Rethinking Firm Operations & Automation with Chad Davis

Hello, and welcome to the Big Four Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Chad Davis, the co-founder and partner at Live C-A-L-L-P, a firm based in Toronto, Canada. Welcome to the pod, Chad. Hey, thanks Dom. Do you go by Dom or Dominic? Usually Dom, yeah. There you go. Nice to be here. Yeah. Thanks for joining. So, yeah, we spoke at Bridging the Gap recently, and you were really someone who, you know, sitting in a chair alone. You're like, I should go talk to this guy. Look, he looks like he's super lonely. You called him. Exactly. No, no, no. And, and I had a really, really good conversation with you. And I have found that those people that I have those really good one-off conversations with, I really want to keep it going, kind of keep them in my life. Because the last one ended up being my business coach who has like really transformed the way I'm doing business and the way I kind of see balancing a lot of things in my life. So I really find that like when you have those one-off conversations where you kind of leave and you're like, wow, it's, it's your sign, your sign to kind of keep going and keep, keep interacting with that person. You have the ultimate platform to do that. You're like, hey, I just met you. Why don't you come on a podcast? We'll talk for half an hour. It'll be crystallized forever. Then I can decide if I actually want to be your friend or not at the end of it. So I realized this is like an interview. So on more than one front. So thanks for having me in, in all, in all facets. Yeah, my pleasure. And for everyone listening, that is why you, you should have a podcast. It's, it's so helpful. You can have so many good conversations with people and it just opens a lot of doors. 10 out of 10 would recommend, but I guess to start off, I'm curious to know what you were doing at bridging the gap. Like what was the kind of main appeal for you to kind of pick and go to that conference? Yeah. Like a lot of people bridging the gap in Chicago. This is the second year that it's happened. It's put on by a company called tri merit out of Chicago, or I'm sure they probably have other offices too. And there are a specialty tax credit place. You think, Oh, specialty tax credits. That's who I go to, to talk about accounting and mental health. Not really. Randy who, uh, uh, Randy Crabtree, who was in charge of the sort of the idea of this, uh, is from tri merit. And it was a really great opportunity for them to marry something that was very high on the passion list of Randy, which was accountants, wellbeing accountants, um, mental health. And through his podcast, the unique CPA, he's interviewed hundreds of people that he has learned from or he has taught or mentored. And that's the precipice for this event. So it's small, it's intimate. There's 200 or so people, maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less depending on the day. And it's three days in Chicago. And the sessions are very intimate in terms of people being vulnerable about what they're struggling with. There's a lot of firm owners there that are, um, just sharing experiences to try to learn from each other. And it's, what's kind of nice is that because it's in one place and it's, and it's like a very, it's in a hotel, which, you know, it sounds very small cause you picture, you know, the holiday and by the airport, but this is not it. It's a very, very nice hotel and it might be in a different location. You never know. Um, but the reason I went is because it's just a great opportunity to meet with peers, meet people you've never met before and talk about the hard things. And I find that when you open up even just a little bit, instead of saying, Oh, everything's great, business is great, everything's great. And you actually tell the truth. There's a lot of people that really want to share as well because they're going through the same things. And it's one of those events you look forward to every year. So if you haven't gotten your ticket for next year, definitely do that in the early bird stuff when it comes out. Yeah. I'm going to be there next year for sure as well. I had Randy on the pod and I, I really admire his kind of vulnerability as well as just like what he's managed to do, like aside from him sharing his story and being super vulnerable, like he's also super impressive and has created a powerhouse firm, which is, which is a nice pairing, right? You, you take things a little bit more seriously when you're like, wow, this really worked this guy. He also owns a great, he also owns a nice bar in Chicago too. So I heard that. Yeah. I missed the bar evening, unfortunately, but I guess that can kind of bring us into first thing I wanted to ask about. Wait a minute. This, this isn't about me. Wait a minute. Why did you go to Bridging the Gap? Aha. A couple of reasons. I mean, I've, I've told you, I work with accounting firms to provide data and this is kind of my kicking off point a little bit. So as of three weeks from when this is live, I will be full-time working on Big Four Transparency. I will not be employed anymore, which is scary, but exciting. And so, first of all, I think that really progressive firms are really good audience for Big Four Transparency in terms of what we offer from like a retention and hiring perspective, people who want to do better, be more competitive and benchmark their hours and like job satisfaction results and things like that against other firms. And then beyond that, like, I'm also a huge fan of the kind of more intimate setting. I much rather get to know 200 people than to have come across 1,000 people. Right. I think these are going to be much better connections. And a lot of people that I've spoken with previously, like there was like 10 people I had on my podcast that were at Bridging the Gap. So for me, like I was like, okay, like these are really people that I, I, I'm very eager to meet. So yeah, so that was kind of the choice for me was like, okay, I need to get in front of more people, find customers, but then also in doing so, I might as well go to the place where I might find customers, but I'm also going to meet all the people I really want to meet. So yeah. Also, this is, this is something that they did really, really well. Like we, we lost a great friend in Josh Lance. Yeah. And Randy and his team and everyone at Trimerit, like they had two days dedicated to Josh and a beautiful, you know, setting where his wife came and talked to the team or to the team, but yeah, I call it to the team, like to everybody there. And they, they were so tasteful and just perfect. And that's the kind of place that just fosters friendship. And we're all kind of looking for that at the end of the day. Yeah, no, it was, it was really magical. Yeah. So what I wanted to ask about bridging the gap for you as well is you presented there at an EOS panel, so entrepreneurial operating system. And you talked about how you implemented that at your firm and how that kind of impacted your day-to-day work and, and how it's transformed. So we've had Scotty Scrano on here previously who implemented EOS and talked about kind of how much free time he has and his lifestyle and all that. But we never really talked about it more concretely. And I really liked the way that you kind of shared that. So I'm curious to know essentially how did EOS change your firm and what were some of the major steps to get there? I mean, it fundamentally changed the firm because we didn't have a framework that was repeatable and that was like known and what we used to run the company. So that put it in and once the framework was put in, we followed it and we saw results. Go figure. So before it was, I won't say like dreading going to meetings, but like meetings, they lack the structure because you would, you would tend to use something that might've worked like quick intros, quick hits, you know, wins from the past, issues to solve and then you move on. But there was never really like a place to document whether it was a long-term issue or a priority or related to like moving the company in the right direction. And EOS was, I mean, there's, there's what, there's EOS, there's scaling up or scale up or something. Then there's pinnacle, like all these things that are popping up for firms, for businesses to sort of follow as a framework. And that's what I would recommend is picking one and sticking with it for a bit. If it aligns with the philosophy of what you're essentially hoping to address in your firm. So now we, you know, if we're going to the end of the game, it's two years later and we have weekly meetings that have, you know, focus, we have cascading messages across all the teams that are important. We have headlines that, you know, get shared in the appropriate times. You're just not blasting slack all the time. When you have something to share, you have a one-year plan that fits in with your three-year plan and every decision that you make in terms of what to create as rocks for every quarter, get you closer to the one-year plan. And of course things change, but that's the beauty of this. You can make changes as you go. And maybe a rock that in quarter one was getting, going to get you someplace. Maybe it wouldn't be something that you would have done next quarter because something changed, right? You lost half your clients, half your team, the economy's going to crap. Who knows? Like just stuff happens and then you're good to go. I should ask you though, it's starting to rain. So I live in the summers, I live in Nova Scotia and there's this like travel around thing and sometimes it rains. And when you're recording like this, it like sprinkles. Can you hear it at all? Cause it's super loud here. It's, it's very minor and it's actually kind of soothing. So I think, I think people listening will be okay with it. Yeah. I apologize everyone. No, no, no, no. And, um, okay. So, and to be clear, just in general, like EOS is essentially like a framework for you to, um, structure how you're managing your business and how you're thinking about kind of long-term goals, right? Or short-term issues. To be honest, to me, it means it's a framework that everybody can get behind. So they have expectations on how to deal with issues or how to lean into things that are working. So if I think about the most substantial things to come out of EOS for us, it's that we have a very clear accountability chart around the company of who's in charge of what we have a meeting cadence frequency of a week or every two weeks or every month, depending on the type of relationship that gets documented. So now we have two years with a documented meetings, right? We get to keep an issues list that if something is brought up, like you don't have to address it right away, you can just go on the list. And that is in itself an incredible feat because for years, I mean, what do people do? They keep a task list in their project management system, or they use an Asana to-do list, or they put it in a Google doc or something and they share it. And like the list just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And once we put this framework in and we did hire an implementer. So like I'm not using a lot of EOS terms that, you know, may not be familiar to people, but at the same time, like this, this implementers gentleman named Andrew, he did a fantastic job of reeling us in and teaching us the systems and calling us out when we were doing things that weren't working. And I'd highly recommend an implementer if you have the budget for it. Okay. And EOS like being implemented in your firm. So the way that like Scotty positioned it was that like it really freed him up. Like he was, you know, everything was on fire all the time and he was getting roped into everything versus he was able to really like step back and then sort of had the choice to either A, in his case, be a little bit less involved in the firm or B, like really focus on like strategy and like how to scale things continually. And so I view implementing EOS almost as like an alternative to calling it quits. Like if you need to sell the firm because you're so burnt out and things are going poorly, which I think is probably the case in a lot of like private equity deals that we're seeing right now. So like, what was it that like made you sort of like opt for this solution? Let's just all just listen to the rain for a little second. What made us go for, I mean, it was really funny. Like my business partner, Josh, he had heard about it from other people online. And like I had seen people talking about it on Twitter and saying like, oh, this is working for us. Anybody else try it? It's been around since traction's been out, like what, over 20 years or something. I forget. But it's been around for a long time. So what led us to, to implement it was that we recognized that we didn't have a structure that was moving us in a direction that was giving us consistent results. I think that's as simple as it is. When you notice you're not getting what you think you should, or you're working towards it, it's not happening. It's not happening. It's not happening. It's not happening. It's not happening. It's not happening. I think most people will look internally and say, how are the decisions that I'm making affecting this outcome? And if you're like, I don't know, or we're, we're lacking something. You go and you look for what other successful people are doing. And I wouldn't say that's what got us into coaching and like my business partner, Josh is really big into, into coaching and he is a great coach in a gentleman named Keith Hanna out in Calgary. And like that whole relationship started because you're just, you're taking introspective and you're trying to find out what you can learn from others. This was no different. It was like, again, EOS could have been any of the others. Just the fact that there is a framework to follow and it like, it sounds like it could benefit you. That's the part that interests us. And to be honest, we don't use EOS to a hundred percent scale. We pick things that make the most sense for us, which is the accountability chart, the vision traction organizer, the L10 meetings rocks. And that's kind of, it's kind of the big, the big elements. Everything else is, is okay. Like processes, marketing and things we'll eventually get there. But for now, I think just getting organized, you can do this with a great implementer and just a few key tools. Okay. Interesting. And then another, another element that you talked about during this kind of same presentation was how, where your firm is at today, you've sort of decided to de-prioritize growth, not necessarily pause growth, but just de-prioritize it and focus it on the things that are important to you. I'm really curious to know what was behind that decision because you hear so many people where it's just growth at all costs. Right. So I'm kind of curious to know, like someone who's actually made that hard choice, like what was going on in your, in your partner's heads at the time? I mean, it wasn't our, it wasn't in our heads. It was really like, what, what's happening to the business. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't our, it wasn't in our heads. It was really like, what, what's happening to the business. Right. I mean, it wasn't our, it wasn't in our heads. It was really like, what, what's happening to the business. The, the reality is like every firm has its own different path because everybody's different and this is a people business and whether or not you're figuring out pricing, whether you want subscription or value pricing or fixed pricing or hourly billing or budgeted hours or whatever, that's a whole decision. But it's also like very closely linked to how you capacity plan and make hiring plans and education plans and all that kind of stuff. So what wasn't working for us was that we were growing really fast, but not enough money was coming down into profit every year in order to invest in the things that were working. It was more like a hamster wheel of just paying for more people. And when you recognize that and it starts to dip because maybe you lose a few clients or you lose a few key employees, like this was probably when we were well over a hundred people, we're just like, this, this isn't working and something has to change. So that's when you look towards changing your business model, deciding if you want to sell versus invest back into the team. And what's really great is that like, well, we have like gone through processes to identify like debt and all kinds of other options for like figuring out what we can get for money to, to kind of bridge while we fix things. But like, you know what, if businesses like ours change every year to two years on average, in terms of what's working and what's not working, like we're obviously due for a really important conversation. And after making a few tweaks to the business without like the very large business model change that didn't work, we're like, you know what? Something big really does have to change. And what's kind of funny is that Josh and I were at an accounting event, an Expensicon over in Italy last year, last May. And during this time, we're like, something has to change. So we're sitting in this rental car driving from the East side of the country to the West side, back to Rome. And Josh is on a spreadsheet just coming up with things that I'm talking formulas from the drive. And we're just talking about ideas. And we kind of came up with this idea of budgeted hours. We're like, what if we just had rates? We knew exactly the size of the company. We knew what the maximum profit was and the minimum profit in order to run it is. And we get all of our clients on this model where they're paying the same rates, but everything they pay is directly related to the amount of time they use. And as long as you're not billing by the hour and you're estimating and watching time, that could work. Theoretically, it's like not fun. It's not fun at all. It's not sexy, like subscription-based pricing and value pricing, but it's sensible and it kind of works. So we worked really hard for a year to implement this budgeted hours process. And we had hundreds of calls with customers and switch them from, you know, fixed pricing before to more of like a fixed pricing under a budgeted hours model. And now we're on the other side of that a year and a bit later. And all of the things that you hoped would happen, happened. Very, very, very low resignation rates, like one in a year or more. There's way more profit, right? So all that money now helps pay off like stuff that happened in the past, but also is money that we can now put back into the team for benefits. And this is like a soliloquy and it's going really long, but I swear it's good. People are generally happy now and they know exactly what the opportunities are. We're very happy at 60 people. So there's the seven minute way of getting to your question of in order to do that, we had to stop taking on new clients. We had to focus on fixing what we had. Okay. Interesting. And what was the biggest change from changing that billing model? Was it identifying more out of scope work or having more reasonable evaluation on employees? Or what was the biggest impact of that one kind of pricing model change? The biggest impact was saving the business model, right? Because if the majority, if not all of people are paying the right rates and you've done your math right, you now have all this stability that you didn't have before. You're not focused on adding people or adding a ton of clients. You're more just replacing them. If you're at capacity, it gives you a very clear view of the inventory of hours you have to sell. So how many times in the first 12 years of owning the firm were we like, all right, let's go into sales mode and take a bunch of people on. And then all of a sudden one would be so heavy that it would take up 50% of somebody's capacity. And you're like, wait a minute, this is not right. Probably have to hire. And I know that's diminishing all of the capacity planning work we've done in the past. But it's a good reminder that the current state that you're in is not the best state that it'll ever be. There's always room for improvements. And when I kind of talk about what's working now for us, yes, there's profit. Yes, there's calmness. Yes, there's stability. And yes, there's clarity. Something's going to happen that we never saw before. And we're going to have to amend it. But I just see so many firms not try to protect their business model in the, I won't say in the vein of trying to become like, like you mentioned before, with Scott trying to like get out of the work. Like that was never really the purpose. It was have the right people do the right work. And if that just so happened for Scott that he's now out of the work, cool. That's great. Especially if he's sitting in the owner's seat or the top seat there. But for us, it was always just about matching the right people doing the right work. Which I can say confidently, like the majority of it is happening now like that, which is great. Yeah. So that's a good, good consequence of it. Yeah. And what was the right work for you personally? So I love speaking to customers before they sign on because there's, there's just something inherent about giving that person the confidence of like, yeah, been here 12, 12 years we've been doing this. Here's exactly how we see your relationship panning out. Oh, maybe I could connect you with some of these other customers. Or have you heard of this thing? This is up and coming. I just, I love that. I won't say informal ness, but the it's less rigorous than like the standard sales process you go through to become like a member of the customer. Whereas this is more just like, actually we're humans. This is what we're trying to build is what you're getting. And if we see something that might be a red flag for our team that I could kind of, I could uncover that maybe isn't part of a standard sales process. That's great. So I love still doing those last calls. And I know there's so many people that say in order to grow, you have to get away from founder led sales. That's probably true, but right now we're sitting at 60 people and it's completely manageable, especially if it's so enjoyable and maybe that's something that changes down the road. But for now, I'm super happy to do this for years. Interesting. Yeah. I really like the kind of more relationship based selling as well, where it's like, Hey, I'm getting on this call with you to find if this works. Because like, again, I've gotten on those calls with people. Like I've gotten on that call with Randy and it was like super quickly. Oh, your firm is super different. Actually. Nevermind. Right. And, and that then builds a lot of trust with this person because they're like, Oh, you kind of almost like denied me, not denied me service, but like denied continuing this process with me because you very quickly recognize like, this is not it. Right. And I think had, I tried to push on that, that would not be a good relationship going forward. Whereas now it's like, you know, I'm going to his conference and like, he's actually really someone I look up to in the industry and you know, that relationship stayed very good as a result of it. So I think that, you know, maybe it takes more time to pan out than if you're just trying to sell all the time to everyone. But I think that it definitely does come back to you in the end. So I love that. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. A topic on improving business model that we spoke about a little bit too, is like, there's a lot of like little things to change internally. And I know we spoke about automation being a big one of them. And it seems like a pretty, you know, passionate topic for you. So I'm curious to know like, what are some of the like automations or implementations that you've done that you would consider to have been, you know, the lowest hanging fruit? Like it had the greatest impact for the lowest amount of work required internally. Okay. So you're asking me specific ones. Okay. This is good. I remember when the, like I first started learning about make.com. It was IntegraMap back in the day. Yes. And we had this email account that was used for sending faxes. It was 10 bucks a month from a company. I'm not going to say who. I'm sure it was against some sort of terms of service. So we would use that email address and we would send all of the faxes through that thing, and that's how we would send stuff to the government. So for anybody that's listening that's not in Canada, you still have to do a lot of faxes. And all I did was create a form in JotForm. And now anytime that data goes through an automation, it sends from the same central email address, but with the right aggregating of all the PDFs and logging all of the faxes to check statuses and notifying the sender when something is successful or not, posting to Slack if there's an issue with that person's email address or something so somebody else can grab it. And that probably took the very first time, geez, probably hours to figure out. But once you get something like that in, you're like, oh, what else could be saved from having that one thing that you thought this is the process of what to do versus not? And that's what started the journey of meeting other friends in the area. I'd never known or heard of Jason Stats before until his email list started coming out. I'm like, who's this dude talking about tech and accounting in 2018 or 2019 or whatever it was? And this is actually kind of cool. I'd like to be his friend. And that's when you start reaching out. And fast forward to today, Jason and I did three seasons of a podcast called Automation Town. He's now doing his Jason Daly thing and kicking butt doing that. And in a week, which is August 6th or something like that, I'll be launching a fully committed automation and AI education community just for accountants and bookkeepers and ops people so they can go in and find their fax solution for their firm. And that was a great segue. I didn't plan on that, but thanks for asking. That worked out well. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the big, big values from a community like that is a lot of people have this self-limiting belief that, oh, no, I'm an accountant. I can't do automation. I can't do webhooks. I can't do any of that. And to that, I really think that seeing some practical examples, like Blake Oliver talks about this too a lot. Jason Satz talks about this a lot. But once you build that first automation, you talked about with that fax process, you kind of realize some of these are really not that hard to do. And a big piece of it is eliminating that self-limiting belief and just being able to move on from that and then feeling comfortable exploring these things. And they'll break, but that's fine because when it breaks, you're just at the starting point where you were anyways. And you learn a lot in doing so. So while that fax example might only be one thing, one process, I mean, first of all, it probably did the output of a whole admin to your company. So that's super important. But then I think it also was just like your bridge into realizing you can do these things, right? Yeah. And one of my favorite stories is with a woman named Pam, still works with us, does great work on the bookkeeping team. And for the better part of 12 years, we were zero only as a firm. Recently, this July, we launched our QuickBooks arm. So we're excited to get into that. But when we were on zero, for the majority, well, for every client, Pam needed to adjust things that had already had payments on them. And in zero, you can't avoid something that has a payment associated with it. So back then, so right now we got entirely went in front of her and was like, actually, we could run an automation where it grabs all the stuff and then unapplies the payment, marks all the payment details temporarily, voids or amends the invoice, depending on what you want to do to it. And then reapplies the payment with the original details. And then you could either market as reconciled or not through the API. And I'm thinking, do I bring this up to her and, and just build it for her and let it go? Or do you want to see if she's interested? And it turned out she was incredibly interested. And this started changing her mind around how she looks at problems. And then for the next four months, she's messaging me saying, hey, could we do this thing? I think this would save a bunch of time. Nice. Yes. And that brings up a whole other problem of prioritization and what do you actually work on? But I love that it makes people think differently about the work that doesn't need to be done manually in order to enjoy your work as an accountant. So to your point, there's a ton of opportunity to enjoy accounting work through automation. And I'm a big believer that you still have to operate in a great business model in order for that calmness and the opportunities to present themselves. But once you're past that and you can start leaning into automation, by all means, your work's going to be so much more fun if you have the right support network. And that's why the community is there, because we all don't have that one person in the firm that knows all this stuff. And just by reaching out and seeing what other people are building or becoming friends with them, who knows where that takes your career or the type of work you work on. Yeah, I find it really unfortunate that a lot of firms where I hear about this secondhand, but either way, don't necessarily have that instinct that you had to say, hey, Pam, like, why don't we kind of take a look at this tool and see what we can do? Do you have any sense of like, why that's the case? Like, are people just too overwhelmed with all the client work and the chaos to stop and take a breather and do that? I think a lot of it comes down to exposure. So like, as an accountant, you don't have a ton of exposure to tech solutions from a purely tech perspective. Like you said, I didn't know what a webhook was until I was like, 37 or 38 years old. No idea as an accountant. Most accountants don't, same as bookkeepers, same as payroll people. You're not part of that world typically. So if you don't know it, you don't know that that could be a possible solution. And typically the tech person in the firm is busy either working on computer stuff or security stuff or special projects, and they're not really trying to work on the how can I make work better types of problems. They're more like putting out fires. So I think the answer to the question is they lack exposure to inspiration. I don't know. Does that land with you or is that completely off? No, I think that does make sense. I do think a lot of people are not consuming content in the space. Again, I think when you're just so overwhelmed with workload or whatever it may be, you don't take the time to explore what else is going on in the industry. Something that was really, really shocking to me is there's a partner at Deloitte that I really, really look up to from my time there. And he's a real people person, knows everyone. But when I started creating here, we stayed in touch and I talked to him about some of the people I'd had on the podcast and things like that. And he hadn't heard of anyone at all, like Blake Oliver, the accounting podcast, Jason Satz, things like that. And I think a lot of it is when you're, especially in these big firms, you kind of end up in a little bit of a bubble. I got a conversation with Seth Feinberg at Bridging the Gap about why is it that there's no large firm people here? I mean, I guess there were some people from Aprio, but that was it. At the conference, and he was kind of talking about all the huge firms, they kind of host their own conference and you end up in this sort of siloed echo chamber, which is fine. They do provide you with real good education, but I think it does definitely narrow your horizons in terms of what you're looking at and what you understand the role or the confines of the role of a CPA to be. And I think that that's a shame. I think more people should try to explore things that are out there. And it's just something that there's not an obvious solution to either. A lot of people only consume content about being a CPA through the big four account and meme accounts and things like that, which is fine. It's super entertaining and it's interesting, but there is a lot more that's deeper that you can kind of get into. And there's these niche communities and things like that. And you might really find someone that you look up to in a huge way that might help you shape your career by doing so. And it's just- And you're getting into a completely new line of work, right? You're moving away from FP&A and analysis and CFO work to owning a data company. How crazy is that? Did you ever think that that would happen 10 years ago? No, really not. And it was entirely, again, because of exploration. And I was on Reddit and Fishbowl and I noticed this topic kept coming up. And so I was like, I'll build this quick fix for it. It's not going to be too hard. It's going to take me a weekend. And here we are today. And then once I got launched into that, I was like, oh my God, I don't know what I'm doing. There was no business model for two full years. And that's where I had to find influences to be able to learn what I was doing. And I'm still looking for the perfect fit of someone who's really done the exact same path. But you can really find everything out there. I was like, oh, I wonder if this exists. And I came across levels.fyi. And so I listened to every single podcast these guys have ever done. Because again, I learned so much from them. And yeah, I wish more people sort of had that instinct because I think a lot of the challenges that we're having of some people feel very unfulfilled in their work. And it's like, that doesn't have to be the case. You can educate yourself to find a way to automate those things that you find boring and then focus on higher level work. It's another shout out to Bridging the Gap. This is not like a Bridging the Gap commercial, but it does help bring people that want to think that way into this. I'd always gone to conferences and been like, why can't someone do something so detailed that people were like, I'm actually here for the detailed presentation instead of the high level stuff. And Randy was one of the first people to say, yes, you can stand up on stage and build a live automation based off of what the audience votes on. Good luck. Amazing. And yes, the internet went down. And yes, we had to bribe people with chocolate bars from Canada to make it work. But it's a great testament to Randy being like, yes, let's try it. And as long as we're all just keeping on trying things, we're not going to fall into the same traps that our predecessors have of stagnant companies where people don't want to work there. It's going to be massive shifts over the next decade. Who knows what those are going to be perfectly. But if we can make small changes that make work a little bit more enjoyable, whether it's through that business model or a little bit of automation or something, something else, we're better off for it. So thanks. Yeah. Yeah, I absolutely agree. And for people who are within the realm of automation, looking for that good influence, make sure you check out Automation Town. I'll be linking it in the podcast show notes. I think the actual release will be a week after this airs, but keep it in mind. I think having those good influences can be very transformative. And even if you don't necessarily own the business, I think being the person who can champion that internally can be absolutely huge for your career. And then, I mean, as well, just for your own learning, right, you can automate things. And then with that time, hopefully focus on either higher leverage or work that you find more interesting. And then you can kind of boost yourself up that way as well. So I think for people at all levels, this is this is really good to consider. And so, yeah, make sure to link that in the show notes. And thank you so much for coming on, Chad. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks. And for everybody that made it to the end, please reach out on LinkedIn. Say hi. We would love to meet. I think that's where we meet all of our friends. And it's definitely fun when it works. So looking forward to connecting. And thanks for having me on, Don. And thanks for stopping and talking to the lonely guy sitting in the chair late at night in the hallway. That was really nice of you. I'm glad it worked out. No problem. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Don.