The AI Squeeze: How Automation Is Compressing the Bottom and Expanding the Top of the Profession

Intro

Welcome to the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast, where our experts share best practices on running your firm in the digital age. This podcast is brought to you by CountingWorks PRO. Let's get started.

Lee Reams II

Welcome back to another episode of the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. Today we're talking about one of the biggest shift this profession has ever seen. Are we really talking about something this big? And the topic is how AI is completely reorganizing tax and accounting. The name of this episode is the AI squeeze. How automation is compressing the bottom and expanding the top of the profession. As usual, I am joined uh by Rebekah Winters Barton, our Chief Visibility Officer. Rebekah, if you can say hello.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Hello, everybody. This is a good one. I think you're going to get a lot of good stuff out of this.

Lee Reams II

Yeah, and we're not uh we're not here for fear. Um, I think we're as we're so obviously we're technologists. We're very into what AI is using and doing and how effective it can be. We're also seeing this limitation. So, we're not here to give the story that AI is replacing you. I know there's enough people on X. I have friends who are melting. They're not going to send their kids to college because AI is going to destroy all knowledge, you know, uh, structures and businesses and professions. Um, I don't think that's exactly what's happening, but I do think there is a reordering is compressing the bottom, all the repetitive work, the lower value work, and expanding the top where strategy, narrative, and human relationships live. And that's the great thing for tax and accounting firms is all these new AI startups and people that are trying to quote unquote compete with you. What you have is that moat. You know your clients. You are an expert in the tax code. you understand the nuances of the tax code and things that AI at this point doesn't actually do. So AI is killing accounting tax prep. It's reorganizing it. So um I think that's a huge thing as we get in here. So let's talk about the the big ship no one is talking about and Rebekah if you want to lead here.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Yeah. So I think what you've said before and we've said before on this podcast is that the pyramid of work is flipping. There was an old structure where you had a huge base of junior staff members, young people, new accountants, and then a very narrow narrow peak of partners or principles who were leading things. That's not happening anymore because AI has really kind of flattened the playing field. It's leveled things from the bottom to the top. So, it's not just saving time for people doing that repetitive work at the bottom of the pyramid. It's actually changing how firms are structured from very literally the ground up. So the seauite is shifting, the middle managers are shifting, the bottom is shifting. Things are not happening the way they once were. You no longer need 25 junior people doing all of this repetitive daily tasks like answering emails, inputting data manually. All of these things that took hours a day can now be replaced by an AI system without replacing actual human knowledge or people. So think of it as replacing the repetitive task, not replacing an actual human being's knowledge.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. So I mean your example is good. Let's say you had 20 people or you had three or four people doing onboarding of clients. Uh AI is going to be able to do a lot of this really really well. Um, so what you don't need perhaps is as much staff there, but you need five great people, experts that know the code, how to implement the advice that's presented in interpret the data that's presented, how you build systems, right? And what you're doing is you're using AI to amplify their impact. So you can do as a five member firm what a 20 member firm used to do three or four years ago. Um, so I wrote a blog article about this is why we're doing this podcast on it. Uh AI is both the great equalizer and the great amplifier and what it does as Rebekah said, it's leveling the playing field and it supercharges whoever knows how to use it. So, um let's talk about what AI is taking off your your plate. So, Rebekah, if you can kind of lead here.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Yeah, it's going to be what we kind of just alluded to, the repetitive things. uh categorizing, you know, different transactions and documents, tagging people within your system, sending follow-up emails, um drafting proposals, engagement letters, all of those kinds of things that previously took really a lot of time and were just tedious and led to burnout and all of the things you don't want your staff feeling. Those are the things you can sort of pawn off on your AI assistant. They're not high value tasks, but they are tasks that are very, very necessary.

Lee Reams II

Well, they are high value in this high value. Not high value in the sense that they're not advisory tasks. They're not things that you really need a human in the loop for all the time. So, I think these are things that are leading to the tedium where your staff is getting burned out. You're you're hearing people say they're spending hours a day doing these basic menial jobs. That's where AI can really shift how your office operates day-to-day. And more importantly, so I was going to I was going to lead into where it is valuable is all this context, all this information, being able to scrape the data for apps from your client hub, right? So your client documents, their budgets, their income statements, their tax returns. Uh let's say you're using an integration with Plaid, maybe getting payroll data. Maybe you're using a tool that helps with segmenting your client base. uh knowing okay these clients are near retirement, these clients are uh you know doctors, these clients are lawyers, these clients own businesses under 10 employees, those kind of things. Now AI can interpret that data to do proactive uh compliance suggestions, right? So uh and this is more when we get into the advisory things. So you're starting to use automation if you're doing it correctly, you're saving hours per week per staff member.

So um you know I had mentioned you know in in a a firm I saw someone on I think it was on LinkedIn talking about how many staff members and how they're doing and a lot of people there's a big debate on well I'm just outsourcing that to you know overseas um I'm now you know I'm hiring all these onboard people and it's kind of following still the traditional model or they're kind of saying well I'm outsourcing it to humans but they're still not embracing AI the way it should be. Um so you know the way I look at it is these admin roles are being replaced um with these automated workflows but what happens is these people these staff members now can be moved into client-facing positions. So how are they communicating um things and what AI is doing is it isn't necessarily replacing people it's replacing inefficiencies in the way you do things. So the data backs it up. The AI and accounting market is projected to be uh I think 90 near hundred billion dollars by 2033. Uh that is huge. That is huge. That's more than double from where we are today. 80% of the firms said they'll expand AI and client communication and analysis.

So the firms that act now are the ones that will win later. And I'm going to go into um a discussion now about those are the the kind of the the doubters. I don't believe in this. Um, you know, the kind of the devil's advocate for a second, right? Uh, this all sounds amazing, but AI doesn't actually work as cleanly as, you know, the promises that are out there. So, and I agree 100%. I use, Rebekah uses, we use AI every day, all day. It has made, we've created systems in place. We put in check and balances. We know how to write prompts. We know how to use the tools, but we're the human in the loop. So the people like Rebekah and I are able to amplify our talents to levels that we never could have before. We could do what perhaps we needed a team of five or 10 people to do that. The same thing applies for you as a tax and accounting firm. So you know AI gets us 85% 90% of the way there. And what it does is it speeds up everything.

AI can analyze data like nothing. You know you can't create software that could do this as well. And you can't create software that is so nimble so to speak, right? Um, but there's one major thing that we got to make sure everyone understands and we agree upon. You know, 95% accurate in tax and accounting is 100% wrong. You know, and accountants obviously, Rebekah, live in a black and white world. So, uh, close doesn't count when it comes to IRS. So, you know, kind of explain, you know, what you tell people from there.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Yeah. So, AI is your assistant. It's not the accountant. So, in the same way that you wouldn't hire an assistant for your firm, a personal assistant, and just turn them loose, you shouldn't just turn AI loose. There should be checks and balances. There should be oversight to a certain degree. This is meant to help you. It's meant to speed things up. It's meant to take hours and hours of work a week off of your plate so that you can do your job better. I think that's what Lee was just getting at. We are now able to do our jobs better because of AI and because we've learned how to effectively use AI systems. So this is not about replacing anyone or replacing you or even counting on AI to do everything. It's about using AI in ways that are going to help you be more productive, help your firm be more efficient, help reduce burnout, help you be a better version of you as an accountant or a tax professional.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. So AI doesn't understand intent. It doesn't understand nuance. It's guessing based on patterns that it identifies, okay? And not professional judgment. And as so I just did um a series of courses, nano courses for our total practice program that were all about AI 101. And I started kind of the basics. What is a prompt? Okay, so for those that don't understand it, and then I went into, okay, what is a prompt? Now, how do you write an effective prompt? And then I go into stage three which is how to write um how to use and iterate with the AI tools. Okay. And that's where the human driving the conversation is getting the outputs that are absolutely amazing. And that's what you can do for your clients as well. You can get highly personalized, highly accurate, highly detailed plans. Um but there's a couple things that if you just rely on the AI, there are risks and I'm going to go through those. There's four big ones. hallucination. Obviously, AI will sound eloquent. It's so confident.

This is right here. Here's your question and here's your answer and it rips off and you're like, "This is wonderful." Um, but it could be confident with some wrong answers, right? Often times what happens is it just misses context. It doesn't know the full story. So, for example, it may not know that yesterday there was some elections in New York City and a new mayor has been elected and what their tax policies might be, right? And if you're asking questions about a New York City taxpayer who's deciding, hey, am I staying in New York City or if I'm leaving, it doesn't know that, hey, the state legislature is determining tax code and and income tax code at least in the city and blah blah blah. So, what I'm getting at is that a lot of times you as a human know this uh the AI LLM may not have that data at this point, right? Or you need to backfill it when you're having communication or using different tools. There's obviously security uh concerns specifically when you're working with client data. You must stay compliant. You must stay within the IRS regulations, FTC regulations, um and just protecting your client data, right? And then overrust, uh you know, teams assuming that the machine is always right. So those are the big areas.

So you must trust but verify, right? That's how you keep the integrity of your work uh intact. So, I'm going to go back and ask, you know, Rebekah, is that 85% still useful or 90% there still useful? How much time are you saving per day?

Rebekah Winters Barton

Yeah, very much still useful. Yeah, because you're still eliminating a ton of that TDM and a ton of the the work that you would have to do all on your own. So, AI can get you most of the way there. Then you step in and finish the job, polish it, make sure it's accurate. That's where AI can really really help you.

Lee Reams II

Um, so the goal is not perfection, it's amplification. It's being able to scale. It's being able to run a five-person firm what used to take 20. Right? So as we discussed in the beginning, let the machine handle the repetition work, the tedious work, and let the human handle the reasoning. Okay? So AI does not eliminate the human. It elevates the experts, you as the human who knows where to step in, how to guide the tools. And I'm hoping this is um kind of following a little bit of maybe if you were more hesitant, you're going to go, "Okay, well Lee, you know, just to reinforce tax accounting 90% accurate is still 100% wrong." I agree. And that's not a criticism of AI. It's just a reminder to you as the user that context matters. Okay? Missing one line item or one election can flip the outcome entirely. So, uh the human in the loop is non-negotiable. Even OpenAI has kind of had putting a little safeguards now on when it's doing whether it be medical or tax type advice. Um you know what we have done at county works is we put a layer of knowledge that's human created content. Kind of think of the cliffnotes of the tax code all the analysis of the tax code on a layer above like a ChatGPT or a Gemini. And that's where we get much more accurate outputs.

We still want the human in the loop to be there, but you can also now start using a lot of these AI tools for things that aren't necessarily doing a recommendation. And that is kind of to me the starting line. Um, where you can now do proposals, onboarding, engagement letters, intake forms, and AI can actually write it all for you based on what it knows about the client and be really, really accurate. You can still review it before you send it, polish it. Um, but that is a big deal. And this is kind of that that idea that now if you have expertise plus AI there's a multiplying value here. So the the real story here is amplification not automation.

So AI handles the volume. Humans bring the nuance. It can analyze summarize and even predict. Um but it can't say that's the wrong move for this client. That is your role right? So that's the new edge separating expertise from the algorithms. The algorithm processes the expert give it gives it purpose. So, I'm trying to do like almost a rah rah, get you excited about what's happening. Um, but let's talk a little bit about what we're doing here at CountingWorks PRO. Uh, Rebekah, if you want to kind of talk about some of the new tools as far as why don't you start with what we're doing when it comes to content creation and then I'll get into some of this scraping of data, how do we do using uh segmenting and triggers and things like that. But just talk about what we've done with AI tools to save a huge amount of time in the client communication side, blogs, uh social media posts, um creating websites with custom narratives and why this is so important and how an AI tool enables us to be an agency without the agency cost. So kind of explain how we trust it to do that.

Rebekah Winters Barton

So during our onboarding process now for VIPs, which is something I'm heavily involved in here at the company, when we onboard you, we go through all of this very very carefully. We make sure you understand it. But our AI blog automation and social media automation is really important in this new kind of age. I've been telling people during onboarding that my focus now is about 80% on GEO, which is generative engine optimization, about 20% on traditional SEO. It's kind of how I view the shift in my role as things have changed. AI search is becoming critical. What AI search wants is highly localized, highly niche, highly authentic content. That's where our blog and social media automation comes into play. During a dashboard training here at CountingWorks, you would go through a process where you would input some prompts into the AI system and then literally it's set it and forget it. It's going to customize all of the copy that goes out from our blog post so that it targets the correct audience. It targets the correct um niches that you may serve. All of these things are going to be addressed in our copy. Same goes for your social media posts. Our custom narratives are also great. Every single page of your website now gets custom copy which again exactly what AI search wants.

This is where we see people being pulled within sometimes literally two to three days. Um ChatGPT will be recommending them within its search system. So custom narratives are critical. I think it's the most important thing we're doing on the website side for people right now. We obviously have a lot of backend things that are set up to be schema, metadata, all of that as well is obviously optimized. But our biggest power play right now with GEO is going to be those custom narratives.

Lee Reams II

And why I brought this up, I didn't want it to be a sales pitch, but what I'm getting at right now is that is a a way that we're using the AI technology to amplify the messaging of small firms. We can stand up a solopreneur and make them look like amazing, you know, seasoned veterans within a week. And that would not have been possible in the old days. It would have cost someone $20,000 to work with an agency to be able to do that. and AI technology with our human safeguards, our human inputs, our understanding of how to write content, how to niche you down, whatever. Uh, that's what's really doing well. And what I'm leading into now is kind of that next step is, okay, how does AI affect me and my practice and making me proactive and me more of the human in the loop. So, we talked about scraping data. We talked about uh creating contextual data mapping, right? So, uh, knowing that certain clients are in maybe their boomers, Gen X, Gen Z, they have different concerns. Maybe there's some other attributes that we can learn about clients, um, our AI tools will be able to are able to put that all together.

So what's happening now is the context from their tax returns uh any context that we have maybe from their segmenting it enables our platform and other platforms that are doing this and I just want you guys to start understanding that to personalize a proposal immediately for that specific client based on the content and data that we have and then when someone signs that proposal it automatically would kick out a custom written engagement letter based on the same parameters and once that engagement letter is e-signed it automatically kicks out an intake for the client fills that out. Once that data comes, it creates to-do lists that your internal uh partners or staff can start running on things and start analyzing things. But these are this is an example of how AI can actually automate that entire process. You want a human in the loop, you review the proposal before you send it. Human in a loop, review the engagement letter. Oh, I want to fine-tune that a little bit. Ask Max, our AI tool, to fine-tune it. Um, so what you're seeing is client context pulled automatically. So everything feels handcrafted. Okay, these are real world examples of things that our platform is doing today. And I'm going to tell you kind of where I think things are going. So connecting data from multiple sources to create deeper client context. Okay.

So when AI when a system understands a full uh financial picture of your client, you can step in now with insight uh before the year-end crunch. Okay. So this starts mean you're doing things kind of year round. Okay. Um, and this is what I mean by how to comp how it's compressing the bottom and expanding the top. AI handles the work. Expertise delivers the worth. So, let's unpack what kind of this scenario looks like. It's called year- round optimization. Okay. Um, and what that is is you're not just doing quarterly estimates or a November check-in. It's a continuous awareness of your surface, right? So, AI is constantly monitoring its data. If you're, let's say you have a Plaid integration with your client hub, um you're seeing what payroll looks like, what you're seeing what QuickBooks looks like if you're doing integration with Quickbooks and bank statements, right? Um the AI can surface this real- time data um into kind of a dashboard or even almost proactive recommendation so you as the accountant can interpret it. I'm like, "Oh my, there's a trend line going here." You may not have noticed it until two months later, right? Uh so instead of reacting in April, you're advising someone in August, right? You're going to be much more proactive.

So uh you can give advice, you know, accelerate that purchase now or adjust your distributions before year end. And what happened is you're being now much more proactive, not reactive. And that's what clients will come to expect. So the real power um is this. This is going to be AI assisted advisory. So, this is where I think things are going and this is where I think firms that are adapting and expanding their services from the commodity compliance work to being this full-on advisor in the loop. Whether you call that starting to develop family office services or what um that is where things are going, but they're not there today. They're getting there. So, my recommendation, and I'll let Rebekah kind of decide what she thinks when we're going to get there. Um, but start baby stepping. Start using these tools to do client communication. Write letters to your clients. Respond to emails. Respond to inbound chats. Perhaps start using it to do tax planning strategies for clients. Um, have it start scraping data for tax returns and organizing it automatically. But Rebekah, you know, we're obviously here at CountingWorks PRO, we're like we're sprinting at this. Um, and we see the horizon. We have a feature development feature that goes out two years. It is exciting stuff. But when do you think things are going to start changing over?

Rebekah Winters Barton

I think things have already started to change over to be completely honest. Um I look at the usage of AI is growing every single day. Very literally daily. More and more people are adopting it for everyday tasks. Everything from you know planning a vacation to making their grocery list to getting recipes. So I think in daily life it's becoming increasingly prevalent and due to that it's also becoming increasingly prevalent in business. people are letting it kind of bleed over into their work because they've seen what it can do on a personal level in their everyday lives. So, I think that it's really already started. We're near the end of 2025 now. I would say probably within the next 12 to 24 months, we're going to see it become really just a typical part of everyday business. Um, you look at kind of the rise of the personal computer, the rise of the internet, all of these things have happened faster than the shift before. computers took longer to kind of take off than the internet did. Then this is catching on even faster than the internet. So I think as we look at historical technological shifts, they've all happened more quickly than the prior major shift. So we're looking probably at 1 to two years before this is just commonplace. Um and then who knows what the next shift will be, but I think for now we're looking at 12 to 24 months.

So my advice is to start adapting now. Start adopting AI practices now. We're not saying you have to become a AI dependent firm, but take those baby steps. Start, you know, pawning off a few tasks a week to AI and see how much that helps you. And then with every little baby step, you're going to start fully adapting to what these systems can do to help you.

Lee Reams II

Yeah. And I I'll just build upon that. I I think the shift to how for example referrals take place, how people choose who to work with has already happened. People are asking ChatGPT who is the best accountant in San Diego. Um they probably trust that advice because they get all the reviews. They see what everyone says. It's gives the recommendations the weaknesses why this firm might be right for them. Uh they it knows the niches that you work in. So that whole gap is already that kind of ecosystem is already happening. We're already seeing it. Google blue links are disappearing, right? Um, everyone is now in this new ecosystem. So, firms that have adapted there are already prospering. We're seeing it with our existing client base doing custom narratives, not doing cookie cutter websites. So, that shift has already happened. I think what the uh the thing about saying I'm not saying go out and get an AI tax prep software and trust it. I wouldn't. Uh, but I would start trusting it for workflow. I would start trusting it for uh doing proactive strategies, building or doing uh tax return analysis or delivery. Those are things that it's really good at today. So the firms that move now start building this gap. Okay? And you're going to see firms that stay in the old day. They're going to start losing losing and the others are going to become more and more valuable.

So the next two years aren't for survival. They're for scale. I don't again I don't want people to be scared. It's not um in a way it's going to make you have more free time to be honest and you could probably build more profitable firms for this. So you know let's talk about that picture again of that five person firm that runs like 20. So AI manages your client communications. It helps draft your proposals. It automates onboarding and billing. It generates advisory prompts on scale, right? Um, and those five people, they're focused on these conversations, that human problem solving strategy. Uh, and explain just I'm going to keep going, but that's really the leverage we're talking about here, right? So, the firms that win won't be the biggest, they're going to be the smartest. But what have we seen so far, Rebekah, just even in the firms that show personality and embed that personality in all of the client experience, you know, the having the cat and your team, you know, bio page. Kind of explain what we're seeing in real world um just from a marketing and a client relationship, that mode item, why it's so important that this relationship layer is dialed in.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Right now, this is something we push very heavily with our clients. Show personality. Tell your story. You're different. Tax and accounting firms online can often sound very similar from each other. Not only does it make it harder for AI to differentiate who you really are as a firm, but it makes it harder for potential clients to understand who you really are and what you do and if they actually want to work with you. So, this is crucial from both a technological standpoint, authenticity, personalization. That's going to get recommended more, but it's also going to help people connect with you more. So, it's important across the board. We see a lot more success from people who actually listen to us um and publish personal photos, do the custom narrative. Uh that is all critical to success. I also am seeing them ranking better when we do AI tests. When we're doing our own testing to see where our clients are ranking, those who have these really great niches, really great imagery, really great stories, they are ranking significantly better than those who just kind of tell me, "Oh, we prepare taxes for people and I can't get any more out of them." Um, you know, we do our best obviously to make those personal, too.

But if I have people telling me stories about, you know, we had somebody who was dropped into the Amazon rainforest to go piranha fishing from literally like a helicopter or something, it was quite a wild and exciting tale and we were able to kind of build off of that sense of adventure and that was a lot of fun. So I love it when people just really let us into their lives and then we can use that to build these professional profiles and professional websites for them that have that color and that personality.

Lee Reams II

The human in the loop be human accountant. We diff That's how you differentiate from these AI engines. It's your personality. It is piranha fishing. Sounds fun.

Rebekah Winters Barton

Yes, it does.

Lee Reams II

All right. I gotta I need I need to put Well, YouTube's probably listening right now and I'm sure I'll have some piranha fishing uh recommendations coming up. So, I don't want to again I'm not all doom and gloom. I'm very bullish on the profession and I I want to stick speak specifically to younger accountants, young professionals jumping in. Um there is a huge opportunity. there's going to be in tremendous growth and the guess what you're more tech enabled than the boomers and the you know maybe some older Gen X's that are fighting this they don't want to do it right so um it might be tougher to land that first job a lot of the you know kind of these junior jobs um are being automated uh because AI is doing all this grunt work but it also means that it's never been easier to start something um you know maybe you go out there and get a job with a boutique firm versus going out for one of the big firms right and learn the business learn how to develop relationships with clients, learn how to deliver the advice to clients, learn how to learn, you know, create that relationship, that bond with clients so they trust you and they they get they share more information with you. That is going to be your value, right? So, with the tools that are out there today, you can build your own brand, create your own secure client hub, right, and pricing model quite honestly in a weekend.

We can do that for you. So, if you're entrepreneurial, AI is a startup kit. Okay? So, it used to take five people in a six-figure stack. Now it's you, a laptop and a smart system, right? So it might be harder today to get hired, but it's easier than ever to build something. So I think that the message to young pros is learn how to think, not just how to follow instructions. And your biggest skills right now are that how to manipulate the AI to get the best output. Understanding how to set roles, how to set tone, audiences, objectives, how to ask the AI to analyze the work they have done. Maybe you as a human are setting, you know, you're so biased that you're creating answers or outputs that you want to hear versus perhaps let the AI um follow your directions, right? And maybe ask it to go back and say, hey, you know what is it? Am I doing the right thing? Um so you got to understand AI follows instructions and that's how your bias can happen, but humans set the direction. That is the skill that you need. So you know what is the sweet spot? AI handles the volume. Humans bring the nuance. So Rebekah, it's not man versus machine, is it?

Rebekah Winters Barton

No, it's not. It's uh it's man amplified by machine, I think, is what we want. And it is AI can make you better. It can make you better at what you do. And then that bleeds over into the client experience in a very positive way. the more personalization and the more attention that you're able to give to each client, the the more likely they are to stay with you for the long haul, the more likely you are to be able to upsell them down the road. All of these kind of things snowball and they can snowball from the fact that you're using AI to help you be a better version of you. So, I think that's kind of a big takeaway I want people to have is that this is here to help you be better and help you build the firm that you want to build. and maybe that wouldn't have been possible for you to build without these AI systems in place backing you up.

Lee Reams II

AI doesn't make you less human. It gives you time to be more human. Um, and I think that is a good way to wrap this one up. Um, and this is kind of the bet we're making. Um, you know, AI will compress the bottom. I think traditional low-end tax prep shops, uh, that will start trickling into more into it, some AI enabled tax prep tools. Um, a lot of things that are just simple will just be automated. But what we're doing and what we see is we're building for the firms that want to live at the top. Okay? Where the human advantage scales through systems and stories. And just because you have, let's say, you don't have the most affluent client base, doesn't mean there's not a lot of ways to add advisory services for that market. And that's something that where we want people to start thinking different. And I'm not borrowing off of Apple's ad campaign, but the real issue here is we want you to think differently. There is lots of ways, and we've done podcasts on this before. I've written blog articles about, you know, let's say a middle class like uh tax uh client base.

What are all the different things you can help them build wealth, generational wealth, how you can help them change their mindset, not living paycheck to paycheck, and that is your role as the adviser. Okay? Um so the firms that thrive um won't be the ones resisting AI, they they'll be the ones leading with it. Okay? Uh the real disruption come won't come from AI. It comes from the firms who learn how to lead with it. Uh, and we even have some copy and kind of a marketing campaign that we're going to hopefully kick off here soon that kind of resonates this and really amplify what we see as the vision and hopefully more and more of you will start coming around and jumping on board. So, uh, if you're listening and wondering where you fit, whether you are a firm or just starting out and now is the time to build smarter. Okay. What are the key elements? Automation, narrative, and what do we mean by narrative? And Rebekah, I'll give you do like two or three sentence. What is narrative?

Rebekah Winters Barton

Narrative is your brand story on the internet cohesively across all of your profiles and all of your web pages.

Lee Reams II

And why that's important is the conversations are now happening inside chatbt perplexity. And if you have a unique narrative, you are going to be referenced by these tools as the recommended professional or expert in your area. Okay. Uh and then so automation, narrative, and advisory, that's the playbook. Okay. So, we're seeing firms of every size reinvent how they work and win back their team or their time. I I see that happening now. Um, we're seeing clients kind of rebrand, reposition that were literally cookie cutter. They were so generic. You read their old website, you're like, "Okay, I can Google and see 30,000 of the same website. They have kind of reinvented themselves and come out and every single one of them is thriving in this new market." So, that's what the Growth Minded Accountant is all about. We want you to think different. We don't want you to do it the same way as I did it last year. We want you to build systems.

We want to lead the next generation. So, if you're interested in anything that we've talked about as far as executing some of these things with when it comes to AI and automation, um obviously CountingWorks PRO, we do have a platform that helps you run uh your five person firm like a 20 person powerhouse. It's great. Uh and I believe the future doesn't belong again to the biggest firm. It belongs to the ones that lead with narrative. Please resonate that uh as a takeaway. So again, thank you for being a uh listener to the Growth Minded Accountant Podcast. I hope we've changed some views. Um we keep throwing out our argument. We believe in this. Um we're all in on it. Uh we're helping thousands of professionals transition from the old way of doing things to this new AI world. And I hope they're going to really do well in the future. If you have any questions, uh feel free to reach out to us at LinkedIn. You can always visit our website at countyworkspro.com. Uh please feel free to share this podcast, like it, comment. Uh we appreciate that. We want to build a bigger audience as we go. So again, thank you uh for spending some time with us today. Thank you.