2 Year Check-in with Jaimie Nichols

As you hear in this episode, running a firm can provide a wonderful lifestyle, but starting from zero isn't for everyone. And that's where this week's episode sponsor Live Oak Bank comes in. Live Oak Bank truly understands the unique needs of your accounting and tax business and specializes in providing customized financial solutions to support firms like yours. At Live Oak, they grow with your business and want to be your firm's financial partner. Whether you are buying, building, or simply looking to grow your accounting and tax firm, they will design a loan package that supports your business goals. Their accounting and tax lending team offers numerous financing options nationwide. Ready to achieve your business goals? Visit the link in the podcast description today to connect with a member of their team. We're FDIC. Now back to the episode. Hello and welcome to the Big Four Transparency Podcast. This week we're doing a little bit of a where are they now type of episode. We've got Jamie Nichols on the pod. You were the guest of our 11th episode as we're coming up on episode 100 very soon. You know, start feeling nostalgic, start looking at old guests and wonder how are they doing? Where are they now? And so welcome back to the pod, Jamie. Thank you so much. That's awesome. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it's time flies. Time flies for sure. I thought this was a one year check in initially in my head when I reached out and it's like, oh, it's actually a two year check in. So for those who haven't listened to the first episode, you should go check it out. You were very, very real about your experience, but a brief kind of synopsis of that. You took a bit of a leap of faith. You kind of tweeted out one day like, this is it for me. Like I'm done working for firms. I'm launching my own. You've got quite a presence on Twitter. I think I got flamed last time for saying that you're very big on Twitter. So we're not doing that. You've got quite a presence on there, which helped maybe give you a little bit of a platform to launch this, an initial lead source. And you started that firm also kind of right as you found out you were going to be a mother. So you really just kind of like, you know, a whole upheaval of everything you had going on. So let's talk about the journey so far. How have things been for you? It was the best decision ever. Things have been awesome. I think the business has grown a little bit more slowly than I thought that it would. In terms of the time that I got to spend with my son when he was a baby, and he's still a baby, he's 14 months old, was so invaluable. And I can't stop, like I always think about how if I had stayed at that firm, like all of the moments that I would have missed, and I've been able to make more money than I made at my old job, but spend so much more time with him. So it's been really, really, really great. Yeah. And I imagine that kind of caused a lot more pressure on you as you were sort of deciding to make this leap. Is that the case? I think my husband has a really solid job. He's worked for the same company. He just celebrated 15 years with them. So combined with the fact that, you know, I was pregnant, and then we didn't have any child care for the first year. It gave me grace to accept bringing on clients kind of slowly and slowly growing. So not so much pressure from like a revenue standpoint, but definitely pressure to perform for my clients. And definitely a couple moments of like, oh man, did I bite off more than I can chew from a technical perspective. I did run into a couple of situations where I didn't scope properly and before completing the tax return, I had to refer them on to a bigger firm. And I've gotten a little bit better about that. But yeah, I mean, kind of normal growing pains that any solo consultant I think goes through. Yeah. And what were some of the kind of like main challenges that like you were expecting going into it? And then how has the reality compared to that? Because sometimes there's these like boogeyman type things where it's like, oh my God, I don't know how I'm going to overcome this. And they actually end up not being, you know, the be all end all either. So how has that been? That's a great question. Specifically for me, when I was thinking about starting my own company, one of the biggest barriers was like my technical accounting skills. And with messy books doing 100% of the cleanup for myself, I was like really worried that I would run into a situation with like, like I wouldn't be able to fix it. And I, you know, I think that I still might invest in, I think you can always invest in education, but like I haven't met a monster so messy that I haven't been able to fix it quite yet. I mean, there was one that I referred on where it was like a really big problem, but that was also some like legal issues were involved with it too. So I was scared that my technical skills weren't strong enough. And I think that I was able to grow my research skills a lot in the past two years. So that's been something that I've worked on a lot and I ended up switching research tools. I was working with tax notes, which is really expensive in my first year and I didn't really use it that much. And so now I use the textbook, which is a lot cheaper and it's also like a lot easier to read and it's been working out really well for me. And I think it's built for more of like the common, like easy 1040, like small business situation as opposed to like, I'm a tax attorney working with big corporations, et cetera. So finding the, finding the research tool that's the best fit for my clients was a big help for me. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, let's talk a little bit about tech stack to kind of have it, you know, be very real for people where when you're starting off, like what, what did you kind of opt to go with? Like what tools were you kind of like, okay, this is essential for me versus what were you kind of like, okay, I can probably be scrappy and kind of figure that out myself. So we have the kind of tax research tool. And then are you, you're using a, a, like a practice management system as well? Yeah. So I guess in hindsight, I was a little bit like penny wise pound foolish in regard to my choice. I had bought a used MacBook pro for $400 and you can only, you can run most tax softwares only with like a Microsoft operating system. And so I was really drawn to ProConnect because it's cloud-based so an Intuit ProConnect and I wouldn't have to get a new computer, which in retrospect, that's like a really dumb reason to choose a tax software, but it, that tool provides a lot of value. Like it's not as cheap as I hoped that it would be, but the data entry from the scanning of the tax documents has improved so much in the last two years. That was something that I didn't expect going into it that has saved me a lot of time. In previous roles, I had worked with Gruntworks and then I think like a ProFX PDF scanning system at another firm. And then in another firm, you know, a team in India would do the data entry. And honestly, like the ProConnect data import for W-2s and some other stuff, they don't do K-1s yet, but just having the W-2 entered by uploading it saves me so much time. And then practice management, I chose Taxdome and there are a lot of valid criticisms of Taxdome. For example, they had like a security breach where in the client profile, you can enter a client social security number. I don't know why anybody would do that. Like that seems really stupid. And I don't know anybody that used that functionality, but those got sent out in a report and that caused a lot of upheaval, rightfully so among accountants. So none of the issues that they have from a security standpoint have affected me. And it's definitely something that I'm mindful of, but I've been really happy with my experience with them. I'm the only person in my firm, so I don't really get into the nitty gritty of like task management. I set up a pretty simple pipeline that automates sending my engagement letter that triggers the organizer, and then it creates a task for me when the tax return is ready to be prepared and then I can cross it off. And that's been really helpful for me. I do a lot of work in Google Sheets and then I use a Google note to take notes during every single prospect call that I have. So really simple. I mean, I feel like I should listen to your podcast more often and learn what other people are doing because I'm sure they're doing better than me. Well, yeah. So we just had an offline talk about Erica Goody and that's going to be an introduction to be made after we stop recording here. But yeah, she's like, you know, she's really mastered the kind of like streamlined, super efficient technology, tech stack implementation, as well as like demands from the client of like, hey, if you want to work with me, here's what it's going to be. And she's talked about how that's like really paid off, like massive dividends for her in terms of firm efficiency, right? So definitely some things to check out there. And then on the client perspective, like how did you sort of select who you wanted to work with in the early days and how did you kind of go by feel to evolve that as well as I guess like scope of offerings, right? Because once you get into tax, it's like, do I want to be super heavy on the planning side of things, which like might have a higher margin side to the business, but maybe more involved and may involve more collaboration across like, you know, getting a tax lawyer involved and things like that. Like how did you sort of feel that out and where have you landed? Great question. I set a revenue limit of $5 million for my small businesses. And then I said that I wasn't going to work with any partnerships where the partners were buying and selling out every year. I think those would be better served by a larger firm. But then from an offering perspective, I was terrified of tax planning, partly because I spent so much time making fun of tax strategists on social media. And I think that they're so scammy and I feel so passionately about like, you know, kind of unmasking those scammers, like the woman who charges you $10,000 for a binder and then says like, do the Augusta rule with like a really unfairly large rent equivalent. And what I have done is essentially provide tax planning for certain clients completely for free to test out who is receiving a benefit from me. And then I talk to them about what's important to them. And I'm pretty candid in my prospect calls and I can get a little bit too wordy about it. I'm basically just doing the research myself to see what the people who I work with want. And what can be a cost effective pricing schedule for it. There are a lot of other people I can go copy their method from them. And I should probably do a lot more research. And I should say that I've been really just trying to keep my head above water for the last two years. And only in the last month have I really been focusing on even planning for future revenue trajectories about, you know, if I have X many clients, including bookkeeping and tax and their personal return, how would I get to this revenue level? I did not look at that for two years. For the last two years, it was, can I help you? Do I have the technical skills to help you? Okay, I'll help you. All right, the tax returns filed and you paid me. And that's all I did. I just. Yeah. No, I feel you like at the beginning, it's so easy to have such like big plans and like, oh, I'm going to do it exactly like this. But then sometimes the reality happens and it's like, it's not exactly that. So I mean, sometimes you just kind of take what comes to you, right? So I think that that's probably going to be something that a lot of people can kind of relate to in the journey. And a lot of people will sort of take that approach and then just later on, they'll clean it up of like, okay, you know what? Maybe this subsect of clients like does not make sense for me anymore. I have heard of people even early in the firm career when they decide to get a little bit stricter about a certain niche, they'll like, they'll bundle out a grouping of clients and they'll like sell that as a book of business as well. Which is something that we've covered with some guests who are like just machines at doing that. They're like buying out books of business, parceling it out and like selling out what doesn't fit. And there's a lot of things like that. But for you, it does seem like one of the biggest things was kind of being more of a master of your own destiny and being able to control your schedule a little bit more. So what are we talking about here in terms of like hours worked versus like where you're at in terms of revenue? Great. Yeah. So I, my top line revenue for 2025, sorry, it's so hard to keep track of the years right now for me. So for 2025, my top line was $120,000. And I have about roughly $10,000 in expenses. And what was the other part of that question? I apologize. Oh, like a time commitment. So this is the best part. I can't believe I forgot that I worked less than 20 hours a week, including tax season and then probably less than definitely less than 10 hours a week outside of tax season. So in 2025, my son was born at the end of 2024. So for last year's tax season, he was a little baby and my mom did come help me for a couple weeks in tax season and my mother-in-law came also for a couple of weeks. But aside from that, I had no help with childcare and I had no paid childcare at all for the entire year. And so, um, from like a personal perspective, I saved at least $35,000 just not having infant care. Um, and you know, I got to spend that time with him, so it was really awesome. And um, I think, you know, maybe my eyes were bigger when I started my business and I thought that I would have be able to say a bigger number at this point, but I feel really good with it for the amount of time that I put into the business. So I think I could do a lot better about closing calls, like sales calls. Um, Same. It's like hard when you're like, it's a new muscle to, to figure out. Yeah. I think I sold myself out of a lot of business. And I think, especially in the beginning, I sold myself out of some really good clients that came from Twitter and I was terrified of, you know, either they were wealthy or they had like a bigger business and, um, I was, I just, it felt too big for me at the time. And so I encouraged them to look elsewhere and, and I'm always telling people, a lot of times people come to me and they're like, Oh, I don't really know if I want to leave my CPA. And if they don't tell me a good reason, then I say, don't leave them. Like stay with them. Yeah. Um, and part of that was because I don't want to grow too quickly and then not be able to prep their tax returns because I don't have any help that I wasn't planning to get any additional, um, help. And so that was a little bit like self-constraining in terms of, you know, I, I don't, I don't know how many tax returns I can prepare while keeping a baby alive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so where, where you mentioned, Oh, maybe I thought I'd be able to say a bigger number. I mean, I think that's phenomenal what you've managed to achieve while having like a great balance, right? Like while kind of having probably more the life that you wanted than had you not left what you were doing. And yeah, maybe you're not maximizing every single dollar, but like you've found something that like really, really works for you. So I mean, I think that that's, that's very admirable and I hope that people can kind of, you know, be inspired by that because not everyone, like I talk about this a lot. I'm like, I'm super happy that like the big four exist because for some people it is that, right? It's like, I want to drive hard. I want to be like in the more like name recognition place. I want to work with the biggest businesses and I want to like make partner and be able to make a million dollars a year. But also it's to not beat yourself up if that's not the path for you and understand that there are other paths that can make a lot of sense of which like solopreneurship can absolutely be one of those paths. Like I think what you're doing seems very like, it seems nice, you know, like I think that's awesome. Yeah. It's great. There are so many invisible benefits to being your own boss. And I think the most important one is what my husband always says is he, he's like, I, until you started working for yourself, I never saw you happy in tax season. Like you were extremely miserable and upset all the time. And I make more money now, but more importantly, I'm not miserable. I'm really happy. And I really like the people that I work with and I get, honestly, I get super energized doing most of my prospect calls. I'm trying to focus on more local relationships and local relationships are super sticky too. And that's, I mean, going back to like selling off a book of business. And I thought about doing that. I have a couple that don't fit into my like niche that I'm trying to work towards, but I don't know if I could, because I really, I really like them. They're, they're my people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that could like, it can also be a later thing, right? Like I think a lot of people, like they'll, they'll just find things like get away from them and they're like, Oh my God, I've got, I've created this monster. And then they need to do the big kind of cleanup. Whereas like for you, it very much does not seem like you've created a monster. So I think like, while it's manageable, like you do what, what energizes you, I think that makes a lot of sense. Right. Um, and then in terms of turning people around, yeah, I think that's one thing to be careful of is like a little bit of like the kind of imposter syndrome that I think is, is probably pretty prevalent among accountants kind of going out on their own. But then at the same time, if it truly is a case of like, I don't think I could serve you properly, I do think that that can kind of be a long tail thing that can come back around to where if you then later come back to this person and say, Hey, like we've evolved their service offering or we hired this person, I now do feel very ready. I think they're going to take you a lot more seriously. Right. Yeah. When the person who says like, Hey, this is not for me right now, but like, let's talk when it is. And then they come back around to me, that's like, you know yourself, you understand yourself and you respect me enough as a client that you actually are really looking out for the best for me. And I think that can kind of come back around in a good way as well. So. That's so true. I have a client who we had a discussion about taking on her bookkeeping and I said I didn't have capacity this year and I helped her with cleanup. And then she said again earlier this week, you know, if you decide you want to take on bookkeeping, I'd love to have you. And so that's one thing that I said that I wanted to start working on is getting more of my clients on bookkeeping on my end. Because I see, especially under like the solopreneur model, having the cost of bookkeeping and then the business return and the personal return, you don't need that many clients to hit a pretty comfortable revenue goal. And then I think you can provide a really good service for them. And then I also, I really want to get my CFP license and really hone in that retirement planning stuff for my business owner. So I was kind of wishy-washy on that. I can't believe that I thought that I was going to be able to do that with an infant, I think. But eventually. Yeah. No, I would, based off all the conversations I've had and stuff, I would highly recommend it because that is a good way. Like a lot of your clients may already be paying that, right? And it is like a much higher margin thing. And I think for a lot of people that the challenge with wealth advisory and financial planning and things like that is around the trust element and around the client relationship element and things like that. So if you already have that, then just throwing on the kind of wealth advisory type of service offering is maybe not that much of a thing. And it may be something that you find ends up being, you know, five times the margin per input as some of the other things that you're doing. But again, there is that like step to getting comfortable with it initially. But I do think that's like a very worthwhile opportunity. However, being a one person business, that can be maybe a little bit straining, right? Because we're talking about adding bookkeeping as well. And so for when you're adding these services, like I mean, bookkeeping particularly, I saw you tweeting asking people about pricing on how they're doing that. That's kind of another kind of big barrier early on in a business. Like how have you gone upon figuring out pricing and doing price discovery and things like that just to make sure that, you know, you're respecting your worth and also just not being faced with a wall of no's either. Like how have you approached that? I've gone in lower on the bookkeeping than I think is sustainable, especially having me do it and then me also doing the tax return prep. And I'm still going in a bit lower. But right now I'm only offering it for the easiest possible clients. I, yeah, I don't want to get too into the weeds, but I mean, I got myself into a crazy situation with a manufacturing company and they're actually like my only bookkeeping client except for the one that I just mentioned. I pushed out all of my bookkeeping because I did not have capacity for it in tax season. And I tried to push out the manufacturing client and he said, no, keep me. That's funny. And I imagine manufacturing is actually probably pretty difficult, right? My only source of doing the actual accounting work was when I was a controller at a food startup and that was brutal because there's so many inputs and things like that. And I did not like doing that at all. And that was an unfortunate discovery to find about like one month into the job. But like it is, yeah, I would imagine manufacturing would be pretty difficult. And so kind of price discovery sort of going by feel like starting at something that, you know, is a little bit low and then maybe quoting higher and higher. Is that kind of what it looked like? And then just seeing the point at which you reach resistance or? Yeah, I think that I wanted to get to a certain level of clients before I bumped up a the bookkeeping price and then also my tax returns. I haven't raised prices on my tax returns since I started. So I'm about to go into my third year. And I'm going to sick Logan Graff on you so hard. I know. I know. Yeah. Okay. So you something that we've been a little bit hung up on. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to tag him in this and just be like, hey, talk, talk to Jamie. Okay. So that's been, that's been something you haven't really done, but is probably an opportunity, especially now that you're a couple of years down the line, you might be, you know, eight, nine, 10% behind on pricing as well. Yeah. I think I also, I think I would do it if I was going to raise prices, I would really go client by client and identify the ones that took me longer. I don't think I would ever do like a mass increase. And I think that that's something that I'll probably do in May of this year. I have a couple of people in mind where they're just like super mispriced and I like as of yesterday. So I'm still onboarding for this tax season. I said, I need to up, I'll just start upping it for people that I'm onboarding now. Yeah. Well, so something that I've, I've done, um, particularly with some larger clients, which I would maybe recommend and can be quite well received because they're usually used to getting like absolutely hosed by the huge business providers who like onboard you and get integrated and then they say like, Hey, it's going up 40% is like, sometimes they'll actually more than anything, they'll find comfort in this. And I do have some contracts where it's like, we have an annual agreement, unless the scope of business changes, this will increase by 3%. percent annually. And while protecting me from inflation, unless it runs away again, it also, to them actually kind of provides comfort where it's like, hey, unless you want to like discuss a whole new contract, I'm expecting 3%. I'm not just like waiting for this hammer to drop where like, you're going to absolutely like, completely change the terms of this on me. So sometimes pre agreeing to that can actually be like a very worthwhile thing as well, in my experience. And it is just like this, like, cool, you get a little bit of expansion revenue on what you're doing. It's maybe not meaning like, you probably can't get someone to sign up to like a 50% you know, but like, I do think there is some basis where it's like, well, it's maybe not like, the most I could get but like, they find comfort in in being able to forecast out what pricing looks like on this and like, I get comfort in like, at least I'm doing something. And there are some softwares that can automatically build that into like engagement letters and billing and stuff, which could be a cool thing. And then one of the things I wanted to ask about too is, where are your leads coming from so far? Like, in building this, like, that's obviously one of the main concerns is like, A, can I figure out the problems, which it feels like you've kind of gotten on top of and you feel good about? And then B, like, where am I going to get my business from? So like, what's been really effective for you? It's still Twitter. Twitter a lot. Yeah. And I don't really love that. And I want to move away from it. But I and also quite a few from financial advisors. Okay. And just to zero in on Twitter. So for some kind of you've built up like a great platform there. So I think that like, you should use that obviously. Right. But like, Twitter, in what way like clients are following you on there or firms are referring to you who follow you? Clients are following me. Directly. Okay. Yeah. And that's about 80% of my clients. Wow. And are you putting out content specifically geared towards them or no? Yeah. Okay. No. Cool. That's nice that that's working. But it's slow, right? So right now, it works for where I'm at, because it's gotten me here. But I think if I do want to, like grow faster, I definitely will need to expand. And I'm really focused on doing local networking. So there's like a local entrepreneurship through acquisition meetup that I keep saying I'm going to start going to. And things like that with younger business owners, I think will hopefully fingers crossed be a really good opportunity for me to network with local business owners. Which I'm sure would go well, because it's kind of like a Hey, like, I'm also a local business owner, right? So you can kind of that might be more relatable to them. And a lot of small businesses and, you know, leads that come through me that I'm able to refer to one of my friends firms. They're kind of like coming through saying like, Hey, you know, I want to feel confident in this. But like, the only name I know in accounting is like the big four. And so I went to them. And it's like, this is absolutely not the right project to be doing with them. And they might shoot you out a quote, but it's going to be kind of like a go away quote, you know, they're going to send you charge you something that's like, very disproportionate to what you actually need, because you're, you're ultimately you're not the right business for them. Right. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then you mentioned financial planners. So are you also kind of like getting those relationships through Twitter? Or have you kind of like done outreach to them? No, I never do outreach to financial planners. I they reach out to me. And I talked to a lot of them. So I've spoken to it's the end of January, and I've spoken to at least four financial advisors this month. So at least one a week, and those referrals might take a year before they send someone your way. But it snowballs and it and I think that the time invested with talking to them is worth it. Another interesting thing that I tweeted about recently that happened to me, and I didn't even realize, but my largest client last year was someone who emailed me. And I didn't realize that. I'm not explaining this well. So I had a client who had a question about sales tax. And I could not find the answer to it. And before I ended up finding out the answer from the Colorado Department of Revenue, but I looked up a local competitor to him and I emailed and I said, Are you charging sales tax on your product? And he was like, I can't remember what he said if it was yes or no. But he ended up reaching out to me a year later and said, I'm looking for a new CPA and he is now my largest client. And I think there's a lot to be said for cold outreach of people in your local area if that's who you want to be reaching out to. So I spoke to a couple people on Twitter and one woman in Atlanta, Nicole said that she does that every year. So I'm actually thinking about doing that next year. She says that she goes through people who just purchased homes. But I'm thinking about doing that for some local businesses and maybe doing some like print mailers or something like that. Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a great way to go about it. And again, like what's cool is you can, like within what you want, you can very much scale that out, right? You can go, okay, we're going to send out so many, we're going to see where we land. So that doesn't need to be like a huge investment. It's going to drive $400,000 of new business for you. And you're like, Oh my God, what do I do? Yeah, I mean, that's, that's a cool, it's a cool idea. And then in terms of like ambitions in the future, like, are you pretty set on wanting to be like a solo, solopreneur accounting professional? Or are you kind of open to scaling? Like, have you explored that at all? Or is this kind of for you? Like, this is the perfect blend of, you know, lifestyle and revenue creation as well. I think I've just tried to focus on like five years at a time. So I think I can safely say for the next five years, it's going to be a lifestyle firm. And I'm going to just revisit it in a couple of years with what, what the nature of the accounting landscape is, what the tax landscape is, how AI is looking for the type of people that I work with. I don't know, I always say that maybe AI will replace me and I'll have to become a Pilates instructor. So I've been working on Pilates a lot. I'm not joking. It's not replacing me though. So yeah, that's true. We're all just waiting. Some of us are scared of it. Some people are like, yeah, I'm down for that. Yeah. I mean, I was going to end things there. You know, it does seem like you kind of have reached a cool cruising altitude where like things are going great. You're able to support a fantastic lifestyle. Although you do tweet a lot about home prices in Denver. So I mean, maybe there is a little bit of like, you know, looking for more at some point, but where you brought up AI there, are you finding that that has influenced your business a lot from like the small firm operator perspective? Or is it just sort of not there yet from what you've been able to find in terms of the tools you're using? It's gotten a lot better in the last couple of months. And I had an awkward conversation with a prospect two days ago where he was, he asked me, what questions do you think I should be asking you that I'm not asking you? And I said, I feel I fear that a lot of tax preparers are putting sensitive information into AI tools without like, really necessarily. Like, I just, I just, I just have to imagine that there's people out there doing it. I don't know for sure. I haven't seen it. And then I saw something that like the one of the government, like they put social security stuff into like a public chat GPT thing a couple of months ago. I have to imagine that there are tax preparers doing that. So I said, like, I'm very conservative about like signing on to AI tools. So I'm only using it for research or if for example, Intuit has put AI into some of their products. And I don't necessarily know if like the ones that I'm talking about are AI, or if they're just really improved PDF scanning tools. But I've seen huge improvement in the scanning tools to put basic W-2 info into the tax software. And I've seen it in their bookkeeping tools to, to get PDFs from banks into QuickBooks now, just from, I have one client where they gave me their their bank statements. And I create books for the entire year, like write up basically. And since in one year, it completely changed, and it got so much better. And it took me half the amount of time compared to the same time last year. And I'm kind of like jaw on the floor. Wow, like, because that was my big, like, I can't take on book, bookkeeping clients or write up clients, because I don't have time. And now I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I could have taken these clients on because these tools are working way faster. So yeah. That's cool to hear. I'm always curious about like the practical like reality of it, right? Because you do kind of hear like these like high flying claims of like, Oh, we've completely automated this thing. And then the reality is never that but it is cool to hear that you've seen like huge improvements. Yeah. And that always is nice. Like when you have like a, an existing client engagement, like when I was doing some work in crypto tax, when I started, the softwares were all brutal. And then there was like some actual pretty significant improvements. Where from one year to the next, I had a client where I was like, I'm gonna have to like, get rid of this guy. Like, it's just too much. I can't I can't do it. And then from the next year, it was like, way more sustainable. And it was actually like a pretty good return. But yeah, it was like a scoping issue where I had onboarded this person. He's like, yeah, like I do a little bit. And then I opened it up and it was like 40,000 transactions and you're like, Oh my god. But as it improved, like that actually became quite tenable. And it became like very possible to deal with because they would just narrow it down to be like, okay, we need your attention on these 1500. But like the rest, like with a 99% certainty we feel good about. Yeah. So yeah, it's it's cool to hear that that's been the case for you. Yeah, I use Gemini for research, and I feel like it's improved a lot. And, but I will say that last week, someone told me that they were looking up the employee retention credit, whether or not it's taxable for 2025. And it was chat GPT was still getting that wrong last last week. So I was kind of like, yeah, it's good to validate these things for sure. Like, yeah. But that's, again, it's cool to see that it has actually like impacted your business and is actually working quite well. So yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing. I really appreciate you taking the time. And I really like doing these kind of check ins because it's cool. Like just being like, Oh, you know, we spoke at the launch of this and figuring out how things are going. Yeah, it feels like all things considered this is going very, very well. So maybe for some people, this might be a testament to, you know, go out and try it. You maybe don't need to wait for the perfect timing either. Like I think, as welcoming a child into the world, probably not. What everyone would say is the dream scenario for starting off a business like that, that exact timing. But it seems like it's been perfect for you. We've been able to like spend the time at home and, and, you know, choose your workload a little bit more than that. So congratulations on how things are going. And thanks for coming on and sharing your journey. Thank you so much for having me. It was so good to chat with you.