Building Sustainably and Synergies with Wealth Advisory with Owen Pryor & Steve Blake

Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. We've got a first of the series this time. We have two guests on this podcast. We've got Owen Pryor and Steve Blake, the managing and senior managing advisors at Evans May Advisory. Welcome to the pod. Yeah, thank you, Dom. Thank you for having us. Yeah. Yeah. My pleasure. We, uh, we ended up speaking after, I think it was after I had Cody Daniels on. What was the, what was the common string there again with Cody Daniels? Because that was a great episode. I really enjoyed, uh, speaking with him. So I met Cody, uh, when he was transitioning out of M&S out of Chicago. He was leaving, uh, the construction, um, team essentially, uh, and he was a leader of that group. And I was actually hired in, uh, to, to take over that, uh, role from Cody. And then as we got chatting, we just instantly bonded, um, had a lot of similar, um, background as far as, you know, really understanding deeply about the ins and outs of the construction industry, you know, cost segregation, you know, just all of those intrinsic, um, value add services to that industry and, you know, the related real estate industry. So yeah, we really bonded over that. And then, um, it wasn't very, I guess, deep into my tenure at M&S, um, that Steve reached out and we found this opportunity and kind of chatted through it. That was earlier this year. So yeah, that, that's kind of where we are right now. That's awesome. And I guess speaking about this opportunity, so Evans May advisory, um, I guess at the surface, something that makes you very unique because we've, we've spoken quite a bit before this. And, and I think there are a lot of things that make your firm unique, but you are essentially sister company to Evans May wealth advisory. Um, so Evans May, some of the owners, if I understand this correctly, acquired a legacy kind of mom and pop type firm, and then that's been owned for a little bit and it's being changed over now to, uh, Evans May advisory, which is where you're kind of both coming in and leading. So what's kind of different about being sister companies with a wealth advisory practice? Because I do see a lot of synergies there and I've spoken to some people who advocate very strongly, uh, for the pairing of those two services, right? So how does that kind of influence your journeys? Well, I think it's given a lot of benefits. So you kind of mentioned those synergies. I mean, it's great to be able to work with a team for the benefit of the client. There are a lot of, uh, there are a lot of things we can do kind of behind the scenes. So when it comes to planning and strategies, working together, there's a lot of information sharing and a lot of communication that happens, whereas when you don't have that type of relationship, the client ends up being the quarterback, oh, the CPA needs this. I got to go talk to the wealth advisor. I got to get that information. I got to come back to the CPA. So they're, they're kind of quarterbacking the situation and getting information for one person to another from all these different sources. Part of what we've done is get, um, legal documents signed that allows us to share information, not just with our sister company, but with any other people that might be involved in our clients that allows us to become that quarterback. We can go get the information we need and take that off of the client's plate. We just schedule a meeting with the client. Hey, this is the information we have. This is some strategies we've kind of come up with. This is our recommendations. These are the numbers. So it really allows us to, uh, to work together behind the scenes and take a much more strategic approach to the entire situation because they can come ask us tax questions. We can go ask them, um, wealth management questions and get a really good understanding of what each one of us is doing. Yeah. It's more of a holistic approach and, and it really provides, uh, just a relief, a sense of relief for a lot of our clients. We've in the past few months really, uh, been heavy and onboarding, um, clients from the wealth office and integrating them into the advisory firm and the smiles on their faces when they figure out what we can do for them. You know, they're out there using big four firms or these big regional firms that they get their stuff delivered at the last minute. They don't have any type of advisory service, no tax planning, and they get paper vouchers with no instructions. So we literally had someone send a picture of putting her last paper check at the post office because we told her that we would just be taking that over for her electronically. She was so thrilled that she took the time to take a picture. So, and that's just like the small little wins that, that kind of give us just an extra energy to, and, and reassurance that what we're doing is being received well, you know, in the market. Yeah. And clients love us taking a lot of that off of their plate. It's almost like in the sense of family office, I mean, we're, we're taxed, we're accounting, we're advisory, we're wealth management. We do a lot of those things, we take their tax payments on their behalf from their wealth management accounts. There's, there's a lot of things that we could provide that are almost like a family office. And so these high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals, they love that they've got so many things going on in their life, they just want somebody to take care of that for them. So they really appreciate the fact that they're no longer having to be involved in a lot of this process. Yeah. And we've really taken that concept and applied it to our business clients as well. And that has been just a resounding success. You know, we pride ourselves on doing an a la carte scope of service for each client offering and just the eyes that get lit up, you know, like we've got some really nice success stories. Like a young mom that's a business owner. She just wanted to be able to leave at 2.30 to 3 every day to go take care of her kids and then have that special time. And we picked apart what she was doing throughout the day and we're like, oh, we can take care of this. And we found that time for her. And yeah, she paid us a little small fee, but like she was tearing up when we delivered that scope of service and showed her that saving of time. And now she gets to leave between 2.30 and 3 every day to go hang out with her kids. Yeah. And to give you an example of what we're talking about, so one of our concepts is, you know, we want to provide that fight club service and we want to meet people where they are. So we identify our scope of services based on conversations with them. And we customize those services based on those needs like Owen talked about. So a great example of that with this client he's referring to is one of the things we identified is two to three times a week, she gets paid in paper checks a lot through the mail. So two to three times a week, she was running to the bank to deposit these checks. If she could get a check scanner, they charge you for that. She still has to do it. It still takes her time. So we said, you know what, just don't even bother opening those checks when they come in the mail. We're going to have somebody from our office come to your office twice a week, open up the mail, pull off the checks and take those to the bank for you. And she was like, I mean, I don't even have to like figure out who paid me and record us. So we have two people involved in that process. One that actually takes it to the bank and one that actually records the receivables paid in her system. So she's not really involved anymore in that entire process that used to take two hours every week of her time. Yeah, no, I love that. And even like my own personal experience, like in tax, there are certain things and they're small, but these compound across like a customer base where like, you know, we had these wealth advisors, they kept putting people into these like partnership investments in Ottawa specifically. There's like a few that are like, yeah, and like, they're like, they're pretty good investments. Like if you're going to throw a couple million dollars at it, sure. But we had a bunch of people who like had $3,000 in these, it's like, hey, like, you know, we're billing you $200 versus the $30 dividend that you're getting like of extra work. And then we would try to tell the advisor or tell them to tell the advisor, like, hey, like, pull me out of this because although maybe it's good, it creates a bunch of tax burden that's like actually not worthwhile. And they would refuse because they're like, no, you're going to make my portfolio look less good, like blah, blah, blah. Right. So there are these little things where like, if you can get perfect alignment between the tax side and the wealth management side, or again, you know, making sure the wealth advisors are following a very tax efficient strategy as per the recommendation of the tax professional, that can go a long way. So no, I, I really, really like that. And clearly it's working well for you. So you're at around 15 employees you shared in terms of full time, but you just, you got a new office space for 34 people, I think you said, and you're hoping to grow out of it in three to five years. So I mean, something's up where it's going really well, um, it is a very large number of, of the new customers for, you know, the, the tax and advisory practice coming from wealth management or vice versa, or is it a healthy mix? Like, I'm curious what the kind of wedge is when you're getting into a client. Yeah, it's, it's a mix. Obviously the wealth firm already had their preexisting client base and they kind of put out the announcement on July 1st with the rebranding that we were kind of open for business to do their tax and accounting work. So a number of their clients came forward and said, you know, for one reason or another, I'm looking to switch CPAs, whether or not my guy retires in the process of retiring, I'm just not happy with their level of service. And so we've picked up a number of clients for our firm from the existing clients for the wealth office. But then a lot of what we're doing is also allowing us like with, with Owen spends a lot of time out in the community. So we've gotten a lot of referrals and picked up a lot of business just from being heavily involved in the community. I'm, I'm sure we'll get to this, but you know, we've really kind of changed our processes and our tech stack and kind of how we go about doing what we do, which has freed up a lot of our time to go spend time at events, spend time in the community, spend time becoming part of associations, working with local not-for-profits. And so we've gotten a lot of really good word of mouth in our community and even online. And we're starting to pick up a lot of clients and gain a lot of traction that way. Owen has gotten several clients because people have found him and found us through LinkedIn and various social media. So we're picking up clients kind of across the country. But because we've been able to free up our time, like we've gone to, we went to a national conference in Nashville a couple of weeks ago. We were the only CPA firm there. And when you look at the time you have some of these conferences, like they're, they're at a time when CPA firms are up against a deadline. Like they're not going to be able to spend a week at a national conference right before September 15th. I know at the firm I was at before, the two weeks before September 15th, I was working more than 120 hours a week. We weren't going to any national conferences. But with what we've kind of been able to put in place and free up our time to be very client interactive, very client facing, very interactive in our community, we were able to go to this conference and we probably picked up, we were working on closing somewhere between 15 and 20 new clients that are going to that conference. Yeah. Wow. That's huge. Yeah. I talk about this a lot of like, you need to kind of like balance things out where you can't be like maybe so bogged down in some of the like lower value work or like you have to be very conscious of who you're taking on to keep room for that, right? Keep room for these super high ROI activities, whether that's selling more advanced tax planning or whether that's like just bringing a bunch of new clients through the door via these conferences. Do you end up with like a specific kind of niche as a result of being paired with the Wealth Advisory or is there something specific that you're targeting? I know that, Owen, you mentioned that like you had some background in the construction industry. So a lot of our referrals from the wealth side are high net worth individuals, families, which include estates, gifts, and trusts. And that is their bread and butter that they've been sending over. And we've learned a lot through that process because the standard and the reason that we did co-brand is because they've set a standard that their clients expect. And as Steve and I got to know the wealth firm, we were like, oh, we want that for everyone that we bring on. So we've really set a pretty high bar. And like Steve mentioned, we're leveraging the technology side to allow us more time with our clients. And then with regard to the niche, so the convention that we went to was a trailer dealership convention. And so Steve's got extensive background in dealership, accounting, tax, advisory services, and that's RV, trailer, anything and anything that touches for financing. And it's an underserved market that Steve really knows in and out, especially with the new tax bill that just dropped. There's been a lot of changes that folks haven't even been told from their current CPA that there's a new tax bill. And then in my background, real estate, construction, Steve also has a fair amount of construction background. Manufacturing. Manufacturing. So we have a lot of industries that we're very capable of handling very well and providing a high level of service. But to kind of go back to some of the technology and the touch points that Owen was talking about. So a great example of this with the wealth office and that standard that they kind of set for us, which we really like to want to take to our clients, is they go down to a very low level of detail with their clients. So for example, when a client comes in to the wealth office, they know what music they like and that's the music playing over the speakers when they walk in the door. They know exactly how they like their coffee and there is a cup ready for them when they walk in the door, exactly how they like it. So they really get to know their clients and what they enjoy and they build that relationship. And so a lot of what we've been trying to take away from that is kind of doing the same thing on the tax accounting and advisory side and really growing and building that relationship. A lot of times we're working with clients on a pretty constant, regular basis. I've got some clients I talk to every week, some clients we meet with on a monthly basis, some just want to do it on a quarterly basis. But we meet with our clients on a pretty regular basis and so we've really gotten to know them very well and the benefit from that is not only a strong relationship, it helps our team want to really do a great job for them, but it also helps us identify those opportunities for us to get more involved in what they're doing on the tax and accounting side. So like we were talking to a client, found out that the wife's father was getting ready to sell the family farm for a seven-figure number. That's not something we normally would have known about, but by meeting with them and having that conversation, we were able to get involved in that transaction. We were able to refer in an attorney that's going to help do the legal documents. So we were able to expand our scope of services with that client just because we were having a 20-minute conversation. And save them multiple six-figures of tax based on our recommendations and strategy. Yeah, we did the math based on what they were intending to do before we found out about it. I think the tax was going to be about $550,000. And with the planning we put in place, it should be zero. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, the sale of a business is like your, your keystone thing. And I'm sure some clients like, yeah, maybe they used to be with like an H&R block or QuickBooks pro advisor type business where like they weren't necessarily into the planning and they maybe know no better. Right. So having those deeper conversations, obviously super important. And sometimes you need to know ahead of time, right? Like if it's like the deals coming across, it's too late. So just a little cherry on top there is one of the reasons that we're able to meet and have those connections is based on the way that we price our clients is we pull that special a la carte and it's a flat fee divided by 12 and that's what they pay every month. So we don't track our time the way a traditional CPA firm does and then nickel and dime our clients just because they want to have a conversation. So we remove that barrier because a lot of clients, you know, they're scared to call, they're scared to email, you know, because they don't want to get that $650 an hour bill or they're not even getting a response even if they do. Yeah. Yeah. So it's great that you're, you're kind of pricing it that flat way. So people feel like they can kind of talk to you more openly because, you know, at the same time for you, that's the opportunity to then go sell the next bit of work to them versus yeah, them feeling like they just don't want to bother having a conversation. So that opens up more opportunities for you. Well, and we've heard so many stories from clients and I've, I've been involved in so many situations over the course of my career where we could have really helped them from a strategy planning perspective, but they didn't call us, they didn't let us know what's going on. We found out later, we found out at the end of the year, we were starting to work on the tax returns the following year. So there was a lot of opportunity that gets missed. So as we were trying to decide how we want to do things as a firm, we said, you know, that's a huge opportunity for us to expand our scope of services with our clients if they would just talk to us. So how do we knock down that barrier that's in place of them not wanting to call us? Well, if we don't bill by the hour, if you picked up the phone and call us, that knocks down that barrier. Clients are a lot more willing to call us and we're very intentional when we onboard clients that every time we talk to our clients to tell them, text, emails, phone calls, meetings, that's all included in your monthly fee. Reach out to us. Please talk to us. Yeah. So without relying on the billable hour, I like to kind of get behind the scenes here because I do actually hear some different answers. What are you doing to track, you know, performance or efficiency of like team members on that front? Are you still entering time maybe or doing time tracking just for like internal metrics or no? No, we're not entering time. I have recorded times since I came here. So what we do, we're task based, not hours based. So we have a certain scope of services that are assigned to that particular client based on what we customized for them. And whoever is assigned to that client is just their responsibility to make sure that client is taken care of and kept happy. As long as that is taking place and deadlines are being met, so what we're tracking is more, are we getting our deliverables to our clients well in advance? So like for quarterly estimated payments, man, we need to be done at least 10 days before that deadline, especially with high net worth individuals. They might have to sell some stock in order to raise the cash to make payment. You can't give that to them on the due date. They've got to have three or four business days. So our metrics are more based on timing of deliverables, hitting those deadlines, keeping clients happy, and completing all the work in a timely fashion. And then for making sure that you are billing your clients sufficiently, do you have something in there that you're tracking efficiency in terms of like, oh, you know, this client, you know, is taking twice as much time as they should. And we're only charging them, you know, the same amount, or do you have something like that that you're tracking? So part of what we do with our clients is we give them a very defined scope of services. This is exactly what we're going to do for that fee. So like the young mother that Owen was talking about earlier, we started out with a scope of services and a monthly fee. She came back and asked more questions. We dug in a little deeper, had a couple of conversations and expanded our scope of services and said, okay, look, based on these conversations, we think you want us to do this list of things that's going to increase our monthly fee to this amount. So she hadn't even made her first payment yet before we had increased our scope of services and increased our monthly fee. And so as long as we're staying within our scope of services, we just kind of do it and we do the monthly fee. If they want something more than that, we just come back to them with either an increase in the monthly quote or a one-time fee for a one-time project. And then part of what we do is that's a 12-month commitment. We locked in that fee for 12 months. And what we do is at 10 months, we have a meeting with them and if we find out during that 10 months that things are taking us longer than we expected, if we're doing their monthly accounting work and we were expecting, I don't know, 100 transactions a month, it ends up being 250, well, then at that 10-month period, we're going to say, hey, our scope of services has expanded. This is what we were including. This is what it's really been. So starting in month 13, this is what your fee is going to go to with this expanded scope of services. And we've got a pretty dialed-in metric system. So if we're onboarding a new client, we typically ask for the last two years of tax returns, access to, if they're a business client, access to their financials, their QuickBooks Online. And then we've actually built out some different formulas to put in number of transactions, number of K1s, number of all these different things that end up adding to either the time or complexity of returns. And then that way, we're moving forward with a pretty good barometer of what it should take. Yeah. So we have a pretty extensive onboarding process, like Owen was talking about. Really digging in deep before we even give them our scope of services and fee quote, really digging into everything, getting documentation the last couple of years, access to the QuickBooks, access to the bank accounts, like, let us really dive in deep on exactly what we're going to have to do so that we're not surprised two weeks into the engagement, oh, we thought it was going to be this, but now that we've dug in, it's really this. So that fee quote was pretty low. Yeah. So as Beth said, I went to an event here recently. Right before we left Nashville, Steve and I were at a real estate networking event. One of my downstreet neighbors has a unique alt investment for real estate folks to invest in properties kind of at a fractional level where it's a lot more affordable for folks to dip their toe into real estate investment. It's a really unique... A lot more tax work. Yeah. It's a unique approach. And so we went there and it was literally like we got sworn once folks realized what we were doing. We've had follow-up meetings to start onboarding some of these folks. And one of the guys that came up had known his own return for years, and he wanted a fee quote for us to take a look at his advisory services. And I took one look, I was like, well, you look like you haven't been taking even modest appreciation on your real estate investment at all. And he was like, well, what do I need to do? He was like, well, we need to amend this year, amend this year. We need to file a 3115 to get you caught up in this year. And he was like, well, how is that going to yin and yang with cost versus benefit? I was like, I'll show it to you on paper. And we well covered our fee based on what we were going to provide to him. And he had no idea. Yeah. Yeah. People really don't know. I'm personally sloppy about that. I have a rental property and I'm like, and it's so embarrassing as a CPA, but I'm like, I know all the things I should and could be doing, but I'm like, on the basis of one property, I'm like, uh, um, and, uh, yeah, that's maybe just a, a nudge for a little weekend project for me. So thanks for that. But it was great though for me, cause like I was able to actually build a relationship at the very base level with a, with an extreme value add, like right off. For sure. So, and this is a great guy that he wants to get into more real estate deals. So he's like, you guys are going to be in my back pocket for all this. Let's go giddy up. All right. So that's. Well, and with our experience, because Owen and I both have pretty tremendous experience. Owen's got about 20 years, I've been about 25 years, but we've got a pretty varied background. I've worked at a very small firm, it was about five people, including the receptionist. I've worked at a regional firm, it was a couple hundred people. I worked at a different regional firm, it was a couple hundred people that got acquired by a large firm that was in the seventh largest firm in the country. So I was a CFO for a while. I've worked in banking, like Owen's worked in banking, I've worked in IT. So we were pretty varied backgrounds. We bring a lot of expertise and experience to these clients and we're able to do things that a lot of our clients have never even heard of. So we had a client come in the other day and they own a gallery, but they also sell items to galleries outside the United States. We brought in the idea of an IC disk, which is an international tax planning opportunity and the client had never heard of it. And as we go to conferences and talk to clients, we bring up some of these ideas. A lot of the things we bring up, business owners have never heard of. They're not CPAs. The tax code is so complicated, you can't know everything even as a CPA. So you can't expect business owners to really know very much of this. And so we're able, based on our experience, to bring that to bear on these situations. So when we're onboarding a client, we can identify those opportunities. dig in and show clients, hey, if you let us do this analysis, our initial scope of services and fee are going to include this. But as part of your onboarding, we're going to do a deep dive on an analysis for these strategies and come back to you with here's how much it would have saved you last year. Here's where our fees would have been. So, Matt, you're ahead this much. Do you want to move forward with this idea? We get to be a profit center. Yeah. Yeah. That's always the best feeling. So I love that. I have a couple things I want to jump into too before we run out of time. So you mentioned the large firm you were at. You guys were both at CBiz. Is that kind of where the plan, I guess, maybe came together for you to start this firm or I guess, you know, be a part of the start of this firm or like, how does that plan come together, you know, between co-workers and how do you gather the courage and maybe even resources to be able to kind of jump ship like that? And I know it wasn't actually that smooth of a transition, but like, what did, you know, what did that look like? Yeah. So I think the biggest thing we got out of our experience prior to coming here on the reason we're doing things the way we're doing it is, I don't know exactly how to phrase this, but basically we've seen those things, we've experienced it. So we kind of had an idea of what we wanted to do and what we didn't want to do. So what's going on in our industry, you've got so many people that are retiring, leaving the accounting field. You've got a lot fewer people coming into the accounting field. You've got that middle generation really being squeezed, which is causing people to do a lot of offshoring. And so we were able to, from our experience, see kind of a reasoning behind all of that, have personal experiences related to young people who came in and then almost immediately left because of the industry. And so we were able to identify a lot of those reasons why what's happening to our industry is happening. And so we said, you know what, we're just going to design a system to eliminate some of those catalysts for why people are leaving our industry and really just do it very differently. So we kind of, instead of just, hey, this is how we've always done it, this is how we're going to do it. We kind of said, you know what, let's just start over. We're going to start with a blank work document and we're going to list out what are the things we absolutely have to do. Well, we have to file tax returns. We have to keep our clients happy. You know, there's like a list of like seven things that we actually have to do. And we said, okay, what is the most efficient and time-effective way of going about accomplishing all of those? And then we spent some time, probably a couple of months, researching technology, AI, processes, everything that we could to try and minimize our time in accomplishing those goals. So we've hired paraprofessionals. So like in the legal world, you've got paralegals. We have paraprofessionals that we're hiring that take a lot of things off of our plate that a traditional CPA from the CPAs are the ones doing that. So we try to minimize, because as a CPA, really what a CPA gets you as far as tax returns, you can actually sign that tax return. Everything else, somebody else can do from a legal standpoint. The only thing you actually need your CPA for on tax returns to actually just sign the tax return. So we were able to identify a lot of things that a CPA doesn't actually have to do, just somebody has to do it. And then we just need to make sure the returns are good, solid, and we sign them before they go out the door. So that frees up a lot of our time to meet with our clients, do the planning, do the strategy. So that was really kind of the catalyst for a lot of this is looking at what was going on in our industry, looking at how unhappy a lot of people were in our industry, a lot of people that were leaving our industry. And then you know what, we can do this better. Right. Well, and going back to Tom's question a little bit about the timing is, I left late November from CBIS of last year. And that was after I got recruited for the M&S role where I met Cody Daniels. And truth be told, I was blown away by M&S. If I didn't have a kiddo and a wife and we were here, I would have probably moved to Chicago for that firm. Yeah, they're great. Yeah, but it just didn't quite work out that way. And then Steve left early in January. And I actually got two different phone calls from two of my mentees that Steve had left. So I immediately reached out and tried to recruit him to M&S so we could open up an Indianapolis office and then kind of do what we're doing kind of in this vein. And then he said, hold on, I may have a better opportunity. I just heard something that's a great buy. So that's how we were introduced to Ryder Kenley. And then that's when, you know, even during like business season, I'm working crazy hours and Steve is already here. And like, so we're spending time like every single day to the wee hours of the morning, like talking about and just pulling apart what a CPA firm is, and then putting it back together. And you know, and as we've kind of figured out how to communicate our plan and vision, and we put it to the market already, and it's been just a blast. When we talk about it to folks in the industry, and we were like, you know, hey, do you have any questions for us? You know, this is people that work in industry is, hey, are you guys hiring? Or when can I get an offer letter? And I think that's the most resounding, like, green light for us to keep pushing forward is people that know the industry, that have been in it for decades, want to come work and do what we're designing and implementing. Well, and a great example of that is a couple, probably five or six weeks ago at this point, I had dinner with a friend of mine that I'd worked with at a regional firm probably a decade ago. And he's now in a different industry, he left public accounting because of all the things we talk about when people leave in public accounting. And so I was looking for him to kind of become a referral source for us. And so we went to dinner and I was kind of explaining to him what we do. At the end of the dinner, he's like, what if I wanted to come back to public accounting and work for you guys? So he's somebody that loved public accounting, like four or five years ago, because he just wanted to get out of public accounting and what that means to a lot of people. But once I explained to him what we were doing, he's like, hey, maybe I do want to, as far as work in public accounting, I'd be willing to do what you're doing. I just don't want to be like the traditional public accounting. Yeah, that's a big thing I try to shed light on for students and like, just people, early careers is that there's so many different flavors of this, right? And I try to be really careful to not be like big four bad or like big firm experience is bad and this is good. For me, I was very much not a fitting the mold employee where I probably would have thrived more in your type of practice, right? But I had really written off public accounting personally as well. I was like, I'm just not the type of guy for this, right? But I think different flavors of it would have actually been really, really, really good and appropriate for me. And to this day, it's still not something that I write off in the future of like, well, maybe I will be a part of that in the next chapter or try to start something myself. And I also really like the action of how this came together between the two of you, because this is something I've done and I've really learned to do is like, I have several people that I have bookmarked, let's call it, right? Like where I'm like, I'm keeping tabs on like what they're up to, where they're going, because I'm like, these are people that I would see myself want to either bring into an existing business or start something with in the future. And like being a good collector of people, I think is like such an underrated skill where just by staying in touch, keeping tabs on these people and like, you know, having four or five outstanding people for what it is you want to do that, you know, you can be a good collaborator with, I think can like really start you off on second base. And like, I mean, the speed at which you guys are moving, you know, tells me that you, you have started off with a very well-oiled machine. The last thing I really wanted to touch on is students. So before we hit record, we were, we were just kind of chatting, catching up and you guys both like lit up at the, you know, Oh, we have this space. We're going to have this space where we can host all these college student events, or, you know, you're talking about your pipeline and investing in these people and how they're very specific students, like super junior to the firm that you're really, really excited about. And I think that that is something that a lot of smaller, even kind of regional practices are missing where they're going into the super competitive pipeline of trying to like poach someone with two, three, four years of experience, because presumably maybe like, they just don't want to train the person or they don't have the time and resources in their own minds to be able to kind of support the growth of this person. What has your experience been like really like leaning on this student pipeline and, and you know, how has that helped you? So I think there are a lot of things and I could probably talk about this for a couple hours, but I think the big thing for us, we kind of talked about how as CPAs, you know, the only thing we really have to do is sign returns. We can get other people to do a lot of the things CPAs typically do. And we've really taken advantage of that with interns, college kids, young hires. So a lot of those things, and with the technology that's available today, you can really do a lot of those tasks with somebody that just understands the technology side of things. So we've really leveraged those people who could come in and do a lot of the work themselves and do it fairly quickly and very efficiently. And you might have to, yeah, the software doesn't do everything. And it, you know, it does a lot of things that might do 90% of its tax returns. You still got to do something with it. But a lot of that freeing up our time and allowing us to kind of meet people where they are, that's for our employees and staff and interns as well. And so we've really been able to take advantage of freeing up our time to spend time with them working with them. So I've probably spent more time in the last month working with interns than I had in the last two years, because we've really freed up our time to be able to do a lot of these things that we've talked about. And so by doing that, they are getting up to speed extremely quickly, being very efficient, very effective, and really taking a lot of those things off of our plate. And so we get very excited about bringing on more interns. That gives us more capacity. When you're talking about a CPA firm, it's not about going out and finding the clients. There are plenty of businesses, there are plenty of individuals. You can find clients. One of the big constraints in our industry is the capacity to get that work done and making sure you're bringing in the right clients that you want to work with. Well, if we're highly efficient, we're highly effective, and we're doing it at a lower cost because we're using a lot of interns, we can bring in even those lower-level clients and still be very profitable. And so we've got interns that have some of their own clients that they're going to work with. We've got one intern that's actually working on taking an enrolled agents exam, so she can sign very basic tax returns. So even a $300 tax return that's got a W-2 on it, and that's it. I mean, she can do that return all day and sign it. Numbers match, you're good to go. So really, really trying to meet students where they are, find unique opportunities and unique ways to grow our revenue, our bottom line, and expand our business by taking advantage of what's out there in the community. And we've gotten some really good connections here recently with a local university. We've met the chancellor's office. We've really gotten introduced to a lot of the professors and the dean of the business school, and we're working with a partnership now. And I was telling you off before we started recording that I was a drive-through teller all through college. I went through their training program. It was a Fortune 500 company. I learned about a lot of the corporate side. I learned how to cross-sell, and I had a structured set of hours, and I could get my classes done, and sometimes I had some free time to do schoolwork. Well, we're finding out as a lot of these students, if they have grants or if they have some type of other financial obligation that they have to be full-time, the internships, literally, the traditional internships just aren't in their cards unless they want to delay their graduation or jeopardize their financial aid. So, we've kind of come to the table and said, look, what if we just offer a perpetual part-time job that just builds throughout a young college student's career and have it capped at 15 hours? We can be very strategic about finding projects and recurring work. So, again, we're not tracking their time. They have a project. We may find a small business for them, teach them the QuickBooks Online, how to reconcile a bank statement, how to do all of these financial statement closings, and then the quarterly tax planning, and then the year-end tax planning. And then they're getting this huge benefit of that experience compared to their peers who are just a cog in a wheel, file out the online, all right, I'm going to put this number in this box and then move on to the next at a traditional CPA firm where it's just more data entry for those students. And we are leveraging their time as well to where they can actually sit in on some of the prospect meetings, some of the delivery meetings because those... That's huge, yeah. Right. Those soft skills. And I think Steve jokes about it all the time is, if you don't get that soft skill training, and then all of a sudden you become that manager, and all you know is the technical, and then you get in a client meeting, and like... Yeah, it's not going to go well. You know, and not every CPA has a personality out of the gate that gives them the confidence to have a conversation. So, we want to bring them up through our program in a very unique way to where by the time they graduate, they're going to be an actual advisor in our firm, not just a first year because they're going to be running circles around their peers. Right. Yeah. And I have a lot of respect and admiration for how you guys are doing things. Like, it feels like you're being a lot more sustainable and a lot more kind of measured in what you're doing. And it feels like you're maybe building on a different time horizon than... And I mean, different systems, but when you're part of an investment with a five-year time horizon, you got to do certain things differently, or when you're publicly funded and you got to make it to the next quarterly EPS announcement or whatever that is, you do things very differently where it does feel like you're investing very heavily in the future of what you're doing and the future of the next generation of accountants. So, on behalf of a lot of the industry, thank you for operating in that way. Because I talked to a lot of students who are really, really frustrated with the underinvestment in them in favor of maybe offshoring or different solutions that in the short term will maybe squeak out an extra 2%, 3%, 4%. But it sounds like the way you guys are doing this, not only is it really sustainable, but I think you really love what you're doing. And I think the contribution of how you're doing it, I think the way you're doing it contributes to that. Well, and we have these- We're people first. Right. We have these philosophies we live by, and I won't list them all, but one of them is do the right thing and treat people right. And so, even taking that to the interns, the colleges, the students, that is our goal. Because if we do the right thing, we treat people right, we do it the right way, that will come back to us in a number of different intangible ways. So, being involved with the school, we're involved with three different programs at local universities. And Owen has been added to an advisory council for a chancellor at a local university. And so, they've really looked at us and said, oh my God, you guys are actually willing and have time to spend with us and doing something that's a little unique, something that we think our students will really enjoy, something that will help them bring in students as they identify us as a partner. And so, they've really taken off with what they're willing to do for us in terms of helping us from a recruiting standpoint, getting our name out there to the students in the community. And so, the colleges have introduced us to not only a number of students, but also local businesses, because they're like, you are the people that we want our friends to be working with. And so, we've had professors reaching out to us, asking us to come to their class and do presentations. And so, the fact that we're willing to do that and build those relationships, everybody at the college, the staff, the administration, the professors, they're getting so excited about what we're doing. They're actively looking to help us in any way that they can. As opposed to the more transactional of, oh, this big firm is just dumping money into the program and it's more transactional. They're sending us those referrals and interdoptions with students and members of the community from opportunities to prospect new clients, all of those attributes. And they're doing it because they know that they're sending folks to the right place. And they know the benefit that brings to their students. So, we kind of alluded to hosting student events. So, at our new location, we've got a couple of really nice spaces that we can host events in. And we've offered to the college, we're willing to host, if you want to bring in your accounting association, whatever different student groups that might make sense, bring in some of your faculty, some of your staff, let's host an event. We can do a presentation. Bring in your students that are looking to get an internship this spring. We'll do a presentation on a day in the life of an intern. What does that look like? What can you expect? What do you need to know? What questions do you need to ask as you're interviewing with firms? Like, really give them some good information from an employer's perspective. Because a lot of what we've learned over the course of our careers is students coming in as interns or first year, what are the things they didn't really learn? So, what do we have to teach them? What do we have to work with them on? What do we need to get them up to speed on? We know all of that. So, as we've been talking to the chancellors and the administration, we've been sharing some of those thoughts with them. They're getting excited because they can see, oh yeah, that does make a lot of sense. We probably should include something in our curriculum about that. And so, they're getting excited about how we can help their students be successful. And we're more than happy to help do that. Because again, we want to do the right thing. We want to treat people right at the end of the day. I want to feel good about what I did that day. And when I have those conversations, when I meet with those chancellors, when I work with the students, I go home at the end of the day with a smile on my face. And that's what I really enjoy. Yeah, I love it, guys. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing. And I think you're a great model of how to, in the early days, do things in a really sustainable manner and really be part of a community. So, thank you for the way that you're operating your practice. And thanks for coming on and sharing, guys.