AI & Accelerating Talent with Jody Padar

Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. I am being joined today by Jody Paydar, aka The Radical CPA. For those of you who don't already know Jody, what rock do you live under? But I will give a little bit of context. Jody is the author of Radical Pricing and has been advocating for a lot of the very well, you know, pretty well accepted best practices today, well before it was cool to do so. You have a track record of being right on a lot of these things with our 2020 hindsight. So I'm really excited to have you on. Welcome to the pod Jody. Awesome. Thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. So what kind of prompted this is the discussion that we had around Excel Labs with Jen Crider, PICPA invested in that, and you are the co-founder of it. But before we jump into kind of what you're up to today with Excel Labs, I'm kind of curious to dig into your journey a little bit. So can you give us a little bit of a run through of like the transition from practitioner into sort of content creator and advisor to a lot of tech firms in the accounting space? Yeah, so, you know, I was that early innovator in the cloud space. So I always say I invented the cloud firm way back in like 2010, 2009, whatever. And we iterated through it. There were a handful of us who were doing it at that time, and we were figuring it out as we went along. And what happened was is I didn't understand what was happening. And so I started blogging about it. I started writing about it. I started using social media to talk about it. And that's kind of how I gained my following. And then, you know, fast forward 14 years, I sold my firm in 2020. I'd written a couple of books along the way. And I went to work for venture-backed tech startups, right? So I went to work for BotKeeper, and we built machine learning and AI for bookkeeping. And then I was recruited away, and I was employee number one at April. And we built tech software to compete with TurboTax. Or FinTech, they're embedded in Chime and other FinTechs, and built a tax team, et cetera. And then at the end of last year, I came back to, I'll say, my roots. And I came back to saying, yes, I want to serve CPAs. I want to go back to kind of like, what do firms need? And then how do I put all that I learned in AI and technology on top of it? And that's what we're bringing to Excel Labs. And that's kind of how we started Excel Labs. Interesting. Yeah. And I think it is like important for these kind of tech companies and VC-backed startups to understand, like, you do need a bridge to like the real world, right? Like to boots on the ground, or even maybe someone who is not a practitioner, like, you know, Seth Feinberg, for example, has like a great pulse on the industry as well. But like, you need that person who's going to like actually get it and translate it. And I think that's a big difference between companies who are launching great products, potentially just into the void, and companies who actually gain traction, right? So I think that's super important. I think what's interesting about CPAs as a whole is CPAs only buy from other CPAs. I don't know if you realize. They're very snobby about it, right? There's very much a snobby, like, well, if you're not technical, like, you can't understand my pain. Now, I think there's good and bad of it. Because I think that there's a lot of opportunity for new ideas to come in. And I think it prohibits some innovation. But on the other side of it, I think there's something to be said about having been in the accounting business for almost 30 years, and knowing the real pain, and then actually solving for real pain, not just, I don't know, taking something shiny and new and applying it to something that is perceived pain. And I think the other piece that's interesting about it is, in order to iterate through software really well, you have to be able to work on real clients. And I think that's one of the biggest hurdles that tech companies feel when they're not in the space, is they don't get the needed feedback to iterate and develop product faster. And that's kind of one of the biggest disconnects. Because you can throw all the money in the world at marketing. But if you don't have trusted CPAs who are working on that product, iterating through it, helping you build it, you're not going to get very far at all. And that's a big difference between the fintech world, who connects to other technology, and technology that connects through people to clients. And that's one of the biggest, I think, hurdles that outsiders in the tech space face as they try and develop software for CPAs. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know if it's snobbism so much as it's very skeptical and there's a lot of trust building that needs to happen before a CPA is willing to buy from you. And I'm in the trenches of that. I'm offering this comp tool, which for a lot... Some firms, some other solutions are great for, but there's some firms where I'm like, I know this is what you need. And they're like, Oh, yeah, you know, maybe. And then I'll come back later where someone referred them and the sales call is three minutes long because they go, Oh, this person said I should work with you. So we're good. We don't need the demo. I'm like, Jeez. Okay, cool. Interesting. It's quite a behavior for sure. Well, and I think the other side of it too is when you're selling to firms, you're B to B to C. And you have to remember that their client, if the CPA firm's client is the actual consumer of your product, CPAs are very protective of that client and they don't want to let just anything touch that client, which is very different than in the B to B world in FinTech, right? And so that's where I think there's a lot of disconnect when outsiders come into our space and try and sell things. Yeah. And so what actually motivated you to sell the firm? Because I do see some synergies between running a firm and being a spokesperson for these brands, for example, where it's like, well, we use it and it's great. How did that kind of change what you do and what motivated the sale? Well, so I had owned my own firm. I started it with my dad, but it was really my firm and I had built it from really scratch and it was 14 years. And I was tired, right? People don't realize after innovating and I saw, not that I was bored, because I don't get bored. I just find something new, right? I was kind of like, kind of same old, same old. And I was like, okay, I'm ready for something new. And my brand as a whole, as the radical CPA was taking off. And what's interesting about that world is your customers who are your CPA firm clients don't care that you're talking to other CPAs. In fact, a lot of times it's detrimental to that firm because they see it as a distraction. And then you're kind of half in, half out, like in two worlds. And it came time for me to really make a choice. And after writing two books and everything, and I was like, you know what, this is where I want to be for where I'm at in my life now. And so, I sold my firm and I was really lucky because when I sold it to Botkeeper, I really came on as being part of their go to market team on the sales side and really got to step into a venture-backed tech startup and learn something completely different, completely new and it was what I was ready for. I was just, you know, 14 years, you just, I don't know, I don't want to say, and I was the only one left, right? Like I had a partner, but she wasn't, I was the one who was really doing everything. It wasn't like I had like a partner, five partners or something like that, right? Like it was really time for me. Okay. Interesting. And so now fast forwarding to what you're doing today. So Excel Labs, what was kind of the thing that, you know, what was the signal that told you like, okay, this is like a very real need in the industry because, you know, there's all these people kind of pursuing AI plays and accounting. And I think a lot of them will one day be really good, but like a lot of them now I feel like are kind of like, you know, it's a great headline and they'll have claims, but like in reality, once it like hits the pavement, it seems like a lot of them are kind of like not quite there. That's my perception. That's based off a lot of conversations I have. But you kind of are challenging that from a different direction, which I actually really like. So I think, you know, my experience at Backkeeper and at April actually building AI tools for the masses and really understanding kind of the technology piece behind it, right? I was on the go-to-market side and on the build side. So I have both sides. But I started using ChatGPT and I really started to understand how thinking with AI changed my critical thinking skills, right? It changed how I would start and work with problems differently. And what I saw out in the marketplace was automate this, get rid of this job, like take away the tax work, take away the bookkeeping. And again, I was in those tools myself. So I'm not saying good or bad. I'm just saying the reality is, is AI in the next five years, I say by 2030, is going to fundamentally change the work that we do. A lot of people think it's further out than that. I don't because I've been on the other side, right? And I thought about what it is to be a CPA. And I think that's the human piece, right? And if you look at, if you ask a firm or a firm owner what they love, they always say, I love my clients, right? Nobody says, if you talk to lawyers, they say, I love the law. They don't say they love their clients. If you talk to CPAs, they say they love their clients. So then it got to be the point of like, okay, what is really materially different between a CPA firm and a FinTech? And I would say it's the professional relationships, the personal relationships that CPAs have with their clients. Okay, great. Now that we know what really makes that CPA firm distinct, how do we amplify that? And by starting to work with AI and from a critical thinking standpoint, I realized that everybody else was going, okay, how do I automate? How do I like, how do I automate something as opposed to how do I think differently as a professional using AI? And so that's kind of how we started with the human and AI. And then what evolved was, is I basically cried into my GPT for hours and hours, and I built something unique that is actually patentable, and it's an emotionally intelligent agent. And so by putting, I say I taught my GPT how to be a woman. So most AI wants to respond back immediately. It wants to solve a problem like a man, and please don't take this like, but right, like that's the way when you're talking. No, I see myself in what you're saying, that's fair, yeah. I said, no, I just want it to hold space with me. I want it to kind of listen to me. I want it to help me reflect and kind of make better decisions. And that's when I realized that AI now could have a material impact on me as a leader and my leadership skills and what I bring to an advisory conversation. And so that is really what we're building at Excel Labs with Navi is the ability to learn how to have advisory conversations faster. And so if you think about a regular CPA, how you go through that process, first of all, you used to learn through osmosis. Nobody actually teaches you how to be an advisor. You hear it from conversations outside the partner's door, which NextGen doesn't even have today because they're in Slack or in Teams. So they don't even have the ability to kind of pick it up through osmosis. But you would learn from hearing those around you have those conversations, and they fumbled through them and they grew. And then after 10 years or whatever, you become a manager, you learn how to have those conversations. Well, what if we could train the NextGen by using AI to help them have advisory conversations much sooner? And that's what truly Navi is. It's growing your own personal leadership skills and then growing them into advisory skills as well. And so what it actually does is it produces empathy at scale. So that's really kind of how it began. And then I think about it as in, why don't CPAs adopt tools? Because they see most tools as taking something away from them, like the job that they like to do, whether that be a bank reconciliation or code, I don't know, whatever it's taking away from them. And where we start with Excel Labs is we start with the professional at the center saying, okay, what's in it for me? How do I make myself a better professional, either through leadership, either through strategic thinking, either through using AI to upskill myself through technical knowledge, not by just automating away some work, because that work's going to get automated away regardless. So how do I learn as a professional? So what's in it for me? Then you put all those professionals together, and you get this AI first firm that is going to have better thinking, better leadership associated with it. And then you put all those firms together, and now you have the profession that's relevant in 2030, when all the other automated work is just kind of gone because it's been automated away. And so that's how we get ourselves ready. And so that's why we say we put the human in AI or the AI in human, is we're really using AI to upskill you as a professional so you're ready for the future. Yeah, well, and I like the approach where you talk about the kind of empathy point and some of what would kind of translate into some of the like the softer skills, how this kind of helps prepare you for that as well. Because when I when I spoke with Jen Crider, I had looked into Excel Labs a little bit, but I didn't understand some of the nuance of like what you had going on there. And to me, like, I was like, Oh, I think that's great. I think that's kind of half of the equation of what we need. This is a little bit tangential, but I have the data on this where the path to senior manager, for example, has been shortening over the last four years. And that's actually like very necessary in the market because right now, from everything, all the perspective I get from like the recruiting as well and things like that, like people are desperate for like an experienced senior or a manager. And yet like the market has maybe softened a tiny bit for like the kind of intern level folks. And that, to me, spells out a need of like, OK, well, we can't all be competing for the same senior or for the same manager. Some firms should be able to take the approach of I'm actually going to take these people and I'm going to accelerate them and I'm going to teach them very, very quickly how to become that trusted advisor and how to become a senior and a manager. Because we've been we've been shortening that path a little bit. But at the end of the day, we're also constrained by the speed at which people are learning. And so I think that this is like a really good kind of bridge to that where it's like, OK, well, now maybe the constraint isn't even like, oh, these boomer partners aren't willing to progress us because it took them so many years. Like that's kind of breaking down. That is changing it. And the path, there is a willingness to shorten the path, but then it becomes a constraint on learning and the people actually being ready to take on the work. So I think this is like a fantastic answer to the needs of the market. And I think the other piece of it is it's unbiased feedback, right? So it's one thing to learn from a manager who or a partner who you may or may not like, you may or may not agree with, you may or may not feel like they have it out for you or not. Right. Versus learning from an AI who is unbiased feedback. So you take that feedback, you can understand it, you can digest it, and you can iterate on it a lot faster. Not only because that AI is with you in the meetings and it kind of evolves with you, but also I think you're more receptive to learning from it versus that manager who you're afraid that, you know, they're not going to go to lunch with you because they said something to you or whatever. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like there's no, there's not that personality there, right? It's just, it's a bot who's helping you upskill yourself better. And that bot learns you and it learns your patterns and it learns what makes you, you. And again, when we think about leadership, part of leadership is recognizing your own strengths and like really leaning into those strengths. And when that AI can do that for you and help you be better to be your best self, like it's a win-win for everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I like your kind of point of like the people you would learn from you might, even though they might be like an exceptionally good advisor, there might be things in their lives or in how they behave themselves with staff or like non-clients or things that like to you register them as like, you know what, like that's not, I don't want to be that person. And so you maybe discount everything they would have to teach you, even though they might actually be teaching you like exceptionally good stuff. Like, and I'm, I'm one of those people, like I particularly at the age I was when I was at the big four, like I would make pretty heavy judgment calls of like, ah, like, no, like this person isn't it. And so I would really discount anything I would kind of learn because I was like, they're not in the place that I'm trying to be. And you know, had that been from an objective source where I'm not bunching in all of these other things of like who this person is, like I probably would have learned better. So I, yeah, I really like what you've got going on. And the other thing we're doing is we're scoring it, right? So now if you think about timesheets, which I hate timesheets, but when you think about the opportunity for data that is data-driven scoring, that now is a new metric that can be compared to someone. So if you have a really good client conversation and you're scored on it and your leadership shows through that metric, you compare that to someone who spent 30 minutes doing something. And before it used to be like, oh, if you were a little bit slower, you got like kind of points off, didn't matter that you had amazing client conversations, which actually have more value in today's world than time spent on something because automating everything is more differentiated. Now you have an unbiased metric to be compared against as well. So, you know, I've been kind of for this transformation, radical pricing, price on outcomes, all of those things with our tool. Now you have something that can help you measure your employees based on how they show up in client conversations, not basically the time they spent, which again, is huge from a business model shift that's going to have to happen in 2030. Because when everything takes three seconds, how are you going to bill for it? Well, you're going to have to measure on something else. And now you have the opportunity to measure your employees on something different. Yeah. So you were like a major player in the shift to cloud accounting, or at least like you were an example to follow for that. And I do believe now you're going to kind of probably replicate that in the AI world. But how do you think that those two waves sort of compare either in terms of like speed of adoption or in terms of like impact to the industry, as well as maybe like the cost of not being, you know, of being a laggard in terms of the adoption of these things? So I say when like the cloud was starting, I'll say I was young and dumb. Not that I was young and dumb, but that I was just inexperienced, right? I was a young professional at that time, and I thought the industry would move much faster than it did. It took almost 20 years and a pandemic, right? And even now it's less than 10% of firms are all 100% cloud, which is interesting of itself because it's not the tool, it's the real time that created disruption in the firm, and most larger firms couldn't deal with the business model change. It's not about the tech. It's never been about the tech. It's about the business model shift that had to happen, and it still hasn't happened. That's why less than 10% of today's firms are cloud-based. And AI is going to be 100 times faster. So like if you think about it, like I say 2030, that gives us like four and a half years to get there. Are most firms ready? I don't know. I think the interesting thing is when you look at PE money coming in, when you look at venture capital coming in, when you look at the technology coming in, that's pushing the market. It's not about what firm owners want. When you look at all the CPAs who are dying or retiring because they're old, right? That's all going to change the market significantly. So it's not going to take as long. I truly believe there will be 30 firms, big firms in the future. The G400 will collapse into 30 firms, and then there will be small firms. And that will be it. Because you already see it happening, right? Yeah, there's a lot of consolidation. There's all this consolidation happening and money's pushing it, right? And like anything else, follow the money. And if you follow the money, we're accountants. Why aren't we talking about that, right? I think what most firms don't realize, their competition isn't the firm next door, the firm across the street, the firm across the country. It's a fintech that has a much better client experience. It's Intuit that is going to go upstream. Right now, I don't know if you like their enterprise, right? Now they're going up. They're doing corporate returns and they're charging more for corporate returns than smaller practitioners are charging for. Like hello, what's wrong with this picture, right? And they have a client experience that's differentiated than a CPA experience who doesn't pick up the phone and call their client back. And so when I started at the beginning of the conversation, I talked about what do clients own, or what do CPA firms own that other people don't. We have to amplify, we have to exploit our ability to have client conversations and that empathy at scale. And if we don't figure it out, fintech will figure it out in five years. So that's why we're doing it. And like people are like, oh, you're so riled up about this, like why? It's because I love the profession, right? That's why we had PICPA invest in us, right? Think about that, having a nonprofit invest in an AI driven startup, that's unheard of, right? But we, Jenna and I believe in the same things that the idea is, is how do we keep our profession relevant as technology and everything comes alongside and the only way is going to be to invest in the humans. And that's why we're putting AI into the humans. Yeah. Well, I like the approach of like, you know, like augmented accountants rather than like the replacement of them. I think like that's a much nicer framing and I do think it's what's going to actually be required for there to be any level of quality of service to people. So I mean, I've said it a lot already, but like I really like the approach that you're taking to this. Let's dig into this kind of PICPA investment. I'm like, I'm fascinated by that. So from like your perspective, like what do you think made them such a good partner? Because again, like I really like what Jen is up to and she's like extending far beyond the traditional scope of like what, you know, a state society would do in such a positive way. And so, yeah, I'm curious to understand like the rationale behind that. So like when you go and you sit in these rooms, like again, and I've been in two venture-backed tech startups, right, like and you're in with the VC money and whatever, their idea is speed and their idea is, you know, they're going to invest in, I don't know, a hundred companies and they know that so many of them are going to fail and they know that like some of them hopefully are going to like jump out and be rock stars, right? And the rest of them will do okay. But they don't really care about the people. They care about the return on investment. And I'm not saying that PICPA isn't concerned about their return on investment because absolutely they're an investor and there's money that has to be returned to them and they want to have a wonderful outcome. They believe in people and they believe in CPAs. and I didn't want to build with someone who didn't believe that humans should be at the center of it, right? And that was truly what I learned, right? I want to keep CPAs at the center. And the funny thing is when people ask me how I became an influencer or why I share all the knowledge that I do and that I have for the last 20 years, I was an influencer before it was trendy, right? I was on Twitter, I was writing for Accounting Today, I was blogging like way back when and it was all about sharing cloud tools and sharing the efficiency that came along with them. And the reason was, is because I got to go home on time and I got to, and it was about like I worked so hard for my CPA and then I got into this firm and I realized like, why did I do this? Like this is not a good lifestyle, I'm not treated well, all of these things. And then when I kind of went out on my own and I really evolved with the cloud, it was like I was given my life back and I was given an opportunity to kind of spread the word. So that's where my excitement for sharing things with the profession comes from because you can have a better life if you use technology right. You can go home on time. You can like change your business model so that you can serve your clients well, you can serve your clients better, you can make a lot of money and you can have a life too. And that is what I've been preaching for the last 20 years. Like that's not new. The only thing that's changed is the tools that now it's AI before it was cloud. And the reality is, is a lot of it is business model change anyways, it isn't even the technology. It's what is the real time and the technology due to the business model that makes you need to change your business model to adapt. And the reality is, is most firms are still living in an archaic business model. They haven't changed their business model at all, which is why they struggle, which is why they can't. Basically they put a lot of expensive technology on a broken business model and then they wonder why things don't change. And now instead of automating things, they're throwing things to India, right? They're pushing things to the Philippines. Instead of actually saying, do we still need to do it this way? Probably not. Is there a way to make this process more efficient? No, we'll just put more bodies on it and we'll do it in India instead of actually redefining what they're doing. And so, and PE is coming in and PE hopefully is going to change some of that. Like you can love PE, you can hate PE, whatever. The thing about PE is, is they're going to make these partners run their businesses better whether they want to or not. And maybe some people will be left behind in it. I don't know. I think it depends on the PE firm. I think it depends on how it's all shakes out. The partners are getting nice checks and hey, they earned it, whatever it is, but it's up to the next gen to figure out what that looks like and how we're going to evolve as a profession. And I hope there's enough next gen professionals who love the profession enough to say, hey, let's figure it out. Let's not abandon it. Because I think right now there's a lot of people who are just saying, oh, forget it. I'll go do something else. Yeah. Well, and what I really like about there being kind of like an option for kind of widespread upskilling to take advantage of this wave is like the wave can be adopted in a couple of different ways. If we increase output per accountant by 50%, well, accounting's in a little bit of an interesting situation where like the average accountant is working too much and to a point where we're actually probably missing out on a lot of like even higher value services. Because when your house is on fire, you're not really thinking about like the opportunities that you can then present to the client base. So I feel like the pool of work that exists and can be alleviated in the accounting profession is actually quite massive. So I think, you know, an ideal state for the adoption of AI as well as just like in general like process improvement going on in the industry would be that, you know, instead of having every accountant working 50 hours a week, maybe every accountant could be working 35 hours a week. And also within that timeframe of those hours, they're actually being proactive, doing tax planning, doing better, like moving up the ladder, doing more advisory work and it becomes a more profitable profession. Then there's the flip side thesis of like, no, they're just going to still work us just as hard and they're just going to lay off a huge percentage of the people and it's still not going to be like great. You're going to be overworked. And so I think having access to more people readily available who are upskilled and ready for this at least increases the likelihood of outcome A, which is very positive, right? Well, and all these guys are going to retire too. So don't forget that. We're losing half of them too. So like, I think it's going to be, I look at it as a renaissance. I actually think, I think we don't know what we're going to, we don't know what we don't know yet. I think it's kind of like too, social media came out, right, 2008, 2009. All the marketers thought social media was going to take all their jobs. No, now there's like all subsets of people who just do social media, right? So we don't know what's going to evolve. And I think that's what's exciting and that's the curiosity and you just take your skill sets and you can continue to evolve them. But if you think that you're going to be doing, you know, I don't want to say data input because I know we do a lot more than data input, but I think if you think you're going to be doing transaction based work or you're going to be doing that kind of stuff, I think the job we do today is going to fundamentally change and be very different than the job we're going to do in 2030. Yeah, I agree. Changing gears here a little bit, I had just like a couple quick questions, sort of lightening around for you. But how has, you know, your 20 years of being what we'll call an influencer and trying not to cringe at, how has like 20 years of being an influencer, like changed the way that you're able to kind of deliver and launch this business? Like, you know, you've been in this for the for the long tail and you've built up a crazy following, like you have 600,000 people on LinkedIn. And for people who are, you know, early in their careers and thinking about, oh, is this content creation thing really worth it? You know, I'm in year two of it hasn't really brought that much in terms of tangible change. Like how how much influence has that had on your business? So it's it's had a huge influence on my business. First of all, I think it's developed me as a professional stronger because you have to have a point of view and you have to own that point of view. And I think that's what makes a really good influencer is if you're just regurgitating what everybody else is saying, you're not an influencer. You need to really own where you stand in the market and what what's important to you. And I think that's that's what makes you a solid influencer. I think like any sort of PR, it brings eyeballs to you and then those eyeballs create opportunities and then it's up to you to take those opportunities and make something from them. And and that's where probably me as an entrepreneur has actually had a bigger impact because I've taken some of these influencer opportunities and done really big things with them. Right. So whether it be writing a book or, you know, doing, you know, doing a regular influencer deal, right, like kind of that's the entrepreneur space. Mr. Beast, I don't know if you're like follow Mr. Beast, but he's opening a Fintech. He's opening a bank now. Right. So I saw that today. I saw the headlines. So it's funny because I told Katie, my partner, I'm like, are we going to open a bank as part of it? Yeah. Like as part of it, because I thought, wow, OK, so now he's opening a bank. But what happens is, is when you look at any sort of sales or go to market thing, people buy from people they know, like and trust. So if they already know you, like you and trust you, then they're going to buy from you. Right. That's the sales perspective. And so for me to introduce a tool like Navi into the market, it's a lot easier because people already know, like and trust me and they have for 20 years. So now it's like, OK, what are you doing, Jody? Tell me about it. It's not like, oh, I have to knock on a door and then, oh, they don't pick up my call or whatever. It's just it makes that go to market process a lot easier. And in today's world where software used to be, you used to have to be really technical to build software and it was really hard. And that was kind of your moat was that technical piece. Now your moat is your go to market motion and your ability to actually distribute it because you can build software in a month now that used to take a year. And so now how fast can you get something to market? How fast can you iterate through it? And so to me, that's that's the cool thing. And if you would have told me when I was tweeting, if you would have told my dad when I was streaming with my partner at OnePi, he would be like, what are you doing? Why are you why are you online? Right. And but it was a lot of sweat equity that is now coming back to pay lots of dividends. But it was all sweat equity. It was it was time and stuff that I invested really into myself, but into building that community over time that has now come back. So nothing happens overnight. You know, it's like the overnight success that took 10 years. So like it doesn't it doesn't happen overnight. But if you if you like it, if you enjoy it, keep at it. If you don't like it, then go do something else. But I think it takes a certain a certain personality to want to do it as well. And I would say I have the heart of an educator. And most of my content is education anyways. Yeah. Yeah. No, I found that firsthand. Like I a couple months back had done like a filtering through my like newsletter audience. And you know, I didn't do a great job with the filtering, so I probably missed a lot of people. But I was like, who is like in a decision making role that's been following my newsletter for over a year? And like kind of sent like a sales motion email to them and like the reply rates were like 10 times higher than any other thing I've done. Right. And it's because, again, like there's been trust built and you've been providing value for these people. So I think that's super interesting. Last question I have for you is, do you think that this kind of like wave of AI adoption, like I think once it becomes undeniable that this is like what it takes to run a good firm, do you think that that's going to expedite a lot of retirements from kind of, you know, firm owners who maybe are just like, you know what, this is like a change and transformation I don't want to take on? Because I feel like for the cloud, it definitely like separated high versus kind of like lower achieving and lower margin firms. However, I feel like a lot of people still kind of just stubbornly held on. Do you think this will be the catalyst that brings a lot of people to retirement? I think it's going to be different because I think AI, really good AI has a really good experience and you don't have to learn tech, right? So the cloud, you had to learn the technology. You had to kind of click here to click there to get it to work. Really good AI just works in the background. Really good AI, you just talk to. Really good AI, like it has much of an iPhone experience versus an old, I don't want to say Android, but like a server room experience, right? So that's the difference with AI that, I mean, like my dad is 85, he's still my partner or like he was my partner, whatever. He uses chat GPT now, right? So it's not an age thing. I think AI is going to have a much faster adoption just because it's easy to use. It's not really, to use it well, you need to be upskilled and you need to be trained. However, a lot of it you can use by using your voice, you can talk to it, right? You can vibe code something, right? You don't have to actually learn how to do it, right? So it's different. Good perspective. Yeah. I hadn't thought about that really, but that makes sense. And if you want to like really date me, I was explaining it to someone and I said it's like from DOS, when we used to use DOS in the old days, you had to like know the codes to do DOS, right? Like you used to have to know the command prompts, you used to have to know what to put in the computer. I know that was before you were born. But then we learned how to use a mouse and we learned how to use Windows and Windows all of a sudden it opened the whole world because all you had to do was click. You didn't actually have to say, you know, do this, do that, if then, whatever. And I think that's, again, that kind of transformation that people don't realize AI has that experience with it. That's just easy. Yeah. How far along in the go-to-market kind of motion is Navi? Because I'm obviously going to like include a link to Excel Labs, but for people who are like, this is great. I need this. I want to get my staff on this. Is it? You can use it. You can go download it now. You can go download it now. You can sign up. You can take a course and you can start using it. And we're really like, we're still in, I'll say end of beta phase, but like we're going to have like really come, I'll say December, January, like full on, like ready to go. And I would say right now it's ready to go. It just depends on how early adopter you are, right? Like are you, because we're really like we want feedback, right? We want you to tell us what's working, what's not, but we have a couple top 200 firms using it. And then we have multiple singles and whatever, like who have been through it, who have said they liked it, who, but you know, we're in market. We want to be in market. We want people to learn from it and start. That's the only way you iterate through software. You can't like, that's what people don't, our accountants don't realize is the only way that we can get software out is to get it at MVP and then have you tell me, I like this, but I don't like this because that's the only way you can iterate through it. You can't, you can't build perfect software and then put it in market. It doesn't work that way. It always has to, and it'll be continue to be built for, you know, for years because you're always improving it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, still to this day, the biggest client of Big 4 Transparency that I've landed, I landed at the time that it was just a spreadsheet and some pivot tables. And then we kept developing it since then. But like, had I not started selling there, like that's still my biggest client, you know? So yeah. So I love the approach. It's your believer. They believe in the vision. They believe in the idea. That's who we want. We want believers. We want people who say like, look, like we know that we need to get more human. We want to create empathy across our firm. We don't want just the partners to have those empathetic conversations. We want everybody in the firm to learn how to have those conversations. That's who, that's who our users are. And if you believe that, then we want you to be an early adopter with us. Yeah. Perfect. Well, go check it out. It's going to be linked in the podcast show notes. And yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time, Jodi. I really enjoyed our conversation. Awesome. Thank you.