Best Practices from 374 Firm Leader Podcasts with David Cristello

This week's episode of the Big 4 Transparency podcast is sponsored by Forwardly. Huge thank you to Forwardly for sponsoring the podcast, but also a huge thank you for what they do in terms of helping firms improve your operating margins. So if you are in firm operations, I would encourage you to take a look at how much your payment processing fees might be costing you currently. It may just be a couple percent here and there, but once your firm scales, we may be talking many tens or even maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars that are not going to your firm's bottom line and are not available for reinvestment in your firm. Forwardly helps you not only smooth all of these processes out with seamless AP and AR, but they also do so using ACH payments in an automated fashion, helping you save on payment processing fees. So make sure you check out forwardly.com for your business payment solutions. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I am joined today by founder, CEO of Jetpack Workflow and host of the Growing Your Firm podcast, David Cristello. Welcome to the pod, David. Super excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. Hopefully, this is one of those crossover episodes with a lot of people. Back in the day when one sitcom would go into the other. I'm a pretty avid listener of your podcast and I think you put out some phenomenal content out there. But to start us off with some context, talk to us about Jetpack Workflow. What do you guys do in the accounting industry? Yeah. So the core of our business and where the podcast come from is, the software is called the same thing, Jetpack Workflow. And what we do is we help small to medium-sized accounting firms, accounting bookkeeping payroll and tax firms, or departments like cast teams within those firms, standardize the work that they're doing, the services that they're delivering, automate things like the recurring deadlines and the handoffs between team members, and then track everything in a simple, flexible way to make sure that everybody's properly scheduled, that things aren't falling through the cracks. Nice. Yeah. And why does the accounting industry need its own unique type of workflow software versus, there's a lot of the ones that are dedicated towards the tech space. What makes this unique towards them? Yeah. I mean, so when we started, I mean, it's really started from emailing a few hundred accounting firm owners and then talking to about a hundred accounting firm owners about what was keeping them up at night, what was stopping their growth. And this problem of checklist management was coming up. And I was the same way. I was like, there's so many checklist tools, why don't you just go and use them? And I think there's a very unique need in the accounting industry where there's a lot of recurring clients who have one or many jobs or projects that are associated with them. And so because of that, I mean, there's really facilitates a need to have a industry solution. And we believe it's not only the recurring client work, but then it's how do you continue to allow people to adjust the processes as you continue to deliver the service. So adjusting a process, for example, could be, sure, you have your template for completing month and close, but it might differ depending on the client complexity, the client industry, the client service level. And that might change over time, the complexity or the service level too. So you're constantly having to tweak or change or update these processes and templates too. Yeah. And from my own experience, even at the largest of firms, even when I was working at big four, this is something that does not feel very ironed down. It did feel like even though we had just a crazy amount of scale, no one had really spent the time or invested in actually having a very, very proper and clear playbook to follow. And I do think that that slows everyone down. I was always obsessed with process improvement. I was always the one who'd rather spend 10 hours building the template to save 20 minutes and then that repeats forever. So I'm definitely a big fan of workflow management. I think that's a super underrated thing in the profession. Yeah. I mean, and where it shows up is probably in your margins, right? And we ran a summit a couple months ago and somebody came out and they said, every problem is a pricing problem. And I think to an extent, pricing obviously plays a really big impact in a lot of the other facets of the business, but if work is not standardized in some uniform way, everything really does fall apart and symptomatically shows up in different ways too. Obviously it could show up in employee retention, just feeling like they're constantly being grinded down by redoing work or tripping over other team members or just bogged down in admin stuff that they don't really need or feel like they want to do, but they're doing it because it's not well documented. So it feels like they have to reinvent a certain portion of the process every single time. So getting it standardized, it also doesn't have to be a big thing, right? So it's like, if you have nothing, start with something. If you have something, make it better. And one of the biggest mistakes that has shown up, big and small firms, is what will happen is somebody will show up on a random Monday morning in June and they'll put a flag in the ground and they'll say, today marks the day we make processes in the firm. And everyone goes, oh, today's the day. Everything will be better. And they go through this exercise of days or weeks of the perfect process. And then reality hits, aka the client hits, and the clients don't follow your process or they have unique needs that need to change the process. And so the whole thing with template creation or process creation, it's not an event. It's a habit. And so every time you feel tension in the firm, things are dropped, suboptimal client experience happens, you go back to the process. Because nine times out of 10, it's a process problem, not a people problem. One out of 10 times, yeah, it is a people problem. You may just not have the right fit, but it has to be treated as a habit and not this magical once in a year or once every two years or three years, this event that needs to occur and then everything's going to be better. Of course, doing that once is a great way to clear out the dirty dishes in the sink and start from scratch. That's great. But you have to continue to tweak and refine your processes. And is this something that was recognized by firms early on? Once you launched, were they like beating down the doors for this of like, oh my God, this is a weak point that we need help with? Or was there a lot of kind of like educating firms on where this was lacking? Because I do find some of the kind of more old school firms at the very least are a little bit difficult to introduce to change. It takes a lot to kind of get them to buy into that type of thing. So what did that sort of process look like for you? We're perhaps in some ways atypical because we had an atypical process to launch. And that was, we'd emailed hundreds of firm owners, we talked with a hundred, we identified painful problems, we found commonalities amongst that painful problem. We dug into checklists, we drafted up a solution around checklists, we pre-sold the solution of checklist management, and then we built it. So by the time we launched, we had done a lot of validating because I'm not an accountant by trade. I've spent a lot of time talking to accountants and understanding the pain and understanding the problem. And so when we launched, frankly, it wasn't like, it wasn't the level of growth you might see in open AI. It wasn't like zero to a billion dollars in two years. But it was very quick to, people, we entered the market, we are not the first cloud-based solution to try and enter the accounting space from a checklist and workflow perspective. There had been others. They understood that this solution was here. They typically had tried legacy solutions in the past. So it wasn't a huge hurdle to say, if you have work falling through the cracks, then we built something to help you get the work done on the right time, right away. And so we had early uptick. Of course, it's not everybody, if you do a distribution of a market, you always have your extreme early adopters, then your next set of early adopters, and then the early majority, and then the late majority, and then the laggards, or I'm kind of paraphrasing the crossing the chasm visual. But I think the nice thing with your earliest adopters is they are typically very much online. And that was the case, six, seven, eight years ago, they were interested in cloud-based tools. So there was breadcrumbs on the internet to try and identify cloud-centric, tech-focused, tech-forward firms. I would say pretty early on, we had decent traction, enough so to leave my prior full-time job and go into Jetpack full-time. Yeah. So, I mean, let's talk about that journey a little bit as well, because I'm very curious as to how you settled on choosing the accounting industry, because to me, it kind of feels like there's been this explosion of development of for accountants type tools and solutions in the last, I don't know, maybe three, four, five years or something like that. But you guys were even actually pretty early to that, Jetpack Workflow launched, I believe, in 2016, right? So what was it that you kind of identified about the accounting industry that made you want to pursue that? Yeah, this is both very formulaic and not very formulaic. So the formulaic part is, I had a mentor at the time, and he just talked about, I'm passionate about solving painful problems, and at the time was fairly market agnostic. So it's like, well, what markets have painful problems? Well, they all technically do. Okay, well, how do you refine it further? I want to have a certain size market, I want to have a market with at least 10,000 buyers in that market. I want to have a market that I can reach the decision maker over email or phone. I want to have a market that is comfortable or used to using software, investing in software. And I want a market that has decent profit margins, right? So grocery stores, you're probably building amazing stuff for grocery stores. There's probably amazing software built for grocery stores. Being a first time founder, I was a little skeptical of entering industries where the margins were so thin, and then I was coming in and asking them to take more out of that margin to invest in my software to potentially save time. So I had this criteria, but from there, you have a lot of industries. So I had done some initial research in legal, I spent a few months actually in dental. And I was just... There was this thing about accounting that I just thought was fascinating. And they checked all the boxes and I started reaching out to them. Accountants are very thoughtful, they're very kind, they're very easy to communicate with. But at the end of the day, most accounting firm owners are very empathetic, thoughtful small business owners. And we focus on helping them run a better business, not be a better accountant. So I was able to connect with them on that level and from that perspective, it's been a really enjoyable industry to be in. And it's a very collegiate industry. In the world of software, it's rare, people charge a lot of money to talk to other software manufacturers and get best practices, what's working, what's not working. And no two software competitors I've ever seen would share a lead like, oh, you're actually better. Let me pass this along to my friend at my competitor. But accounting firms do this all the time. And so it's just, it is actually an amazing community and I'm glad more people are getting into it. I hope they stay in it once some of the venture capital goes away. But it's a great industry either way. That's really cool. And what was your background before this? You talk about being passionate about solving problems and improving workflow and whatnot. So what were you doing beforehand when you came up with the idea or decided you wanted to do this? Yeah, so when I graduated college, it was the first time I heard the word entrepreneur. And I just thought, well, this is a really fascinating, I guess, career choice. I graduated with a degree in psychology. I was a social worker, but I fell in love with this notion, the creativity and fulfillment and freedom that comes with entrepreneurship. But I had zero business skills, I felt like. So I just started doing stuff to learn, quote unquote, business skills. So I would teach drum lessons, what I needed to learn how to pitch myself and collect money and curriculum design. I became a landlord just to try and get better communication skills. I sold appliances on the weekend. I did free work for local companies for marketing and content marketing. I said, look, I'm studying all this marketing stuff now that I'm getting into entrepreneurship. I'll do it for free. And I was just building up this hodgepodge of skills while also being a social worker like Monday through Friday and working with kids on the autism spectrum. And then eventually got more and more intrigued in the world of technology and tech entrepreneurship. And I was like, I love to do this, but I have one problem, which is I had many problems. My problems were I didn't have an idea, I didn't have any money, I didn't have any technical skills. And I couldn't scratch my own itch because the itch that I would scratch would be like, I wish I could make more money than I'm making now being a social worker, I guess. Which I guess there could be an app for that, but it was hard to do. But the core thing around tech businesses is like building something nobody wants. And so when I came across this framework that was about how do you interview a market to uncover painful problems that you can then build for and typically it is a software solution, but it could be a service solution or training slash content solution, then you can figure out the fulfillment of it. So that kind of led me into accounting and then here we are. Yeah. That's really cool. And then how did the podcast tie into all of that? What led you to launch the Growing Your Firm podcast? Yeah. So the backstory of I interviewed the market to find the pain, so I had that skill. And when we're going to launch, I said, well, I'm a big believer in content marketing. I mean, I still am. And I think educating the market is such a great way to build community and gain exposure. But I'm obviously not an accountant, but what I could do is I can interview accountants and accounting leaders and expose best practices on the Growing Your Firm podcast. So we were very early in that podcast world, but it's only because that skill was so transferable from idea extraction to podcasting. And so that podcast just became a way to attract an audience that was wanting something more out of their firm or out of their career. So sometimes we get people that listen that they want to launch their firm and they're listening to build best practices. Other times it's just ambitious firm owners who want to get a broad swath of best practices across sales, marketing, M&A, of course, workflow and productivity, talent, it's obviously a big one. And so we've been running that for, I think, 150 years. And we're whatever, I told you, 374 episodes in. It's just been now a core piece of our content engine. And we like to think really keeps us fresh in terms of industry trends and what things are changing in terms of talent or go to market or M&A or anything in between. And has this translated in a very significant way into business success? Can you trace a lot of leads, a lot of your business back to the podcast? So we do get direct. We do get direct like trials and demos that say, Hey, I've been a long time podcast listener. So I knew when we were going to look for something, you were going to be on the slate of options. So we do get direct. There's also, I really like doing things that have so many benefits layered into them that even if you don't get the easiest primary or fastest benefit, you still get all these additional value out of it. So what I mean by that is, so when we shoot a single podcast episode, that content could attract a new viewer or listener, which then puts Jetpack Workflow on their radar. And maybe they were about to enter the market for exploring workflow solutions. Great. Very easy for time invested and cost to produce. Great ROI on that case. And of course that content lives in an evergreen fashion. But we get the audio, we get the video. So now we get exposure to YouTube. We get shorts now. So now we're investing more in shorts. You get YouTube shorts, you get LinkedIn shorts, you get the actual written content. And then you also get exposure to typically influential people in the space. So you've started to build loose ties with people that you're going to want to know anyways. And then the other thing is, it also informs a lot of our other content strategies. So once we did our first 100 episodes, we did write the book, the Double Year Accounting Firm book. I mean, I think it's due for probably a revamp at this point, given that- Triple Year Accounting Firm. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. The sequel. Yes. Right. So once we get 274 more episodes into that journey, there's more tactics, more frameworks and we've learned. But that created the book, helps inform maybe what webinars we should do. We've been doing these quarterly summits. We've done cast ones. By the time this is launched, we would have finished our M&A one. We're going to do offshoring and workflow ones. Well, great speakers and panelists are first vetted from the podcast. And it's very easy to get speakers once you've already interviewed them. They know that you're human and have good intentions. So they'll come speak at the summit. And that's also not to include, there's a whole bunch of ways. I could take the last 100 episodes and I could publish a state of marketing for 2025. Because a lot of episodes touch on marketing. So I can actually generate more content, more PDS, more resources, more downloadables from that. And then the final thing it does is if there's something that I am very passionate about in the product roadmap, but it's unclear the exact direction we should go in, I can also search for experts to come on the podcast and talk about it. Or I could search for customers that have solved that problem and invite them on the podcast and have them talk about it and inform our listeners. But in the back of my head, I'm also thinking about how this relates to the features in our product strategy. So to answer your question, it's yes on the front end, but we've been doing this for a long time. So we've built up some base, but there's all these other ways that it helps with our SEO, with our thought leadership, with our posts on LinkedIn, whatever it may be. Yeah. No, I love that. And very, very well expressed by the way. Because I have a lot of people who come to me and ask about the podcast and whatnot. And I just say like, hey, you know, there needs to be more to it than just hoping it'll like one-to-one drive leads, because it's like a long game where, you know, I'm speaking at Bridging the Gap now, which I wouldn't have done without the podcast, which maybe that'll generate direct leads. But I'm not getting like, you know, guest comes on says, let me buy this product, right? Like, it's not a linear thing like that. So, you know, from taking notes from what you're doing, I was going to ask you, like, you know, I'm a podcast in the accounting space serving accounting firms, like anything I should be doing differently. And right off the bat, I think, you know, some of the downloadable content and turning it into PDFs and, you know, fishing for more content from the podcast and then putting it into other formats is one. Do you have any other advice for people who are like running a podcast in the accounting space? Yeah, to me, it's trying to get crystal clear on, you know, so I've seen accounting firms launch their own podcast. You know, I think in one part, one of the reasons we've had success in the growing firm is because we're very clear, we're trying to help these small to mid-sized firm owners and leaders run better businesses. And so we know we're going to talk about talent and M&A and marketing and sales, but it's all against people operating or coaching firms that do these things. I think if you run a podcast as an accounting firm, and you try to put out generic content, I think it's going to get lost in the shuffle, right? So if you're doing a podcast right now about the tax implications of the recent bill, the big beautiful bill that just passed, there's some marginal value in that because you could take that recording, transcribe it and send it out to your clients. You know, is that better than just sharing an article with your clients? Maybe a little bit, but if your accounting firm is focused on, I mean, let's just pick an easy one from that example, technology companies, and you know, like your podcast should be focused on, how do you make sure tech companies are exceptional from an operations and accounting perspective? And maybe 80% of those episodes are accounting-based, but maybe you're bringing in COOs or admin managers or HR managers, and you're just trying to be the back office podcast for them. And your audience is not the CEO, but maybe the director of ops or the COO or the director of finance at these technology companies. So you're interviewing those people because maybe those people hire you to help with outsourced part of it. Now, if that's not true, you're like, I never get hired by that. We always get hired by founders that are doing sub 1 million. Okay, then readjust your focus. But to me, that's how you get the multiple benefits that occur. When you are crystal clear on that specific avatar you want to talk to, then you can repurpose content and you can find ways to make it successful. But general business content will most certainly get lost in the fold in this era. Yeah. No, I really like the framing of that, of take it one step further and digest it and put it in the context of the actual target audience of that. And that's what I see a lot of firms do who, for example, have podcasts that are actually driving a lot of leads. Brennan Hall, for example, he talks about the real estate industry and will talk about all of these new tax changes and their implications for someone operating in the real estate industry. And they'll have that as a discussion with someone managing a huge portfolio of rental properties or whatever that might be. And I think that that's a really, really good framing of that for people to understand. For something like Big Four or... So there's a podcast in the technology space called, I think it's just called Lenny's Podcast and it's for product managers. And he does so many interviews on how to nail product management interviews or how to level up like, you're this level product manager or here's the things you need to do or say or here's how to nail your promotion. And so he's very focused on that. And if the Big Four audience is like the ambitious accountant, not the owner, maybe it is the owner, but if it's the accountant, then your swath of topics now include career progression and career skills or nailing interviews or trying to help people determine when's the right time to jump to a new firm versus old firm. How do you evaluate culture versus compensation and things like that. It's much different than, obviously what Big Four, who you target overlaps with Jetpack because firm owners can get the access for their own hiring needs, but it's also non-firm owners that get a lot of value out of Big Four. So you have the optionality to adjust to your target audiences for things like your podcast. But to me, the value comes from the specificity of who you have in mind when you're interviewing someone. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, your advice is something I'm going to, after this, have a little ponder about because for me, I think the podcast has drifted a little bit away from my actual service offering where I'm selling to firm owners or COOs or CHROs or whatever kind of that may be. But whoever's handling compensation, it's certainly not HR directors who are listening to this. I think there's a lot of firm owners who do listen and then there's a lot of people who are hoping for more out of the accounting industry for themselves. So maybe a manager somewhere who's like, should I start my own firm or what else is out there for me? Should I go to a bigger firm, smaller firm? So I think that's who's listening. So you end up with a little bit of that disconnect there for sure. Yeah. Well, shout out. If you're listening, tell Dom who you are. or right now if you want content A or B, like shoot them an email. That'd be, that'd be great. Yeah, shoot me an email. Dom at bigfortransparency.com. I'll put it in the podcast show notes. And then last question for you, David, because I've gotten a lot of insights on the accounting industry, what's working, what sets some like great people apart. What are some common threads among guests you've had connecting those who've had like the most success in the industry? What are lessons learned that you have kind of distilled down yourself from these guests you've spoken to? Yeah, I would say, you know, from a principal perspective, the ones that I've been most impressed by have this, it feels like it should be common, but it is an uncanny ability to absorb and take action. When they realize something is directionally correct, they take it and they run with it. So for example, I just did this post about Greg O'Brien and he's one of the more popular episodes because it grew to a million in revenue in about 18 months or something like that. How did he do it? Well, it's when, you know, he started and somebody said, well, you should really do, you would benefit from fixed fee packaging. And obviously it's not like every idea that comes into a firm owner's brain needs to be executed on, but something clicked for him or he heard it enough times where he's like done and he knew it wasn't gonna be perfect, but he did it and he iterated on it. And he was okay to have some egg on his face if things went slightly off. I don't think any of these changes burn down your firm. Right, and I think we, sometimes people that struggle, they over catastrophize the downside. You know, they give it a negative 10 and the upside like a plus one, when it's really like downside is negative two, upside's like plus five or something like that. Right, so it's like you're typically way ahead and the likelihood of being plus five is higher than being negative two. So somebody like Greg here's, okay, I need to do fixed fee billing. Great, done. You know, I wanna build out a digital lead generation engine or his example was like, I kept hearing about, at that time there was more of a white space in video, video, video, video, video. And he's like, oh my gosh, I cannot hear about video anymore. So it wasn't like he did one video once a month and then came out a year later and was like, wah, wah, video doesn't work. I guess it really, I can't believe they told me that. It was like, all right, who do I need to learn from that can help me do video? I'm gonna hire that person as quick as possible. Then what is my relevant output so I can learn how to do video better and better and better? So he started like once a week, then he was doing twice a week videos and he was looking at the analytics and iterating, iterating, iterating. So I think principally the top owners and leaders are exceptional action takers and they have a good calibration on the upside versus the relative downside. And a lot of others find ways to stop action. So they might be like, well, fixed fee, if I go to my old clients and I tell them it's all $500 a month, that's gonna ruin my reputation. Where other owners will be like, okay, I'm just only gonna do it for new clients and I'm gonna see what that looks like first. I'm gonna do that per year. So I'm not looking for reasons to say no to this thing that seems to be really effective across the industry. I'm gonna look for ways to say yes and mitigate the risk and then figure out things later. So that is the most common trait. And then I think in terms of common characteristics of the top performing firms, I mean, there is a large reliance on fixed fee. There's a large reliance on, I mean, we just did this survey, this time tracking survey on managing productivity. So, and I might get a little bit of flack for this, but I'm just telling you the data, 80% of all firms track time and the larger you are and by large, I mean, you just have more than five employees, that jumps into the 90 plus percentile. And if you get into like 25 and 50 employees above, it's like 99%. But they are finding ways to manage productivity, even if they're not billing against time and time tracking is a very, very common one. And they're using it to reinforce capacity and schedules and looking at budget via actuals from time. They're thinking about obviously the advisory services. So great, we have bookkeeping and compliance-based work, but how can we do cashflow analysis? How can we do industry benchmarking and charge more for it? Every firm we've talked to that's kind of been the top performer has some version of that in their firm. And if they don't, they certainly have a strong referral partner where they know who to send it to. And then last but not least, and there's more, but I'll just kind of end with four, is they have figured out their best customers and they're unapologetic about who those best customers are. And the best customers could be an industry. It could be, we deal with dental practices or hair salons or landscapers. It could be geography plus revenue. So we deal with companies in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that are doing north of 10 million. But so many positive downstream things happen when firms start to niche down. So if you're Mr. or Mrs. Pittsburgh, then you understand all these different opportunities within the county, within the state, that somebody not within Pennsylvania know. If you're a Mr. or Mrs. hair salon person, then you can deliver certain profitability reporting and speak the market language that other people can't. And so they zero in, even if you start generic or wide early, like after a few years, they quickly zero in. Your Brandon Haw example is like real estate investors. He likes that, they like him, they can spend money. It's profitable, there's a lot of them. So he's gone all in on that. And then everything becomes easier. It's easier to standardize your workflow. It's easier to get pricing power in that industry. It's easier to market to that industry once you've zeroed in on that customer. And oftentimes firms I talk to, they sometimes feel a little bit like, for lack of a better word, inadequate against larger firms that have all the resources in the world. But what small firms have is the power of focus. And if you don't, but if you don't have focus, then you are competing with a very similar set of tools from a large firm, from a big four, big 10, or top 20. So your focus gives you leverage to then have positioning that others can't, that can offer services that are a little bit more focused and clear. If you go to a top 20 website and, hey, I love top 20, so don't take this the wrong way, but you see industries and you see 32 industries that they service, that's really, really hard to then have a go-to-market machine that caters to every niche within that. But as a small firm, you can do that. You could go speak at creative agency conferences. You can go attend local meetups for, landscapers or whatever, right? So I mean, when you zero in on that customer, everything starts to become easier and the snowmobile can happen. Yeah, I'm gonna clip that last segment and send it to someone. I just had a conversation with someone who's like, yeah, I'm a little bit involved with this close connections bookkeeping firm and I would really love to be able to move to it full time. And I think that that last point is exactly what I was trying to express to them of like, this is what you're missing and yeah, you need to narrow down and choose and start going to all those meetups. You need to understand, right? Like an example I had given was like, if you wanna start narrowing in on medical professionals, have a platinum tier offering that you actually handle all the medical billings for them. Right, like start doing that, get into that like differentiated level of service beyond just like, you know, we understand accounting rules and we can do bookkeeping to kind of something more specific, so. Yeah, and the power comes if they could do that, the first hurdle rate is to just get the attention of the market and if you're clearly positioned for a niche, hopefully they at least lump you in with other firms they're assessing. But then the real magic comes when you actually have that sales call or consultation and you can start to pattern match or express case studies that clearly fit what they have, you know? And I can't speak to the medical profession, but one could imagine that if you sit down at the prospect and they're talking about the challenges they're having and you are the accountant on the other end, you might say, well, you know, look, you know, we were dealing with a similar firm that, you know, their payables, you know, 30% of their net payables was over 90 days and after working with them, we got it down to this, you know, it got down to 5% over 90 days and like that saved them 200 grand and I'm not guaranteeing those results, but let me show you some of the Lego blocks we put in place to solve for that. And like, I could tell you the prospect on the other end is gonna be like, all ears. Like they're gonna be so attentive to being like, wait, you did what? Tell me more. Because you know the common pain points for that industry once you do it over and over again and then those sales calls and those quote unquote close rates go up, your word of mouth and referral increases once you're able to have sales conversations that you can better articulate the pain point of that prospect better than they can themselves and you can show them the map of how to improve it. They will naturally come to you to solve it. Yeah, David, thanks so much, man. This is so much value that you're kind of providing and you know, it shows that you're, what was it? 374 episodes deep into podcasting because again, the context you have on the industry and what people are doing, and that comes at you quick. Like I found like after around 40, 50 episodes, like I found like you start to build that. So I can't wait till, you know, number 374 and be able to have that kind of clear thinking on what ties everyone together. And who knows what the trend's gonna be, right? Like we, you know, three years ago, we almost never talked about acquisitions because it was kind of like this little boring, I mean, it's exciting in the sense that it's an acquisition, it's a wealth generator, but it was like pretty straightforward. And we would occasionally talk about, you know, what that process looks like and you know, whatever. And the multiples were always kind of the same and the buyers were always kind of the same. And then obviously we know everything's been turned on its head with PE. And then we have AI. And so, you know, there's more change that's been going on, it feels like, you know, in the last three years than in my prior five years of interviewing people. So I'm excited when you get to 374, what's the latest thing? Maybe it's like literal robots working in office. I don't know. Yeah, hopefully humanity persists, you know, so bye then. But yeah, no, thank you so much for taking the time, David. I really appreciate it. I'm gonna make sure to link Jetpack Workflow in the podcast description as well. Make sure you go check that out if you're trying to kind of, you know, do some process improvement for your firm and just make sure everything's a little bit more streamlined. And yeah, once again, thank you so much, David, for joining me on the pod. Thank you.