Stop Scaling Accountants. Start Scaling the Firm.

Welcome back to another episode of the Growth-Minded Accountant. My name is Lee Reams. I'm the founder and CEO of Accounting Works.

And today's topic, we gave it a title, is Stop Scaling Accountants, Start Scaling the Firm. And I think today's topic, and we're going through this as well, we see it with our own network of tax and accounting firms. And there is all this new technology, there's all these new opportunities to save time. But then all of a sudden, maybe a partner or a subject knowledge expert becomes the bottleneck.

So we're going to talk a lot about what's changed, what's happened with technology and kind of where you should go. We're going to give you some takeaways that you can bring to your next partnership meeting and actually tackle these issues and address them. And it's not doom and gloom. There's a lot of ways to handle this.

And technology has done a lot of great things. As usual, I'm joined by Rebecca Barton, our chief visibility officer. Rebecca, if you can say hello. Yes.

Hey, everybody. Looking forward, as always, to diving into this today. Yeah, and I think the way to look at it is the old way, which was only a couple of years ago at this point, you know, you had a kind of a basic formula. You went out, you try to win more clients, you hire more people, which then adds a layer of management, right?

You might buy more software, you try to automate a few more things, then you ask everyone to become a little more efficient. And what we have found is that works for a while, but lots of headwinds happen. So the problem that eventually more clients obviously create more work, That's when you start getting frustrated, you're working odd hours and you're ready to fire certain clients. What happens, unfortunately, is more work then creates more people.

More people creates more supervision and all of that complexity starts rolling uphill. I believe, and we're seeing it too, it lands on the partners. Some of these partners are all in. They're all in on technology and using AI to make themselves more efficient.

But some of them are like digging their heels in right now. And I'm not touching this. I'm not using AI. I'm not using technology.

And they become a massive bottleneck. You know, I've experienced it. It's almost like a kid, you know, with their toys and takes their toys and goes home. And it's a real difficult, delicate, I guess, negotiation to try to unblock these and get people to start utilizing technology to do things.

So, you know, you end up in the partner mode. You start reviewing more work. you start answering more questions you start handling even more exceptions and solving more staffing issues which becomes no one enjoys hr right so you get pulled into more client situations as well so revenue may be growing but so is partner drag and eventually the most valuable people in the firm become the bottleneck that's what i want to talk about today um what if The biggest constraint on growth of your tax and accounting firm is not necessarily this huge shortage of accountants, but what if it's the way your firm was designed in the first place? So this isn't really an AI episode per se. AI is obviously part of the answer, but this is how to build a tax and accounting firm that can grow without adding complexity at the same rate as your revenue, okay?

So we're going to go walk through. I did six questions. There's a takeaway at the end. Again, these are things that you can actually do action items on that every firm I think should be talking about in your next partner meeting.

So let's start with the first one, which is this partner ceiling. So what are the partners still functioning as is the operating system of the firm? I've seen firms with fifty people in them now that have the main top level partners that they're just business development they're completely out of this bottleneck they have made adjustments they have adapted to this new world and they don't have these bottlenecks because people below them are making a lot of these decisions right you know so the partnerships that are still have this bottleneck it well it may sound harsh i think it's one of the most important questions you can ask and many firms almost everything eventually reaches a partner uh and then there's also you know return uh review there's a lot of different bottlenecks that happen beforehand but you know a staff member might have a question a client has an unusual situation and these start multiplying and backing up you know something fails outside the normal process And that curveball goes, oh, I got to go to the partner. So and more importantly, if a lot of approval is happening at the partner level, this is, again, another just brick wall.

OK, so each interruption on its own seems reasonable. But the problem is the accumulation of these things. Right. It's the bee stings.

It's the ants bites, whatever. You know, the first five. So be it after ten or so. You're like, whoa.

And at twenty, you're like, I might die. So. The firm continues growing, but partner involvement grows right alongside it. So that means you've created a bigger firm, but you have not necessarily created a scalable one.

So a scalable practice should be asking a different question. So what actually requires partner judgment and what simply requires partner involvement because the system is not strong enough. And I think some of the examples I'm going to show you is there's ways to use technology that that partner judgment. Well, first of all, people below you might be able to do this judgment call now because they have assistants that are helping them make that.

And by the time it gets to you, a lot of the research, the prep work of answering that for that human judgment should already be ready for you. You should be able to go, okay, here's the background, here's the backup, instead of starting from scratch, that blank state. I think that's very important. Let's talk about this.

If I need to make the final decision, fine, but why am I also gathering the information? Why am I doing this research from scratch? Why am I organizing the work before I can even apply my judgment? And that is where the partner ceiling starts to break down.

And this is where I think AI platforms, AI technology, workflows, skills, agents, whatever you call them, you don't necessarily remove partners from these important decisions. But now you have a tool that is going to look at all the client intelligence. It's going to prep the human decider. So by the time they're there, this is a cursory review.

I like to call a lot of this cursory review. So meaning we think everything is ninety to eight percent there. We just need that subject expert, that partner to give their blessing. Yeah.

Did I overlook something? Did I perhaps miss something? And when you do this, you improve everything that happens before the decision reaches them, okay? So I would say to you, and then this is kind of the partner meeting question, what are three recurring things a partner today that should arrive better prepared be handled somewhere else in the organization or never reach the partner at all and start with three, keep it basic.

Let's not try to redesign the entire workflow in your processes in one meeting. But I think that is a good place to start. And I think you'd be surprised how easy it is to solve these problems. So that's question one.

The second question is, are professionals spending their time on judgment or preparation? This kind of falls back to the whole AI thing, right? This is where AI becomes very important. And I think firms often approach AI backwards.

So everyone wants to know what AI can replace, which makes sense. But I think the better question is, what should require the attention of a highly trained accountant in the first place? So the real value of an accountant is not moving information between systems. We can all argue, or at least I hope most will say, technology has now automated a lot of that.

And if you're using the proper workflows and you're using AI, you should be able to get multiple systems to talk. You should be able to be building an incredible firm knowledge graph, I would call it. You should be able to have client intelligence on every single client. And it's helping you kind of move things forward.

So the real value of an accountant is not moving this information between systems. It's not organizing the documents that should be done by the AI. It's not drafting the responses or even doing the tax research right now. And it's not manually reviewing hundreds of clients hoping to notice interesting.

I think the value is your judgment. So AI can do recommendations. Sometimes AI is way off. If it had the client intelligence, it can say, hey, maybe this client should do a Roth conversion.

But as we know, there's so much complexity and there's so much personalization to every decision, it's really hard for AI at this point to nail this. So this is where the human in the loop is there this is your judgment is this business owner approaching a succession issue right are they older are they boomers are they going to be selling this who are they selling to are they planning for this sale to make it tax efficient you know is should they then restructure the entity ai actually can identify this if you have your client base segmented correctly we have a new client enrichment tool that we help we add like thirty different attributes to a client that we can identify perhaps their age bands, really their net worth. From tax trends, you know their income. But there's a lot of things.

Do they own real estate? What type of positions have they held? There's a lot of different things that you may not know about. But this context can make you prepare for better decisions.

And the AI can actually say, hey, did you know Because you're not sitting there doing all that research before. But this is another example of how it can really prep you. Should the client act now or wait? What are the risks involved in making this decision or not making it?

What information is missing? That's the context. And AI will make decisions based on the context it has. If it doesn't know things that you are obviously going, wait a second, we need to know that.

That's where your professional talent belongs. that's why i keep coming back to very simple principle ai prepares humans decide so ai can gather this information it can organize it it can identify signals really really well it can prepare an initial analysis it can even recommend questions asked i think that's one of the easiest things is just having something analyze a client's profile and set up the questions before an interview And then you can have AI analyze the entire transcript of that discussion. So you're not taking notes or anything you missed. And then it can draft a summary and action points, right? It can even draft the communication after a meeting to the client and say, hey, we talked about this.

These are the things I think we should be doing. But you as the professional are deciding what you're sending out to a client. So a very simple way to look at almost any process in your firm is to break it down into four buckets. I should go this way.

Preparation, judgment, communication, and then execution. And then start asking whether your expensive professional talent is spending too much time in the preparation bucket. I see this all the time. And even some of our old schoolers, our older students, I'm not going to come older, let's say more experienced technical people.

They are not using or trusting the technology the way they should be. They're now becoming a bottleneck. So, for example, we have a ninety percent of the company is running one way. We almost have another bucket.

And I think it's very clear a lot of partnerships are going through the same thing. So you got to sit back and go, OK, How do we overcome this? How do we get buy-in by everyone? So in that partner meeting, which parts are preparation, which parts require professional judgment, and which parts are communication, and which parts are execution?

Then ask a simple question. Why is a professional still doing the preparation manually? I'll give an example when we do webinar outlines. So our humans and our subject experts will create the entire kind of summary this is what we're talking about these are the key technical aspects i want to talk about but we're no longer handing it off to design team to say hey now build me my deck we're going to lovable and giving them a template that we've already created and lovable completes that task in five to ten minutes The old day, that could have been an eight hour day.

And it still doesn't look as good. And it has typos and all kinds of problems, right? And that's kind of my point here. There's a lot of manual preparation that more experienced people just feel I have to be a part of this and you do not need to be anymore.

And it's up to the less experienced, People are pro AI to kind of push that narrative and say, hey, you know, this is this is going to expose a lot of capacity that we're still doing manual things. And this is why we should replace it. OK, which leads into the most logical thing is what I call the knowledge trap. So this is the third question.

What would break if one of our best senior people left tomorrow? And every firm has these people. Somebody knows exactly how a complicated process works. Someone knows the history behind certain clients.

A senior manager can look at a situation and immediately know what questions to ask. Someone knows all the exceptions, right? Someone knows how to get something done because they've been doing it for fifteen years. And I think this is where the institutional knowledge takes place right but this is what ai has done it allows us to feed that institutional knowledge to a platform that everyone in the firm has access to all right we now have the client intelligence because ai has scraped all the client data all the notes the transcripts everything is now inside you know we use max we call our ai max but now it's inside max's head not this person's head So if a junior partner is working on the client, they have same access, this institutional knowledge that that partner would have.

Okay. And this is what I, you know, this is that whole key person dependency is starting to break down. If you use that knowledge and feed it into these systems and you, this enables you now to scale without it, you're stuck. knowledge person it's in their head he's not available or she's not available because i have fifteen tasks and sitting on their desk right um when they get overloaded the system slows down or in some places it stops right if they retire even worse that knowledge disappears right so if they leave for another firm years of operational experience can walk out the door with them and that hurts your partnership it hurts your firm it also affects succession and enterprise value right so a buyer does not want to purchase firm where the operating system is in five partners and if one leaves so that adds more risk right so that is another reason to start utilizing technology the way i'm i'm talking about to help your firm become scalable and to take the risk out of this institutional knowledge disappearing okay um so go through what are the signals what information matters uh you know what questions need to be asked what analysis happens you know when does a professional intervene and then of course what happens next so you know one framework i really like and we're using this with our own development of county works pro is trigger data analysis, the recommendation, and then professional approval, a professional human in the loop reviews it. So you had four steps that took place before any human ever got involved, right?

And that's the beauty of AI. And then you have your action point. Then you say, ignore, yeah, I agree with this analysis and recommendation. Let's send it to the client. or hey i like this but i would add a couple nuances okay um so in the next partner meeting what is one valuable process in this firm that currently lives primarily inside one person's head and i guarantee you you'll see a lot of it right so pick one build a new playbook and then do another one and this is how you'll start moving that institutional knowledge to a knowledge base that everyone in the firm can use I've been talking about client intelligence, and Rebecca, don't worry, you have plenty to talk about.

I'm going through my, you know, I'm preaching down on kind of my view, but we do have some things on marketing and branding. So you'll be in here in a second. All good, no worries. All right, so I've talked about client intelligence.

I introduced this as a kind of a subject. You know, the question is, are you reacting to client events or actively, predictably detecting them? And most firms are reactive, they're not predictive. And I think the problem here is they don't properly, and I mentioned this a few moments ago, they don't have segments of clients.

We have an enrichment tool that really enhances that client database. That becomes a production system. Most firms still think about their client base, hey, who needs a tax return? Who needs bookkeeping?

Who needs payroll? Who needs a project completed? It's a task list, right? But your client base should be more than a production schedule.

It is full of financial signals. And these happen inside your client communication, your emails, your conversations with clients. Perhaps, again, data you're able to enrich from third parties like our enrichment tool. you know clients retire they buy buildings they sell businesses they hire more employees they accumulate a bunch of cash they take on debt right without even talking to you they might inherit money they're nearing social security age they've changed the job a lot of those thoughts are inside all of these signals right so on social media on linkedin for example You might be able, with our enrichment tool, we would actually probably already know ahead of you if someone just changed a job. And that enrichment tool and Max could look at that and say, oh, hey, by the way, congratulations.

And do you want to relook at blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay? So I think this is where the traditional model is that we often find out after the fact. I think that's the whole compliance mindset. You know, a client sends us tax documents and say, oh, by the way, I bought a building eight months ago.

You're like, oh, great. You should have talked to me first. And, you know, you'll say it again. I wish you had called me.

Right. And I think the one sentence captures a massive opportunity for our profession. Because an intelligent firm should increasingly be able to see important changes proactively, predictably. Maybe it's a real estate signal, maybe it's a business expansion that you're seeing in their income statements or cash statements.

Maybe somebody is reaching retirement age or they're pre-retirement. They're in their fifties and they're they have no idea what Social Security will be like when they retire or Medicare costs, all that kind of stuff. Right. But these are signals to you and technology starts harnessing and building this profile.

It's a knowledge graph. We call it client intelligence. But basically, the role of technology is to say something changed. This may deserve attention.

Then the accountant gets involved. Instead of saying, hey, I wish you had called me, the firm gets to say, hey, we noticed something changing. We thought we should talk about it before you make this decision. Or we notice a lot of our clients who are nearing sixty are starting to think about retirement.

They have no idea what Social Security is all about. They have no idea when to start Social Security or how to plan for Social Security. Right. That is a difference in how client experience now is another area during this partner meeting.

You should say, OK, what are three client events we routinely learn about too late and then just pick the three. And then what information or signals could have helped us identify those situations earlier? You don't need to solve all fifty individual use cases, but start with some high value moments and then start building it. The way we address this is we build what we call skills inside AccountingWorks.

You can call them agents. But what we've done is we have a secure so we're not sending client data out to the public cloud world, but we're able to monitor and take all that client intelligence proactively, twenty four seven. You come into the office and it says, hey, here are six things you maybe your clients should look at it and review them. And I think that is a big difference and a kind of the evolution of the role of a tax and accounting firm going from reactive to predictive and using the power of AI to do that.

So Rebecca. I know you're ready. You're sitting there going, okay, when do I talk? When do I talk?

When do I talk? Your turn. Now I get to have some fun, guys. Yes.

So number five here is to decide what kind of firm you are building. And I think this is a really important layer. Of course I do. This is my wheelhouse.

But you can't systemize a firm effectively if that firm has never decided what it wants to be known for. um you're just kind of throwing spaghetti at the ceiling at that point and that's not a very effective or efficient way of growing your firm so a lot of accounting firms still describe themselves by listing everything that they do and this is a problem that i see when i talk to people all the time i'll say well you know tell me about your firm and they say well we prepare taxes There's not a lot of personality there. So of course, when we're talking to people, we direct them, explain to them, but their off the cuff response is very often a menu of their services. Well, we do taxes, we do bookkeeping, we do payroll, We can do IRS representation, they might say, those kinds of things. But that really just tells me what you're selling.

It doesn't tell me why I should pick you, right? And that matters operationally as much as it does from an outside marketing perspective. So if you're trying to be everything to everyone, you make every other part of the firm that much harder to scale. So your website is going to be generic.

Your marketing is going to be generic. Your processes internally are not going to be stabilized because there's no common goal or common denominator among these things. It all just kind of feels like a free for all trying to attract every single person in existence. Your technology is going to have to accommodate too many exceptions.

Well, this person has this, this client has this, this business has this. That's not effective. I think you can start to see how this very quickly becomes, I don't even want to say organized chaos, possibly just chaos, because you're not going to really know what's going on in any different department or with any different client. So focus, however, creates leverage.

The more clearly you understand your target demographic or your ideal clients and what kinds of problems you solve best, then the story of your firm becomes clearer. And then in turn, it becomes easier to build systems around that. And that's really where AI comes into play here. AI is changing discovery.

We've talked a ton about this in recent episodes. So go back and listen to them. We won't waste a lot of time on going into the nitty gritty today. But basically, AI has changed how people find your firm.

So increasingly, people are asking these recommendation engines things like, you know, who's the best accountant for real estate brokers in Boston, if that's what they do? Who specializes in selling rental properties? Because I want to offload some of my rental properties. Generic firms are significantly harder to recommend in those kinds of specific situations.

However, if you specialize in those scenarios, you become much easier for these AI engines to recommend to your target audience. So one of the most important scaling decisions may not actually have anything to do directly with the tech that you're using. but instead on where you decide to focus. So the partner meeting question for this section is, if someone asked every partner in this firm who our ideal client is and why that person should choose us, would we all give roughly the same answer or not? And if not, you do not just have a marketing problem, y'all.

You have a strategy problem at a core level. And most firms, that's just the way they started and that's the way they do it because I did it last year that way. I'm going to do it next year that way and the year after. And what's happening is you're seeing firms that have grabbed real estate and grabbed focus and have very concrete messaging.

They're starting to run circles around the generic kind of the cookie cutter firm. it's a huge deal it's something you definitely should put into that partner meeting and it's something that's really easy to address moving forward and it moves the dial faster than anything else you can do it helps you drive more advisory business than you had before and it helps you find the ideal client profile those that are willing to pay you you know i hear it all the time well i have clients they just don't have any money well then go attract clients with money if that's what you're trying to do otherwise say this is my market and get more of them okay So it's really an important thing. And I think it is not a marketing problem is it starts in strategy and moving on. So let's talk about now people and operating systems and understanding kind of how this all works. So I'm not saying do not hire people.

Great people are always going to matter. Those that know how to use AI are going to be superhuman. They're going to have ten clones of themselves, basically, and be able to do more work, higher level work than ever before. I think that is a game changer for any firm.

But another employee should not automatically be the answer every time a firm has a capacity problem. I think before you hire, ask, can we simplify our processes? Can AI prepare more of the work, that preparation side? Can we standardize it in a playbook?

The whole firm has that institutional knowledge. Can client intelligence tell us which situations actually need attention? Are we scanning our client database twenty four seven? Are we looking at data that we never could have analyzed in moments?

Right. Because we're now using the right type of technology. Can we reduce how much coordination is required? I think that is one of the biggest bottlenecks.

So we have all this AI bolted on top of software and all it does is it might compress one area, but then it creates a whole new blocker. where people are now doing more work that they didn't do before because they have to now decide, did the AI do it correctly? So then say, hey, if the answer is still we need another person, hire the person. But at least you know you are adding that person in a well-designed process that you've already optimized, right? Other than using labor to compensate for what I'll call broken strategies, broken processes, whatever you want to call it.

So that is what I mean when I start saying become an operating system. So client information comes in, technology organizes it, maybe even chases it. AI now analyzes it. The signals are identified.

If you have skills, agents, playbooks, whatever you want, the column, it determines what should happen. And then you have the workflows that start. So communication starts being prepared. Professionals step in when they need to review it, when judgment matters.

And that client experience is connected through the entire process. So this is not simply buying more software. I think, honestly, most firms probably have too much software. The challenge and all the time it takes to get trained on this software, AI, you don't have that training curve.

Software is limited. It is good in the fact that it's very rigid. But at the same time, AI just opens up capability that software never could have. So the challenge is getting the pieces to work together around your defined operating model.

And then when you do that really well, something very interesting starts to happen. Technology does not necessarily make the firm less human. And that's what I think a lot of private equity firms, I think they're very cold. They're trying to put all this technology and then clients are like, who am I talking to?

And I think what you're going to see though, is the accountant spends less time chasing documents, searching through systems, doing research, moving information around and managing all this admin work. They have time for real client conversations, more time to explain to a client. More importantly, to give advice. We have been building out skills all around soft advisory.

I think we've identified now almost forty different soft advisory opportunities. We did a skill on Social Security. And there are, I bet you, in your client base, if you had five hundred clients every year, at least ten to twenty percent of your clients has one of these life events, one of these soft advisory opportunities. And you're probably just missing them.

You're at that compliance mode. You're in that meeting. You're like, oh, I wish you had called me. Instead of proactively reaching out, it doesn't have to be a monthly advisory subscription.

It could be, hey, we're doing analysis on this or we're doing consulting on this. This is the value. This is why it matters. I picked you because you are near the blah, blah, blah, blah.

I thought it was interesting. Now you can charge perhaps five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars and move the client and save them fifty thousand dollars. Right. So that is where the real value is.

So in the next partner meeting, Are we solving a people problem? Or are we adding a person to compensate for a broken process? And sit back and say, well, it might be a people problem. But make yourself answer that question.

I think it's really important. And that's how you'll start dialing in your operating system. But that goes into scaling and scaling client experience. So let's talk about this.

We have some new tools that we've been creating, what we call Max client intelligence that we're actually pushing the AI into the client side. So everyone thinks of practice management behind the wall, what happens behind the wall. You actually, if you're having a really solid client experience, your AI tools should be facing your client. Your client should be bringing the input.

AI might even be surfacing these opportunities to your client and your client hub, for example. And it says, hey, by the way, we noticed this. Is this something you want to talk about? Talk to Sal, right?

That is when your client experience allows you to scale significantly. And it also takes this whole practice management behind the wall and kind of pushes out a lot of task and responsibility to AI and gets your client involved. And it's really powerful. So Rebecca, let's talk about improving or making, I guess, the client experience scalable.

Yes. So as firms build more technology and more automationally, like you said, they really can't lose sight of what the client experience actually entails. So efficiency in your firm doesn't automatically equate to a better experience for those existing outside of your firm. Clients don't care that you have a great workflow.

Clients don't care whether you have a better email system than you used to have internally. That doesn't matter to them. The things they care about is if you understand them, you see their problems, you're communicating with them on a regular basis, and whether or not they know what happens next in your process. Internal workflows don't influence that.

The way your client experience is set up influences that. Clients wanna know whether they're gonna hear from you before there's a problem or after. So this is where the narrative of the firm and the operating system of the firm have to kind of coincide and meet. Think of it almost like a Venn diagram.

So the promises you make in all of your marketing materials should be reflected in the experience that the client has after hiring you. If, for example, you're promoting that you're a proactive firm, the client experience needs to be proactive. They need to be getting emails from you, communications from you, phone calls from you, meetings scheduled before these issues happen. They need to know that you have their back, that you're in their corner, and that you're looking for issues before they arise.

If your story is, hey, we specialize in a particular type of business, let's say dental practices, we've been doing a lot of dental practice examples lately. Let's hope that all of your social media, your reels are tips for dentists. Your blog posts are tips for dentists. Your monthly newsletter is focused on things that matter to dentists, right?

It's not going to make any sense if you're sending out, you know, email newsletters that pertain to grocery store owners, right? Like it needs to be focused on the people you say you focus on. If your story is that you provide a modern experience, your client shouldn't be asked to fax you documents, that kind of thing. It really matters.

Scaling your firm is not just about serving more people, but it's about delivering on your promises and on your value more consistently than you were before. So during your next partner meeting, go around and ask, does the experience we deliver match the story that we're telling the market? This is a really important question because it's going to influence everything else. Yeah, that sounds like more strategy to me, Rebecca, which I think is a good thing, which I think the takeaway here is, again, we have the scorecard.

I'm going to go through this and I think you should sit back and kind of have a discussion about these items and see what the consensus is and see how you can move the firm forward. So, you know, get the leadership together, you know, Again, are the partners still the operating system? I think this is a common issue. And as AI becomes more powerful and as power users of AI become more powerful, it gets more frustrating for them when the operating system stops because you have a partner who wants to do it their way and is not adapting.

You just want partners involved when their judgment is truly required and where they are involved because the process cannot function without them. You don't want them doing the work. You don't want them doing manual tasks because that's the way they've been doing it for decades. Number two, are professionals spending their time on judgment or preparation?

I think this is fairly obvious. What should come to them on their desk or in their task list is something that's already been researched. all the background and context is put together the analysis or the pre-analysis is already done this is now ready for a decision a human judgment time think about that if you can truncate what let's just say it was a sixty minute task to ten minutes because fifty minutes would have been spent doing all the prep work that is an amazingly um well use of your time okay and more importantly the partner's time Does our most valuable knowledge belong to the firm or does it belong to an individual? I think this is a real risk issue, specifically with aging partners and staff. I think someone left or retired or whatever, became disabled.

Does that knowledge disappear with them? That is a big risk item for your firm. Everyone should be thinking about that. Are we reactive to client events or are we detecting them?

I think this is a huge plus of what AI can do. You wanna be predictive. You wanna be, and again, it's not always gonna be accurate. You can dial it in.

So don't like try it one time and say, oh, well it gave me ten things and only four of them were actionable. Well, guess what? You got four more actionable items than you would have before. But dial in why the six weren't right.

And I think you'll find this is a big difference maker with your client relationship. More importantly, the financial outcomes of your client. Rebecca's favorite. Are we clear about the firm we are building?

Do you have a strategy? Do you have an ideal client profile? a clear point of view and it doesn't again it doesn't have to be a niche it just might be the way you work or the target audience that you're working with um you know why should the market choose you if you are all things to everybody you're not going to have the line out the door like an In-N-Out burger it has like a very clean menu very targeted audience they know their ideal client profile versus someone who's trying to sell every meal breakfast lunch dinner whatever It just doesn't work. The messaging doesn't connect. The brands that work today are extremely targeted.

Rebecca, if you know this brand, I'd give up on life. I think it's called Leveon or Leveon or something. It's a bakery of all. They make cookies.

They do. They make big cookies, supposedly. They just opened one up in Newport Beach at Fashion Island. Do you know how long the line was when they opened?

All people got was a bag. I would say it's like a city block, probably. oh city block it was around it went all the way around all the way around the tesla then back towards like i mean it must have been three four hundred people i have no i didn't go i just saw the videos of it and i'm like what happened but that is branding that is messaging that is the way the world works and tax accounting firms need to understand you have to adapt to that And six, is growth increasing leverage or simply increasing your complexity? Before you add the next person, sit back and look. Do we need to redesign the work?

Can we make ourselves more efficient? You would be shocked how much more you can get done by using AI in a repeatable process. So that is the purpose of today's I think we had. We're both thinking where things are going.

But more importantly, it's already happened. These changes have occurred. You're not putting the genie back in the bottle. um and you can start transforming your firm today right you can sit down and have this partner meeting and maybe you go through the six and there's not consensus but if you can pick five six ten different items you can start getting and forcing your firm to look differently in the future and i think that's where i would start so I hope we've hit this right. It's not about automating judgment.

I don't believe that. I still think there's a huge role for humans. You're seeing it everywhere. You're seeing it in coding and everything that was going to be, the machines were going to run everything.

At this point, human judgment with all that context that AI can do is really the difference maker for me. So, you know, we don't want you to turn into some cold faceless technology stack, right? But you can actually make your experience even more personal by building a better system that's built around you as the pro judgment. about your relationship, about trust, about the advice. And I think that's really important.

So you need to start capturing this knowledge that already exists in your firm. So if you are not building a client intelligence about each individual client, if you don't have a knowledge base of the people in your firm that's replaceable, you need all that information in a system that can be repeatable. So the concept here was stop scaling accountants. start scaling your firm. So I hope this has been an effective Growth Minded Accountant podcast.

We're really trying to get you to see how the future is. And again, a lot of this, it's already changed. You know, it's getting crazier and crazier. The models are getting better and better.

Don't get as afraid. I know there was a big article today, you know, someone at Claude, an open eye, you know, basically said there's a ten percent chance AI and it's going to kill us all. It's going to kill all the humans. We will control things.

Common sense prevails. Right now, these are the tools. This is what you can do. This is how it applies to your practice.

It can make you, I think, more effective than ever. And I think it's definitely worth investing your time and your direction in your firm so hopefully this worked for you uh until next week we'll have a new topic for you i hope you enjoyed the social media one last week with alex he was great again thank you for being a listener and if you have any questions about this obviously you can hit us up on linkedin or visit our website at countingworkspro.com and see how we are doing client intelligence so until next week thank you very much for being a listener.