The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

238 ⎸ Transforming the Accounting Landscape: A Conversation with Joe Woodard

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 238

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In today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Joe Woodard—founder of Scaling New Heights—and we’re diving into what’s really happening in the accounting industry right now.

We talk about:

  • Why the ‘AI hype vs denial’ debate is missing the point
  • What tasks you should actually be handing off to AI
  • Why moving off hourly pricing isn’t enough anymore
  • And how to position yourself so clients see you as indispensable
  • how to make sure your pricing model matches your vision and goals

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Meet Joe Woodard

Joe Woodard is the CEO of Woodard®, a company that empowers accountants and business advisors through education, coaching, resources, and consulting services, with a particular focus on Client Advisory Services (CAS). Woodard equips professionals to modernize their practices, optimize accounting software, and expand their reach.

Joe has trained over 150,000 professionals, is a published author, and hosts the Scaling New Heights® conference. He has been recognized by Accounting Today as one of the Top 100 Most Influential People in accounting since 2014. Joe also publishes The Woodard Report™, which reaches over 100,000 readers annually.

Connect with Joe Woodard

🌐 Website: https://www.woodard.com

👥 Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realjoewoodard/

Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me @ambitiousbookkeeper

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What if I told you that only 14% of accountants are actually using AI in a meaningful way, but at the same time, the entire industry is about to shift faster than anything we've ever seen. Most bookkeepers are either panicking or completely ignoring ai. So in today's episode, I'm sitting down with Joe Woodard, the founder of Scaling New Heights. You may have heard of it, and we're diving into what's really happening in the accounting industry right now. We talk about why the AI hype versus denial debate is missing the point. What tasks you should actually be handing off to ai. Why moving off hourly pricing isn't enough anymore? how to position yourself so clients see you as indispensable and how to make sure your pricing model matches your vision and goals. This was a really, really beefy conversation, so in order to prepare for it, I wanna make sure you have a notebook handy. And when you're ready, let's dive in. Hey, Joe, welcome to the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm super excited to have you here today. Yep. It's good to be here, Serena. Yeah, so I, I don't even remember how this interview came to be because we've had it on the calendar for quite some time, but I think someone reached out to me from your team wanting to have you on the podcast, and I was like, yes, actually, you've been on my list for a while Oh, that's great. I'm glad that worked out. so I, I'm very. I, I love to bring really quality guests to my podcast, and most of the time I don't accept pitches and I bring people that I wanna have conversations on with, because that just makes for a more quality podcast in my opinion. So Absolutely. Nobody just wants to be Yeah. A big commercial. Who wants that? Yeah. Yeah. So let's start with out of my own personal curiosity. your background and how you kind of what you have now and, and ended up where you're at? Well, interestingly enough, my background is not in accounting. I have a a bachelor's degree in classical Greek. That's a nice waste of a four year education. It's just above basket weaving. Not, not, not the Greek language of today that would be valuable. Classical Greek, where nothing's a dead language is a real, real good use of four, four years. so kind of, I had this rude awakening when I embrace life and realize you can't make money at translating classical Greek. So I went, got a job at a staffing company and they placed me with a CPA firm to do. Office work. And the CPA firm sold a lot, a lot of potential in me and said that, uh, they'd like to send me to the University of New Orleans so I can study accounting. And they wanted me to become a professional in their firm. and this was before the staffing crisis arena. This was back when you could still hire accountants, but I guess they just saw something in me. And I would think that's true because when I sat through my first class, I really loved, I fell in love with accounting from the moment I was introduced to a debit and credit. so they kind of picked up on that spark. Mm-hmm. then between, so then I kind of went back and I was a little bit more of like an intern than I was an office worker picking up the skills and one thing left, led to another, and. And here I am with, with one exception on their master plan. They wanted me to get enough credits to sit for the exam Mm-hmm. that I never did. I got distracted by the technology side of the profession and that intrigued me so much that it just kind of distracted me from the CPA path. And so, but still, here I am. Yeah, I've always thought that the people that choose to go into accounting and, and couple it with that IT background are probably the most marketable. And I thought that back in college too. And it turns out it's It's even more true today. That's correct, yes. Yeah. so now you. Run. if you're a listener and you are hearing Joe's name, you may be familiar with his event, scaling New Heights. So how did that all unfold from the beginning of your career to now where you're putting on these pretty big events for Yeah, that was kind of a, a corner turn a little bit, but, it evolved out of my experience. I was, I was what they called today. A standalone CS practice. Or a non-credentialed cra. I like standalone better. Mm-hmm. CS practice. That's what I had. We just didn't know to call it that. You know, I was doing not just bookkeeping, but controllership services skills and I was coupling it with accounting technology and some business advisory. So I was basically a CS practice with a strong technology bent and I was servicing larger clients, which I would encourage your listeners, if they don't have any clients that are a little bit larger, say two to 5 million. Go ahead and jump in that deep water. It's not as scary as it looks, and there's some really good money and opportunity there. But what I found is I had started moving into that segment. Some of my most notable clients were Elf on the shelf, the maker of the little kids'. Children's toys. Yeah. I helped them get over the hump before they went into enterprise level software back when they were, you know, smaller, Mm-hmm. big Green Egg before they became a big national company. We did all their management on QuickBooks and inventory systems. So it's really fun to be a part of people's journey when they're going through that phase. And, and all of that was because. I had scaled, here comes that word, into a larger clientele. So I wanted all of my peers, my fellow QuickBooks consultants and and, and bookkeepers and some of my CPA friends. I wanted them to start doing that kind of work for a little bit larger client.'cause I was enjoying it and I saw the opportunity, so I created the first conference scaling New Heights because I wanted them to literally scale into what had just been launched as QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions Desktop with some of these add-ons for the mid-market. That was the whole point is scale to the mid-market. Hmm. But what I found is there was an unaddressed market need out there where QuickBooks consultants, 'cause they were, I mean, they're still dominant today, but that was really in 2019, the, I mean, 2007, excuse me, when I launched this, that was the world. so I found, found that all these ProAdvisors just wanted to go someplace because they had nothing. There was no Intuit Connect, there was no QuickBooks Connect. And they all flooded in whether they were interested in the mid-market or not. And I thought. Okay, well I need to pivot. So from the second scaling new heights all the way up to today, scaling new heights has meant scale. New heights in your practice, Mm. not scaled to a larger clientele. So I flipped starting in year two because I listened to the market and I listened to my attendees, and that's what they wanted. Smart. It's Everyone take smart to listen to your customers. Isn't it funny that way? Yeah. Yeah. It's like we know that deep down, but do we always pay Do we always pay attention? Yes. But are we willing to change? Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually have never had the pleasure of attending the conference at all. Well, we've gotta fix that. Coast, let's fix that. um, and it's always, it always lands during a time of the year when I have like other family events going on or something. So Yeah. June's tough. You've got graduations, family reunions, there's all these, Yeah. Yeah. But one of these years, maybe not this year, but maybe next, That'd be great. So I, I'm really excited for this conversation because like before we hit record, it was kind of like we could go in any direction. We'll see how, where the Yeah. goes. But one thing that I wanted definitely to talk about is kind of where you're seeing the industry change, and I'm sure you're gonna be addressing this a lot at scaling new heights. I mean, we're themed this year to Strange New World. So yeah, it's a very strange world out there right now. Yeah, but you know, what is your, because you've been talking about advisory and. Moving into that area for a while, as, as have most people that are thought leaders in our industry, because that's kind of, you know, that's just been the conversation for years and years. Now it seems the most prevalent like five years ago, I would say. Yeah, for some people that makes sense, but not for everybody. But now there's, I mean, there. you use the AI built into zero, like there's hardly any data entry anymore. Yes. what are we gonna do with our time? And it only makes sense to go deeper with clients. So are you seeing in, in that area of like tools that have greatly improved the workflow for people to be able to step into that? What are you seeing with like. people are approaching things or the mindset shift that you've had to help a lot of bookkeepers through. Anything you wanna talk on Yeah. that realm? Well, let's start with the mindset shift because and, and of course all of this is very current events, there's been, there have been mindset shifts as we've worked our way into the cloud. We had big mindset shifts and now we're working our way into ai. So I could look at this in terms of horizons of decades, Yeah. But just focusing on say the last. 18, 12 to 18 months, which in the world of AI developments, ancient histories. So just, let's look at that window from 18 months ago till now. I'm finding that the mindset is tending to be polarized. Either you're, you're panicked and rapid pace adopting, or you know, just because you love new technologies, you're rapid pace adopting on that extreme. And on the other, I'm getting, either resistance or denial, and it's mostly denial because. It's a really easy confirmation bias to embrace that all of this is just hype. And the reason it's easy to embrace is because 18 months ago, 12 months ago, six months ago, there were all degrees, varying degrees of hype. There's hype today, but the gap between hype and reality is closing faster than the pace of any technological development, and I'm not being hyperbolic in the history. Of technology, and it's because of the nature of ai. It's not just a technology. Human minds are building. It's a mind that helps to build itself and that creates exponential growth. So if you're reading articles or you're seeing book titles, or you're hearing people say, it's all just fake, or it can't do this, I just had somebody send me an article, you know that, that. The majority of accounting functions are still wrong by ai, but, and, and I respect her and I get that. I'm gonna read the article and there's probably data to, to back that up. But the reason you have to look really hard at this segment, listeners is because a lot of the people who are saying it's wrong are going to LLM prompts like chat, GPT, they're feeding it, financial statements, and hopefully they're doing that with a privatized version. And then they're saying build a financial statement. Alright. Obviously it's gonna get a lot of things wrong. I mean, I just tried that in anthropic just to ho around earlier. And of course, a privatized version about a week ago. It got about 80% of my financials built out, right, which is just nothing but bank statements now, and it asking for a little bit of follow up information, which is good to do. It'll ask me questions. you know, and I didn't give it a chart of accounts or anything. I said, go create a chart of accounts and based on my company type, gimme a good one. I mean, I went from nothing Mm-hmm. And it got about 80% there. So you might see an article that says only 80% accurate or creates, you know, unreliable outputs. And you see that headline and you're not realizing, they're not talking about zero's artificial intelligence, which is built into their period close feature, which is controlled, structured, custom designed for the accounting profession. They're talking about a generic prompt with nothing but a bank statement. So you gotta compare the apples to the apples. And so the biggest takeaway I would get, oh, so if we're looking at the extremes, right? The mindset is denial or, or sort of panicked adoption. Or enthusiastic adoption. And in the middle, I'm not seeing where we need to be living. Where we need to be living is respond to what is happening. Don't ignore it. Don't react to it. If you think that you're behind and the train's leaving the station and you need to get caught up. Let's dispel that thought. 14% of accountants are using AI in a meaningful way in their practice. That's a stat that just came out. One of the developers of Silicon Valley shared it with me. I have to admit, I don't know their source, but I trust the developer. And so let's just say that that's marginally correct. 15 to 20%, somewhere in that range, as compared to other industries like computer programmers that are over 90%. So you are not behind. However, you don't have the luxury of time, so your mindset needs to be, learn and respond, Yeah. And learn from trusted, trusted resources. Yeah, that, I think that's a really key piece, and that's one of the areas that is like, well, if you don't know to trust, maybe like start just doing your own research. Thank you. Here's the problem. The developers are the ones that are generating a, a combination of hype and reality because they have products to sell and they have market price, they have share price to preserve. So you can't necessarily trust them by themselves, Right. But then if you listen to the enthusiast or the deniers, then you're not getting perspective either. Right. so you're gonna want to get people Who are well researched, who are objective and are just following the facts, right. And who also understand the profession. Yeah, that, that piece is really key. I, I did a YouTube video not that long ago on utilizing the AI system built into Xero so far, and it's in beta right now. So Sure. of tinkering with it on screen and kind of talking through like my thoughts and how I would use this and where it kind of falls short. And that's what people need to do. You need to tinker with it and experiment in order to really understand how it's gonna work for you. And your process. But the other piece of it is the whole, like, just like if you were to bring in a junior accountant in your firm, you wanna be reviewing their work because they're junior. And that's kind of how I look at the Yes. is like, it's a junior accountant at this point. Yeah. everything That's insightful. Serena. As a matter of fact, there was a, a report that just came out from Microsoft. Keep in mind, they're the developer's of co-pilot, but okay. There's a report that came out from Microsoft where they were saying that in the team structure of the future, in any industry, in any profession, the people that are leading those teams are going to have a combination of what they referred to as an AI worker and a human worker. Mm-hmm. And, you know, when, when we're talking about the way it's intersecting, the, the bookkeeping profession, I want you to think of it, bookkeepers not as displacing you because it can't feel, it can't care, it can't, understand what the psychological and emotional reactions of the business owner are. The political dynamics between that business owner and their team members, between them and their vendors, them and their customers, them and their family. It, it doesn't understand and can't, it can pretend to, but it can't really discern all of those pieces. It can't replace you Right. and it can't, and shouldn't ever make judgements about what a business should or shouldn't do or provide guidance for the direction of that business. As a coach or mentor, it can't do any of those things. And it can't do anything with physicality. But what it will do is it will replace certain tasks. Mm-hmm. you have to ask is, which tasks do I want to give it, and which tasks do I not want to give it it? Is that not the same question we would ask of an employee? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The, the human touch piece is one. You know, of the things I talk about a lot too is that's never. We're always gonna be needed for that. Where I see the fear happening is when I, you know, I, I coach and mentor a lot of bookkeepers, and some of them have a lot of experience and some of them don't, and they're newer to the profession and I think there's a lot of fear of, of those newer to the profession that are really afraid of their jobs being taken. And so what do you say to maybe some of those folks who. See the writing on the wall and they're like, okay, I gotta learn how to do this so I can oversee ai. Basically, like what do you think is the next step for that person to get more comfortable with the oversight role rather than the the doing. Yeah. Okay. So already you're reviewing your own work. I mean, you might be listening to this podcast and you have no employees, but you're. You're wearing a couple of hats. You are the financial information input person. You are the financial compiler, and then you're the reviewer, and then you're the account manager. You're just wearing all the hats, right? So just break your desk up, break your roll up into chunks and separate you from the roles. Then place yourself, continue, keep yourself into the roles of reviewer, account manager, and you know, the, the person that's, that's only the client relationship. A CPA firm would call that the partner in charge, right? Or the partner or the portfolio. But you're the, you're the owner, the company. So you'd manage that way. And the only role that you are delegating is the input and the capture. It's just really a. A way of bifurcating out your, your, your desk Mm-hmm. to the things that you can and cannot delegate. so the encouraging thing is you're already a reviewer just of your own work. Take that process and apply it to AI and review its work. And, as far as that other first part of your question, Serena, you know, what do we do to go get more familiar with it? Where the developers are doing a great job is when they don't form opinions about the future. And they don't, they're not writing marketing materials for a billboard or a Super Bowl commercial when they are training on the program because there are different people in the organization that are doing that and they, the only thing they care about is usability. And user enablement. So when you go into, say, Claude's own training about Claude, Claude Philanthropic or chat GPT or Microsoft's own training about chat GPT, you find it to be methodical and accurate and objective. go through that training and most of those offer all of that training for free. All you have to do is set up a free account and then go. Now the paid accounts are the ones that are more privatized, but you can set up a free account just to get to the learning materials. You just have to be very careful what you feed that free account. Yeah. would be the first step I would give people. And then I would say don't try to go out and reinvent what developers are making huge investments to invent. You mentioned zero several times. Zero has the resources. They're multi-billion dollar. Global company. Let them take the heavy lift of building out the tools that you need and then go use their tools. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still go through. The chat, GPT and the Claude and the co-pilot training because the way you're gonna use those tools is different from the way you're gonna close a monthly period. And I'll give you a good example. If you have a conversation with a client, you have a recording bot record that conversation, and they want you to do a certain kind of work or maybe a special kind of project, a cleanup and catch up engagement or a conversion from one general ledger solution to another, whatever it may be. You can, you can feed that transcript into an LLM, into a GPT and ask it to write a proposal for your client, Mm-hmm. and that will save you an hour or two, you know, starting that process from a blinking cursor. But that's different than going to zero and closing a monthly period. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's a really good way use of that. I never really thought of that, but I also don't do a lot of custom pro proposals, so, Well, can I give you one more too, that Xero just signed a multi-year deal with Anthropic and Zero, and, and Intuit has done the same thing with Anthropic and with Gemini and at OpenAI. So, as these major platforms are forming partnerships with gpt. You're gonna have to know how to use the GPTs because they're either gonna be embedded into the general ledger solutions, or they're going to be integrated with the general ledger solutions. You're gonna have to get, you're gonna have to make friends with prompting one way or the other, and that's where you can go to that training and get those prompt strategies. Yeah, that's really smart. I mean, that's kind of the strategy I would recommend for learning any software. People always wanna overcomplicate things and try to recreate the wheel, and it's like, just go and take the actual training from the software so you know how it's intended to be Exactly. Um, And, and those training programs will even them. Exactly. And the training programs will even give you example prompts. It'll say, go try this one out. You know, or, or, or here's 10 more things that you may want to ask it. And it's fun just to take their prompts, plug it in and see what happens. Yeah. it's very interesting. Yeah. So one of the other things that I was thinking about is another conversation that has me seemed. Well, I'll save my opinion for a moment. Do you think that the hourly versus value billing is still a conversation that needs to be had? Um, unfortunately Serena, it will be a conversation we need to have until the last time she is dead. Right. So, but, but what I can tell you is it's even more of an important conversation now because as you're delegating work to ai, you're going to make yourself so much more efficient. And you're gonna punish yourself for those efficiencies of your charging by the hour. But you know the sneak attack here, Serena, that I'm seeing with the accounting profession is they will understand conceptually what I'm saying and that that's great. Alright, so let's divorce ourselves from the time sheet, but divorcing yourself from the time sheet is only step one. The time sheet measures something. It measures effort and it measures time, right? Time and effort is the combination of those things. How much effort did I exert to produce this month's books? So if you divorce yourself from the time sheet, but you don't divorce yourself from the effort based pricing. Then all you're doing is moving from a frying pan to a frying pan. It's just that you don't have any measurement or controls over your effort anymore, and you're having to take guesses at what that effort was. So if you wanna really make the jump and you wanna get outta the frying pan altogether, it's to base your pricing on the outcomes that you drive, not the effort that's exerted to drive them. Now, I don't want your listeners to misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm not saying the effort doesn't matter. Effort is a management consideration for you. It is not a pricing consideration for your clients. There's a, there's a really big difference. Yeah, Yeah. so in like in a real life example, say there's a client that. Th this is where it, it becomes a little convoluted and difficult to measure that outcome because there, you could have a client whose books are very complex. They probably take a lot of time. There's a lot of moving pieces that you're working to keep reconciled and accurate. However, the client continues to make decisions that don't result in good outcomes. Right. So it's hard to measure, like. What we Yes, this is good. Yeah. Can I address this? This is good 'cause I get this one all the time. Your outcome has to be what you are responsible for, not what the client is responsible for. So I tell bookkeepers in a situation like that, and I like complex books. I see the more complex books the better because that's the less chance that they can, they can reasonably offshore it, hand it to tech. You know, get their, their aunt Bertha's roommate's cousin twice removed by marriage because they know them and they like them coming in and do the books. All that silly stuff we deal with, right? You know, you get the spouse effect all the time, or my daughter's home from college, she's gonna take the books. All that weird stuff, right? And, and all that goes away. The more complex the books are'cause they can't fool themselves into thinking it's that easy. But the other thing that comes with complex books is. Cost displacement. Now you can go to the client and you can say, well, let's run the math. What would it take now that you can't hire your Aunt Bertha's friend? What? What it's gonna really take to run this finance department in your back office? And here are all the things that you have to consider as you build that out. You have to curate your own technology, which is ever changing. You're going to need to build your own workflow process and put that into some kind of a step-by-step system. And by the way, that also has to be maintained and curated. You're gonna have to build standard operating procedures so that the people you hire are doing it consistently in a way where that you can measure the quality. Then you're going to have to find somebody in this crazy market that we're in where it's impossible to find qualified bookkeepers. Who knows what they're doing. And I've been out to Indeed and ZipRecruiter and just checked, and one in your area costs about $65,000 a year. Plus you have payroll taxes, plus you have benefits. Plus you're gonna need to give that person a computer and that computer's gonna wear out in two years. I, I could keep going Mm-hmm. and then all of a sudden I just want $2,000 a month. And they're gonna say. Where do I sign? Yeah. No way that they're going to try to bring all that in-house and, and I've had people say, yeah, my clients are smaller, so they don't really need a full-time person. Well, everything else I just mentioned stays the same. The process, the technology, the office, the computer, the only thing that changes is you cut that salary in half. You can still sell it cheaper than they can incur the cost to replace you with in-house offerings. So your, your only real competition is not that they're gonna do it in-house. The real competition is your fellow bookkeepers Mm-hmm. and the way to protect yourself from the, they're where they're underpricing and therefore price cutting you would be to do what they don't do. Right. Not just do what they do more efficiently, that's step one, but to do what they don't do. So how many of your peers offer controllership services where they analyze what's happening with spend to help the client determine where they can spend less money in the future? And any business owner, I don't care what kind of poor decisions they make, if you tell 'em that they can, they can cancel this subscription or they can stop that cell phone or they can shut off that device and they can save money. I mean, if you've got one that doesn't say yes, then pick another client. There are plenty of them out there, Mm-hmm. when you start saving clients money instead of just recording the money that they spent, you're going to be in the five percentile of excellence. Nobody can compete with that. You just have to lead with that, and that's an outcome you can drive. Yeah, a really good one. Thank you for talking through that. Yeah, absolutely. Hopefully people took notes. uh, we are getting closer to the end of time. But one of the things that I also wanted to get your take on is, you know, I know a lot of the firm owners you work with are, you know, upwards of half a million and, and over that. As we talked before, we hit record, a lot of my listeners are, to get to maybe 250 KA little higher than that. And I wanted to know what, what kind of common mistakes you see as, as people are growing into that zone. Things that maybe they should avoid or pay attention to. All right, so one of the common mistakes is try to price competitively. Don't price competitively price to your value. Yeah. yourself how you can drive value up so you can drive price up. So that's, you heard me say all that. That would be good way of saying that's the first checkbox. The next one. Is when you are the sole producer.'cause if you're doing about 250,000 or less in revenue, I'm assuming you're a sole practitioner. If not, that's a whole other problem. We'll unpack on a different podcast, but okay. So we're assuming that you're a sole practitioner, you are the producer. You are also the owner, and then you have general and administrative expenses. But what I find people do since one third, one third, one third is the formula. You want a third going into general. General and administrative. You want a third going to owner and you want a third going to producer. Well, when you are the producer and the owner, don't take a third, take two thirds. Put two thirds in your column. Now, it doesn't mean you need to draw that out. You could retain it in the company, right? We all know the word for that. It's called retain earnings. You could retain it in the company, but you need to allocate it to yourself because you're both the producer and the owner. Now, what that will do, when you set that model up, it will protect price.'cause you, you can't afford to take certain clients below a certain price and you're gonna turn them away appropriately. Then when you are ready to hire. And when you start getting much above two 50, and especially as you approach 300, 3 50, 400, you're way overdue. You need to bring on that other professional. And of course, in a world of ai, excuse me, in a world of AI, that math may change. But for right now, we'll just go with this. So when you do, if you don't have those margins baked in, you have no one third to give to the employee, and you're, you're locked in. You literally can't hire. Or you have to take a loss to hire, or you have to fire every client or reprice every client to hire, and then you hit this ceiling. It's not a glass ceiling, it's a concrete ceiling. Hmm. Yeah. And that's when people get to the point of throwing in the towel, Yeah, because I'm just working way too hard for no upside, no leverage. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I, I completely agree with that. I. I, I hired on, I hired really early on because my intention was never to work full time. And so I, from the very beginning have had a similar pricing model of like, there's this 50% is allocated to me and I run the, be the rest of the company on the rest of it. And so if I can't price accordingly, then I don't take on That's great. And yeah, whether you have part-time or full-time. The, the, the breakdown is all pretty much the same. As long as you start with that from the beginning. Yeah, absolutely. And then, and then you need to have, and I know we're over, but you need to have a process. that you have defined because when you bring that person on board, you have two different risks. If they're, if they're not competent enough to run it, end to end with their own brain, then you end up with quality control problems and productivity problems. If they are smart enough to run it from end to end with their own brain,'cause you hire somebody really experienced, then you end up with. A couple of different bookkeeping practices under your name. That's their, their book. Their clients become their bookkeeping practice doing it their way with their secret sauce. And then you have your way with your secret sauce and you're just kind of a house of bookkeepers. You hire the third and fourth one of those and you get four different ways of, of making the recipe. So you want to hire people who are competent and you want 'em to run your rails. Don't hire before you have the rails. Yeah, I do see, I mean, there's definitely a, a balance between wanting it to be perfect before you hire actually just Yes. the baseline there that you can build on as you hire. But But at least have the baseline, define the tech, define the broad stroke processes around each client, and then you can, you and the employee that you bring on board, the team member, you can perfect the process as you go.'cause now you'll have a little extra capacity to make that happen. That's a good point, Serena, you Yeah, you wait until you're ready to hire somebody, get married or have a kid, you'll never do any of them. exactly. And I've done all three so. Yeah. Wasn't ready for any of it yeah. and it's worth it. It's worth it and it's been worth it on all three. That is correct? Yes, sir. So if a listener wants to connect with you, where is the best place to find you? And when is scaling new heights Yes. Alright, so I'll answer the same way with the the same URL. It's my last name.com. That's Woodard with one w woodard.com. And if you go there under event, you'll find Scaling New Heights. It's coming up in June. And you did mention correctly that if you're in our coach program, you're typically at or approaching a million or more. But the folks that come to scaling New Heights, everybody walks those halls. We have plenty of people that are gonna be right in your peer group. Listeners, if you're just getting started out. We even have a meetup for brand new business owners in the accounting profession that you can go just meet people that just started in the last year, if that's you. But, um, yeah. So just come join us in June. That'd be great. And where is it That's in Orlando. Awesome. if you wanna take your kids Disney World hit up We're, we're right across the street from Disney World. You can look out your balcony at, at all four parks in one view. We're right across the street. Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and I can't wait to have another conversation with you in Anytime. I'd love to come on, Alright, talk to you soon.

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