From Podcasts to Practice: Cody Daniels' Journey

Before I jump into this episode, I want to give a big thank you to this episode's sponsor, Canopy. Canopy is a best-in-class practice management software to help your firm run smoother. If you want to get the most out of your talent at your accounting firm, you need to make sure that they have access to the right tools to be able to properly leverage their time and spend more time doing what they are best at, and less time in the weeds trying to manage firm operations, trying to get organized folders, and trying to figure out where all the documentation is. So if you want to run a smoother operation, check out getcanopy.com. They're going to be linked in the podcast description. And unclunk your firm with Canopy. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency Podcast. I'm joined today by Cody Daniels, the founder of Builders Tax Group, a tax firm formed, I believe it was 11 months ago, focusing on the tax base for builders. Welcome to the pod, Cody. Thanks, Don. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, my pleasure. So we initially got in touch, you had actually made a post on LinkedIn when you were leaving and you thanked a bunch of kind of podcasters in the accounting space for, you know, helping you come to that decision. So I mean, first of all, thank you. It's really cool to see, you know, what we do have real impact. But I'd be curious to dig a little bit deeper on that. How did podcasts, you know, creators in the accounting space help, you know, influence that decision, help normalize it for you? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll start out, I'll shout out John Randolph, CPA Life Podcast. That was kind of the first podcast that I got into when I was starting to kind of question where I wanted to take my career, you know, back in late 2023 timeframe, started listening to that one. A friend of mine recommended Accounting High with Scotty Scarano and Accounting High was the one that really led me to everybody else, you know, Jason Stats, etc. So I just consumed tons and tons of podcasts over the better part of, you know, six to eight months while I was trying to make this decision for myself and, you know, just hearing from other people's experiences and, you know, kind of using that to alleviate any doubts or concerns that I had about myself. It was, I would say, the catalyst that gave me the confidence to really kind of make this jump. That's cool, man. I love hearing that because my own journey, like, without it being a direct correlation of, you know, I got an idea off of this thing or whatever, but I had been really into, you know, a number of business podcasts, not necessarily in the accounting space and it's just kind of, it's like if in your own friend group, you don't have entrepreneurs necessarily, it's a way to kind of proxy that. It's sort of like you normalize the idea of entrepreneurship, of taking a swing, of giving something to try and it starts to feel a little bit more sane than it would otherwise, especially when you don't come from that kind of group. And so I do think that, you know, if you are consuming content from people who are talking about the thing you want to do, it starts to feel a lot more achievable, a lot more normal. And then you actually find some concrete names of people who are going through the same journey as you, which is really nice. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, I can look at somebody like a Logan Graff and Logan and I are around the same age and you can kind of see his journey from year one and he puts out the annual, you know, kind of a P&L video where he breaks everything down and it's like, okay, well, these were all things that I thought, but now I have confirmation and you're absolutely right. I don't have any entrepreneurs within my family. You know, you go to college for accounting and the pushes to big four firms, like nobody talks about entrepreneurship as an option for accounting students, which is really a shame. So, yeah, you need somebody to kind of give you that vision and to put yourself in their shoes and say, yeah, I can definitely pull this off. And so prior to pulling the plug, you were at Maori and it seemed like you had a pretty straightforward career progression. You were a senior manager. I don't know exactly, but maybe partner on the horizon. You had kind of been moving up pretty steadily and were there things in public accounting that you decided weren't for you or was that really kind of more of an intrinsic internal decision for you? Yeah, I mean, I have nothing bad to say about my experience at Maori and Schoenfeld. I was there for 12 years, got to see a lot there. When I started, that firm was around 50 people, probably just made the top 400 firms in the country. And by the time I left, I think they were well over 200, the top 150 in the country. So tremendous growth over a little over a decade while I was there. And, you know, with that growth, the firm started to evolve and change. And, you know, it felt like a bit more of a corporate structure than maybe the family kind of friendly business that I started at 12 years ago, 13 years ago, I guess at this point. And I would say that really the firm outgrew me. I can't fault them for scaling that firm the way that they have and building what they've built. But, you know, for me personally, I knew that I wanted a particular atmosphere and environment. And as that firm grew, it kind of just outgrew me. A couple of that with me trying to get back to some of my, I guess, kind of childhood roots and goals. And as a kid, I always pictured myself running my own business. I would actually write out like little business plans for things that I thought would be great ideas as an eight year old, which in hindsight would probably have been huge flops and, you know, giant money pits. But, you know, I always had that vision for myself. And over the years, kind of forgot about it. Convinced myself that making partner at a firm would give me an entrepreneurial experience. But at a firm of 200 people, even if you're a partner, you're not like the sole owner of the business. You got to work within the structure and the confines of a firm that large. And obviously you have to have structure and rules and processes at a firm that size. I felt like I wasn't going to get that experience of being like the sole decision maker and the person who's, you know, the buck stops with me. And if I make the decision to, you know, utilize this software, take on this client or whatever it may be, if that's the right or wrong decision, I have to live with it. And, you know, I don't think I was going to get that experience at a firm that size. And then during your time at Maori, like were you in the construction niche or how did you end up kind of choosing that space? Yeah. So very early on in my career there, I was approached by a couple of the partners that had been sort of leading that industry segment from like an accounting and assurance side of things. But at the time, they didn't have anyone on the tax team that had that specialized technical knowledge. And so I approached very early on and said, hey, here's an opportunity. We want you to, you know, develop the technical knowledge and skills within this industry. And there's a path for you to really own this and kind of build out a team, so to speak, there. So I started doing, you know, specialized CPE and going to construction conferences and things like that pretty early on. I will say that even though the opportunity was presented and I wanted to follow it, if it had been a different industry or a different specialization within tax, I don't know that I would have pursued it. I grew up with blue collar family members. I grew up in the middle of cornfields, you know, in northern Illinois. If you weren't a farmer, I mean, you were blue collar in some other way. My family, we weren't farmers, but my grandpa, one of my grandpas was a union carpenter. My other grandpa was a welder. My dad, when I was growing up, was he's kind of middle management at a manufacturing facility. He's now plant manager. But I mean, he built the house that I grew up in with my with my carpenter grandpa. So he can fix anything. I got uncles that were electricians and plumbers and road builders. And now I have cousins that are in the trades, too. So like I was the oddball that went in pursuit kind of a, you know, a job. So it was, you know, one part opportunity to dive into that industry. And then, you know, kind of another part like this is a business that I can I can relate to these owners like there's a there's a personality type among blue collar people. You know, sometimes they're a little rough around the edges. They speak their mind, you know, and some people may not be able to work well with that. But but I felt like I could really relate to these businesses and take a lot of pride in helping them out. So it was a combination of there's a need and this is something that I'm excited about on top of it. Yeah, that's that's super important always right is that you can then relate to the people you're working with, and you feel a sense of ownership over really wanting to help them out because you have empathy for them and understand their situations. And, and then just being able to speak the language a little bit is super helpful, too. So as it relates to kind of the construction industry and builders, what is unique about tax in that space? Yeah, that's a great question. I would say like, first and foremost, you know, everybody within accounting has a base level understanding of the accrual versus like the cash method as options that you can, you know, choose when you're, you know, electing a tax method on your tax return. What's complicated about construction is rather than two choices, you know, we could have upwards of seven, eight, nine potential accounting methods that we could choose from. Obviously, there's percentage of completion, which anybody on you know, kind of the accounting assurance side is probably familiar with. But we have completed contract method that we can utilize there. We have a 10% method for for jobs under 10% complete. There's a, you know, methods that apply to home builders, there's methods that apply to residential contracts, which are different from home contracts. So you could you could have one contractor if they're doing commercial builds, if they're doing home construction, if they're doing residential builds, again, like apartment buildings, or my favorite example of a residential contract is a prison counts as a residential contract. So so you could easily on on one single taxpayer be applying, you know, four or five different methods of accounting on a contract by contract basis. And so it's not as simple as Oh, yeah, my accounting method is a cool man counting method is cash. No, no, it's, you have to analyze these methods on a contract by contract basis. And it can get it can get very complicated very fast. Okay, interesting. And then there's a whole kind of cost seg side of things as well, which I'm aware of. Are you you're involved in the cost seg part of things as well? Yeah, so so at Maori, in addition to kind of leading the construction and real estate tax service line there, I helped alongside another partner, build up the cost seg service line there. So we have partnered up with, and I guess I've continued this under builders tax or I should say, so so I've partnered up with engineering firm based out of Denver, who has a business model, they partner up with CPA firms to jointly produce a cost segregation study report. So we'll go out there and do kind of the fieldwork walkthrough documentation phase of the cost seg study, utilizing a proprietary app they've built, they'll handle sort of the engineering side of things. And then on the back end, we'll sort of do the legal analysis and say, yeah, these are the various components of the building. And these are the different depreciation methods that you would apply. Okay, interesting. And, and during your time at Maori Lake, would you have considered yourself kind of like a business development person or more of like a technical person or like where along that spectrum would you have put yourself? Um, I, I definitely wouldn't say I was a business developer. I think during the 12 years that I was there, I could count on one hand the number of clients that I brought in. So when I was deciding whether or not I wanted to go launch my own firm, I it sounds cheesy, but I did a SWOT analysis for myself. And the first weakness that I put in the weakness column was, like, I have unproven business development skills. I didn't want to say that I didn't have any, but it was unproven. I had no evidence to suggest that I could do it. But yeah, I guess I you know, I felt confident that I could do it. I just didn't have the evidence to support it. You know, I'd been involved in proposals and, you know, meetings with potential clients and things like that. But there's usually a partner there as well to kind of oversee that and ultimately responsible for closing the deal. So I would say if anything, I was more of a technician, but I also don't think I fit that role particularly well either. I probably not the most detail oriented person, which is maybe not what somebody wants their tax accountant to say. But, you know, I like to take a high level approach to things. I like to, you know, kind of step back and look at the overall situation. Just earlier today, I was doing a tax planning call with a client that's a fiscal year end June 30. So we're doing some year end tax planning and they had a lot of questions. And, you know, we tried to approach it from like, yes, this is the tax implication of what you're asking. But what's the business implication? And sometimes the decision that's right for the business isn't the most tax advantageous, but that's still the decision that ultimately I think we should make. And so being able to kind of have that more high level sort of mindset, I think is an advantage. So I don't know where I fell in terms of the different roles during my time at the old firm, probably more of a technician, but barely. Okay. So unproven in terms of business development, but then you chose to go off on your own. So I imagine that was probably kind of one of the top of mind things for you. I guess maybe to start us off on that vein, because I have a couple of kind of things I want to ask about that. But where did your sort of initial lead base come from or customer base come from? So I was very lucky that as I was transitioning away from Maori, I was able to negotiate a purchase of a small book of business from them. So I don't actually have that quantified right in front of me, but I know that represents over 50% of my revenue to date. So it was definitely a big chunk. Without it, I think I'd be feeling pretty nervous about where things are at right now. But yeah, I was able to negotiate sort of initial acquisition of work from them. So I'm paying out a percentage of revenues over the next three years is kind of the terms of that. And then everything else has been referral based to date. I think I've had one, maybe two clients find me organically through various means, but virtually everything else has been referrals from firms that are bookkeeping only, that don't do tax work, fractional CFOs that don't do tax work, other clients that are having conversations with their fellow business owners that are sending things my way. So it's really a relationship trying to gain right now. Yeah. You're very much not the first person I've spoken to where it's kind of like scope limitation as a business driver almost. So I know Protea Financial does that in the wine industry and any tax firm, I think it's tax they don't touch at all, would love to have them because it's like, well, now we have these people who at least are going to have super clean books and it's going to be way easier. They're going to become a way better client for us. And I'm not really worried about losing any of the revenue to what they're doing because they have a pretty hard line in the sand where they don't do this. And so that firm is also obviously going to become an excellent source of leads because it's just a win-win situation. You get clients and then they get easier clients who are now more equipped to work with them. So I do find, especially in the early days, that kind of having a relatively limited scope can be very, very good because there are just more people who are going to want to send business your way versus once you're one of those firms that does wealth advisory and this and that, well, wealth advisors are going to be pretty scared to send people over for tax work, right? So yeah, I find that to be super, super interesting. And so, okay, so it's mostly referrals based and coming from that kind of initial set of customers that you started off with. And are there any plans? What else are you doing in the business development front to add more work on later on? Yeah. So my strategy right now is to try everything and see what, number one, works and number two, I enjoy doing. Because even if it works, but I don't like it, I'm probably not going to stick with it. So things that I'm looking at right now, early on, I was trying to be pretty active on social in terms of just putting out content out there on LinkedIn and other things like that. I fell off doing that during tax season, but I've been vetting some tools to help me with scheduling and being able to create a backlog that will automatically post and schedule that out. So that's one thing that I think, even if it's not getting in front of client size, I found that even just a handful of posts that I was doing early in the year attracted a lot of potential referral sources. It's like, hey, I saw your post on this and I see you're working with contractors and I work with contractors a lot too. So let's have a conversation around that. So again, even if it's not directly bringing in clients, I think there's certainly an advantage to that. The other thing that's on my, I'd say, probably, hopefully before year end, timeframe is I'd like to get into doing something like what you're doing here with the podcast. I think there's a missing element within the construction world. There are a lot of construction podcasts out there. There are not a lot of podcasts that are focused on what I'll call the business side of running it. There's a lot of, hey, let's interview business owners and get their perspective on things. Let's talk about more operational issues and items like that. But somebody that could focus in on the financial side of things, talk about insurance, talk about bonding, talk about banking, doing a combination. Again, like what you're doing, solo episodes, and then bringing on guests in areas that I don't have any expertise. I think there's a real opportunity to build out this back office financial side of the business podcast specific to construction and the trades and fill a missing part of the marketplace out there. Yeah. Yeah. I always recommend this very highly to people. And I explain to them that it's a little bit of a longer game than you necessarily think it is. So I'm not really driving a lot of first order business necessarily through the podcast. Early on, I thought, oh yeah, firm owners are going to listen, which check, a lot of firm owners do listen. And then they're going to reach out to me and be like, hey Dom, why don't you help us with our compensation? That's the part that doesn't really happen. However, you'll get invited to speak at conferences. And then from there, you'll find the right leads or you'll guest on other podcasts. And from there, you'll tap into a new audience and stuff like that. So it's been a little bit more of a long game, but ultimately it does come full circle and help drive the business. And it does, I think, really pay off pretty significantly. It just is a little bit of a longer cycle than maybe one thinks it's going to be. But I highly, highly recommend doing that. And it's cool hearing all you have going on. Because again, in my head, I'm like... And I would put myself on the other side of the coin. Also not the most detail-oriented all the time, more of a big picture kind of person. But I was always the person they would set loose on the conference floor with a bunch of drink tickets. And I would have conversations and turns out a bunch of them were very interesting business prospects and stuff like that. And so to me, I see that type of person starting a firm a lot. But when you're not that type of person, it is very intriguing to me of how one goes about that. And again, you probably do have it in you as well. You just maybe haven't experienced that yet. And so part of that question too, of understanding if you're a more technical person, one of the things I think about a lot for if I were to start a practice, is I'm like, where would I go to do my research to figure the things out where I kind of get stuck? Because again, I left as I would have become a senior. So I never... I always had that instinct of like, okay, I'm really stuck on this one. I'm going to go talk to the manager or the senior manager on the file. You obviously were more experienced than me. So you're going to have a deeper knowledge base. But I'm sure at certain points, there are some sticky elements or you need to keep up with a very rapidly evolving tax code. And so what do those resources look like for you? Yeah, it's a good question. I'll say that something that helps to minimize that to some extent is being niched into one industry. Changes in tax code that might impact other areas that are outside of construction, I may not have to worry about too much. I don't have any international tax concerns. None of my construction clients are going over the border to do construction jobs. They're all pretty geographically focused in their neck of the woods. So niching definitely helps with things like that. I think the other thing for like new firm owners to do is to build out their community. I joined Logan Graphs counter community like the day that it launched. I've been following Logan for a long time and was eagerly anticipating the launch. So I signed up for that right away. And there's a lot of people that are very quick to respond to any sort of technical questions that anyone in the group poses. I would like to think that if I call the folks at Mowry, that maybe somebody there would still be willing to find some time to help me out. And just outside of that, even folks that have come and gone during my time there, I'm still very well in touch with folks. And maybe even I only worked with for a few months. There's one guy there that we crossed paths for maybe three months before I left. And he and I actually text pretty regularly. So I think it's important to just build community. Know that you're not stuck doing this on your own. I think maybe a few decades ago, the industry wasn't as supportive as it was nowadays. Or maybe the infrastructure didn't exist for it to be as supportive. We didn't have the communities, the realizes, and the counters, and things like that. But from what I can see within the communities and on LinkedIn and things like that, people are very willing to take the time and jump on a call for 10, 15 minutes, help you talk through something. There's somebody out there that's an expert in whatever area you may feel like you're lacking knowledge in. Yeah. Outside looking in on that, I love hearing about the abundance mindset that you're seeing a lot of in the accounting space. I've had some people on here like Jamie Nichols, who started a firm and she was a pretty big Twitter personality. And almost all of her leads early on were coming from other firms who some people might call competing firms, but that's not really the case because a lot of people are overwhelmed by demand. That's not necessarily where the issues coming from or limitation on on scaling one's practice. So it's it's really cool to see how much collaboration that opens up right. Whereas in another field where there's maybe a scarcity of demand that that maybe is a different dynamic. So it's it's really cool to see that dynamic among people. And I think that's what makes it especially rewarding for accountants who kind of get out there and get in the network is that you know, there's so much opportunity for like cross referral of like, maybe someone you could help and is a really good client, but would be a super fantastic client for this other firm, you might send their way and then vice versa. Right? So Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, again, we kind of touched on it earlier with, you know, I've got referral sources from bookkeeping only firms from fractional CFOs. I've passed along some potential opportunities to other firms because they were leads that that came through that were within sort of the construction real estate trades, you know, sort of niche that I want to focus on. And it's tough to do that. I mean, I haven't hit my revenue goal for the year, I haven't fully replaced, you know, my, my full time paycheck, you know, from Maury. And, and so there's a part of me that wants to take on those clients. But then there's a part of me that says, you know, we, it's a good client for somebody else, you can pass it along. And eventually, that should find its way back to you. And, and it allows me to stay focused on bringing in, you know, clients to fit the ideal client profile that are going to be good, long term clients for, you know, hopefully 10 plus years rather than Yeah, this is this is revenue today, and it's going to help me pay the mortgage. But it's not three years from now, when hopefully things are really humming, like, that's not going to be the ideal client for me. Yeah, yeah, I was just listening to David Christello's pod and he had a guest on, I forget who, but I think it was a someone who was maybe in leadership at Baker Tilly or something. And he was talking about like, not every dollar of revenue is equally valuable, right? And you're really focused on the high quality dollars of revenue bringing in rather than just like, hey, I need to add, you know, whatever it is, four or five $6,000 to the bottom line here. And I think that is a very sustainable way to go. And, you know, maybe spares you some of the cleanup, which can probably be kind of painful later on that so many people that I'm sure you listen to talk about, where it's like, okay, well, early on, you're just taking and taking and taking whatever you can get. And then eventually, you just end up with this basket. And you're like, Oh, my God, two thirds of this is not what I want to do is not a good match for what I'm looking for. And then you have to kind of clean that up later versus now you're building very sustainably by the second. Yeah, and then to kind of jump in, you know, on that, that was why I didn't look at buying a firm. Very, very early on, I, you know, I was checking, you know, some of the different websites out there and, you know, seeing the firms that are available for sale and seeing firms that I think for a lot of people would be very good firms to target. I mean, firms that are very profitable, running very lean. And I'm like, man, I could, I could more than replace my income, I could almost double my income, just by myself, going out and, you know, identifying some of these very successful, very profitable firms. But to your point, two years down the road, what do I want to do with, you know, 80% of that client base? If there was a firm out there that was just construction in the trades, I consider that, you know, I can, I'd be very open to that. I don't know if somebody would split their book of business up, but I consider that as well. I, I was talking to a fellow firm owner last week at lunch. And, you know, we, we kind of threw out the idea, well, what if we, what if we both went to a firm? I bought all of the construction and trades and landscapers and things like that. And then you took everything else. Would that, would that work? I don't know, maybe. Yeah. And there's some like established practices that'll do that. I did an episode with, forgetting his first name, but Dylan Business Advisors, last name Dylan, obviously. And, and he was talking about, yeah, every time they do an acquisition, they'll like sub-segment it out and they'll sell chunks of clients who aren't a good fit for them. And I find that to be super intriguing. And if you are a practice, probably basically exactly at your stage, like there may be some, you know, there may be some subsets of clients in there that are actually like ideal. And I'm sure they're not charging, you know, premiums that are in line with like private equity, because this is just kind of like, this is sawdust, right? This is like the, this is the additional kind of cost of having acquired what they wanted to acquire that they're just trying to recover a little bit on. So, I find that to be a very, very interesting practice. I think that that's really cool. And so your goal here with Builders Tax Group, like, are you looking to scale this and like take on a team or are you looking very specifically to be a solo practitioner? Are there certain things that you, you know, vowed to yourself that you wanted to do differently from what you've seen in your career? Like what's, what's the vision for this? Yeah, so I was very intentional about laying out personal goals for myself that I am going to use to define how the business operates and eventually scale. So I don't know if you're familiar with Michael King with CFO Accelerator, I think is the name of his company. No. He puts on a lot of YouTube content directed at, you know, people looking to open fractional CFO firms. And he had a very interesting video that was, you know, really, really set on like focus, focus on your individual goals, things that you want to achieve and let those drive the business, not the other way around. And so I did that months before launching. And, you know, I kind of built out, you know, this is year one, I just want to replace my income year two, this is kind of where I want to be income wise. And maybe by year three, I can get to here. And if that's all the further I ever made it, income wise, I would be fine with that. And then I also kind of set up more lifestyle boundaries. You know, during January through April, kind of the busy season, I'm willing to work up to 50 hours a week. Outside of that, I would like to try to be as close to like 30-32 hours a week as possible. Yeah. And I know that it's possible to scale a business and build out a team within within some of those parameters. Am I the guy to do it? I don't know. I know other firms can do it. I don't know if I can do it. So for me, I like the idea of building it out. I like the idea of getting out of the day to day. I like the idea of creating an environment that's appealing to people that don't want to go the traditional kind of larger CPA firm route that are you know, more in tune with, you know, again, like kind of the modern way of thinking, the adjacent stats and you know, those types of kind of mentalities and things like that. So I want to do that, but only if I can stay true to sort of the personal boundaries that I've set for myself. That's awesome. I love hearing kind of more accounting professionals go that route of like, I want to make this profession work for me. These are the parameters that I would consider having it working for me under and those are kind of hard lines of how I'm going to operate my business. And I really respect that type of mentality. And I think that it's very healthy that we're seeing a lot more of that. And it gives people an opportunity to kind of self-select into the type of firm, right? Like I talk about this all the time, but like, I think it's great. The big four is out there and doing their thing and, and, you know, operating the way they operate. Like wasn't for me, like, you know, square peg in a round hole kind of thing. But like totally for so many people, like that is such a tremendous opportunity. And so it is good to see kind of more different options opening up. And, and, you know, part of what I do, I hope to shine a spotlight on what those different opportunities are. Right. I think a lot of people, by the time they stumble on my stuff, they're making kind of like, Hey, like this isn't maybe working for me. I'm looking for something else. And so I love the opportunity to kind of like put a little bit of a spotlight on that for people who are maybe kind of looking and, or, or maybe even down and out on the profession saying like, ah, Dan, it's all the same. It's not right. Like stuff is out there. Well, yeah, that goes back to your original question of, you know, how did podcasts kind of influence my decision-making? Like I needed to see those case studies in action to, to know that this was possible. Right. Because, you know, I'm like, have you had Yuri on, on the podcast? I think you have, right? Yeah, he was pretty early, but yeah, I love what he's doing. So I'm familiar with Yuri's story. I mean, he was at a different firm every year, right? He worked at, I don't know, eight, nine different firms over the course of his career at a huge variety of experience. I worked at one firm. I knew, well, I did an internship in college at a big four, but full-time was at, was at one firm. Uh, and so I had a somewhat narrow view of what, what possibilities are out there, um, you know, for, for us in the profession. And so, you know, hearing, um, hearing like a story like Erica Goody, who runs a, a firm, uh, doing 15 hours a week and, and a very profitable, uh, you know, sustainable firm at 15 hours a week. My dumb brain says, well, if I know what she's making during 15 hours a week, I can make double that doing 30 hours a week. Right. You know, it should be that easy. Um, we'll see if, we'll see if that's how it all pans out. But, uh, you know, it was, it was very enlightening and refreshing to see again, examples of what other people are doing out there and. And, and pick and choose different things from different, uh, firms and, and try to use that to build what, what I'm excited about. That's awesome. I love that. And, uh, you know, you're paying it forward by coming on here and sharing your own story. So I appreciate you coming on the pod, Cody. I really do. And, uh, you know, not just myself. I know you shouted out a couple of people when you kind of pulled the plug on that and made that jump. That means a lot for people when you're, when you're creating content, it's very, it's often, you know, you talking alone in this room in your house. And every once in a while you get a bit of feedback come through and it's very meaningful for people. So I appreciate you sharing that for sure. And, uh, yeah, you're paying it forward for the next person who maybe wants to do that. Um, as a complete aside, I love your background. Very, very, very construction appropriate for people listening in. You got a bunch of like wooden, you have a wooden tractor there. You got a wooden forklift. That's very fun. So my, my grandpa, my grandpa built those actually when he was, uh, in his retirement, probably built 200, 250 wooden toys, you know, military vehicles, construction vehicles, fire trucks, you know, all kinds of stuff like that. So when he passed away, um, we, you know, everybody in the family started kind of dividing them up and, uh, you know, for again, whatever reason, this was bad. This was before I even started working in public accounting or started specializing in construction. I kind of gravitated, you know, towards some of those, uh, some of those toys. So I got, got a few other sprinkled throughout the house, but that's kind of a, kind of a fun reminder that I get to see of him every day. Yeah, that's cool. I love that. Well, yeah, once again, thanks a ton for joining me, Cody on the podcast. If you made it this far in the episode, if you could give us a five-star rating on whatever streaming platform you're on, don't know what it does, but I'm sure it helps. Uh, and, uh, yeah, catch you in the next one. Thanks a lot, Cody. Thanks Tom.