Ryan Bakke’s Secrets to Scaling to $3M+ in 4 Years with Copywriting

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Hello, and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I'm joined today by Ryan Bakey, founder of Tax Strategy 365. Welcome to the pod, Ryan. Thank you for having me, Dominic. It's been awesome. Yeah, my pleasure. So what really caught my eye about you is a post on Twitter, I guess, X, talking about firm growth. And I've learned some pretty amazing things about you since. But what caught my eye initially is it seems like you basically started your firm in 2021. And then by 2024, you were doing just over $3 million a year in revenue and had grown 100% or more year over year, give or take. What are you doing differently? That's incredible. If I had to boil it down to one sentence, I would say sales and marketing or marketing and sales. The problem with a lot of accountants is we're so niche and specialized in what we do. And we go to school to learn one thing. And even though accounting is the language of business, like our professors told us and mostly everybody else, if you don't know how to sell, there is no business. Because the person who can make the customer walk in the door should be getting paid the most amount of money. The CEO doesn't exist, the accounting team, there is no finance team, there is no HR, there's no marketing. The person who makes a customer walk in the door is going to make the most amount of money. And I feel like that's what I've mastered or specialized in is using what's called direct response marketing to acquire customers. And if we dig into that a little bit more, I was really interested in copywriting for a little bit. So I read a lot of direct response type marketing things. So historically, that would have been pamphlets delivered in the mail. What does that direct response marketing look like today? Well, direct response is always, it's more of like you let the customer tell you what they want. See, the problem with a lot of even accountants, business owners, is we have an idea of what our prospect or customer wants. So then we put together these packages based on what we think that they want, when in reality, we should just ask our prospects or our customers what they actually want. You'd be surprised at what they say. And then direct response to me looks like, okay, let's say there's a forum post or somebody posts a question on Facebook about needing help. If you can be there to provide them value, give them a good response, provide them value, they're likely to want to work with you. It goes back into something that I call, that's in my five laws of marketing called the law of reciprocity. And if you give value to people without asking for anything in return, they're more likely to want to return the favor to you. And so that's, I pretty much built an entire business just on, um, I remember this is even back when I was still a big four, I would set a timer on my phone for 20 minutes and I would just go on these Facebook groups and answer people's questions about tax, real estate tax. And it was never like, oh, DM me or call me at this number or email me. I would just answer the question, provide a lot of value and people would naturally want to message me and, um, work with me. Yeah. Yeah. You're not the first person to say that, um, Brandon Hall talks about that too. How like, you know, another huge name in like real estate tax, how, um, early on a lot of his traction and like interest in what he was doing was just kind of these forums where he was answering questions for free. Um, same for me even really like I built up like a decent book of business. Nothing like yours, but in the crypto space after I had left Deloitte, it was just like a side hobby. And I literally picked up every single client just from like answering a couple of questions online. And it was never like, I never even wanted to do crypto tax work. It was just like, I'd answer questions and then eventually people were like, dude, I really, really, really want to work with you on this. Right. And you've gained their trust. So, um, that's an interesting like thread to kind of tie together because again, a lot of people got their starts that way. And I think it's also a good way for you to build confidence, right? Like because as you answer people correctly and correctly, and it's like, okay, this is awesome. Like this works. And then where you talk about like how you do marketing differently. I just went to your website, tax strategy 365, also very different to most firm websites. Um, a lot more aligned. The page is just a VSL and it's taken from, it's taken from, uh, you know, OG direct response marketers. So that, and, um, I wanted to say something before I go into this, but the, I picked a niche that I understood and that I love. Like I just genuinely loved real estate tax. I mean, I, my first job was at an accounting firm. I prepared two returns. One was for a married couple that made 200 K W two. And then another return, um, was for this guy who owned like 18 apartment buildings in Chicago. And he was single and he paid less than taxes than the married couple. And I thought I was going to get fired. Like I asked my boss, what did I do wrong? And he goes, no, no, it's because he invests in real estate. And so I've always had this in the back of my head, like real estate's probably the number one path to build wealth. And then I started buying my own rental properties. I bought my first house with an FHA loan. I lived in one side running out the other. I actually got paid to buy that house because I was able to negotiate seller credits. And then as well as, um, I was able to use the tax benefits to save six grand on taxes. Um, but what I wanted to say about that is if you really know the lingo and the problems that your customers face outside of tax, right, they, they'll, they know if you know what you're talking about, because I can, I can go toe to toe with anybody about real estate and talk about, you know, debt service, cap rates, um, exit strategy, like refinancing, all these complicated terms. But if you don't know how to do that in your niche, they'll sniff you out right away. It reminds me of, um, my grandma, she grew up, uh, 13, she had 13 or 13. It was her and 12 other siblings. She grew up on a farm and sometimes we would go visit that farm when I was younger and she used to tell me, she goes, Ryan, you know, um, horses and donkeys when they're young, they look a lot alike when they're first born, but you can really tell a donkey from a horse when it opens its mouth because it goes, you know? And so if, if you don't know what you're talking, like if you're trying to go in the crypto space and do crypto tax and you don't know about, you know, um, what do they call it? Staking or, you know, swapping or whatever the lingo is. See, I don't even know. You could sniff me out right away if you don't know that, then, then don't expect to play in that sandbox. But if you can really understand and beyond just tax, but understand your client avatar, they will trust you because it's, well, not only can he provide me value from the tax angle, but he or she can look at my portfolio from a different perspective that no other accounting person can, no other CPA or EA can, right? Yeah. Yeah. So are you doing advisory as well with this firm or it's really kind of like primarily tax? Yeah. I mean, most of it stems off, uh, tax, right? But in order to give a really good tax strategy, we have to make sure that our clients are aligned and like headed in the right direction. So yeah, you can save a boatload of money on taxes by doing X, Y, Z thing here. But would we rather save this amount of money in taxes this year or, Hey, you got $400,000 in that property of equity and it's only making you 10 grand a year. Well, math says you actually should sell that property, get rid of it and go buy something that can, that can get you 50 or $60,000 a year in cashflow. So that's kind of how we help advise our clients. I wouldn't say it's full blown advisory. We're definitely not picking out properties for people or underwriting deals for people, but we'll just say, Hey, look, like this property doesn't have as good of returns as what industry standard is from what we can tell from our other clients. If you want to go back into the direct response marketing, I mean, my landing page on my website is a playbook from original direct response copy. So direct response copy, if you've ever read like an ad or you've ever read, even those old infomercials, it always starts at the top of the headline. You're calling out exactly who you want to work with, attention, real estate investors. It's no different than those commercials they used to sell where it's like, attention, if you're 65 and over and you have mesothelioma, you're entitled to compensation, right? Yeah. 90% of the world watching that doesn't give a shit, sorry, my language. But if you're 65 and over and you have mesothelioma, you're watching the damn commercial. Or like if, you know, I've seen some weird ones where it's like, Oh, if you work at this factory in 1996 that had asbestos, like you're entitled to, it's like 99.9% of people in the world, doesn't matter to them. But if you're that 0.1% that worked at that factory in 1997 that has asbestos, like you're paying attention. And so that's the headline. It's just, it's calling out exactly who you want to work with, right? So you've got the headline, you might have a little sub headline. So the sub headline, it gets a little bit more detailed of like, Hey, if you're making a real estate investors, if you have five properties or more, right? So it's not just real estate investors, but I want to call out exactly who I want to work with. Because by calling out and saying who you want to work with, it's also telling the entire world who you don't want to work with. Because when you're, when you're starting out and you're growing your firm, especially when you cut ties with any sort of W-2 employment, you need to put food on the table and you're trying to drive revenue. Well, the problem or the mistake that a lot of people make is they'll just take on any and every work to get food on the table and bills paid when they're not taking on their ideal client. So you want to make sure you're taking on only your ideal client, because otherwise you're just going to get bogged down. You're going to do work, you're going to do five hours of work for somebody paying you $1,000 and then you're going to do five hours work for somebody paying you $5,000 and you're like, what the heck? Spending the same amount of time on both people, one of us paying me five times more. Yeah. So for people listening here, I've never really recommended or pushed you to go do something on your browser while you're there, but I'm going to link the website and I would really recommend people go check it out because this, again, this looks very different to your typical firm website. But again, I also have that interest in direct marketing, copywriting. And to me, this makes me actually want to spend the rest of the day reworking some of my landing pages. But it's very different. There's screenshots of Facebook group messages. There's screenshots of messages like that, serving as social proof, which is really different, but very, very effective from a marketing perspective. We've over the last maybe 15, 10 years grown really accustomed to like all these like cutesy landing pages and things like that, where it's like ultra clean, ultra pure. And this is kind of like a different form of marketing, but obviously is very, very effective. Yeah. And if you're watching this or reading this or listening to this and you have one of those landing pages, you have to tell yourself, do I want my landing page to look good and cutesy and artsy and appealing to everybody? Or do I want to make money? Because these landing pages, the way that I have it formatted, make money. They are designed to call out attention, tell you exactly who I want to work with. It goes into the pains and the emotion and the fear that our audience is dealing with on a day to day basis or our prospect. And then it gives them an easy, easy way to move forward. Go pop it up on mobile and notice where the button is at. Go type it in on mobile and notice where the button's at. Checking it out right now. Hold your phone like this. Where's the button at? Where's the button at? Oh, sorry. I get it. Like while I'm typing bottom right. Where's your thumb at compared to where the button's at? It's literally like where your thumb is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All they got to do is click. Yeah. So this is like ultra, ultra optimized. Click to book a call. I like that a lot. And I will say like, it might depend a little bit on who your customer base is. I think this is probably most effective for who your customer base is, which is real estate investors. Whereas again, if you're trying to attract tech companies, like looking and sounding and feeling more like their types of marketing might be good. But mentally, this is proven to work with how kind of people's brains are wired. So that's really cool, man. I really, really like that. I want to dig into your first year of, I mean, I guess your second year of growth. So from 2021 to 2022, when you're running this firm, you went from no employees and just under $100,000 in revenue to four employees and almost $900,000 in revenue. You post all this on X, by the way. I'm not like leaking your numbers to the world. So just so people know here, that's crazy. So you 9x revenue in your second year. And so there's a ton of people doing this with $100,000 in revenue who are like, I'm going to make a really ambitious goal for next year. And that goal looks like $180,000 in revenue, right? We're not talking the same game here. So what were you doing? And was that your goal starting off was to pursue that really, really rapid growth? Man, I remember that first year I did $100,000. And that was actually, I was one foot in, one foot out at Big 4 at the time. So that was doing $100,000 part-time for the most part. I left Big 4 January 2022. And then I spent that entire year of 2022. That was when I did that $800,000 year. And I remember I was... So when you become a CPA at the Big 4, they give you a CPA bonus, right? And at Deloitte, it was $5,000. And as long as you stayed there for 2 years, you got to keep the bonus. Well, I was 21 months in to my 24 months because I started in June of 2020. So I needed to stay until June of 2022 in order to keep the bonus. Maybe I was 4 or 5 months short when I left. And I remember telling myself, man, maybe I should just stay. $2,500 was a lot of money at the time because my salary was only $65,000. And so I knew, okay, if I don't leave now, they're just going to dangle another carrot, and they're going to give you a raise or a promotion or a bonus, and they're going to keep you sticking around. At the time, I didn't have any kids and I wasn't tied down. I still don't have any kids. But I had to come out of pocket for $2,500, right? And I almost let that get in the way of $800,000 in revenue, $1.6 million, $3 million. Because we live our lives in what if? The fear of what if this goes wrong? What if it doesn't work out? But nobody's ever there to tell you what if it was better than you ever imagined. And that's what it was for me. And there's studies that show psychologically that if $10 falls out of your pocket, you have to find $50 for it to make up for that emotional damage. I know it sounds weird, and we're all math people here, but it's like $10 versus $50. But that was me writing that check. I almost let $2,500 get in the way of all that growth and all that income and life goals. But at one point, you have to decide and take the chance. My buddy is a commercial airline pilot. He invited me to fly a plane one day. I'm like, hell no, but I'll watch, right? He goes, yeah, the big major thing is when the plane's on the runway, it's got to be going at least 140 miles an hour for it to take off. But otherwise, if it hits 140 miles an hour, it either crashes and burns into the wall, or it takes off. And you have to decide, if you're going so fast, you have to decide if like, are we going to crash and burn? Are we going to take off? But the problem a lot of people have is they never reach. And that's called the point of no return. And in airplane school, it's called the point of no return. Because you're either going to go into whatever's in front of you, or you're going to take off. But a lot of us, a lot of people are not going fast enough in order to take off, right? Nobody's feet are getting put to the fire, right? And I always tell people, I mean, if you have a year's worth of savings, and let's say you're a manager, you're a senior, your worst case scenario is your current reality. Because if you leave and go try to do it and try it out and it doesn't work out, just go get another job after a year. Maybe not at the same firm, definitely not at the same firm, but you can go get another job. And so that's just a little motivational thing. Because this is what was going in my head that three years ago, if I had somebody that would just slap me and tell me to do it sooner, I wish I would have done it sooner. But most of that growth, I remember telling myself, I'm like, man, I really only need to net like 150. If I can maybe gross 180, 190, be super lean, net 150, I'll be okay. To me, that would be a success. Because I'd be clearing six figures when I leave 23, 24. Yeah, 23. I never knew it would grow that quickly, but a lot of it came from a lot of the direct response stuff that I was doing. Facebook groups, Reddit groups, posting social media content. We didn't even talk about content and how it can really build trust with your audience. So it got to the point where people were just... I would get on sales calls with people and I have these sayings that I talk about. Like I've used tons of analogies and stories already today, but I have some of these sayings where I'll say something and people will finish my sentence before I even finish it myself. And if you have people that are finishing what you're saying, there's 100% chance that they close and become a customer. Yeah. Well, I think that we consume a lot of the same content because a lot of the stuff you were saying, I was like, oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the whole burning the boats analogy and stuff like that. And before we move on from that topic, yeah. I think the general population of accountants is relatively risk averse. There's a little bit of a selection bias of why do I go into this versus someone who maybe picked finance, right? Finance, I think, is very much a degree where either you make it or you break it, make it or you break it, where there's some pretty crazy outcomes out there. But I think on average, the average person is probably doing a little bit less well than an accountant or than someone following the CPA route. But then on the flip side, CPA is like, there's a lot less variability, but you're going to do well, right? And so I think there's a selection bias, which is towards a little bit of risk aversion. And so that makes it harder for people to go out, go and take those risks. And it is hard because a lot of people who will acclimate to a lifestyle of like, okay, I'm making $130,000, I need $125,000 to maintain my lifestyle. And it's like, well, that's pretty hard to do. And I ended up falling into that a little bit with Big Four Transparency too. When I left, I was like, damn, this is hard because I'm used to a pretty good income. I had moved to FP&A in tech. And sometimes having that job that's just good enough like, yeah, it's going to keep you in a place that you shouldn't be and is going to prevent you from going out and taking that risk. So I really applaud you for going and jumping and going through that whole kind of mentality. I think that that's so important. What were you surrounded by? Like, what kind of helped you make those choices? Are you like from a family of entrepreneurs? Did you just start consuming all of that kind of content? Do you have like a friend group who's entrepreneurial? Or did that all just come from within? No, my dad actually just retired last year. He was an electrician for 40 years. And the cold Chicago winters most of the time. And I remember coming back home from school with a good math score when I was 12 or 13 years old. And he was like, oh, great. He goes, you're going to get to work with your brain. And so you're back in your hands like I did. And so I always knew I was going to be some type of desk job employee, not having to work outside and the temperatures are with my hands. So I never really wanted to let my dad down, so to speak. But no, none of them were entrepreneurs. And that's what I was getting at every step of the way. I had to stop telling my family that I bought a rental property or I'm leaving my job. I think my wife didn't even know or her parents didn't know I left for like three or four months. Damn. Like they would have been like, your was a fiance? Yeah. They're like, they're going to be like, your fiance's crazy. Like, why would he leave a big for the number one accounting firm in the world? And that's what I wanted to get into about my backstory. Because I went to a small Christian college and we had four accounting majors total, entire graduating class, right? Like 50 people in the business department, four accounting majors. And like, if you could went to U of I or Penn State or Alabama or all these big schools, like Deloitte is pitching tents at these schools, whereas we have to fall our way into Deloitte. And I remember getting in that being the level set for me. It's like, okay, well now because I got in and I get my CPA, I'm going to be on the same level as somebody that took a hundred grand and went to University of Iowa or something like that or whatever. And I just... So I got the job and something about me that I think has really helped me is I've always been grateful for what I have, but never complacent. Like I'm always trying to knock down doors and barriers that I never knew existed to begin with. Because we only can want what we know and we can only know what we can see that's in front of us. So imagine like you're outside at a park and you can see like buildings or you could see the park or you could see trees, you could see kids playing. That's all that you can see, at least for now. So you can only want what you can see. Well, if you put yourself in a different situation or in a different mindset or different location, then you're opening yourself up to doors that you never even knew were possible to break. Like breakthroughs that you never even knew. And I still remember on my Snapchat, the stories of like the first time I hit 10 grand a month, 30, and then it was like, oh wow, 30 grand a month, 50 grand a month. I remember the first time I did 100 grand a month. And then recently I just had my first $500,000 a month. And it's like, holy... You have no idea what doors you'll be able to break down and new ones appear and you just keep figuring out how to get past them. But... So when you, when you started this, like, where you call in your shot of like, I'm going to build the firm to do like millions, or like you were literally like, I think I can get this past one 50 a year of in revenue. The first year I was just like, Hey, if I can make it one 50, I'm good. Yeah. But I just never see, that's the thing. If I told myself what I won 50 and I made one 50 and I was good, I would have been complacent and I probably would have stalled around three or 400 K a year. See, there's two types of people in this world. Cause I have, I have friends and we both know people that let's say they need five grand a month to live, right? Five grand a month covers their bills, groceries, rent, a little bit of investing. I have friends that figure out how to make 500 bucks an hour and they're like, great. I only need to work 10 hours a month. I figured out how to make 500 bucks an hour. And I'm like, how do I work a hundred hours a week? Right. Two different types of people. Not saying one is better than the other. I'm just saying it's two different types of people. Um, you know, uh, this is really bad to say on this podcast, but you know, my, my mentor, he said, he goes, look, in every relationship, you're either a princess or a prostitute and you gotta decide you. And if you don't know which one you are, you're probably the prostitute. It's funny, right? Like you're either calling your own shots or you're letting somebody control your destiny. You know, there's a guy who is a, at Deloitte for like 19 years, senior manager, hasn't got promoted a partner. You know, he left, he left to go to RSM, spend three years there, senior manager, never made partner, came back to Deloitte, still not a partner to this day, like, are you going to control your own destiny or are you going to let somebody else control it for you? You got to decide that. Yeah. No, I, I liked that a lot, man. And, uh, so back to the content piece, when you were talking about, uh, you know, we didn't even talk about content yet. Um, so it feels to me like if, you know, initially you were like, okay, I think this can get to, you know, making me 150 a year and it actually just exploded. It feels like you kind of found product market fit basically in that year, right? Where to break your frame to that degree and to like over-perform what the goal in your head was by that much. It seems like people were chasing you down to do work with you. And so from that, that's got to come from something scalable. Like that's not you going and shaking hands one-on-one. And so like, where were you creating content and what do you think it is that like really clicked to make that all happen? It was, um, so there's, there's two different types of content. There's like, we call it just short form. So it's more of like attention grabbing. So I might do a 30 to 45 second reel, um, which follows a very similar format to these landing pages, right? You got a hook, uh, which a lot of people, their understanding of a hook is it hooks them in and reels them and it grabs their intention. That's not a hook. The perfect hook, as soon as they listen or read that a million questions go in their head, right? So I was helping, uh, I was helping a friend. She teaches, uh, she teaches multilingual kids, like kids that grew up in multilingual, you know, especially in Chicago, it's like super common in Chicago, right. And I'm helping her build this just passion, passion of mine. Right. And she goes, yeah. You know, one of the interesting things is like a lot of multilingual kids get misdiagnosed with ADHD or, or sometimes even worse or, um, you know, symptoms or worse or diseases, but they don't even have those diseases. It's it's, they're just multilingual and it takes them a little while to understand what's going on. And so at a young age, the school system labels them as ADD or ADHD and it puts them in a silo, right? So then these kids grow up their entire life with a disease, thinking that they have a disease that they don't even have. And I'm like, I got the perfect headline for that, you know? And so you, you might say like, Hey, uh, 37% of ADHD diagnosis are actually misdiagnosis because you have a multilingual kid. And so if I'm a parent that has a kid that has multi, you know, that's multilingual, I'm listening is, is my kid going to get misdiagnosed with ADHD? Did they already get misdiagnosed with ADHD? It's that hook. It's a million questions run through the prospect's mind, right? Um, Hey, uh, investors who do a lot of fixing and flipping, here's why you're getting screwed on taxes. Am I getting screwed on taxes? I fix and flip a lot. How am I losing money? I thought investing in real estate was the best way to save money on taxes. Well, it keeps them in their seat and it keeps them around, you know, that short form. It's, it's no different than Hollywood. Hollywood's mastered this. If you ever go and watch a movie, um, I, the best example of this, if you've ever, if you guys ever seen baby driver came out like late 2010s, I think early to be, yeah, but it starts off the Ansel Angort, I think the main character, I'm terrible with celebrities, by the way, don't, don't ask me any celebrities. I think his name is Ansel Angort. Movie starts off. He's whipping out of the bank. They're in a getaway car going full speed. You're sitting there watching the movie. Like what, what's going on? What, like they didn't introduce any characters. They didn't introduce this plot. They didn't introduce anything. Obviously the book is called, or the movie's called getaway driver, but you don't know anything. It keeps you glued to your seat and it keeps you wanting more. That's why these movies, when they start off, you have no, there's no background. There's no, um, they don't explain it to you because they know that people are glued to the seat because they want to hear the ending. Right. We call, and, um, you know, in sales and persuasion, we call that open loop, closed loop. So like when I said earlier, we haven't gotten into the content thing yet. And I talked 15 minutes about something completely different. That was an open loop. And now I'm closing the loop because you want to learn more about content. Right. Um, and so see what I'm doing. So the short form, it's more like attention grabbing and it attracts followers. Yeah, it can prove your expertise, but what really converts right now in direct response marketing is long form content. If you can get them listening to a 20, 30 minute podcast of yours, um, hell, if you can do a one hour masterclass or some type of training, man, the conversion on that is sky high because people need to give you their time before they give you their money. I don't care what you do. People need to give you their time before they're ever going to give you your money. Now, a lot of people are like, oh, well, you know, the millionaires that I want to work with, they don't have any time. Yes, they do. I've had people who have a $10 million net worth sit on a three and a half hour webinar of mine because they want to learn how to save money on taxes. So don't tell me that they don't have time. I guarantee you they do. Um, people need to give you their time before they give you their money. That's why, um, you know, the greatest example of this is timeshare companies. So if you guys ever gone on a vacation and you get the whole timeshare pitch, I've had that happen many times. Um, the one thing that they know is there's going to be 50 people in that room at the start of the meeting and two and a half hours in, there's going to be five people, but guess what? They know that those five people are going to buy because they're still there because they gave their time and you need to give time before they ever give you money. So that to me, that's what long form does is that it nurtures, it's, um, it holds their time like, and really what it does is what's called a suspension of belief. So it suspends your audience's belief long enough because a lot of people, when they get on a sales call, they're already, they're already committing before they get on the call to say, no, they're like, I'm not going to buy it. I'll get on the call, but I'm not going to buy. Right. And as marketers and like salespeople, we have to, um, how do I say it? We have to diffuse that. We have to turn off the, no part of the brain. Okay. So if you ever studied the brain, you know, you have the conscious mind, the subconscious, you have what's called the lizard brain, like the reptilian brain, you know, lizard brain basically is like, um, can I eat it? Can it eat me? Or can I sleep with it? That's all that, uh, like old school is your brain thinks, right? Um, it's fight or flight type of thing. Right. But then the, the part of the brain that like rationalizes and like thinks about things, that's the part of the brain that actually makes decisions. So we have to turn off this, um, no part of the brain that I call it and get in the part of the back of the brain where somebody can actually make a decision. Right. Um, and there's, like I said, there's tons of ways to do this. I would, I could teach an hour or two hours on this, but you know, you guys should check out some of my, um, I don't really push content for accountants so hard because to be honest, I'm just so busy doing it myself that I don't want to give away all my secrets just yet. But, um, no, there's some crazy stuff. And I think, I think the code that I've cracked is OG direct response marketing mixed with CPA firms. Cause no CPAs know how to do direct response right now, at least. Yeah, there's a few unique crossovers. So if right now, you know, I'm a, I'm a manager, I'm working at UI. I'm like, eh, I don't love this, whatever. And I think that, you know, this type of marketing and like this type of knowledge that you're sharing with us is the way to go. What are like the three resources? I only got time for three. I'm going into busy season, but I want to be free after busy season. Right. So what are those three resources that you're pointing me to? Man, if you've ever get your hands on some Dan Kennedy stuff, if you ever heard of Dan Kennedy, he's like the godfather of direct response marketing. So, um, no BS magnetic marketing book. Uh, he's got a, there's a podcast out that he has of just, I mean, these are some conversations and recordings from early two thousands, you know, 2010s, early 2010s, but the thing is, is nothing ever changes when it comes to marketing. Cause it's all based on human psychology and how people interact. That's why the Billy Mays guy ran the same damn commercial for 30 years in a row before he passed away. Right. Billy Mays here with the quickest, cleanest, cheapest way to clean your toilet or whatever. Right. And you know, if you buy within the next 48 hours, you're going to get this, this, this, and this, you know, if you call it the next, whatever, you're going to get that, that, that, that, that none of it changes. Um, so Dan Kennedy is a great resource. Uh, I like, uh, you know, Alex Ramosi, a hundred million dollar offers. Great book. So, but that's just a part of it. Right. So you got to understand any business. I don't care if you're selling hot dogs or if you're selling an account, if you're doing accounting, you need traffic, which is marketing. So you need to learn how to drive traffic. Right. Um, you need to, you need to offer, like you need to learn how to sell it. So you got marketing traffic, offer sales, and then fulfillment, which is process. Right. And so you need to productize it. So there's, there's different analogies there like traffic. Um, you want to find a starving crowd because if, if you and I open up a hot dog stand and you know, what would you, what would you do to your hot dog stand to make it better than mine? You know, would you add more condiments? Would you add more Coke and a fries with it? Would you have a bigger sign? No, you will your, you will your hot dog cart in front of a job site where they just got out of work and they're starving. Right. You gotta have a starving crowd when it comes to marketing. Cause if that's the case, then it's just going to attract more people that need what you sell. And then you have, like I said, you have a good offer, which is sales, and then you have fulfillment, which is process. Um, you know, when I think about process and fulfillment, there's, there's ways that it's always been done and then there's always room for improvement. You know, if you guys ever get a good, a good thing to read is the autobiography of Henry Ford and the documentary as well. Um, there's a, there's a quote in there. He goes, um, if I were to listen to the opinions of other people, I would have built a faster horse. He says that in the, in the, um, I don't know if it's the movie or the book, but like what's been done before in the past in terms of like accounting and how it's done, it doesn't have to be the same. Like my model is a community first model. So I'm getting people used to like interacting with each other. Like they get one-on-one time with our staff, but they're getting used to interacting with other real estate investors. So it's building community and it's building bond and it makes them stickier. Um, you know, and, and every community has what a leader, right? It's no, it's very similar to like old school Colt building. Like the Colt, um, you know, has its frameworks. It has its ideologies and then it has a leader that they kind of follow after. Right. Um, and if you have this community-based framework with whatever you're doing, whether it's real estate, crypto, you know, small business, like you're going to keep clients for a long time. Yeah, man, I, uh, yeah, I'm going to probably spend the rest of my day on, on some landing pages here. I really, I really, really like the style of what you're doing. It's very different. Um, and clearly it is working. Um, I had one last question for you. So you being, you say you're 26, I believe. Yeah. How, how do you handle that dynamic? Like, I assume you're probably hiring some like senior managers and managers out of other firms and stuff like that, who are quite a bit older than you. Um, how has that been an issue at all? And if so, like, how are you handling? Yeah, I mean, it, it, it goes back to that Isaac Newton quote, right? So it goes, if I can see past the next man, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants. So the way that I see firm building now is I don't have to be the expert at, um, debt tracing rules or certain sections of the tax code. I need to learn how to market and drive the traffic and sell the learn how to market and drive the traffic and sell them and then go find the experts that know how to do that type of work, you know, whether it's foreign reporting, bank account reporting, or it's, um, you know, we've done, uh, four or five property, 1031 exchanges. Like I can go find those people because I know how to market and sell. And it all starts with the marketing, right? Cause again, you don't have a business. If you don't have marketing, there's no CEO, there's no HR, there's no nothing. If you don't have any customers, um, yeah, I, I guess that's, you know, dealing with people or like managing people that are older than me, cause all my employees are older than me. So that remote for the most part, I think. And so that is a, I guess it's a challenging dynamic, but, um, you know, it reminds me of, uh, so I spoke in front of 800 people when I was 23 on, on stage as like teaching tax. And, um, uh, I'll, I'll never forget this. Like I had this presentation, they were going to show it on the big screen. And I had these note cards that I was going to like look at, uh, before I was going to go present. And I was in, I was, um, in the hotel room the night before with my, with my wife and she's like, what do you got the note cards for just go out there and do it. Like you, there's a reason why you're the one out of 800 people that got picked to be up on there. Cause you know more than they all do. That's the reason why you're up on stage. So act like it. Like, um, I used to have a football coach, uh, whenever we like freshman year, we'd score, you know, and we would do these dances in the end zone and, you know, back flips and stuff like that. And he would come yelling at us. Like we, we were beating the crap out of this one team and we were celebrating. He goes, act like you've been there before. It's like, hand the ball off to the ref. You know, like act like you've been there before. So it, um, sometimes you gotta have the confidence before you even have the confidence. Like you gotta tell yourself and commit by like, I am that person that can achieve these things. Because if I tell myself I'm lesser of, then how am I going to act? If I'm always saying I'm not good enough. Right. Um, I know that's kind of misdirected, but that's where my mind goes when I think about that. Yeah. No, I mean, it's good to know just in general, your systems. Right. And I think again, more and more growth engines and whatnot, like younger people tend to be savvy too. So there may be more and more situations where people who are kind of taking those risks and kind of going for it might have more leverage in terms of, you know, tools to help them grow and whatnot. So a lot of people who are listening may actually find themselves in this exact situation. Right. So even just hearing the frameworks that you're going through that kind of help you deal with all of that is, is, is super helpful. Um, just in general, I, I think you're a super interesting guy, Ryan. I'm, I'm really happy that we connected. I'm going to be definitely staying tuned to what you're up to. Um, I'm going to make sure I link kind of your socials for people to check you out. I'll link the website too. I really think if you're an accountant, like check out the landing page, it may or may not be for you, but I think it's very unique and is interesting and is clearly working. Um, but yeah, I just want to give you a big thank you for coming on, Ryan. I really appreciate it. You got to ask yourself, do you want a pretty landing page or do you want to make money? Yeah. Go look at Warren Buffett's page for Berkshire Hathaway. It ain't pretty. It's been the same damn thing since the nineties. I think they built that on the same servers that they put the man on the moon with. Yeah. But there's what works historically, and then there's what doesn't work. Um, but yeah, it's been awesome. And if anybody wants to reach out, like I said, I'd, I try to respond to most of my messages. You guys can grab, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, just my first name, last name, CPA, and you could grab my five laws of marketing that I was referring to. Um, and that's, that's a great resource to start.