Double Digit Growth While Independent with Michael Hoover

In this episode of the podcast, Michael Hoover and I discussed the importance of firms having access to strategic capital when it is time for them to make new investments. And that is the perfect introduction for this week's podcast episode sponsor Live Oak. Live Oak Bank truly understands the unique needs of your accounting and tax business and specializes in providing customized financial solutions to support firms like yours. At Live Oak, they grow with your business and want to be your firm's financial partner. Whether you are buying, building, or simply looking to grow your accounting and tax firm, they will design a loan package that supports your business goals. Their accounting and tax lending team offers numerous financing options nationwide. Ready to achieve your business goals? Visit liveoak.bank slash big four today to connect with a member of their team, member FDIC. Now back to the episode. Hello and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. We've taken a little bit of a break while I was traveling Asia, actually for the month of April. And we are going to be back here with some fantastic guests. So I'm really, really excited to be back here with Michael Hoover, the partner and the chief growth and strategy officer at Bennett Thrasher. Welcome to the pod, Michael. Thank you, Dom. I appreciate it. Welcome back to the States. Yeah. Well, I'm based in Canada, but I will be in the States probably when this comes out. Welcome back to North America. How about that? Yeah, I will probably be in the States when this comes out for Firm Growth Forum. But yeah, so we've had you on the pod before. We talked a little bit about strategy, Bennett Thrasher's, you know, commitment to being independent at the time. And, you know, a lot about having people from the C-suite, maybe not be accountants by trade. So you being the growth and strategy officer, how are things? How are things at Bennett Thrasher? How's growth been? Yeah, growth is great. Yeah, it has been what, probably close to 18 months since we caught up last. A lot of good things happening at Bennett Thrasher. Really excited about where we are, where we're coming from, and more importantly, where we're headed in the future. You know, the last time we talked, we spent a lot of time on being an independent firm. That's not changed. Organic growth going up, that's not changed. So those two really important kind of pieces of our business have really stayed the same. A lot of other changes. So, and I think that really sets us up nicely for the future. Yeah, yeah. Well, so speaking about kind of some of the growth things you shared, you know, I think it was the eighth consecutive year of double-digit organic growth at the firm, which is fantastic. And we're in a market now where a lot of the growth comes from sort of inorganic channels or acquiring things in and trying to cross-sell across. So for that organic growth, like how, like what channels have been really effective? Is it like an expansion of service that contributed a lot to that? Or is a lot of it new customer acquisition, moving up market and such? Yeah, it's a good question. So it's really not one specific area I can tell you. So we, if I look back at 25, just a great year, we're at 10%. So that's now at this point, nine consecutive years of double-digit growth that we've had. And it's all been organic, no acquisitions at all. So peeling back kind of the layers. So how are we able to do this? Well, we've got three big juggernauts in the firm right now. Transaction Advisory Services just continues to grow by double digits annually. So 24 was a great year, 25 even better. So we're talking 30, 35% compounded annual growth. Valuation Services, another just juggernaut of a service led by Chris Anderson, who's out in our Denver office. Chris has come on board. I think he's been here about two, two and a half years at this point. Chris runs a practice that I've never seen in any other firm, just in terms of being able to produce organic accretive revenue. And then tax, of all things, right? Tax really had a very strong year. We're up 68% in core tax last year. And so from a service line standpoint, those were juggernauts for us. They moved the needle. They really allowed us to grow. We did some other things. So moving into 25 that we didn't really have set up in 24. So our BD team, I've got to give a call out to them. So that was brand new to the firm. We never had that. Began to hire late 24, really put those pieces in play in 25. And if I look at it, you know, organically, those guys brought in about 65 to 70 brand new logos. They were 185% above goal, right? You can't beat that. You can't beat that. So we really got into the market that way. And then two other things on that. The first is our partner mindset has shifted. We understand that if we are going to remain independent, our partners need to be in the market and they need to be able to sell. It's one thing to be able to take care of your clients really well. And we've got third-party validation that we do that extremely well. But the reality is, you know, revenue leads to growth, growth leads to opportunity, and you've got to be out in the market doing that. And so kudos to the partnership here to really, you know, stepping up and doing that. And then kind of a side thing which we thought was there, but we never measured it. Our younger staff, like our non-partners, continue to drive organic growth. You're talking millions of dollars annually. So it's really a mindset of let's go out here and let's grow the business, smart business. Let's stay in our markets. But yeah, so far so good. Yeah. So how are you kind of like fostering that within the firm to sort of encourage the business development throughout? Because it sounds like there's a business development team. So it'd be pretty easy for people to be like, well, that's not really my job. And when we spoke offline, you kind of talked a lot about sort of fostering that really early on in people's careers where they showed an ability to do so. And for me, I mean, I talk about this a lot, but I think that's a big reason that I left the big four firm that I was at where I had a partner there who was kind of advocating for me of like, oh, let's see if we can put you on a different track where maybe we ask less billable hours of you and there's more room that's created for you to be involved in some of these business generating activities. But that being one of the big four, I think you're in such a large structure that it's kind of hard to carve out those different paths for folks. And it's like, if you don't want to follow the path that has been paved for you, then it's just not going to kind of work out. And so, you know, I think for me personally, like that's something that I hear that I would have really leaned into and enjoyed. So I'm very curious to hear more about how you're fostering that. Yeah. So I don't think accountants ever go to school to go out there and be business developers, right? There are some that are naturally just good at it. And then there are some that are pretty good. And then there are some that really quite honestly have an aversion to it. You know, it's not a right or wrong. It's not a one size fits all. So I think the first is, let's have realistic expectations. Our partners today are asked to do more than they ever have from a client delivery standpoint. So if we go put a massive bogey on them to go out there and deliver at all costs, new revenue coming in the door, that's not our culture, right? But if we make it where it's incremental, right? Where, hey, this is, we believe you have the ability to do this. Let us give you the tools to be able to do this. And then let's not just say, all right, here's your goal. Here are the tools, go figure it out, which I think a lot of firms do. We have spent a ton of time thinking about how do our individual partners sell better? And so that could be, you know, somebody who's just a dynamic marketplace guy who can go out there and work the room and come back with 10 leads that they then follow up on and they close. You've got others who, you know, let me write a case study. Let me write a white paper. Let me meet people kind of organically that way. That works. And then, you know, cross-serving, cross-selling, everybody talks about that. The reality is that's good business. That's a new business for us. It's a creative business. And so what we found are those technical partners, right? Those partners that really enjoy that client service work, they can actually contribute a ton by bringing in new additional work per client. So I think the industry average is somewhere around 1.6768 in terms of services sold per client. We're somewhere around 2.7, 2.8. And a lot of it has to do with our partners recognizing that they don't need to go out there and be a rainmaker. They can do that within their own client base and they can do it in a way where it's not forcing the sale on the client, but it's really better understanding their business and being a true partner to that client or that business itself. Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I think the ability to be a true partner and being close to the business and things like that are something that we're just gonna be leaning into more, right? Like as you're worried about AI or whatever, kind of displacing some of the labor market, I think that's the one thing that'll never change, right? Is being the trusted individual to oversee everything no matter how the work is getting done. Yeah, I think you're right. So, and we'll talk about this, I'm sure at some point about technology and AI, it's a natural thing to come up, but what we have found and we believe if you look back at everything is really, yeah, AI is great, technology is great. We're making strides, leaps and bounds, right? I feel very good about where we are there. But the reality is this is a people business. And so your clients wanna talk to you. They wanna talk to you about issues they may be having or issues that could be on the rise. And then there's just something about that personal piece, which makes a difference. And that's where we are. We're investing heavy in that at this point. In fact, I got an invite from my CEO earlier today, Jeff, and it was to talk about client experience and how do we continue to make that better despite all these other initiatives that we're doing? And we do it really well. I mean, we've got third-party data which tells us that, but how do we continue to serve those clients in a way that's meaningful to them regardless of everything else going on in the firm? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, maybe let's kind of lean into some of the technology improvements that you've been able to implement. Because again, like you can't talk about a commitment to being independent and private equity without sort of talking about the cost and how you're going about implementing that tech infrastructure update, I guess, so to speak. Because we've talked about that a lot. Very recently, I spoke with Justin Shellman from Prosperity Partners who's like, yeah, after we raised, we kind of like bottom up, redid our whole tech stack that's free to stop. And he was kind of like, we're talking about 15 to maybe in the future, 20% improvements on productivity of the staff from just everyone being completely equipped. And I think that's one of the things that makes the competing in the market a little bit difficult when there's so much outside capital coming in. So how have you gone about that? Yeah, so that's the first thing, right? Obviously, we've talked to private equity like any other firm, you've got to do your due diligence to do it. And the first thing that gets brought up is can you afford the tech stack? And the answer is yes, we can. We feel good about that. Reality is operational costs are going through the roof, right? And it's largely driven by technology. So we've got to be smart about that. But I would put our tech stack up almost against anybody out there, not the big four. We don't have those resources, right? But AI is a big piece of our strategy, but it's not the only technology strategy that we're looking at right now. And so we've approached AI, which everybody wants to talk about AI. We've approached AI at a macro firm level where we're looking at, can we build a data lake with all of our information and plug and play various apps around it? We're going in that direction. That's a big, big step for us. So imagine kind of a closed loop, large language model that resides in the firm that continues to get better and better and better, right? Then we look at the individual service lines and then kind of the micro service lines in there. So what works for tech is not going to necessarily work for audit. And what works for audit is not going to work for advisory. And so you can't have just a bunch of kind of spaghetti threads running out there. They all need to have some congruency. But the reality is we've let our partners really help understand what makes more sense for their business. And so we're doing that. I'll give you a great example. We just built a small language model and transfer pricing, which is really interesting because that's a 10 to 12 person group for us. And what we've done is we spent a lot of money on not the structure of the actual small language model, but it's on the prompts, right? And so we're bringing in people telling us how to write those prompts to make that AI piece stronger. You know, you look at our, let's say our transaction advisory, we can easily pull together reports using AI. Cloud AI is really good at that in particular. iCopilot like everybody else has been really big for us as well. On the tech side, you know, we use BlueJ like probably some of the other firms out there. We can write these memos that are great. And so we're doing really well from a tech standpoint. And that's usually one of the first things, you know, when an outside investment comes in, they're going to say, we can make your tech stack better. I don't think there's an environment where you could not make a tech stack better because reality is it's moving fast, it's changing quick, right? But I feel good about where we are from a technology standpoint. I don't think we're going to be lapped, if you will, by being independent. That's just not a reality for us at this point. It may be in the future, but so far it's not been. Yeah, well, and part of me sometimes wonders if it makes more sense to take like a more scaled approach into some of the tech investing where, you know, again, if you look at computing, right? Like even just computers or memory or something like that, something that once costs hundreds of thousands of dollars might now cost 50 bucks. And if you're plowing all of your capital in at the point in time where it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and then five years later, it costs 50 bucks and you've diluted yourself to be able to afford that. But now that's like pocket change. I mean, that's kind of a, that's a shame. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Think about these large firms that have, it's a little bit like poker, right? You play poker enough, you get into a hand and you're called, what's pot committed, right? You've committed so much in there that you can't back out of it. We're not in that case, right? We have evolved and changed technology. What you said is exactly right. AI today is going to look different in six months. It's going to look different in 12 months. The rage forever was Copilot and Copilot was a great, great program. We use it a lot, but reality is Clawed is probably better at this point. But what happens when Clawed is not the flavor of the month in six months, right? And we've put all these eggs in one basket. So we're looking at kind of this data lakes that we're building almost as a plug and play type architecture where we're able to pull out these apps or these solutions and not be so beholden to them because we've got a language model that's basically speaking the same common tongue and we're able to just pull in place and do all that. And I think that's going to help us over time. That's really cool, actually. I like that for the flexibility of it and being able to implement the new thing as it becomes possible because a lot of firms, I mean, I recently helped and am still helping a senior manager exit like a top 10 firm because she's kind of like very frustrated with the stance on technology. And she's like, it's so hard for me to like even just do my work and serve my clients because they keep yanking whatever it is out and putting new things in and they'll pick the wrong thing and then they'll change it. But for you to be able to remain agile and probably test out multiple models concurrently can probably like help steady some of that. So taking the kind of very scalable approach is cool. Yeah, it does. And what we found, user adoption, right? I mean, there's a reality to user adoption as well, which is we're all changing so quickly, right? Think about just how you go and do a search on the internet right now. You know, it used to be a browser. Now it's probably AI, right? More than anything else. And think about like Gemini and what Gemini puts out for you instead of that traditional kind of search that you did. That changed almost overnight. I do agree with you on a lot of those parts. The plug and play makes sense, all of that. I think that over time, we're all gonna get to a point where technology hopefully begins to decrease in cost. I'm not 100% sure we get there right now, but right now operational costs are going up, up and up with that. I think at some point they do plateau because competition comes in and makes it better. But it could conversely go the other way. And all of a sudden, there are three or four dominant technology stacked out there and you gotta pay a lot of money to use them. So that's kind of the other side of that card. Yeah. So for carving out the capital to be able to kind of do these types of investment, how is that handled internally? Do you have like a strategic investment fund or something like that, right? Cause the idea behind the traditional partnership model is it kind of flows through and you distribute all profits, right? Which is, I think one of the things that sometimes holds firms back where they maybe don't have the capital to invest in some of these things because it's been overly optimized on partner distribution. So how do you, yeah, how do you do that? No, I agree with you. I think the fly in the ointment for partnerships are exactly what you were just talking about. How do we distribute profit at the end of the year and still invest in infrastructure and how do we do that in tech? So there is money set aside each year for that. No two ways about it. Probably the most important thing is you need to have not only that built into your budget and you need to have an outside fund that you can access if you need to go long on a certain technology, which we have. I think more importantly, you've got to have your partnership group bought in on, listen, operating costs are going up. This is where they're going up and we're pretty detailed about that. Most of it's going to be tech spin, but we believe that we can make that up in different elements of the business. So yes, we are spending more money on technology, but the flip side is our margins are better, our clients are served better. And so, you know, for the most part, I think all of our partners are on board, not a hundred percent, it's a partnership. People are going to disagree, but I would say that, you know, the ability to continue to reinvest in that area smartly comes down to our partnership group in particular. And within that partnership group, having the buy-in knowing that, yes, you are probably not going to get a full distribution, I guess, if you just threw away all those expenses, put them to the side, but this is long-term and this is the direction the firm's going and hopefully you're on board. We haven't had much pushback to date. Yeah, yeah, no, that's really good to have because I could see, right, like if there's a long history of distributing X amount and saying like, hey, like we need to pull back or something like that, like that can be a really hard sell. And like from the individual perspective, like it's really easy to lifestyle creep your way into whatever earnings, right? Or even pre-creep into what you think is going to be coming down the pipe. Well, so you look back, I mean, we've got nine years of double-digit organic growth. It will get interesting, right? If I'm being really, really candid on this, it gets interesting if we stumble, right? And we go back and we have 3% growth, that changes the conversation, right? I don't believe we're ever going to go back that way, but reality is we could. And at that point, I think those discussions get a little more interesting. We'll put it that way. Yeah, so, I mean, I introduced you at the start of the podcast as the Chief Growth and Strategy Officer. Something that's really interesting that we spoke about at length offline beforehand is that you also kind of head up the talent acquisition side of the business, which I think is really, really cool. And I want to get into a bit of a talent conversation here, but to me, like that kind of almost makes sense where it feels like in the accounting industry, at least at this very moment, like the constraint on growth in many places is actually talent, right? So they kind of go hand in hand a little bit. How did that come to be? Yeah, it's just a bunch of different circumstances led to this. So my background is talent acquisition, right? I've owned a bunch of firms. I've worked within firms creating and developing talent acquisition organizations when I was younger. So it's in my DNA, if you will. It also comes from working in a firm where we quite honestly did not have the talent all the time and that caught up to us from just a client service delivery. And so when I called Jeff Call, our CEO about coming on board here, I said, I really want to do this, right? But I've got a bit of a different ask and that is let me own growth, but let's pull talent acquisition away from HR and let's put that back into growth. I think it makes more sense there. No FedStar, HR, our brethren, right? I mean, HR is really important in any organization, but in this environment, you've got to be able to hunt and you've got to be able to sell and you've got to be able to identify and attract the right talent, right? And so we've been able to do that. We've been able to go out there and hunt effectively. We've been able to attract the right talent and bring them on board. And so if I look back last year, we had 63, 65 hires somewhere in there. Probably 15 of those, 15, 16 are at the director level and above of those 16, I'm going to say at least half are partners. So we're able to go out there and recruit partners. We're able to go out there and recruit directors. And so if you pull it back, you acquire 63 new heads to the organization in very strategic, well-thought-out roles. You've got the best talent in the market and then you've essentially made two acquisitions, right? Two small tuck-ins when you're able to do that. And so that's been really effective for us. I don't see that changing. You know, our strategy is, let's go get the best talent in the market. If it's really outstanding talent, we'll build around that talent, right? We're doing that down in Tampa right now. But we are going to continue to go long on our ability to attract and retain the best folks out there. And I've been amazed. I've been blown away. I knew coming in the door that we would be able to attract good talent because we're independent. And the bottom line is a lot of these people were not quite at that partner level who did not participate in that liquidity event. They're interested, right? They're interested in us and they at least want to hear our story. They come hear our story and they're like, sign me up. And so we have really seen talent at kind of across the board at a really high level, come our way. 2026, we started off the same way. We hired two partners out of the gate. One big four, one middle market, game changers, right? Just dynamic people for us that fit a really specific need. We then added three different directors which are going to help bolster different groups for us. And so we're off to the races again. Here it is, end of March and actually, what are we, April, right? At this point. So we're looking at right now hiring at the same clip, if not higher. And we're not filling roles where people are leaving necessarily. Yes, attrition is part of it, but most of these are creative dynamic hires that are going back into the firm. Interesting. And so a lot of these, this sounds very heavily skewed towards more senior people, which is, I mean, reflective in what I'm seeing when I'm working with firms who are looking at this. going to hire through the big four transparency talent pool, small plug. Uh, but a lot of people, you know, a lot of people are looking for kind of manager and up I find, and it feels like from my perspective, like if you're a manager and up and you have like a strong track record and you haven't worked at eight firms in the last 10 years kind of thing, you are just like the hottest commodity under the sun versus, um, I want to say like two, three years ago, like it felt like really junior people were where it was at. And, you know, as a result of this demand, like we've seen, you know, in 2024, for example, uh, raises were very, very disproportionate, uh, in favor of very junior level employees. Whereas I kind of think in 2026, that might actually reverse. I think we might actually see wages climb a lot more for more senior people because there's just like this crazy demand for them. Um, is this something that you think is kind of like systemic? Like, are you seeing the, you know, almost the pyramid shape of the talent equation changing at Bennett Thrasher where, you know, maybe for one partner, you once upon a time had 12 or 14 staff and now you only have 10. Yeah. It's not probably as rapidly as people would, would talk about. So, um, you know, going back to this, we've hired, so take 16 out of 60 six people, you've got 50 hires that were probably at that experience staff to, to senior level. And so we've also been able to attract those. So that's been good. So going back to your question about, um, the pyramid model, which is so traditional, you know, you'll see a lot of people come out and say, well, we're moving to a diamond and that's, that's kind of where we're going with technology and offshoring being the bottom, uh, two quadrants of that triangle. I don't, I don't think that's off entirely. Um, I do think the model is shifted. Do you need fewer people to do more things? The answer is yes. Is it going to continue that way? I think it does, but, uh, we are still going long on, on campus hiring. We're seeing that really pay a dividends for us. We're seeing a lot of two to three year people come to us and say, we just want a different experience and what we may be getting in a big firm, you know, by the way, um, I'm overworked because everybody else in my group is, is left for whatever reason, and my work life is terrible, so we can combat that pretty easily, and then I think our market's interesting, right? We're, we're low to mid market, uh, lower mid market in that space. You work with a lot of founder led companies. You're working with those, you know, firms that are probably, are companies up to about 500 million, which that's really interesting work. We do fish higher, exponentially higher, but if that's your core, we're able to offer, uh, these young people in particular, the ability to come in and really learn a business and not just work on accounts payable at a, uh, at a fortune one company, right? Do an audit or something like that. And has the path for these, like maybe campus hires, for example, like changed at all in this sort of like evolving landscape, like, is there maybe more, more focused on developing them to be engagement managers versus like actually leaning on them to execute the work? Yeah, that's, that's a great question. I think without a doubt, right? Talk to anybody in the industry and that, that accountant is changing, right? That accountant coming out of school is changing. Now, the question is, are they being taught that way or are they kind of naturally gravitating that way because of how they've grown up, right? If I look at my kids and the way they use technology and AI is certainly different than the way that I use it. Um, are we looking more at project managers? I think, yeah, project managers become kind of an interesting piece. Where does that all fit into the equation? Um, communication skills are huge without a doubt, right? I mean, it's one thing to be able to come in there and do technical accounting. Now you get kind of the technical technology. Are you able to effectively communicate? And that goes back into leadership and project management. So that's changed a fair amount, but you know, I, is it the schools, is it the work we're doing, or is it just kind of naturally younger people are better equipped because they've grown up that way? Um, and they can play better in that environment. I don't know. I, it's probably a combination of a few things. Yeah. I mean, that, that kind of aligns with a lot of what I've spoken to some other people about as well as kind of like my, my own theories that I've developed a little bit from being deep in the data. Um, the last thing I kind of wanted to touch on with you, um, is, you know, you talk about how pretty much all the growth I've been at Thrasher has been organic and you're not really doing acquisitions. Is that like a strategic choice or is it really just like, because of PE's entrance into the industry, you've seen valuations climb to a rate that just like maybe doesn't make sense anymore for, for your firm. Yeah, it's, it's both. We look at deals all the time. We're in a really interesting spot where deals get brought to us and we'll look at those deals. But then at the same time, we have firms who are interested in merging up. And so we do see a wide range of, of, of firms out there. Go back to 2015 since there, you know, since 2015, there have been a thousand private equity deals done. 177 of those were kind of these platforms we hear about, right? So then you've got 875 that are roll-ups essentially. And so 2025 had more acquisitions in 24 and 23 combined happened. So think about that, right? So 25 was this massive year of acceleration, but we're not talking about big, big companies. Sure. There were some firms that merged and you had to look at that. But you know, the reality is a lot of these deals we're talking about a 30 to 50 member firms out there. And so private equity by its structure is buying revenue and they're buying headcount. That's pretty much it, right? So I can increase my top line. I can pick up people to do this work. Hopefully I can make this more efficient. I can get some, some margin out of that. What we have found is not all revenue and not all people are created equal. And what I mean by that is, you know, I can run a pretty easy analysis on a $6 million top line company that's kicking off about 2.1 million in EBITDA, right? So about 35% margins versus going out and hiring two partners and 10 to 12 staff with them and seeing where my breakeven point is. I can get cashflow positive probably in the first 12 to 18 months by, you know, going out there and hiring that talent. What we have found is when we really get into these deals, you know, that, that $6 million company is probably going to trade it 2X, right? The reality is I can take 70% of that work because their client base just isn't going to fit ours all the time. So I'm paying a multiple for work that I probably can't get. 30% of that work I can't get. Or it's going to, you know, naturally have some attrition in there once you do that deal. So I'm buying 70% at an accelerated price. And then I started looking at the staff and I'm like, all right, well, there's some really good people there, but there are a lot of people who don't necessarily equate to our people. And so that puts that staff in not a great spot. And then it makes the deal economics really shaky at that point. So yeah, on the top level, that, that tuck-in looks great. $6 million of revenue. We're going to pick up, you know, 15 to 25 people. Reality is once we get into the deal semantics of it, it doesn't look that great. And so the multiples are really the deal killer for us. When we started looking at some of these, we can't compete with private equity. There's no two ways about it, right? We can't go in there and offer, you know, two to four to six. We've seen six with some of these and expect to get real value out of that at any point in the future. So if I'm a PE firm and I'm looking to roll and capture that revenue, that makes all the sense in the world. If I'm an independent firm and I know that, you know, I am trying to build this foundation and continue to build for the future, I can't take a chance on making a bad acquisition that potentially submarines the firm, right? And so we have been really, really diligent about that. But yeah, it's an interesting, frothy market for sure. You know, just this week alone, we've had two deals brought to us and we've been able to say no to those pretty quickly, just based on back of the envelope deal economics, once we get down to it, having seen, you know, 15 to 20 of these over the last 12 months or so. Yeah. I mean, that's something I haven't really been able to get into the weeds with, with people. So I find that really interesting is, yeah, the economics of just hiring some of the talent, that would be a part of that equation versus, you know, a multiple of EBITDA for full operation. It is really interesting where, yeah, it seems like, you know, your payback might be 20 years minus the growth that you see versus an employee. I forget the timeframe exactly you gave, but it was like significantly shorter than that, right? Once you factor in not being able to absorb all of the revenue and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. And so then what if I accelerate that and I take a complete counter notion to the market and I say, all right, I'm going to buy out your non-solicit because everybody has a non-solicit, it's in there. And so if you're non-solicits, you know, 0.5% of all revenue that you would bring over to us, I may take that deal. I didn't, I didn't construct it, but I may pay, you know, whatever firm for it. And that partner becomes accretive even faster. That's it. That's, that really gets interesting. There is when you begin to look at some nuances like that, you know, what that requires us to do though, kind of going back to the talent acquisition side is we really need to kick the tires hard on who we're bringing over, right? You need to be a revenue generating machine, but you've got to be accretive to the practice, both with the people and then driving that top line revenue as well. And what we found are, you know, most people are, are not only adept at it, but they're eager to get in there and kind of flex their muscle because they've been overshadowed for whatever reason. Yeah. I mean, for a lot of people, this might be the opportunity to work kind of unconstrained, right? Depending on where that partner is coming from too, sometimes there is actually like genuine misalignment. Like I worked with someone who was on deck to make partner who was leaving their firm very recently. And he was like, I was shocked by who they allowed me to walk away with. But at the end of the day, they were truly kind of like, listen, we're trying to kind of clean up and move up market. And they're sort of borderline in terms of clients. And so, you know, you can just have them. And so a lot of times it's very surprising to see like who might be able to come along with those deals too. Yeah. So then take it a step further. If I, if I can buy work and I don't want to buy the work they don't want, I, yeah, I can go to a partner who's on deck with us and say, you cherry pick 50% of the clients that you really liked that we think we can grow and I'll, I'll buy you this out, right? I didn't set the contract again. Somebody else set it out, but better yet. Let me go get your team and see who you want to take with you. And we'll buy that out too. Again, we're not, we're not doing anything that goes against a contract. We don't want people to come here and bring their clients, right? That's not, not what I'm saying by any means, but if there are certain situations where it makes sense for us financially to, to, to follow the rules of a contract, then we may do that. Um, you never know, right? You never know. Um, but again, we're, I mean, we're, we're pretty hard and fast that we want you as a person, we don't want your clients, we don't want your staff. What we have found over time is clients naturally matriculate back to that service partner. And so you're going to run into it at some point or another. Um, just be prepared to work through those differences as they come up. Right. Yeah. I mean, cause they landed with that partner for a reason, right? Like they go to the same, they're at the same golf club or something and they see them all the time and they naturally ask them the questions. And so they say, Hey, can you help me with this engagement? Right. So, um, that's really fascinating. That's, that's very much like kind of micro acquisitions almost. It is, it is. Yeah. Carveouts, micro acquisitions, whatever it may be, but it's just, it's a different way to look at the market, right? This market is evolving and changing so fast. You gotta be able to look at it. So, um, moving forward, when we look at acquisitions, 110%, we will, but they've got to be, they've got to be good for us. So we've got Denver and Dallas, you know, those are, are two offices that have grown exponentially faster than we ever thought they would. Um, Dallas closing on 60 people, Denver closing on 50 people. We're taking Tampa out of the ground. Right. Um, and so if there are markets similar to those that we want to get into, and there are a few kind of on, on the roadmap, we will look at an acquisition. But at the same time, I mean, we started Dallas with, with Dan Harris, right? Dan was a director, I think, coming out of Baker Tilly, who was this guy who just. He he's a, he's a machine. I mean, he, he knows the market really well. He can go out there and sell. He's a great leader. And so what started as an idea with, with a transaction advisory director now is, you know, a 60 person office and Dane's leading that office. So if we can find more people like Dane and we have, um, those are the folks that will build an office around, right? So shameless plug, if you're up in, in Charlotte, right, or Chattanooga and Nashville in this speech to you, then then let's talk, right? Because I do think we'll invest the resources to, uh, to build around you. Wow. Well, that's, uh, that's really cool. And I mean, if I ever come across someone, which I have, I have in Dallas where it's like, you know, I kind of want to join a firm, but like, I have this like $600,000 book of business and it's like, I don't really, I don't really just want to like hang up the boots on that. Like I would like to be recognized for that, at least in some form. Um, yeah, people have all kinds of situations and it, you know, one of the things that always impresses me in, in, in our conversations, uh, on and off the air, but like, it just feels like you're very willing and flexible and, and with the whole firm behind you, but like really willing and flexible to approach things with an open mind and kind of approach it from like a first principle standpoint, rather than just be like, Oh, you know, yeah, there's a non-solicit clause for a reason we can't do that. It's like, actually, well, within the terms of the agreement, we can't, we fully, we can, but these are the economics of it. And then actually checking to see if that's worthwhile. That to me does not seem like a level of diligence that most places are doing. So, yeah, I mean, it's just, I've got a great C-suite around me. I've got a great partner group around me. They give me flexibility, which is important. Right. Um, yeah, now I do hide color in the lines, um, you know, and that's, that's important. I think that's what makes this work is there are a series of checks and balances where, yeah, I'll come up with a crazy idea. Let's go chase that down. And reality is it doesn't work. The, the key piece right there is they let me chase those things down and flush them out and bring them to the board and the board will weigh it pretty heavily. And sometimes she'll say, yes, interesting, but not now let's put it on kind of the side or what are you thinking? This really doesn't work. Or, you know what? That's a really good idea. We haven't thought of it that way. Let's start exploring that and go down that path. And that that's been, it's, it's been nice to have that here. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing. I, uh, I really appreciate you taking the time for anyone who wants to, you know, maybe get in touch or anything like that. I'll be, I'll be linking all of, uh, Michael's contact information in the podcast show notes and, uh, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming and joining me. You got it, Don. Anytime really appreciate it.