Accounting at Scale

In the latest episode of "Through the Door," Megan sits down with Matt Bontrager, CPA and Managing Partner of TrueBooks. Matt launched his accounting and tax services business in January 2020, right before the pandemic hit. Despite the challenges, his firm thrived thanks to their virtual setup, increased demand for financial services, strong online presence, and range of educational products. Tune in to hear Matt share insights on navigating rapid growth, the benefits of a flexible workplace, and the importance of team dynamics.

All price references and market forecasts correspond to the date of this recording. This podcast should not be copied, distributed, published or reproduced in whole or in part. The information contained in this podcast does not constitute research, recommendations, representations or warranties as to the accuracy or completeness of the statements of any information contained in this podcast and any liability from Zions Bancorporation, N.A or its divisions (including direct, indirect, or consequential loss or damage) is expressly disclaimed. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of Zions Bancorporation, N.A. or any of its divisions. Zions Bancorporation, N.A. is not providing any financial, economic, legal, accounting or tax advice or recommendations in this podcast. In addition, the receipt of this podcast by any listener is not to be taken as constituting the giving of advice, investment or otherwise, by Zions Bancorporation, N.A. to that listener, nor to constitute such person a client of Zions Bancorporation, N.A. Copyright reserved by Zions Bancorporation, N.A. Nevada State Bank is a division of Zions Bancorporation, N.A. Member FDIC

Chapters

• 0:06 Welcome Matt Bontrager
• 1:00 A Nevada-Grown Entrepreneur
• 4:16 Starting an Accounting Business During the Pandemic
• 5:41 Troubleshooting the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) for Clients
• 9:05 Small Business Financial Literacy
• 10:32 Transitioning From a W2 CPA to Small Business Owner
• 12:43 Managing Rapid Growth in Your Business
• 14:37 Working With Customers To Create Better Experiences
• 16:26 Is there a CPA Shortage?
• 17:37 Tax Strategy at Scale
• 19:50 Delivering on Value to Ensure Recurring Revenue
• 20:25 The Importance of Understanding Your Own Business Financials
• 24:33 Social Media & Accounting Advice
• 27:35 Not Everything is "One Size Fits All"
• 29:18 Building a Company Culture in a Remote World
• 33:15 Optimizing Channels of Communication
• 36:42 Getting Ahead of Customer Concerns
• 38:12 Managing the Seasonally Aspect of Business
• 40:45 How Many Businesses Ask for a Tax Filing Extension?
• 42:10 The Power of Being Prepared
• 44:54 Evolving From Gear Turner to Visionary
• 48:41 Letting Go of Tasks to Focus on Growth
• 49:48 Communicating with Different Personality Types
• 55:12 Closing

Transcript

(...) Welcome and thank you for tuning into Through the Door, the insider's perspective on running a business. I'm Megan Comfort. I'm the small business manager at Nevada State Bank. This is a podcast where we interview entrepreneurs, business owners, and leaders and get their thoughts and lessons learned on running a company and some of the decisions that they've made throughout their time as a business owner. I want to introduce my guest. His name is Matt Bontrager. He is the managing partner over at True Books. It's a CPA firm that does all things tax related, but also focuses on tax planning and tax strategy. So welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm pumped. Yes.(...) So we typically start these episodes off talking a little bit about your origin story, a little bit about your background and how you arrived at forming and running True Books. Cool. So born and raised in Nevada, which I like. I take a lot of pride in. Priority. I know. I feel like when I talk to people, I'm like, oh, I'm one of the 10 people that are still here. Everybody's like, I'm waiting to leave. No. So I'm here.(...) Born and raised here. I went to high school at Western and I was going to go play-- I tried to play college baseball. Did not work. So then I'm like, oh, something's safe. We go accounting degree.(...) Accounting degree. I had an interest in money. I worked at the bank at the time. So I worked at Wells.

(...)

And through college and accounting, they're always preaching to you. You got to go big four or you got to go industry. So I could go work at a casino out here and be like an internal staff accountant or go get my license as a CPA and go to the big four.(...) The big four was immediately something that I wanted to do.

(...)

Because you needed your hours in order to actually become a CPA. Exactly. So you need not only educational credits, but then you need work experience hours, which is good that you ask that. So as a CPA here in Nevada, you either need, at the time when I did it, 2,000 hours, basically two years of public or four years of industry. So you can see there too that if I was going to go be like an internal staff accountant somewhere, I'd have to wait four years to get my license instead. So the big four route made a lot more sense to me. And it had more money attached to it, which I think too. It just was more prestigious.(...) So I tried everything that I could to get to Deloitte. We have three of the big four firms here in Vegas.

(...)

That was the firm that I wanted to go to, and it worked. So I worked through school, went to every networking event that I could, put on a suit, went to all the lunches,(...) and that worked out well.

(...)

Spent about two years at Deloitte. So I've been in public accounting out of school since. UNLV grad. UNLV? Yeah, I didn't even say that. Oh my god, that's so nervous.

(...)

No, so yeah, I went to high school here, and then I went to UNLV. I went to CSN, which is their community college, and then I went to UNLV. Same. I followed the same path. Love it. Finance though. Did you just see UNLV beat Reno? Were you at that game? I wasn't. I had tickets, but I was in Montana. But I know. It was good. Oh, I want to go to Montana. It was good. So I went to UNLV. Go Rebels. I know. Go Rebels. Graduated from UNLV, went to Deloitte.(...) It's very common in tax or accounting that you'll start to grow a book of business on the side as an accountant. So you'll catch a client here and do their tax return. You'll do some bookkeeping here. So after Deloitte for about two years, I stayed in public accounting, which is, again, serving a multitude of clients. I didn't work for one client.

(...)

And my book of business on the side, this is 2018, was maybe like $40,000.(...) And my W-2 at the time was maybe $75,000.(...) My wife was making OK money, $80,000 to $100,000.

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So the book of business was growing for me.

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And I got an opportunity. I saw somebody post online. They were a real estate investor here in town, and they needed a bookkeeper. And I was like, oh, I could do this with my eyes closed. So I reach out. And after a few meetings, landed him as a client. That was at like $2,200 a month. Oh, wow, nice. I know on top of the $50,000 that I had on the side. So I'm like, this is great. This is great side money here. That's a big client. So I know, a big client. So then I had made a joke to him like, hey, we should start a firm together. He had a big presence online and was doing pretty well in business.(...) And he was all for it. So then this is about 2019.

(...)

And it was Q3, Q4 when I brought that idea to him. Quit my job December of 2019.(...) I had just had my first son that May. So he's like six, seven, eight months old, something like that. And quit my job in December. Started my firm January 1st. Of 2020.

(...)

2020 COVID year, yeah. Wow. So that's like the fast track area. Tell me a little bit about starting your business. Because was it similar to what happened to a lot of other companies? Like for example, my husband, he started a company December of 2019,(...) not realizing that three months later, he would have to board up his other business. Not deemed essential. So did you go through like a kind of panicked moment a little bit? Or was it more you dealing with panicked clients? Like what was that experience like? I like that you said that. Cause you just gave me the, that is the answer. It was definitely,(...) so grateful that in 2020, I didn't run into a hiccup in business. If anything, our business skyrocketed. And because we were virtual from the start, I didn't have any like hard, really overhead costs. Like a building or rent.

(...)

And so again, I didn't really have to board anything up. If anything, I was shielding questions off from people that were like maybe losing their jobs or transitioning into how they made money. They were moving positions, whatever the case was. Moving industries. So yeah, it didn't really affect us much, which thankfully.(...) So it, well, it didn't affect you, but it sounds like it kind of helped your business from that perspective. Negatively it didn't, yes. But yeah, it had a huge impact to us as far as clients. Cause it was, we were remote and it was at that time again, people were, I think a little bit more worried about their finances at the time, whether it was business owners or-- Calling you and asking you like, were you trying to brush up on like PPP knowledge or like, you know, the ERTC funds and all of that, you know, fancy footwork that kind of came out over the years, were those things that you had to-- Huge. And so like we could spend two hours on that topic. I stayed away from those. So again, we're talking late 2020, 2021 when those programs started to come out.

(...)

The term that we had for like in the CPA world was basically helicopter money. You probably saw it too from the bank. There was so much money being like thrown around that what concerned me was yes, we had a lot of clients that were reaching out to us, asking us for help to fill out those applications. And we were a hard no on it. It wasn't clear at the time really how to even get the money cause it was all new rules, but we stayed far away from helping people. I maybe ran calculations for two or three people on PPP. They got the money, but it was, I wasn't signing any paperwork saying that I was helping them do this and filling out the apps for them. Cause it was a lot of money opportunity wise for us, but seeing now what's gonna be, what's gonna come from that, I think so many people are gonna go to jail, period.

(...)

The referral fees that people were paying were insane. We could have got 20%, at some point 20%,

(...)

let's say I wrote someone's paperwork to get them a PPP loan for a hundred grand. I could have got 20 grand within 10 days of writing that application. And then they would just have to obviously wait for the difference. - That was like firms that were saying, "Hey, give me a portion of the funds and I'll do the paperwork for you." - All these ERC specialists that were popping up, but yeah, it was basically if we would help submit apps and basically, because the biggest question with PPP was, "Do you really qualify for this money?"(...) Reading the rules, getting your financial statements together to determine if you can really apply for this.

(...)

And even then it was so shady. Let's say somebody was gonna get a hundred grand back. If I wanted the money upfront, let's say I could have got 20 grand. If I was willing to wait for the money, I would have got 30.

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- Yeah, that doesn't sound good at all. - None of it sounded well. So it's like now we're seeing all these articles pop up where it's like, "Oh, they got PPP money and went and bought a Lambo with it." And so we just stayed far away from it. If clients got the money and they needed help with like, "Hey, now what do I do with this? Great, where are your tax? Where are your CPAs? We're gonna help you with this." But I'm not gonna write applications at mass volume to try to get people money for this. So we stayed far away from that stuff. - And I think that that was probably, I'm sure there's always gonna be an industry or companies that are gonna try to take advantage of something like that. I'm more so focused on not necessarily the scams and the negative side of it, which I know was very bad. More so the actual businesses that needed it and that used it for the purposes intended, which I think was really important. It also made a lot of people realize, or at least in my mind, it made me realize how interesting it was how people paid themselves or paid others and them not realizing that that was not obviously things that they could necessarily obtain PPP funds for if they had all independent contractors. They had to do their own PPP loan. If you were an S-Corp and you just paid yourself their distributions, technically you don't get PPP because that's not part of it. And so I think that it really kind of opened up people's eyes more so to understanding the importance of financials. - Financial literacy totally was a good smack in the face for people there. - Because it was something that I think a lot of people took a real hard look at and was like, wow, I'm not able to really benefit from anything legitimately because I'm not really doing what I probably should be doing with my financial reporting. Or I've just been doing it a different way, not realizing that that would impact me from something like this. But I mean, at the same time, who knew we were gonna go through a pandemic, right? I always joke and say, who knew banking could be so exciting? It was a very exciting time. We were,(...) and I remember coming to work and not leaving, just working probably 20 hours, like literally sleeping here and just-- - During those times of-- - Yeah, just caring so much about making sure that people were taken care of because you could hear the stress and the strain in their voice and-- - Thousand percent. - And I mean, you know, as a business owner, when you start to provide for others through employment and jobs,(...) your business takes on a life of its own. It becomes this separate entity outside of yourself that you have to basically continue to feed and make sure that it survives because there's so many other people depending on it. So tell me about that. So you venture into,(...) you know, getting your CPA, now your book of business is bigger than really your W-2 employment that you had at the time. And so you make this move with a partner, it sounds like.

(...)

And then what was the strategy there then to grow it? Because you're a unique CPA. Most CPAs that I know, they're not trying to be in the limelight. - It's a little quirky. - You know, they're-- - Mm, from the content, yeah. - They're not necessarily,(...) I think that's a big shock for a lot of people in the CPA world too when they're getting into accounting is, wait, wait, what do you mean? Like, I just wanna be able to-- - Crunch. - Crunch numbers and do things like that. I don't wanna have to network and go out there and find new clients and build a book of business or think, like that is, I think, a very big shock for the personality type that goes into accounting.

(...)

- When we started the business, it's funny, because all of that now which, right as I walked into the UNLV game, someone looks back to me and he's like, "Oh, you're the tax guy?" And I was like, they were like, "It's nice to see you outside." I was like, "I feel like I go outside." But it was, that was very new for me now. When I started this business, it was, "I'll be the operator. Hey, you do all the marketing and you talk about us online and you get people to come to us." And that's how it was for the first two and a half years or so until I started to make videos online and you cringe at the first couple, but then it's like, whoa, you get some good exposure. And so that's what kind of flipped the script. But starting out our, I don't even think we had a strategy to grow. I think it was we really capitalized on his current business. He was a home flipper and did not only home flipping, but educational products, so like online education. So, hey, I've learned how to do this. Let me teach you how to do this now. And just the lead volume and the sheer exposure that the internet brought him for his businesses

(...)

just easily trickled to us. Cause it was not only was he getting questions as to who's your CPA, who's your accountant, now he could say he owned a firm and we helped people similar to him in his situation. And that was, it was really no strategy. But like I say, when we got so lucky, we did 120 gross in the first year. The second year we did 860.

(...)

Third year we did 26. - So how, but I mean, with that growth comes capacity constraints and client experience. Especially you're talking about those numbers.(...) It's funny because as a business owner, I could be like, oh my God, that's a huge success. Like amazing. But as a banker, I'm like, ooh, that's concerning. Cause how do you manage through that growth and make sure that it doesn't implode on itself? - Failed pretty hard in 22.

(...)

2021 and early 22, I started to do content. So now we had double the lead volume. Think of it as we had his audience. And then I started to grow an audience as this just person that talked taxes online. It wasn't really any, no one that wants to talk taxes is gonna go online. They're usually 65 year old men who's just like phasing out of their practice. - Or like Ben Stein, who am I love? But you know, very, very dry. - So the thought, yeah. So the thought is now we had all this lead flow and in 2022, I got featured on a podcast that was, so we're real estate focused. We help a lot of real estate investors. This was a real estate investor podcast and I had landed a spot on that podcast cause one of the co-hosts was our clients and still is. And he, so he gets me on his podcast and sales went through the route. It was like taking burger orders at In-N-Out. It was wild. So as a business owner, great. You couldn't count the money fast enough, but the problems were huge. It was how do you service this work now that you've taken people's money?

(...)

And we did as good of a job as we could, but we just still, it was a very stressful time in 22. Q4 of 2022 was very hard for us, which really bled into Q1 of 2023.(...) So, but I think in that time, it was the traditional worry about sales, sales will cure all and sales were there and the money was there. So the, I guess the good side on that was it allowed us to have the capital to deploy on more labor. It was just by the time the labor got in, it was a little late. So, but I mean, I have a strong, like I still get kind of yelled at it now. It's pretty uncommon in this newer age business industry to really give refunds. And I'm very big on like bad experience, take your money back. Cause as a consumer, that's what I would want. I try to make it as fair as I can. Like if you have a bad experience or you got half of what you bought, you know, so it was a mix of refunds and it was a mix of saying, hey, we'll prolong your service from a year to two years. I would work with them to see what they wanted, but it's fun to talk about now. It was not fun to talk about then, but it was a huge, huge speed bump in our business. - But I think that that's one thing that I always find interesting sometimes with business owners is you can't really shy away from the difficult conversations.(...) It actually creates for me more loyalty and longevity with your customer base because they really do one, either feel your authenticity or the genuineness in your voice when you really care about the fact that they aren't getting what they signed up for and hearing them out. And honestly, that's really all that people can ask for is with a day and age of technology and AI and all these things where you really are more pushed towards self-serving and not being able to have that human aspect of things to then work with a company where they get to talk to somebody or they get to actually express why things didn't go the way they thought. I mean, that builds character, builds strength in your business, even during a time where maybe people weren't having a great experience.(...) - It's cool to think about too now because I almost weirdly like when people ask or at that time when they were saying, "Hey, I had a bad experience last year. "Tell me why it won't happen again. "Hey, sit down with me. "Give me 15 minutes and I'll explain to you in detail why." You'd think it's almost cool because you would see somewhat of the insights of, "Wow, this business like really hit it big," and then just had a struggle getting to where it needed to be to service that many clients. And it's funny, so right now this week I'm at a tax conference and it's one not only, and I think later on we can talk about it too, just interesting to see the average age there. I'm 32. The average age there has to be 65 to 75. So they say 70% of CPAs are gonna retire in the next 10 years and I can see it in this room. - Are you worried about the capacity and the workflow of, you know, just people getting engaged with accountants, right? - Labor. - For example, the construction industry and the trades, that job,(...) people have been suffering finding talent to come into those spaces. And there is this concern of labor shortage in that particular industry when you look, you know, 10 years down the road, do you see kind of the same thing in your world? Like how do you plan on building around that?

(...)

- Talent acquisition now for us has been,

(...)

when you're a starting business, like when you're a young business, talent acquisition doesn't, I would hear that word and be like, "Great, that's not a problem we have. I'm worried about finding customers still."(...) But when you have a book of business and clients are coming in, you turn into this, "Okay, now I need to spend the money that I've just earned to deploy and now service these people."

(...)

So I think, yes, it'll always be an issue right now, especially in accounting,

(...)

but how our business is kind of handling that is similar to what we talked about earlier, is education and sort of tax strategy at scale. So when you think about how our firm offers our services, if you take an old traditional CPA versus our firm, they look radically different. And I think it's because our model kind of fits to this labor shortage and more people, as we both know, needing not so hard advice.(...) It's pretty clear and well laid out as to what they need to do. It's just more so them taking the action to do it. And the benefit of that is for me or anybody on my team or any CPA to give that advice, I can easily do that to a room or a Zoom call of 20, 30, 40, 50, 500 people versus the in-depth tax planning conversations that need to take place over someone's estate. - Oh, wow. So that's actually interesting. So you're doing more of a classroom type of environment for your clients to say, like I'm teaching a masterclass on this particular strategy. If you're interested in understanding more about that, then you can kind of tune in like that. - Here's exactly how our model works. If you want to meet with a CPA quarterly, and you're one of those people that's like, hey, I saw this online, why don't you tell me about this? And you want them to actively look after your situation, that's 6,500 bucks. That's a flat fee through us.(...) You meet with them throughout the year. You have email access, all that. It's one to one. If you're just like a newer level investor or small business owner, high W2 owner looking to start a business, and you just need a couple questions answered, for 3,000, you can see the price disparity too is way cheaper, but it's because it's in a group setting. So we use a platform called Circle. I just call it like a Facebook group on steroids, but there's videos in there of me talking about S-corps, and LLCs, and P&Ls, and templates. There's templates in there. There's this big knowledge bank of stuff that I think a newer level investor and business owner needs, and then I just do live calls monthly.

(...)

So I think for Black Friday, we're filming this on a, we're filming this what it's a Tuesday, but in the last four days, we probably have 40, 50 people that have got it. So it's tax strategy at scale is what we call it, because it helps me from a labor perspective. I don't need to deploy a lot of people to do that. I can do what I run the calls now.

(...)

And again, it still gives, because my biggest thing too is in business. I feel like I've been doing this for 20 years. I've been going on five.

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Is it's important for people to get what they pay for and see the value, at least for me as a business owner, because I'm in this business, I want recurring revenue. I want to wake up the next year knowing that if I don't sell a dollar, I have a book of business coming back. And I think for three grand, whatever lower price point that is, I'm able to give you that value easy.

(...)

So that's how we've structured our services, which is uncommon compared to other CPAs. They don't do Zoom calls or group things. - Or bookkeeping type of elements. Tell me a little bit about that, just because that is something that,(...) for example, I teach a class through the Las Vegas Chamber(...) as part of their EDGE program. It's a program for minority women owned businesses. And a lot of those business owners are either there because their businesses are having some challenges or they're just barely starting out or they're recovering from COVID and kind of still trying to find their footing.

(...)

But it's always interesting to kind of listen to different businesses and their mindset around financials and financial reporting. I remember listening to a little snippet of a podcast that you actually had on your Instagram. And it was funny because you said something that I feel like I've said a million times where I'm like, you have to know where your money's going. So it's as simple as that, if anything. But tell me about that, because that's a huge point of contention and stress for a lot of businesses. - Huge. - Is figuring out how to understand the financial aspect of things and how to then use that as useful information to then plan and strategize around it. What do you do in your realm or kind of help with that? Because that's a problem set that I think businesses always continuously have. Even when you give them the rule book, they're like. - Oh, exactly. Little off topic here, you might have to cut this. Do you know Jessica Velasquez?(...) - No, no. - She's a minority, she's a women owned business. She's the firm that I worked for before True Books. So I feel like you guys would cross circles for sure. Yeah, she's in town. - I don't know. I'll have to look her up though. - Yeah, yeah. Okay,(...) so bookkeeping, which to this topic is,

(...)

even before taxes, I did accounting. So this is where I'm much more passionate about the bookkeeping side of things because I think that's just where I'm stronger as far as a knowledge base goes. Because at the end of the day, numbers are numbers, but balance sheets and P&Ls. So I want to fix bad bookkeeping like it's world hunger, okay, for at least small business owners. And so the quick answer is how we solve this. We have a service that offers it to people. So if people want to pay monthly for it, but as you know, most small business owners aren't gonna pay three, four, $500 for bookkeeping. I would tell them as an advisor, don't pay for that. Because I feel like one, it's a good exercise for you to do. And two, you would save the cash that you could ultimately use to probably find more customers or whatever the case is. - Well, and if someone's doing it for you, you're generally not looking at it. - You're not at all. - I mean, I do have somebody that does my bookkeeping and I love them because I don't have time, but I'm also a finance person. So as soon as they close my books, I'm reviewing that with my very confused husband who is just staring at me like, "What does that mean? I don't understand."

(...)

- And that's where like even further into bookkeeping, because now, so I've just brought, it was a huge feat for us. Our bookkeeping price per month was $500. And again, just to share context, I'm not trying to share like the dollar amounts for any other specific reason, is we were at $500 a month. It's very hard to get, and our bookkeeping practice for context shows some experience. We're gonna do about seven, 800,000 this year in bookkeeping, just the bookkeeping practice.(...) So pretty sizable, it's a good amount of business.(...) And that is, but again, that's a business owner that's going to pay somebody to do the books every month.

(...)

I needed to get prices down to 250 because I needed to be able to bring on, I would do so many tax returns for people and come tax time, I'd say, "Hey, where's your numbers?" And they'd say, "I need a little bit." Or they'd send me something that is just horrendous. Or they'd say, "Why can't you just do it off my bank statements?" Which is our favorite line.(...) And what does that do? That slows down my tax prep practice, the same way it slows down your loan apps and everything you guys have going on internally. So to fix this problem is, at least our stab at it, you can pay us to do it for you, or you pay me to show you how to do it, or at a minimum, I'm gonna give you the resources and the tools to do it, which would just be simply like a template. But I don't know, the sad part is I feel like most people start to understand what a problem it is that they don't look at it when it really bites them, which is sad, but it's like, I don't know how to really, let's solve it on this podcast, because I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to really steer them clear of it. Because until it stings them, they don't really understand the severity of it. So until the bank loan doesn't close,(...) until they lose out on the house that they're trying to get, until they didn't get a loan for their business to push payroll out for the next three months. So whatever it is, it's gonna really just sting them, is my thought.(...) One thing that I find really unique about your business model is the social media aspect of it and kind of the power behind being able to do that. But one thing that is also scary, and maybe you have seen this too, is I'll see a lot of, like for example, I follow you. So I listen to a lot of the different things that you talk about and say, and I'm like, "Huh, that sounds accurate. "That's an interesting kind of topic that you're sharing." But then in my algorithm, all of a sudden you get a lot of other tax people or just investment people. And that is the part that kind of makes me a little bit nervous about the social media power, because for example, I saw one video where somebody was talking about using credit card advances at 0% promos to then buy a property free and clear, make it into an Airbnb, and then refinance that into a traditional mortgage after it's cash flowing. And I'm like, "Oh my God, that sounds very scary." - Could that work, yes, but yeah, no. - For, yeah, for people, but it is interesting. Do you ever see that being an issue with the social media aspect of business, like related to something where it's intangible, right? It's more of your expertise and experience that's really kind of driving what it is that you're talking about versus people that are out there that maybe don't have necessarily that same background or are just trying to become a financial coach, but not necessarily sharing solid practices? - It's a problem for us in the sense of the watch, and this is where I try to end some of these videos when I talk online like that, because I've even had people try and let's say fact check me, and then you gotta get into these debates there. I've seen bad advice.(...) What I try to tell people there is anything that you hear online should be used as a, "Oh, that kind of sounds like something I'm involved in. Let me start to look into this and also ask my advisor if you have one." The problem that it poses for us is, yes, people hear this stuff and they come to us saying, "Hey, I'm ready to do this," and then they pay us money to tell them, "No, you can't."

(...)

Because that's one of the biggest challenges in our business is if somebody gets on a sales call or just starts to, let's say, meets me somewhere, meets someone from my team somewhere, they kind of treat you like a doctor where they're like, "Hey, well, I have you for a minute. Can I ask you some of these questions?" And the problem with that is you're essentially now giving them free service when you're not even engaged to do so. I would say it's, yes, it's the misinformation and people thinking that they can do things, but then ultimately getting into the weeds of things that they can't. So it's always my disclaimer of,

(...)

the good side is, "Yeah, there's a lot of good information floating around there." That's a crazy scenario that could work, but it's not.(...) 99% of the time, it's not going to work. So I think just trying to groom an overall audience of people on a platform to say, "Hey, you gotta just watch this and try to see if it sparks an interest, not rely on it." My favorite thing to say to people when they ask me about finances or even some of the things that they've seen is I go, "It depends." Because that's what is so unique and interesting about financials and the financing is it really depends on your situation, your financial position, your trajectory, your historical performance, your projections, your strategic planning, everything. So it's really hard for me to say yes or no, or be able to appeal to a greater, broader audience on a particular topic because it just depends on how you're using that information and where you are today, right?(...) That's a difficult component. You do it very well though, I will tell you. - Walk through that though even, because even no one likes the answer of it depends even though we know it's the right answer. And it's like, "Well, hey, great." Because nowadays, somebody was just saying how easy it is to check out with things. When you're buying something from a platform, it's almost too easy with all the affirm and you can finance it now. - Buy now, face recognition. - So it makes me think is like to that answer, they don't wanna hear the, "It depends." Great, well here's this information that I need to give you a clean answer, but what's the problem? They don't have the information trickling back to the bookkeeping, so it's like they, again, they can get the answers that they want and even the timeliness I think that they want. But it's the problem is they're not putting in the work to get people, professionals like us, the information that we need to give them good answers would be my thought, yeah. - Yeah, well I think that that's one important thing. I hope you do solve the problem of bookkeeping because that is on both of our sides, the banking side and the CPA side, that's always been somewhat of a challenge, I think, for clients to understand the importance of that information.(...) So we've kind of talked about the labor shortage. Tell me a little bit about company culture. You said that, do you still have everyone kind of working remote?

(...)

And how, that's a unique kind of business platform just because so many business owners that generally I encounter and talk to, they're like, you need to be in the office and I want you in the office. And remote is going away and it's gonna be gone soon. So what's kind of your take on that or how have you been able to grow with a remote environment and build culture? That's a lot of questions and why. - Yeah, no. So the team has grown way faster than I thought it would. It was just me for like the first eight months. First employee was about a year later. Now we're up to 30. So in five years, we got 30 full-time people, eight overseas and the rest here. - How did you find the overseas folks? Was it like online posting? - Yeah, two staffing companies. So it's, which from our perspective really helps with like, from an IT perspective and just security.

(...)

And so that was pretty easy, honestly. And that's what's when you really look at our business now. If I needed to turn on labor very heavily, I could get a lot of people overseas to get on quick(...) and start doing the work that we need, like prepared tax returns and stuff like that or bookkeeping.

(...)

From the jump, we've always been remote. I'm just trying to think back. It's like, that was something that I wanted at the firm where I was at, I didn't need to be in a chair. This is a position as a CPA. When you come up, you're like, why am I sitting here? I don't need to be here. I'm not talking with the client necessarily. I'm doing work that could be done anywhere.

(...)

And I also think that from the beginning, it was a unique advantage for us to drive good labor. I think about one of the guys on my team now, Jerry. He came from the big four,(...) used to wear in a suit. He's in office. And some of the other talent is they've been in office. They want a change of pace. They want that flexibility of working from home.(...) I think I'm the last generation though where I did work really hard in office.

(...)

And I was sitting there till two, three a.m. when the partners were there and then it was the waterfall effect. The partner left, the manager left, the senior left, then you got to leave. And I kind of miss that because I don't buy this, you're more productive at home. I really don't. And even now running my own business, I just think that you're not. No one's gonna convince me you are. - There's just so many distractions. - There's distractions and information doesn't flow as fast. So the week before last, we had an in-person meeting.(...) It was a leadership, no, it was tax and leadership. So our departments, we have accounting, tax and planning. Tax was in town. Just being in town for three days with that one team was so fun because the information moved so fast and the conversations you're having, it's not like, if I got up to go to the restroom, I could easily talk to somebody for a few minutes. If I get up at my house, I'm not gonna get on a Zoom call quickly and call somebody.(...) But now next week we have our whole team in town. And so that's gonna be another week where we just clearly see that for a full virtual remote team,(...) it's cool for them to see people in person now. But also you get a lot done in that amount of time because the information moves faster. So I think it was a branch of that's the kind of firm I wanted to build. And I think it helps us find labor because it's a cool, unique advantage, getting to work remote. I think that's like my wife. She works for MGM.(...) She left COVID saying, "I'll never go back."(...) And it worked out so well for us because we have young kids. I got the twins and I got a five year old. So my kids are all under five. So for her it was a-- - I couldn't work at home because I have a five year old and a three year old. And I remember when we were primarily working remote, I actually always kind of worked in the office just because there weren't a lot of people here and it was, I had tons of monitors here, which was super nice. - The station is nice. - Yeah, to be able to work remote. But it gave me that focus and clarity of quiet that I just really needed to be able to work fast and quick when you are in an environment where it's like your kids don't understand when you're on a meeting or what silence means ever.(...) So that stuff is always kind of challenging. But not only that, the remote part, how frequently do you meet with your team in person? Because there is synergy and power and energy that kind of just gets transferred across a group that gets to work together. Do you feel like that part is kind of being missed? Or how do you capture that with remote workers? - I think I have an honest answer to that because I do believe that you're gonna be more productive in person. So I know that my firm right now is not being as productive and we do miss those opportunities because I see them happen when we are in person. Like I said, next week, so I'm thinking gonna be magical. We're gonna have everybody in office and for the first time with a team this big.

(...)

But meetings now, like if you get on a Zoom call with me and your camera's not on, I'm not having the meeting. Like so small stuff like that. - Yeah.(...) - A lot of phone calls. It's kind of bled into texting, but a lot of slack. But like certain leadership members, you know, all texts. Because if we're gonna shut down one channel of communication, which is in person face-to-face, you better open up every other one that you have. Because the information needs to flow. We can't just talk on the phone once a week and think, and run a department meeting and think we're gonna be okay. So I think it's, there's like my office manager. So every day in the office, it's me, my COO, a marketer and a setter.

(...)

And then every couple days, our two admin will come in.(...) Right, and one of those, my office manager. I'll sit on Zoom with her for three hours and we're just clicking away at the keyboard because we're sitting there and can still talk if we need to. So some of that starts to happen, but I think overall we definitely do miss out on that interaction that you would get in person and that good vibe and that, but I think a lot comes from that. - No, exactly. - It's just hard to, yes. - It's a double-edged sword. It's like you can't have your cake and eat it too necessarily, but there's obviously good things that happen, like finding talent and giving flexibility that, to be honest, there's value in that to a lot of employees and colleagues that you have. There's value in being able to have the flexibility of just knowing you wake up, you, you know, business on top, the job's on bottom, and you can still be very productive in work. Some people kind of thrive in a setting. - They do. - Me, I get so overwhelmed and distracted sometimes with just every element of communication coming at me. So when I work remote and I'm also on a Teams meeting, I now am more aware of it. I try to focus, because there's been so many times, not so many, right? I don't think Terry will listen to this podcast, but there's been a couple of times where, you know, someone has asked me a question and I'm like,(...) I'm sorry, can you repeat that question for me? And it's in, you know, with colleagues and other people on the call, and you know that you're maybe a little bit more senior and they're like, all right, well, Megan's not paying attention. So it makes it a little bit more challenging. But I like the on-camera thing, I think, is important. We do that as well. - Cameras are huge and we have set meetings. I mean, every day I have some sort of meeting that I'm in with the department or one-on-ones, but it's very structured meetings.

(...)

So every week and then, yeah, just a lot of Slack, email, and Zoom, a lot of it, or even Slack has their huddle feature. So it's, and I'm a huge Face Timer. - How so? - COVID turned me into a Face Timer. - Yeah, me too. I mean, well, I do, but sometimes in public, I try to be mindful of the fact that like, you know, if you're at North Italia restaurant, you're not trying to. Although I see a lot of people doing it. It's like very normal nowadays. I'm like, I don't know. Are they doing their own like private testimonial? Or like, are they talking to someone? - Are they filming or are they talking? - It's very challenging to tell nowadays.

(...)

But I was gonna ask you a question and now I totally lost my train of thought, which is super annoying.

(...)

And it was about the,(...) what were you just talking about? Sorry. - Meetings, working from home, labor,(...) driving the talent, convenient, productive. - No, I can't remember now. See, totally lost my train of thought. - So, team's calls. - I know.

(...)

Yeah, it escapes me now. - See, that's what happens. - It'll come back. - It's momma rain. I know, hopefully it does come back. So, as far as like your customer feedback or things that you've kind of talked to about your clients, tell me a little bit about how maybe you leverage that information. Like, do you get feedback from them on what it is that they want to hear topics on? Or because now you have this bigger book of business, do you leverage and use that information(...) to then say, hey, I'm kind of seeing this, you know, across the board, since you kind of focus on particular industries and certain things. - Okay, so you're talking about not necessarily like complaints and how I pitied my firm for-- - Yeah, no, just more like stats. - Yeah, tax news and stuff like that, yeah. I get a lot of it, honestly, other than like your Yahoo and like big just news articles and what's going on because that obviously drives our industry.(...) But yeah, the trends online for sure. Like when the 1099 rules were coming out and people were freaking out about the Zels and the Venmos and so you hop on those trains because now you're somebody that ideally holds that precious information that everybody is like waiting to figure out what's going on with. And so I'd like to say that's one of my superpowers is I can dumb down what is normally a complex topic to something pretty simple.

(...)

So yeah, I just think I don't really try to set those trends. I just wait to ride those waves. See the wave pick up and I'm hopping on it. And whether that's a video that I see that's really picking up or I subscribe to other tax articles and I think it's gonna be something relevant to our client base, like depreciation is huge for our client base. So whether it's cars or real estate, so stuff like that is, you know, those buzzwords is what I watch for.(...) - What about, this is the question that came back to me, the seasonality aspect of your business. How do you manage through that? Cause I know that in your world, that is a huge pain point and it's actually a big stressor for a lot of firms and a lot of employees that work within firms, it's like not their favorite.(...) Tell me how you kind of deal with that with your employees and also just yourself. - Yeah, it's funny. We kind of use the term flatten the curve, which I feel like they were using around like, cause we look at a graph, so we track everything, you know, pretty specifically. And if you watch our tax production numbers, so we're really just us cranking returns out, it obviously gets super big in Feb, March and April, really dies down in the summer and then picks right up in August, September, October.

(...)

And I think for that it is people come into this industry, at least, and I think about my tax manager with this, he's like, I basically have no life for those six months because when you're coming into this industry, you have to understand that there is seasonality to it. So during those times, you are gonna be busier, you're not gonna work 40 hours, you're gonna work 50 to 60, 50 to 70, somewhere in there maybe.

(...)

And so I think it's not only the mentality of people in this industry know that you're gonna pick up at that time, but what we do specifically around those times is we try to almost gate keep who can get their stuff done by certain dates. So how we do that is like, a business return is due March 15th. So we will set a deadline of let's call it Feb 5th. You need to have your numbers, your P and L, which is pretty soon after the year end, that's what is only 30 days, 35 days, is you need to get us your numbers, get us your tax docs, because then we will guarantee you, hey, we will try to get your return filed by that deadline. If you give us the docs we need, we'll get it done. So the beauty of that is not everybody's gonna hit that. So by having those cutoff dates, it allows us to at least have a hard stop to say, hey,(...) 70 clients made it past this day, now we're just gonna focus on these 70 clients, but then the tough part about the business is, now all those, let's say 400 people that have been emailing you, you're not looking at their stuff.(...) So one of the complaints that we got in 22 and 21, let's say is, hey, I sent you my stuff on March 8th, let's say for the 15th deadline, it's like, we're not gonna look at that, no one's looking at that. We're working on the work that's in the door. And then we wrote them back by the end of May with like, hey, Jim, thanks, you sent us eight of the 10 items, I still need these two. And Jim goes, why don't you tell me that when I sent it to you in March? And you're like, well, Jim, I'm not looking at your stuff in March. And so that is one of the hardest pieces of this business is figuring that out. But I think having those just pure cutoff dates is really helpful. But the problem is you send those emails and clients don't even read them. - Well, and it's always, it's usually as a fire drill. I was gonna ask you, what percentage of your client base actually just goes file an extension?(...) - Oh, yeah, so we file extensions for almost every client, unless they're very explicit, I'm like, hey, don't want one and we're gonna be done by the deadline. Because even if clients are like, oh, don't worry, I'll be done by the deadline. Yeah, no, you won't. We're just gonna still file this for you.

(...)

So percentage wise, we ended up like 38th, because the next year's goal is 40. We're gonna try to do, and we basically almost did 40 this year. It's 40% of tax returns were filed by April 15th. So you can see the rest trickles, the remaining 60 is gonna trickle over summer. And here's good numbers. We were supposed to do about 1000 tax returns this year. So let's say about 400 of them were done by April. And we still have, let's say 80 to 100 that aren't done after October. So you still have five to 10% of the book that just like doesn't get you their stuff and they're late. But it's like, if you're gonna get a refund, you're not really late. I mean, you're late, but you're not late. So again,(...) of the three pieces of our business, prep, planning, and accounting and bookkeeping basically, is prep is the biggest, most difficult machine to manage. There's too many gears turning at once. And like you in this business and banking, you're waiting on clients for stuff, which is just the worst part about it. Because if we could get in and get those docs ourselves, or they would listen to our advice is to keep up with their stuff during the year, we wouldn't be in this problem. But that's what makes it so challenging. - There's just so much power in the prep though, too. That I think a lot of small businesses can really benefit from. I think about business owners and how reactive sometimes they can be to situations rather than being proactive as much as they possibly can. There's always gonna be reactive components to any business. And things that kind of throw you for a curve ball. And I mean, sometimes it feels like it's happening on a daily. But I feel like a lot of that can be minimized if you do some of the prep and you are a little bit more proactive in your strategy. My husband's companies, they're not big by any means. They're small businesses. But I've already been able to see the difference with me always focusing on strategy and using historical data and historical information to then leverage that and push us forward. That's the next level though. We don't need them to do that. - But there's so much power in that as a business owner. And it helps you become more financially sound and stable as a company. And the stress kind of goes away, right? - Totally. - It doesn't get completely eliminated. But it does tend to get subsided a little bit. And you can focus more on the exciting parts of your business and the things that you really want to accomplish. And so that is constantly, I think, a fine line with, I envy business owners because they're risk takers. They have a lot of moxie. But at the same time, they kind of remind me of the Gryffindor house in Harry Potter. They just kind of run towards doing things, not necessarily always understanding the consequences or how to make sure that you could do it in the best, most optimal way. Sorry, I'm a Harry Potter nerd kind of. - My wife is too. - I love it. - It's a funny story after. - Yeah, so I wish that there was a little bit more planning there. - When you think of prep, though, so what exactly do you think, because I know what I think about it. And I think of bookkeeping. But I'm like, when you say the word prep, it's like, hey, yeah, business owner, that's making 80 grand a year, 120 a year. If you just took the time to look through your bank statement, throw some categories next to those transactions, I feel like mentally,

(...)

and I'll call it physically, but you would be in such a better spot if you just did that, that I feel like that's what we gotta, at least his first stepping stone. - It depends on how big and complex your business is. - Totally.

(...)

- For business owners, a lot of them have a very simple kind of structure, which is nice, because it is very minimal, portions of prepping, that can really kind of help you move the needle forward. I also think that it's more of the time component. A lot of people have a difficult time with time management, and understanding when is the right time, or when should I block out and dedicate time to focus on these things. Which kind of brings me to actually my next question for you, because you mentioned something when we talked last time that I found really interesting, and I think a lot of businesses kind of struggle with this, where you are the owner operator, but then you have to kind of move into this visionary role. You have to move into this role where now you're kind of more 10,000 feet above, and you're not necessarily in the nitty gritty, it's virtually impossible for you to be in the trenches, but then also be focusing on long term and kind of where you see the business going, and where is the next best move as a company. Can you share a little bit about kind of that transition for you? That will be my last question actually for you. - No, that's cool, because I've taken a lot of time personally to think about that, because when I started this business, I was very much the gear turner, the operator, hey, I was the licensed CPA, you get online and dance, you send us to clients, I will take care of them.(...) And so at that, what's interesting too, that I think to support this is at that time, we all took personality tests on, I think it's called a predictive index. And so my personality profile was the altruist at that time. So a little more operator looking into details, but also very, when I wanted to make a decision, I would ask a lot of people, it also annoys my wife, but it's like, that's how I am, I want to get all the data that I can before I make a decision.(...) And so it's funny, recently, this is maybe four months ago I've retaken that test and I'm now a venture, which is more so on the driving side. And the only personality trait that is switched has been my, instead of now being more collaborative for decision making, I'm more driving in myself. Which for me, I feel like great, because I know this business now, I've been doing it for, it feels like 20 years, five years. But so for me, I've got to watch that change very clear. And it's just like yesterday, yesterday I'm talking with Steve and my COO.(...) We have a new hire that's coming on board that has eight to 10 bookkeeping clients of his own.(...) We are going to acquire those clients, because part of the, hey, I don't want you doing side work here, respect it, but like you either gotta sell it to us or let them go somewhere. So we're gonna buy that.(...) Steven calls me and he's like, hey, do we have the, or do we have the buyout agreement for these clients? And I'm like, I could care less, Steven, I don't know. Just get the clients on board at our firm. Just have them sign our engagement letters. And so it was just an exact example, because now I've hired a COO to come in and ideally replace me for what I was. And just oversee ops and these gears turning.

(...)

And so I like now that when me and him have these conversations, I can clearly see the yin and the yang as to somebody brings up a problem. Prior Matt would have dropped everything I was doing to try to say, okay, how bad is the problem? And like, let's try to think of a solution. Versus the other day, that same scenario pops up, problem comes up, I thought about how I would have handled it, Steven handles it. Five minutes later, the problem wasn't as big as what this person even thought it was. And they solved it in five, 10 minutes. Versus how I even would have done that would have been radical, probably wasted two or three hours looking into these other options of how to fix it. And so I like now watching live time scenarios where it's like I am the 30,000 foot view, 10,000 foot view, because I feel like I have a good understanding of what the vision for the firm needs to be. Versus now him, he can take the time to like really dissect what's going on, because I call it like my ADD, I just can't, I can't do that anymore. I just, my brain won't allow me to slow it down like that, I'm already on to the next. We'll do exercises in the office, we do a late night or a week, well we'll go from like seven p.m. to like two. We'll just go buy in and out and we'll just rage out on spreadsheets, because you can't really do it during the day. - Yeah, yeah. - And so we'll do this at night, and it's funny to walk through certain exercises where I can just see it's painstaking for me to go line by line, but it's something that he's like, we gotta do it. And so I just like watching that now, because I feel like that was me when I started this business, now I'm just not. Because I'd rather worry about where we're going now. - Well, and it's good that you found someone that you kind of trust and believe and can focus on the details. I find that interesting too.

(...)

That's one thing that I'm trying to kind of focus on with my husband's companies, and even just running a division for the bank is, are you getting to an end result that is the most optimal outcome? Fantastic. If you get there differently than me, or it takes you a little bit longer, I'm not gonna painstakingly try to hover over you and force you to do it my way. I'm just gonna, I'm gonna be okay with the way that you want to do it, because it's you, and you need to learn it. And that gives you more confidence and power to be able to continue growing in the way that you need to. - Yeah, and that's where I would look back to at the roles. I used to think like, oh, you're a visionary. What do you do? But now I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a full-time job. It's a full-time job to really understand the current sentiment of your client base, and what are your opportunities, and what should you capitalize on? I'm like, okay, now that is a full-time job. I was always like, what are you doing up there? - Puttering around. - Get to work, turn a gear. But now I'm like, oh, okay, there's a little bit more strategic thinking here that needs to happen. So that's been a huge thing for me, because, and again, watching the personality profiles for me was amazing, because I can feel the change now day to day. - Well, I like that you bring up the personality profiles actually, just because that is one thing that I try to focus on with my teams, is I want to understand what type of personality you have, and how you can communicate with that individual. - Oh, that's huge. - I feel like that the crux of any business sometimes is communication styles, and forgetting that there are different communication styles around you, and at some point, both of you guys need to acquiesce and kind of bend to obviously meet each other in the middle. It's a lot harder than normal, especially like me, for example, I'm a red, I can't remember what communication-- - Oh, and the color codes, yeah. - Yep, the color codes. - Type A. - I'm a red, and facts only do not waste my time, and I don't mean to be assertive or direct-- - Direct. - Or mean by any means, I just need it very fast, because I'm trying to work very fast. So it's interesting when you are with a blue, or someone that wants to tell you the emotion behind it, and the storytelling and everything, and I'm like, please tell me fast. Right before we came up here, I had that situation happen, I'm like, I have five minutes, I need you to tell me in one. And then they kept going, I go, we're still not there yet, we're not there, this is me being, and they're like, you're just being such a red right now, but I love that we have that communication, they know that I'm not-- - The fact that they know, yeah, so I have to share this little story, because two hours ago, I'm on the phone, next week, the whole team's coming in, we're looking through the agenda, and I'm like, dang, we have nothing to do, the back half of, this was Wednesday or Thursday, so we now, one of the guys in our office, his wife does this color coding, so we're having her come in, and she's gonna do it for the whole team. The best example that I have that I'm gonna share with the team is my COO, Steven, he is a high operator, typically type A, but needs to know the low, like really low level details, he's the gear turner. And then you have Jerry, who runs our tax department, they're both on this, we'll call it, like range of, they're both driving forces, so they're both pretty independent,(...) and they are not getting along when Steven first gets hired. Jerry's almost like, what value does this guy even bring here? And so I'm like having to bridge these two, and I was like, I think we should do these tests. So we do these tests, and come to find out, it's like Jerry never understood that it's not only in Steven's personality, but in his role to ask small level details. And so when you look at Jerry's characteristics, and I think back to one of the arguments, we're like yelling at each other over a Zoom call, because that's another thing, I work off like radical transparency, which is, if you don't like an idea, you better speak up, or don't ever say later, like, well, I told you so, because you never said anything earlier. - Speak now or forever hold you. - Exactly. So Jerry's like yelling at us, like why do you even care about these things, when all we care about is the top line number, and the number was 1.8 million.(...) And it was at that time that now once we got the personality profiles to come back to see like, well, look at Jerry, he only cares about top line, but then when Jerry got to read Steven's and understand why he's asking these low level questions, it clicked. And it was so cool to watch that play out, and now they understand how to communicate with one another, and they're blossoming, working great together. But it was because of that mismatch that they're not understanding that not only is it a role thing, but it's how these people operate in the business. - Well, and the diversification of personalities, to me, I love seeing my team all come together. They're all very diverse, very different. When we all get along, it's beautiful. When things kind of, you know, are disruptive, and that people are not getting along, it's also very interesting for me to see, just because there's power in communication, and really the communication aspect behind it is understanding how to talk to each other, and what lens are they looking through. It's very different for people. So I love that you do that as a business, because that's one thing that I think a lot of small businesses don't always focus on, is understanding team cohesiveness, and the beauty of communication and understanding styles, because styles are so different, but all styles are necessary, and styles gravitate towards certain roles in a company too, which I find interesting. But it doesn't mean that they're exclusively in that role. It just means that sometimes they kind of all gravitate towards specific areas. - Yeah, it's huge. It's like someone that would approach you that doesn't know you're a red, and is wanting this fluff talk and detail, and they're not gonna get that from you. - Yeah, well yeah, I know we did a 360, and I remember my team really just destroyed me, because they said I didn't say good morning. I never said good morning, or asked how their weekend was. And in my mind, I was like, we're at work. Why would I socialize? But then I was like, oh my goodness, that makes complete sense. I need to actually ask people about their lives. That's such a simple thing, but I just never thought about it that way. - But so you're not doing it, so I always like to use the word ill intent. You're not doing it out of ill intent, because that's where if you could sense that, then it'd be like, there's a problem here. But you're just not thinking about it. - But the stories that people tell themselves is kind of what goes into that. - And that's why I like that personality test, because now you're seeing on paper, oh, this is why that person, this is why Jerry was yelling at us, why are you asking me small questions? Just worry about the top number. But we're like, Jerry, it's this guy's job to worry about that, and it's his personality to ask you details. So it was so cool to, it's nice to see living through these experiences, the textbook kind of thing, back it up. That, oh, okay, this is how this works. And so to the small business owner point though, is like, I don't think most small business owners have a lot of staff. So maybe the team side doesn't really make sense for them to do. It's like, just worry about the numbers.(...) Worry about the bookkeeping. Worry about the bookkeeping.(...) - Focus on that. All right, well, thank you so much, Matt, for being here today, and thank you for tuning into Through the Door, the insider's perspective on running a business.