Make $200k in 15 Hour Weeks with Erica Goode

This week's episode of the Big 4 Transparency podcast is sponsored by Forwardly. Huge thank you to Forwardly for sponsoring the podcast, but also a huge thank you for what they do in terms of helping firms improve your operating margins. So if you are in firm operations, I would encourage you to take a look at how much your payment processing fees might be costing you currently. It may just be a couple percent here and there, but once your firm scales, we may be talking many tens or even maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars that are not going to your firm's bottom line and are not available for reinvestment in your firm. Forwardly helps you not only smooth all of these processes out with seamless AP and AR, but they also do so using ACH payments in an automated fashion, helping you save on payment processing fees. So make sure you check out forwardly.com for your business payment solution. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Erica Goody, an independent accountant running a firm that made an impressive $220,000 plus in revenue in 2024, $180,000 in owner profit. We're going to be careful about terminology here because it's a bunch of accountants listening, which already in a silo is impressive. But what's very impressive about you is that you did that while working about 15 hours a week last year, which is unbelievable and something we should all strive to learn from. Most recently also, you're the host of Aligned Accountants, a platform for accountants not looking to scale and manage their businesses as a lifestyle business. So yeah, welcome to the pod, Erica. Thanks for having me, Dominic. Yeah, my pleasure. There's a longer intro spiel than normal, but I like to give context on this because again, like what you're doing to me is kind of the dream of accounting of what could be achievable. Right? I agree. It feels pretty good on this side. Yeah, I bet it does. So let's get into that. Was that your whole intention and plan when you started this? Were you kind of like, maybe I'm looking for some part-time work almost, but I'm just going to do that for myself? Or did you just find yourself incredibly good at optimizing systems or how did that all come to be? Yeah, absolutely not. It was not. This is not the plan. This was never the plan. This was built out of necessity because I have two kids and I don't know if you have kids, but kids like to eat. They like to be driven places. They have to go to school. I'm surely not going to teach them, so I have to take them somewhere for that. And yeah, actually a funny story on how much this was not the plan is when I was leaving corporate. I was in a corporate role. I had a great boss and he was the one that I had to give my resignation to. And he spent probably about an hour convincing me not to put in my resignation in that moment. And when he realized he wasn't going to, he's also an accountant, also CPA, also had a view of the industry. And in that moment when he realized this was not going to work, I was going to leave, he quickly flipped the coin and said, okay, well, if you're ever ready to come back to corporate, do not come back to corporate. Start an accounting firm. And I said, and I had never, ever considered that. And so my response was, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. I will never, ever do that. And because God laughs at us when he says things, I started an accounting firm and only did it based on how much I could work with my kids, only work when the kids were out of the house. And when I started my firm, they were three and seven. And so I worked very little. I started this firm on two hours a week with one client and no marketing because I didn't have time to take on more clients. And so I just slowly built and my business grew as fast as my kids grew and as much as they went to school out of the house, which is very slow when they're in preschool and half day kindergarten and all of that. And so I just slowly built and when I ran out of time, I found processes that I could improve and make more efficient so I could take on new clients. And I just kept repeating that cycle, hit a block, hit a boundary, recreate something, hit a boundary, recreate something, hit a boundary, recreate something. And I did that up until 15 hours and stopped growing because I liked what I had built. Yeah. No, I love that. And I've kind of framed this in conversations before where we need to be thinking about time as a constraint in accounting, right? The format of the traditional accounting firm makes it not so where, uh, you know, you have all this staff who's working unpaid overtime, even probably overseas resources are probably working kind of crazy hours. And so it kind of like pulls the emphasis off of process improvement to a degree because it's like, well, you know, the, the marginal extra hours are free because we're not paying that. Right. And so I think that that's kind of prevalent in some of the decision making and some of the planning and format of a firm. Like you can kind of see that being like endemic in the, in the accounting industry, um, where there is that like deep under investment and process. Now it feels like in the last little bit, like, you know, that's, that's become a bigger topic and like I see in the big four transparency data as well, hours on average in the industry have actually decreased a little bit year over year since I started collecting data, But we're still talking about, you know, went from, I don't want to misquote it here, but like call it 48 to like 46 or something on average. Right. So there's still a lot of room for improvement. Um, so like what's the playbook on that? Like what, maybe, maybe let's start, start with, um, how you manage your customer or your clients. Right. So I imagine you probably have to be pretty ruthless about what is or is not a fit. And then also probably some pretty tight pricing practices to kind of maintain that. Yeah. My price. I mean, it's really the pricing to time commitment ratio that makes the formula, if you will, the magic formula work. And I think we're all accountants. We all realize that that's how it would work anyways, but it's really a product of, in your scoping, like what you know, you're going to say no to, and then actually saying no to it. Because I think we were all bred in a culture, like in a work culture where like you didn't have the opportunity to say no, like you were not allowed to say no in whatever, whether you worked in public or mid tier, you know, like whatever you, a corporate, like you had a boss, they asked you to do something, you don't say no. And so, you know, however many years you spent doing that, we're trained to not say no. And so when a client, now you're on your own and your client comes to you and it's like, hey, can you just pull this one report or can you like do this one thing or quick analysis here or there, or look at this letter for me from the IRS, like we're built to say yes. And so I think it's reconnecting our brain into knowing that we build the scope, we hold the boundaries and giving us the permission and confidence to say, actually, that's not part of our current scope. I would love to reprice you on that if that's something you're interested in and being confident moving forward with that. That allows you to then look at the scope you have built and see how you can make it more efficient and play with tech and play with now AI, that wasn't around when I started my firm and see where you can make your processes more efficient. So you can constantly whittle your own hours and get the benefit of that versus when we were in public and corporate, you whittle your hours and you just got more work. There was no incentive to do that. And here like you're building something where there is every incentive to cut your hours. You either get more time doing whatever you want to do outside of work or more time to take on clients and get more profit out of it. And you just get to build what you want, you get to choose what you want to. Yeah. And so what is the scope of your offering and like how do you kind of communicate that to your client base? Yeah, I've dabbled in lots of things over the years just figuring out what I need to do. I was looking back at some records today and I was like, oh my gosh, I forgot I had a tax prep book of business years ago. I did tax prep. I don't do tax prep anymore. But for me now, it's bookkeeping to fractional CFO. My background was never in tax, I've obviously trained and when I did tax returns, retrained myself on tax returns, but like that was never my bread and butter background. I have an FP&A background in corporate. So forecasting and budgeting is my happy place. I work in QuickBooks, I do my client's bookkeeping, and then depending on what they need, want, can afford, I do three levels of service. One is just straight bookkeeping. The next one is bookkeeping plus forecasting and a quarterly meeting. And then beyond that is bookkeeping, forecasting, a monthly meeting, budgets, and that kind of cadence of giving them both accurate financials that they can hand off to their tax preparer that are IRS compliant, that the tax preparer isn't fixing, and also a forward looking view of what their business is going to look like in the next three, six, 12 months so they can make better decisions today. And is that, I assume that's kind of like three fixed fee packages that you're offering? It is. There is a sliding scale just on how big the client is. I'll take clients anywhere from $200,000 in revenue up to $5 million in revenue. And so there's kind of a ratio on those three tiers based on where their revenue and their size of firm is. So it's specific to them. It's formatted, but custom. Yeah. And I mean, you know, in those pricing tiers too, like industry is important as well, right? Like I've worked somewhere in the restaurant industry that did maybe 10% of the revenue of the tech company that I worked at. And I would say the tech company's books were probably a lot easier and simpler than the restaurant books that I was working with, just because there's, there's a lot less kind of like, there's fewer moving parts and it's a little bit simpler on that front. So what kind of like, are you, are you in a service niche there or not really? Yeah, I niche in consultants and agencies. So anybody who would be a solo consultant, just like we would be, you know, kind of considered a solo consultant, whether that be marketing, communications, IT, engineering, any kind of those service-based, you're selling your expertise to somebody else. That would kind of be my realm. And then people sometimes build agencies out of that and they would be the, the bigger, bigger clients for me. And then I guess because you're not in tax anymore, there's probably less need to kind of constantly update and do the research on like all the evolutions and things like that. Cause that's a question I like to ask like smaller practitioners where it's like, Hey, what are you like, where are you getting your resources like for, for research or are you just doing it yourself? And I guess staying out of that lane probably makes that a lot easier as well. I would say I like, I still want to stay in the know as quickly as I can. Like, I mean, on July 4th, I was reading through the new tax bill when it was approved on July 3rd. Okay. Because my clients are going to, because as a CFO, your clients are going to have those questions and unfortunately we see a lot of tax preparers not able to respond quickly to communications that their clients send them. And so I become the point person for all questions for my clients, which is great. That's, that's what I price on. That's what I, you know, that's what I market on. That is a value proposition I provide. Like you email me, I will email you back within 24 hours. I might not have an answer for you in 24 hours, but like I will always communicate with you quickly. So I'm doing high level, staying very in the know on tax things that relate to my clients. But I'm not in the nitty gritty of where does this fall on the tax return? What line? How do we corroborate it with a different, a different form on there? I'm not getting into the weeds, but I'm definitely giving directional advice and in the tax realm. Okay. Interesting. And then before we get into the, like the tech stack on execution and whatnot, do you have like a key for communication? Like, do you have kind of a process on that? Because I do think that's where a lot of things fall down. Right. I'm working with people who do like lead generation for accounting professionals and, and one of the top complaints when someone's coming to look for a new firm is like, they're not answering me. They're not responsive. They won't, you know, whatever that might be. And so, I mean, I'm sure part of the key is just not having an excessive number of clients who are pestering you. But do you have kind of a process flow on that communication? I do. I mean, I'm a huge time blocker. If anybody's ever followed me, read anything I've written, it's usually revolves around time blocking and that's what keeps my hours so low. And so like the first time block of every day is answering emails. And I have a personal like filtering system in my Google workspace that filters things so that I can hit the highest priorities first. And if I don't get to everything, the things I don't get to are not important, but I always start with clients. And so they're hearing from me within 24 hours usually of the time that they respond, you know, sent me the initial request. And I've never gotten a complaint for you don't respond fast enough. And also I think coming from corporate, we have this assumption that I have to respond in an hour. I have to respond in two hours. Like we're bred that way. And when you come out on your own, I don't know that everybody has that assumption. I think we think everybody has that assumption. And in reality, getting back to somebody in a day or two is actually normal. So if I check my emails once a day and respond, I'm operating in the realm of normal outside of hardcore big four corporate accounting. Yeah. Yeah. That is pretty crazy. I hear like a Slack message out in public and like, you know, my last job like was, was very good. Like people, it was, they were, did a good job of looking out for people's wellbeing and like, it wasn't crazy, crazy workload all the time and stuff like that. But still to this day, if I'm like at a coffee shop, I've been working for myself for almost a year now. So I'm starting to get on trend, but I hear like the pop up from Slack and I kind of like, Oh, what, what's going on? And you should respond right away. So we're like setting up a workflow where you don't have that kind of like immediacy of response. I imagine less context switching is probably very important, right? Yes. Can I tell you a crazy story? Do you want to hear a crazy corporate story? Let's hear one. I once had a real, this really happened, a boss, we were getting ready for a presentation the next day to like a board or a committee, somebody, and I had prepared the deck and my boss said, okay, I'm going to look through this tonight. Just stay near your computer. I should be able to give you feedback around 2am and just let me like, just stay near, just keep your computer on. And I was like, what? Like you want, are you asking me to sleep next to my computer with it on? I did not do that. That was not a great working relationship. I think those are the, I'm not the only one with crazy stories like that. This is where we get this mentality. I have one too. Yeah. Like I got in, I mean, not trouble, but like I, a senior manager got really mad at me and ended up kind of falling back on him, but he got really mad at me because I hadn't answered something on like a Sunday afternoon and then it was like Monday by noon and he had a whole freak out and I was like, yeah, like I, you know, it's, it's in my list for like this afternoon. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, I think probably way too many people will relate to that unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. So let's get to the actual like execution of the work because yeah, pricing is part of it, but like you need to be delivering at a rate at which it makes sense to charge that pricing right at the end of the day. So what are you doing that you think maybe some of the typical accountants in their early days aren't doing from like a workflow setup perspective or, or whatever that might be? Like what's the key to getting this all done in, in several times? I found that at the very beginning, like I just had, you know, maybe three clients and I was always just very aware of what processes took me a long time, which is fine with three clients and is not fine with 13 clients. And I was just very aware, like if I'm going to take on another client, I first have to fix this process. So when I'm, so when I'm onboarding the next one, I now have two clients on this more efficient process versus one client on an inefficient process. And one of those for me in doing forecasting, and I grew up, grew up in corporate doing forecasting in Excel because sometimes you just need the freedom of Excel to, cause you can't do anything else at huge companies other than like, give me a spreadsheet that I can do anything in. And so I was doing forecasting for my current clients in Excel at the very beginning and realized like, if I'm going to do this on more than one client, there is so many limitations on doing this in Excel. And so I eventually onboarded into a reporting and forecasting software. I went into Fathom at the time this was years ago and Fathom was one of like, I would say one of the first movers in that space of tech and I still use them today. But it's what got me out of Excel and created efficiencies in that process and then also snowballed into efficiencies in reporting. So that I always say taking on that one tech platform kept me from hiring. That's what allowed me to stay solo because I could then press a button and repeat that through multiple clients, whereas I was doing multiple button presses and multiple manual processes for just one client. And being able to create a format for reporting and a cadence for forecasting that was talking to QuickBooks made that process, gosh, 10 times more efficient. So then I could do it across more clients faster, which obviously accelerates your profit quicker. Yeah. And so are you like, are you like in the weeds of like setting up like a data flow? Like are you doing the API plugins into Fathom and all of that? Or do you usually trust the client to do that? Because again, like my last job in FP&A, like that was the dream is like have this beautiful live dashboard and whatnot. But for whatever reason, the data backend was very, very difficult to like pull off and it felt like we were lacking a little bit on the data infrastructure side to make that happen. And like for anyone in this service, like every single leader's dream is the same thing of like, I have 12 metrics I actually care about. I want to see them updated as live as possible in this thing. And I just want everything to flow and be able to fully, fully, fully trust it. Right. But oftentimes like the backend might be what's difficult. So are you standardizing tech stack throughout of like, okay, you need to be using Stripe or what have you for your billing so that it plugs into this or how are you handling that part of it? That's a good question. So if somebody is not familiar, if they don't know like these, these tech stacks that we're talking about, QuickBooks flows into Fathom. If you have actuals in Fathom, if you've closed the month, or if you have actuals in QuickBooks, you've closed the month, they appear in Fathom. And that's the same as LiveFlow, Reach, SIFT, all of these platforms will just take your actuals from your GL. And that exists. So I know as I've done the books, if I've closed the accounting, I know that the data is accurate. If I know it's accurate in QuickBooks, I know it's accurate in Fathom. And so that gives me actual peace of mind, actuals peace of mind from the past. And all the other flow is then going into QuickBooks. So as long as I'm controlling Stripe, Bill, what else do we have? I don't know. Even sometimes... Fordly. Fordly. Everything that's flowing into QuickBooks, I'm managing on the month and close side. And I found that when you niche, you're already limiting the tech that you're using. All those clients in the same industry are using the same types of tech. And it would behoove you to know all of the tech that they're using, because it'll just allow you to speak like an expert in that industry. And so I think there's far less tech than you imagine when you niche, because there's probably only five platforms that in any industry, most people are using. Okay. Nice. Yeah. I guess that's the service niche, right? That makes sense. Whereas against SaaS, you might be in the GitHub dashboard trying to pull stuff. GitHub never works. For those who know, they know. You're not in the Shopify flow, right? So okay, that's interesting. And then in terms of the actual execution of the work, in QuickBooks, are there a lot of plugins that you use that are really helpful at automation? Are you leveraging AI on that front? Or what does that look like? I'm not leveraging AI on the tech stack syncing, just honestly, because I think so many of the platforms have such good syncing to QuickBooks. Whether we want to say that or not, I know there's a lot of mixed reviews on QuickBooks these days, but I think other platforms have done... The really good ones have done a good job allowing us to sync into QuickBooks in a way that makes our jobs easier. I know I've picked up clients where I can tell the previous bookkeeper or the previous accountant didn't know how to sync Gusto into QuickBooks. And they were like, literally, the accounting was wrong because they were just taking that second journal entry. The direct deposit goes out and the second journal entry just gets listed as payroll tax and you're like, no, that's not the accounting for it. But Gusto, if you go into the background of Gusto and understand how that sync works and how that integration works, you save all of your journal entry steps by just setting it up correctly. And so I know I'm not using AI because I haven't found a need to go beyond what those other platforms are already doing. And I think there could be. I know I always struggle with Stripe as one that doesn't play nicely, just because it's such a good, I think it's a great developer platform. It is not a great accounting and reporting platform, in my opinion. And it never has been. I think it was sold. You're talking to the right guy. I'm on Stripe because like, well, all the ones I want to use like don't serve Canada. So like, you know, Bill Fordley, Anchor, like get on that. But they all don't serve Canada. And so I'm on Stripe and it is a very frustrating one to use. And so I could see where if I had that would be an instance where if I had multiple clients doing the same processes on Stripe, I would either find a third party integrator or I would, you know, go into Google Script, AI, start writing things that could make my process faster. But I would have to feel the pain first to do that. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So if a team comes to you and they're like, I'm using, I forget the name of it. So they're lucky they're not catching a stray on this one. But I had some like payroll software that was like just brutal. Like it was bad. Yeah. And they say, Hey, Erica, like we're on this payroll software. We're on a three year contract. Like we are not changing payroll softwares. Are you turning them away? Or like, what does that look like? Because I feel like that's a place that like people aren't really putting their foot down. Right? Like, client says, Hey, we've changed over to this and now you have like this whole broken process or whatever that is. Like, what does that look like on your end? Yeah. I had an answer for you until you told me you were on a three year contract. Because I would very easily say, well, I only work with clients on this platform and I'm happy to transition you over and include it in your onboarding, would be happy to do that and we'll make it a seamless, easy transition for you. That usually clients do not care what platforms they're using. They don't want to do the... accounting anyways. And I've had many prospective clients say, I don't care what you do, just do it right. And that's fine. So they're happy to change platforms. On the three-year contract, then I would just build it into the pricing. And I would say, okay, I'm happy to use that platform. Here's the pricing on that. My quote for them would be different than somebody who was willing to come over to the platform that I preferred. Okay. That's a good, disciplined approach to it. Because again, I'm sure everyone is just sweeping that under the rug. They're like, all right, I don't really want to lose the deal. Fine. And then it becomes a nightmare because you would get three of those clients and now you're spending all your time manually transcribing data or whatever. Which is fine. I'm happy to do that if that's a client I want to work with. But I know at the end of the day, I'm judging my own firm. My main KPI is profit per client per hour. And knowing that that's the end result that I'm going to look at, I can sit in a discovery call and be like, ooh, you're going to hurt that metric based on what you just told me. So I'm going to raise the price so that when that metric calculates down at the end of the month, I'm good. I still like the outcome. Yeah. And are you cleansing your client list a lot or you're mostly catching them on the way in? It's like a learning curve, right? In the beginning, everybody just took whoever needed an accountant, whoever needed a CFO, all that. So I'm no different than I think anybody else starting out listening to this. I took everybody and anybody. And then as you go, you learn what processes you don't want to do and you niche and you learn the telltale words that somebody says to you in a meeting and you either don't pursue or you price differently for that and it's just a learning curve. So I don't do a lot of cleansing now because I've learned that, but that probably took me five years to get to the point where I'm done cleansing, I'm done disengaging, and now I have who I want and I know who I want to bring on based on all of my experience to date. Cool. And are you having to do anything in terms of business development on that front to generate leads or are you just completely steady and people come your way and you decide whether to take them or not? Or do you continue to hunt for like, oh, this might actually be a better fit, the good old PPCPH, the profit per client per hour metric. Are you looking to advance that or is it just kind of like you're cruising on that front? Yeah, that's a good question. I would have given you a different answer in 2024 than I am in 2025 as we're recording this. I hit my capacity for the number of clients I wanted and the number of hours I wanted to work in 2024. And then I really, I don't know if anybody else, I've heard this from other people, 2025 took a hit. I think the economy collectively held their breath and that trickled down to less spending, clients getting concerned, clients pulling back, which trickled into accountants getting hit on cash flow. I don't know that the tax accountants have felt this yet. I think they might feel it in 2026 tax season. But from an accounting perspective where my clients were paying me every month, they had pullbacks. They needed to downgrade services. They needed to decrease expenses. So I took a direct hit and I retained clients where I could with lower pricing and lower services. But I'm back in a lead generation mode. And so when I'm at capacity, I don't seek out lead generation. I put up a wait list on my website, but I'm back at it now. So yeah, I go out and do my lead gen activities and network and I have a podcast and a newsletter and all of that and just start the machine again. And what are those activities like actually look like for you? Because I mean the podcast and the newsletter like helpful for sure and keeps you in touch and whatnot. But are you doing any kind of like, are you attending events? What does that look like? Yeah, I find my best referrals because I think whether or not people say it's right or not, I think we live in a referral based economy as accountants and people say you can't rely on referrals. Okay, but that's when you talk to people, that's where all of their new clients are coming from like 90% of their new clients. So I try to get in virtual rooms. I don't go to a lot of individual events, in-person events, but I try to get in virtual rooms where those people are hanging out. I try to build real relationships and just talk to people. They know what I do. They like me or they don't like me. It's a really good vetting process, right? Somebody already knows you. They already know if your voice annoys them. They're not going to work with you. It's great. You don't have to have a call with them. And I also have a lot of people who I just got one today. I just got a intake form on my website that says I've been following you for three years. I've been listening to your podcast. I'm finally at a breaking point. I had not been at a breaking point until today and I was like, oh, wow. So I do think when we put content out and we put our expertise out there, there are people paying attention and accounting is a sticky thing people buy. It is hard to break away from your accountant and being the voice of reason potentially when they're finally at their breaking point is a marketing tactic. Yeah. Well, so that kind of brings me to the last topic I wanted to get into here. So yeah, referrals, you can't count on referrals. That is if you're a $5 million firm hoping to grow 35% a year organically, right? But if you are not, that's probably okay. And so there's this whole kind of mindset difference. Whereas like, you know, I was spending some time in like the indie hackers community and whatever when I was trying to build a website, I was just, I wanted to get into that world. And there, there is this very well documented dream of like, I built something and it makes me $200,000 a year, like very much in line with what your business actually literally is in accounting. Right? So I built this thing, you know, it was busy for the first year and now I work 15 hours a week and it makes $200,000 a year. That's like a vast number of people are like chasing that and people are leaving their job at Stripe. They're leaving their job at wherever making crazy money to go chase this dream. Right? But in accounting, like that feels like it's not talked about enough, which is why I absolutely, I love what you're doing. I love what you do. You know, same like Scotty Scorano, like he built, built, built, built, built, and then stepped back and now like lives an incredible life. He's always chasing kind of a new adventure. And I think that that's like pretty admirable as a mindset of like, okay, there is such a thing as enough and I want to focus on a good lifestyle. And I mean, bless people whose ambition is to build $100 million firm. Like I have respect for that too. But like what you're doing is a very different mindset. So I'm curious, like with Aligned Accountants, which kind of drives that message home for people, like was there just like overwhelming demand right out of the gate because people were like, I want to do this. Or are we as accountants like, is there something wrong with us where we're like, that's cool, but I need more. That's cool that, but I need more. And we just kind of keep chasing that. Yeah. I like, like I said before, like I think we're, we're bred on this. We're bred on more is better. This is, this is not an accounting mindset. This is an American mindset. We, we wonder why we can't take sick days. And then we're like, yay, you got an perfect attendance award in third grade. Like, gee, I wonder where that comes from. I mean, we like, we just were taught to go and do better and earn more because more money means more happiness, at least I think on this side of the world. And there are a ton of people, if you're listening to this and you think you can't find anybody who doesn't want to scale their firm or isn't, happy not building a seven figure business. Like there is a whole slew of accountants who are quietly sitting in the margins who want to build something to just enough so that they can hang out with their kids so they can hang out with their grandkids so they can scale down into retirement. Like there's a whole group of us and it's really hard to stand up. And in the noise of seven figure builds, it's really hard to stand up and be like, I only work this many hours and I only want to earn $200,000 like as if that's not good enough. And that's just fine. Like we couldn't, we can decide what is enough for us and then just live in contentment and happiness and use our time and energy and for something else, even if it's just getting more sleep, because that's important too. It doesn't have to be this grand dream of like, well, I want to work less so I can circumnavigate the globe in my sailboat. You don't have to do anything like that. You can, that's fantastic. But you could also just want to grow a garden or make dinner for your kids every night. And that's wonderful. That is actually helping people in your immediate circle. And that has a legacy beyond a lot of other things that involve money. Yeah. I mean, I have that affliction too, for sure. Where I like, you know, immediately did the backwards math. I was like, oh, you know, 200, 15 hours. Oh, that's half a million dollars if she scaled it to a real full-time schedule. And so it's like, yeah, it's really hard. And so what's going on inside of Aligned Accountants to help people you know, to help facilitate that dream for people? What does that look like? Yeah. I think a big part of it is just knowing that there is a group of 150 other accountants who think the same way you do, because the noise in the media, social media, the industry is that here's how to scale and here's how to do more. And so it's really hard to feel like you're the only one who doesn't want to do that. And so just knowing that you're surrounded by 150 other people just like you who just want to be home with their kids more or do something outside of work to know that you're not the weird one. Because I think sometimes we can feel like the weird one in the realm of all the industry. And so part of it is just having community that gets it. And then we have trainings in there for forecasting and time management, things that actually make a difference to your pricing and to your efficiency and to your time management. Because that's really, at the end of the day, the cogs to the formula and making the machine work for a high profit, lower hours firm. And same thing like you said... Cogs the machine part. Sorry. I was like, the cost of goods sold of the... Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Yes. Cog in the machine part. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so it's just really supporting people in that mission of their life of having a life first firm so that they can, yes, still make money, but do what's more important to them outside of work as well. Okay. And then, yeah, resources around, yeah, time blocking, workflow management versus offshoring, outbound sales and whatever that is, right? Yeah. So we have a lot of meetups. So you can... Yeah, we do lots of trainings and meetups and there's templates in there. A lot of discussion, real life discussion, real time. Here's what I'm dealing with. What should I do? Type questions. Yeah. And then as part of that too, there is a free newsletter that I want to call out too, because it's nice to have an on-ramp of like, oh, maybe that does sound nice. I don't know if I'm fully bought in. What's the name of the newsletter for people? And then I'm also just going to make sure that I link that for people to check out. Yeah. The newsletter, it comes out every Wednesday on the day I don't work. I usually write it from my yoga mat and it is called the 15-hour accountant. And it is just a stream of consciousness of what's going on in my firm. So you can see behind the scenes and it's always really great to get replies on that. People are very chatty and just to hear replies and what people are dealing with. It's just really great. There's about 1700 people on there. So if you think you are alone, you are not. Nice. And then once I've pushed you into Beehive and away from MailChimp, I'll be making sure to add that to my list of recommended newsletters on there as well. But yeah, thank you so much, Erica, both for taking the time to join me and have this conversation today, but also just for what you do in the industry. Because again, a lot of people, it's this all or nothing mentality or I'm so burnt out, I need to leave the profession. And you are really living proof that there is this other option. It's this in-between. And it is this very broadly spread dream in tech. And you're doing it in real life, just in a field where I think that's an underrated thing. So keep doing what you're doing. It's awesome to watch. And I think you are setting an amazing example for everyone. Thanks so much for having me, Dominic.