Operational Excellence with Mike Libbey

Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Mike Libby, the COO and partner at Your Bottom Line, a tax, accounting and advisory firm based in Ontario, Canada. Welcome to the pod, Mike. Thanks, Tom. Appreciate you having me. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So kind of jumping right into our first topic, you mentioned to me as we were talking kind of before recording that your father was actually an accountant working on his own business before you joined the profession. And now I kind of, you know, you followed in those steps, whereas a lot of people online, at least they say, you know, they they see accountants going and they're worried whether or not it's the right profession for them. And you've kind of gone in the opposite direction where you had full exposure to someone in the profession and decided that that was kind of for you to at least to pursue kind of firm ownership and firm operations. So I'm a little bit curious to hear about that journey and how how you kind of took in all of that influence. Absolutely. And I mean, it is it is a rather interesting one, quite frankly, because in hindsight, it seems like it was either his master plan or my master plan. And it really wasn't. I mean, it might have been his I don't know. But he actually had absolutely no influence on me kind of joining the team. And so to go all the way back, as any teenage kid would kind of butt heads with his dad and I call him Ross in a professional setting, but for context, he certainly is my dad. And so while I was in high school, I thought, you know what, this accounting class is actually rather easy, rather straightforward. And I like this. I like the numbers. I like what's going on. And so then I ended up going to college for accounting, business admin accounting. And it was not easy. It was actually pretty difficult. And during that time, I'd go home for the summer as I went to Niagara College. So I'd go home for the summers and I'd work the Ministry of Finance. I do a little bit of work for my dad, a couple of tax returns here and there. And so once I was done college after three years, I went out there and I was going for rounds of interviews, different places in downtown Toronto. And on my resume, I had that obviously I worked for my dad a little bit. Meanwhile, between you and I and everybody who's watching, I was really just did a few tax returns. And so ultimately, what ended up happening was in all of these interviews, they would say, we see here that you work for your dad's company. Why don't you currently work for your dad's company? And I really didn't have an answer, quite frankly. And so I actually went home after a second round of interviews one Friday evening. And I was living with my parents at that time. And I asked them the questions. I was like, I don't have an answer to this. Do you have an answer to this? Why don't I work for my dad? And so what ended up happening is that we discussed throughout the entire weekend. And I started on Monday and the rest is history. And so just for context, at that time, sorry, probably about the start of when I went to college three years prior, he really started up his business and it was just a nighttime and weekend gig that he was doing because he was working nine to five, certainly more than that, actually, in Mississauga, I believe, just as a CFO controller for a company. So he was starting this up on the side at nights and weekends. And so that's why I really didn't do a ton for him. He wasn't necessarily all in yet. It was his goal to turn into a full-fledged business. But ultimately, in my eyes, it wasn't really something that I could participate in because it's not like I saw him all day, every day working his business. He was out working at the job. So that's why it really hadn't been something that I'd really been, let's say, working towards or groomed towards. He had no influence in that at all. And so it really just kind of naturally happened that way where I did get into the numbers and it had nothing to do with my dad, as much as I'd love my little man to join in my footstep here. You don't want to actually force that. And so I really just started working with him as a bookkeeper, helping with operations, administrative. It was really just in his living room. So I was living with my parents and I was going upstairs because I lived in the basement, working in the living room with me and him just together on bookkeeping. Then I was doing taxes and then I was doing some kind of operations and I was overhauling all of his processes at the same time. And so as that was all happening, we were growing and growing, finally hired our first employee. So I joined him, I believe it was 2010. And we finally hired our first employee, I believe, 2016, 2017. And that was just an administrator. And so they helped us out significantly. At that time, again, I was really doing all the taxes, all the bookkeeping. And so then we kept growing and growing. We moved to a bigger office. We'd hired about five different people, expanded again, hired about five more people, and then finally moved for our last time, I believe it was November 2019. And so we really work primarily virtually now ever since that lovely thing happened in 2020. And ultimately, now we're out about a team of 23, we're now official partner, CEO of the business, as minimally client facing as possible, taking care and overseeing absolutely everything. So it's it's worked out rather well. Absolutely. That's awesome. And so being remote kind of at that point, around 2019, was relatively unusual. I think it was pretty unusual, I would say, especially for kind of like more traditional businesses like accounting. Do you think that being already set up to be remote made a huge difference for you when COVID hit? Like, was that a huge period of growth for your company? Or like, do you think that that really helped give your your accounting firm like a leg up over others? I do, actually. And it's almost palpable how impactful it really was, because I love technology personally and professionally. I'm obsessed with it. I'm always looking for the new latest and greatest thing that we can either implement or sort of vet and then implement, whether that's personally, professionally, whatever that might be. And so I think that's really helped drive our business. Well, I know it has, humbly speaking. And so ultimately, we really did capitalize on that. And so when everything kind of transpired, March 2020, everybody just go home, work from home. We had all the technology ready, set up. We just needed to click a couple of buttons and all of a sudden we were magically working from home. And so we were, even though it wasn't an ideal scenario for a lot of individuals, a lot of companies, and we were helping out companies tremendously, we were very fortunate to be able to help them out. Our doors were really flooded, our virtual and actual physical doors were flooded because there were a lot of other, let's say, old school firms that weren't necessarily ready for the influx of people, all of their COVID questions, as well as just, hey, we're working remote and we can only do this, we can do that, everybody trying to set up their technology as quick as they can. So we were able to capitalize on that. And I really do think it helped kind of springboard us into kind of the next level. And we have seen considerable growth ever since that had really kind of transpired and went down. Do you think there's like a modern day equivalency of like being ready for that sort of event that can help, you know, catapult your growth? Because I've been speaking with a lot of firms recently where a lot of them are actually growing through business being referred by other accounting firms who are like underwater. And I'm a little bit curious even if like the current version of that and being able to capitalize on an issue to grow like this might be actually having like a good talent strategy in place, as well as maybe having like the technology in place to support like scaling rapidly and taking on new clients. Because, again, it's pretty astounding the number of firms right now that I hear of growing through referrals from, again, basically rejected clients from other firms. Right. Yeah. Do you think there's like a modern equivalency or would it just be like staying on top of like your resource and talent management these days? A little bit of both. And I mean, expect the unexpected sometimes. Right. I mean, nobody could have expected what was really going to kind of go down at that time. But I think, well, I know, again, that the technology really kind of held us above the rest in that regard to be able to help. And I think it really just by way of being able to help those clients and them spreading the good word, certainly, like I said, helped springboard us. And so I think ultimately making sure that everybody's adaptable and tech savvy. I mean, we learn from all of our mistakes, right? Everybody learns from their mistakes, not everybody, but most people will learn from their mistakes. We're very fortunate that we have and everybody's made mistakes. And so with that, ultimately, we've learned some things along the way, whether it's technology, adapting to the times or something along the lines of just essentially making sure that you're ready for what's to come. And so being able to forecast things is obviously extremely important in any business, but especially in one where you've got the extreme seasonality to it. And so to your point, Dom, there are a lot of firms out there that are effectively saying, well, you know what, we don't necessarily want that seasonality anymore, whether you're talking about just mitigating the personal taxes or increasing your rates or whatever that might be. And so making sure that you're prepared for what's to come, as well as making sure that you're working with the most appropriate people. Right. I mean, I mean that internally and externally, whether you're talking about the talent, which was very difficult to find. And now I think in our eyes, it's going considerably better now. And that's one of the things as well. Right. As soon as you say, OK, we're remote or we're working virtually, primarily anyways, being able to open up that talent pool to all of Canada, all of the world, it's really transformed our business. I mean, if you're looking for somebody in your backyard to be in person, that's fantastic. That's perfectly fine. But by way of opening up those floodgates to be able to have the talent pool just. Global has has really just helped us kind of propel this success, for sure. Are you are you working with kind of like outsourced solutions as well or or it's just kind of Canada wide currently? No, we do have some outsourced solutions as well. So the I would say I would say of the roughly let's say roughly 30 employees, we've actually just hired about five employees in the last few months, about 80 percent of those, I would say in Canada and almost all provinces. We have four people in the Philippines. We have one in India and interestingly, the one in India was not actually outsourced at all. He's one that that had lived here and he's he's got some other stuff going on. His family's from India. He's worked for us for about six years now. And so he's got some stuff going on in India. And again, there's just one of the perks, right, from from keeping and maintaining that talent and keeping everybody happy. He said, can I go to India for six months? I said, how about it? Doesn't matter to me. That's perfectly fine. So we're really all about kind of flexibility and communication, right? Just making sure that we're staying in touch with the team as often and frequent as you can. And the flexibility piece is just a win win from from our perspective. It's not for all firms, but it works fantastic for ours. And that's really all that matters to us. That's awesome. I'm happy to hear that. So another one of the big things that kind of caught my attention and why I was like extra interested in speaking with you was you were talking online. You're having some conversations with some folks in the community and you kind of mentioned that you were roughly 95 percent removed from client work at your accounting firm. So I have a couple of questions on that. The first one being how and like a little bit of like the timelines on what it took to get there. And, you know, I guess like how much time commitment was needed to kind of offload most of those tasks a lot, quite a bit. And so, you know, it's one of those things where, I mean, kudos to my operations manager. She's really opened my eyes to a lot of things. And what you really had opened my eyes to were a few things, but mainly Jason Stats. And so I've been following along with Jason Stats, part of his realized community and a few other communities as well. And so just kind of hanging out and seeing other like minded accountants who are really in the same situation as I, who I'm able to have kind of soundboard conversations with as well as what are you doing in this situation? What are you doing in that situation? That's really helped me significantly get off the client work. And frankly, if you asked me five years ago, that was not even necessarily a goal of mine. But as we grew, as we scaled, it became a high priority because I cannot juggle all of these things. Be head of HR, head of operations, head of processes, tax manager, bookkeeping manager. You have to set up that proper kind of structure. And so I did spend a lot of time. A lot of it was natural to an extent. Like I mentioned before, there's a few family members who work. There's my sister-in-law, there's my uncle, there's my mom, there's my dad. And so you won't hear me call any of them by those terms in the company. But that's really helped me, selfishly speaking, to delegate much easier. Now, it comes with its pros and cons, working with family, understandably. And knock on wood, I'm very fortunate that it's been overwhelming me, overwhelmingly pros. But that's helped me move things over much easier in regards to essentially saying that if it were somebody that I was just hiring, whether it's a VA, they don't necessarily know anything about me. But with working with somebody and having them know me personally for so long, it was that much simpler to basically say, OK, shadow me for a day or I'm going to write up some rules or some processes of what you're going to do. I have somebody take over my emails, do as much as they possibly can with my emails, have my ops manager who helps me kind of structure the process and flesh it all out to determine, OK, here's who can do this, here's who can do that. And my clients have just been so positive about it. Right. It's so, so positive and so understanding that, hey, we're growing. This is the position I'm in now. It's just not reasonable. But here's what we've done as I transition you over to a new individual within the firm that's going to be kind of heading off your file. And they've been so understanding, so appreciative. And it's gone so smooth, thank God. And I owe that all to all the people that I work with. Right. The team, I have a fantastic team who just picked it up and run with it. And so by way of doing that and templating a whole lot of email responses has allowed me to really do that. Right. There's a path for anything I'm doing, whether I'm handing off a client, whether I'm handing off my email inbox or whether I'm doing something else that's really allowed me to kind of really get off it as much as I can get off client facing work and having discussions with my referral partners. Right. A lot of them would say, hey, here's let me introduce you to Mike. He's fantastic. And I heard from one through that referral partner almost six years ago. And it's really kind of resonated with me where they effectively said that, hey, I heard from the client I referred to you that you brushed them off and pushed them to a different team member. And that really resonated with me because I was actually pushing them up to the chain to somebody far smarter than I. But the optics, right, it's all about that transition and having them understand that. So I reached out to all my referral partners as well. And I said, hey, make sure when you're introducing me and number one, thank you. But it's Mike and his team. And so every part of that, even when somebody comes on board as a prospective client, we have them fill out an intake form and then they schedule a call with the most appropriate person, regardless if they're introduced to them. So setting up all these automations as well as processes to make sure that everybody kind flows through the proper path and is communicated to properly has been kind of vital in that transition. So that's that's really transformed the business to free up my time to be able to deal with those kind of high level things. Yeah. Yeah. I had only thought about like the operational challenge of like getting yourself back and like having the processes in place to do that. But that's true. Like the client, you know, emotion of feeling like they're being handed off is an entire different thing. Wow, that's interesting. And these referral partners that you mentioned, what what does that look like? Because I don't think that's really a conversation I've had with folks talking about like formal referral partners for their firms. Yeah. And so I wouldn't necessarily call it formal, but ultimately, Ross and I, my dad are very big in local networking groups. And so we're still meeting with a lot of people in person on Zoom and kind of different groups where we're discussed with mortgage brokers, financial advisors, people in what we call the power team. Right. And so what ends up happening naturally is we'll have referrals for them. They'll have referrals for us. There's no money changing hands or anything like that. It's really about kind of that giver's gain. If you give me business, I'll want to give you business and so on and so forth. But those are really the people that we're really connecting with. Like I said, mainly mortgage brokers as well as financial advisors, because those three together, like I said, that's really the power team where you're able to help people out. And so tax planning and dovetailing is extremely important in that regard to make sure that you're qualifying for that next property, whether it's a rental property, whether it's your primary residence, whatever that might be. It's important to have those conversations with everybody in that loop, right? Especially when you're talking about corporate investments and stuff as well. So that's really it. When I say referral partners, it's really just those people we're regularly working with. That's interesting. That's good to know. And then so with yourself kind of at this point being mostly removed from the from the client work, are there a couple of things that you can point to that you would say are kind of like the highest leverage process changes that you were able to make to your firm? Or like new softwares or anything like that? Yeah, yeah. So we are regularly vetting. I mean, it's at overload out here. There's overload and overwhelm. There's every day there's a new, different app to try out. And again, God bless my my ops manager, she's the one who really kind of helps go through that, as well as my bookkeeping supervisor and other people as well. So I'm not necessarily having to dig deep until I really need to. But again, that alone is saving me time. So having those people alone really helps me leverage my expertise in other areas and getting out there, doing different webinars, different podcasts, making different content online certainly helps leverage my time from a sales perspective. So, I mean, we're we are big on technology. We are big on apps. And that's actually one of the main questions we ask people in any interview. Right. I can if you can prepare tax returns or you can do bookkeeping or whatever that might be, you really have to make sure you're tax savvy and you're going to understand kind of what we're dealing with here. I never want to sugarcoat it. Right. I want to be extremely candid and I want them to understand what we're doing. And I want them to understand what they're really walking into. So we are really looking for kind of tech savvy individuals, because like I said, well, I'll hopefully vet an app, make sure that it's appropriate, going to benefit us or our clients and implement it as quick as we possibly can. Now, within reason, I don't want anybody hating me if I'm going to implement that on April 29th, the day before the deadline. They got to be conscious about that. But yeah, freeing up my time to be able to kind of focus on those relationships, focus on whether that's content or just getting the good word out there. And we've got a lot of things coming down the pipeline this year that I spend my time on. We're actively going through a massive rebrand right now. The name is going to be staying the same, so no concerns there. But really just kind of honing in on who our ideal clients are, our missions, our values, our kind of brand tone. And it's extremely important to be able to make sure that we're working with the right people and that my team internally really understands what we're trying to achieve is important. So I've been focusing a lot on that rebrand. Sure. Right on. And you even like have some white label technology. Am I correct in thinking that? Or is white label the right term for it? Yeah, yeah. No, that's the right term. So we're utilizing Soroban. In the back end, it's called Soroban, which is a the way we're utilizing it. We've we've white labeled that and it's called YBL Connect. So it's our smart tax app. It's our personal tax app and we're going to be branching that out. We haven't necessarily told anybody yet, but we're going to be branching that out into more things than just personal taxes. But what it effectively is a smart tax organizer, intelligent organizer, where we send it out to all of our clients and it says, hey, it's tax time. Here is your conditional questionnaire. It knows information about them. It's able to have conditional questions. So we'll say easy, simple example. Do you have income? If yes, it will ask you some different questions and populate it and it'll get as complex as it possibly needs to be. So we were the first ones to utilize Soroban within Canada. And we're really trying to make it a little bit more of the norm. And it's helped considerably. We've had fantastic feedback on that. We used it last year for the first year, which went fantastic. We're using it exclusively this year because we had a little bit of a buffer year to give people a little bit of leeway and we've completely overhauled it for this year. So it makes it that much easier. We don't want our clients to have to do more work. Right. But we want to make sure that they're answering the appropriate questions, not leaving any money on the table. They've got a secure portal in their encrypted security, live chat access to us. All of their documents are live there. So it's got some fantastic features. And so, yeah, we're getting really good feedback on that. So we call that YBL Connect. And that's really helped streamline the personal tax filing process and just made it a whole lot smoother. So it's also front loaded tax time, strangely. So April is going to be considerably less busy compared to March, which I'm not mad at. That's awesome, that's incredible. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it's been a unique experience. Always learn from things, already have a lot that we're going to be implementing later this year. But no, it's really helped us out for sure. I mean, I can tell. Right. I'm talking to a firm leader on April 12th. Like that, that in itself is a very good signal that, you know, things are things are under control. So congrats. Yeah, that's awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Very fortunate. Yeah. So getting adoption on like a wide scale rollout like that from customers, no less. Right. Like internal adoption, you can kind of just force customer adoption, I think, is a little bit harder. What was that like? And and, you know, do you have any advice for someone who's trying to roll out something similar? So you're spot on. Change management can be extremely difficult internally and externally. This year, so like I said. The pandemic, as much as I don't love talking about it, but it actually did open up a lot of, I'll say, good opportunities for people to understand that things can be done remotely. Right. Everybody realized, OK, Zoom is an easier option or an option at all. And so technology actually just went to the forefront of a lot of people's minds. So that actually helped make it a little bit simpler for a lot of people. Now, that's not to say that as soon as everything was done and over, people weren't like, hey, can I drop off my documents again? And we said, no, you can't. We're still sticking to this. So this year, last year, we were. We said, hey, we suggest you use YBL Connect, we're not going to force it on you. This year, we have said nicely, this is the way we're going, because ultimately it helps us and it helps the client. If I have to have two different systems, whether it's hard documents, hard copy documents are dropping off or they're just emailing stuff over in an unsecure fashion versus YBL Connect, that's arguably three different ways of preparing a tax return. And how do I ask the questions? Is it in YBL Connect? Is it not? So it makes it more difficult for us, certainly, as well as the client not having a cohesive way to say that this is just how we work. And so we have considered this to be, I'll call it a painful year, but that's that's an overstatement. It hasn't actually been painful. But when I say that, I really mean that it has been a deep year of training clients and letting them know that if this doesn't work for you, that's OK. We've actually got alternatives or other firms that we've partnered up with that we can say, hey, you know what, they'll take hard copy documents, they'll work this way. But we believe that this is a better, more efficient, more secure way to file your taxes. And we genuinely believe that. So by way of positioning it that way and saying, hey, it's OK if you don't want to work with us, but this is the way that we work now. Next year should theoretically be a breeze. And that's why I said this year is painful, just from the way that we're kind of laying down the law and saying that this is really the only way that we're going to work. And it's not for everybody. And that's OK. Right. That is completely OK. But it's gone very well. We've had good feedback. There is always going to be that one to five percent of individuals that say, that's fine. Great. Sounds good, Mike. We're going elsewhere. And God bless you. That's OK. They certainly have my blessing. But that's just the way it goes. Interesting. And did a lot of clients kind of end up changing firms as a result of that this year? Do you have any kind of like stat on that or? Not yet until the season is over. But I would it's absolutely I would say it's going to be under five percent closer to more like two. I would bet a lot of people have said, OK, we really like you guys and you gals. We really like YBL and we're willing to give this a shot. And so we're really looking forward to gathering everybody's feedback. after the season is done to say, hey, did you like it? Did you hate it? What did that feel like? How could this be better? And we're huge on constructive feedback, again, internally and externally. And that's how we built all of our processes and all our systems, right? It's just really gathering and taking that feedback to heart and saying, okay, how can we make this easier to make sure that we're serving the appropriate people? What should we be changing? What's next and what's on the horizon? So we're very welcoming of all feedback in that regard. So it's been very well in a lot of, it's been very well received for sure. Yeah, that's like a, that's like a bold, like a relatively like bold move, right? From an accounting firm. But I think personally from my experience in tax, I think that'll serve you incredibly well. Cause like every year, you know, we'd have like the client who drops off like a million receipts in a smelly duffel bag. And it was like, which interns getting it this year? And it was always just a disaster, slowed everything down. Like, I think, I think this is going to pay off massively for, for your firm and just employee happiness and stuff, right? Well, exactly. Right. And, and it came to the point and people really understood. I mean, we had different, like I said, templates and things to say to people, depending on what they'd say, but at its core, put it this way. Yes, we love technology person and professional. We genuinely don't have the talent locally to be able to serve you. This is genuinely not off. We've got people all over the world and they can't do that. So now we actually, for those rare few who just straight up dropped off their hard copy documents, we've scanned them in front of them, given them back. Otherwise they'll leave them there indefinitely. And we charge them a fee. And so that is an option this year, again, in the kind of painful this year, but next year, it's not even going to be an option. These folks had ever so nicely, not necessarily seen that we said, hey, this is actually not an option. So they just come in and done it. We say, okay, you're already here. That's fine. But there is a fee and here's a situation. But it will make things simpler kind of for the long run without a doubt, for sure. Awesome. And then, yeah, one of my last questions for you is, I noticed you are actually not a CPA. And again, like operating a pretty sizable firm. Do you think that that's influenced your experience at all, or even like interactions with clients or has it not really come up? So what I would say is, given that I'm not client facing anymore, it certainly doesn't come up. But I would say one out of every 300 clients that comes on board had asked, hey, are you a CPA or do you have CPAs? And my answer is, no, I'm definitely not a CPA, but we do have CPAs on the team. And they say, okay, sounds good. And again, Ross is a CPA. I've got no knocks against CPAs. In fact, I debated at one point, and then when I saw my kind of path and that I wasn't just going to be the traditional partner reviewing tax returns until the end of time, I realized that that's not necessarily the right path for me. So I really debated it for a very, very long time. And so as we really set up the structure of this firm to be less like the traditional one partner, two partner, three partner, under that, it's more of CEO, COO, operations manager, and that type of new school structure. I really didn't see a place for it. And so we do have a lot of CPAs on the team. We have a lot of people that are not CPAs or not designated in any capacity. Now they've all gone to school in some fashion, but at the end of the day, and I know Ross would say this as well, we'll put our non-CPAs up against a CPA any day of the week. And really the experience there, it does wonders. And again, I love CPAs. It doesn't matter to me. CPA, EA, if you're in the States, whatever that might be, it just wasn't necessarily the path for me in how I saw my future. So it didn't really matter to me. And again, now that I'm not client facing, arguably irrelevant, whether I own the company and run the company or not is irrelevant to me with the way that I've set up this business, but you will always get those select few who will say, oh, if this person thought of CPA, then we're not going to them. And that's fine to each his own, right? Whether it's just optics or whether it's the reality, it gives them some comfort and that's okay. But I know there's a lot of people out there who are non-CPAs who are running firms now who don't even know the technical work. So I know a lot of the technical work. I've done bookkeeping, payroll, personal taxes, corporate taxes for years. I just choose not to anymore. It's not where I want to be, right? Interesting. And then one kind of ending question I'm trying to get in front of most guests, but if you're a young person kind of looking to enter the profession, do you have any advice for that person in terms of like career path, career planning, anything like that to get the most out of it? I would say, selfishly speaking, and it's not a saying that I've made up, it's not about what you know, it's about who you know. Now, that's easy for me to say. I work for my dad's firm. But get out there, build those relationships, talk to other accountants, go in the communities where the accountant's residing, whether that's in a different community, whether it's doing this volunteer experience or something like that, get talking to people, right? And even still, after I've been doing this for over 14 years now, I'm still learning a ton of new things nonstop. So if you go to the right spots, whether it's just online communities or speak to people out there, I'm happy to talk to anybody who's thinking about getting a foot in the door. And we're doing a lot of intern and co-op programs as well, and I love to see that, seeing new people kind of coming from different universities and such who will jump on board for a few months and get that experience. So just get out there, talk to some people, and make sure it's a path for you, right? When I was in college, I'd actually, because it was so difficult, even though I got into it because it was easy, I debated changing careers. And so I was very, very fortunate that I didn't change careers in the way that this all transpired, but talk to people, right? Talk to people and understand the pros and cons, what it's really like, and talk to many people, right? You can talk to me and it'll be about technology, it'll be about this, it'll be about pushing the profession forward as much as you can. You talk to somebody else who might necessarily just work with paper files, and it's a totally different beast, right? So whether you're starting a firm yourself or whether you're getting out there and you're a complete junior, you've got absolutely no experience, just gain that different experience and see what works for you, because there's a lot of different opportunities out there for sure. Awesome, I love that. And I could not agree anymore. That's typically what I advise people as well. So great advice. And thanks again for coming on, Mike. It was awesome having you kind of share your advice. And I hope anyone who's hoping to become more operational, less client facing can take something away from this, because I know a lot of people dream of getting to where you are today in terms of being able to really focus on their business, right? Working on the business, less in the business. So hats off to you for achieving that. Thanks, Dom, appreciate you having me. And absolutely, it's not an overnight process. It's really not. It takes time and it takes a lot of time writing out those processes or what I would normally do, because we all get in our heads and say, only I could do this. Of course, only I could do this. I've known this situation and these clients for so long. And that's just not the case. Yes, you have a lot of information, but good has to be good enough at some point. So you got to relay that information. Otherwise you won't be able to take that next step. So appreciate you having me, Dom. It's been a pleasure, my friend. Absolutely. Thanks, Mike. Bye. Take care. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.