Solving Foundational Problems & Network Building with Michael Ly

This week's episode of the Big 4 Transparency podcast is sponsored by Forwardly. Huge thank you to Forwardly for sponsoring the podcast, but also a huge thank you for what they do in terms of helping firms improve your operating margins. So if you are in firm operations, I would encourage you to take a look at how much your payment processing fees might be costing you currently. It may just be a couple percent here and there, but once your firm scales, we may be talking many tens or even maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars that are not going to your firm's bottom line and are not available for reinvestment in your firm. Forwardly helps you not only smooth all of these processes out with seamless AP and AR, but they also do so using ACH payments in an automated fashion, helping you save on payment processing fees. So make sure you check out forwardly.com for your business payment solutions. Hello and welcome to the Big 4 Transparency podcast. I am joined today by Michael Lee, the founder of Reconciled, co-founder of AF Ventures, and most recent addition, the lead ambassador for Ignition. Welcome to the pod, Michael. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. So I know you through kind of a bunch of things. You seem to be at most conferences, and I would peg you as one of the most social people in the accounting space. You do quite a few meetups. Last year, you texted me the night before a big meetup in Montreal and said, you got to be in Montreal tomorrow, which is, you know, appreciate it. And you also kind of host Scott Stasel, you're legendary for that. So how has being, you know, one of the more social people in the space served you in accounting, which is not necessarily a field that's associated with that? Oh, that's a great question. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on, Dominic, and it's been great getting to know you and glad that you did make it to Montreal and with a 24 hour notice, which speaks a lot to about who you are. And I love having those spontaneous connections in my life. You know, I've been a fairly social person, especially since high school. You know, most people would be surprised that before high school, I was fairly introverted. I was fairly shy. And a lot of it had to do with my upbringing and a lot of it had to do with my name wasn't actually Michael before high school. I chose the name Michael going into high school. And that was an encouragement for my mom to choose an English American name versus the Chinese name that my given birth name, the Chinese name that I had. And so it was part of it was just, you know, so my education, my social experience would be better. But my social life really started in high school. And so that kind of curtailed and that really helped me blossom as an individual, as a person. And so when I got into accounting, accounting is kind of a field I ended up falling into because I had a family member that was studying accounting that I met and hadn't met an accountant before anybody in accounting. And now he's my brother-in-law today. He was my older sister's high school sweetheart. And so he became a family member and taught me accounting and taught me about it. But I think from my identity standpoint, I've always thought of myself as an entrepreneur, somebody who would be doing business and be winning people over and creating things out of nothing. And so I really brought that into the accounting, my accounting work in many ways. So I don't consider myself the best or greatest accountant or CFO or bookkeeper. There's way better individuals than me at that service, especially at my company, Reconciled. People that I've hired are way better at it than me. I definitely can dabble and do the job because I've done it long enough, but I'm a much better marketer, salesperson, social person. And really, I think the gift I've been naturally given is, or maybe the superpower is the gift of hospitality. So I've always enjoyed exercising that gift of hospitality ever since I was in high school. That's really cool. I like that. For me, when I was going into the accounting field, people were like, oh, really? That's kind of a weird move for you. I had done a careers course assessment and it was like, oh yeah, you should be a radio personality or someone who's involved in debate or something like that. And so a lot of people were kind of like, oh, that's odd in accounting. And I did actually kind of struggle with it when I was at a big four. But then when I sort of broke out of that mold, now I'm seeing with all of the firm leaders that I'm speaking with, a lot of the kind of smaller firms, even some of the private equity back places, I'm finding out that there is room for these people. And being someone who kind of stands out from a personality perspective in a field is not necessarily a bad thing. It can actually be absolutely a superpower, like you said. So I think you're the kind of extreme example of that, where you're like incredibly, incredibly social. Like, you know, everyone knows about the Michael Lee outings and how that's where you want to be when you're at a conference. So yeah. Yeah, I do enjoy it. I'm not the type of person that needs much alone time. I actually thrive and get energy from being surrounded by people. And so usually the times alone are times of reflection or times of thinking about who I can reach out to and connect with. And so I really, really, I really, really thrive and just get energy from connecting with other people. And it has helped serve me well because it's given me a lot of influence in the industry. I've been able to speak and get invited to speak at a lot of different conferences. I've been asked to host dinners and events for different vendors or different accounting firms, including Reconciled, my own. And I, in general, I think whether real or not, I'm perceived to be a very warm, approachable, welcoming person, which I'm glad is the perception. I'd say real for sure. I believe I am, but you know, and then I get to learn from all of these firm owners and all these business owners and software leaders that I meet, which is probably the biggest win for me is, is I love learning and I love the things I can learn, not just about business, but about human nature and about human interaction and social life and the way relationships work. I can learn something new and something profound from every individual I meet. And so that's an anchor to who I am at my core. And I've been able to carry that out, not just in my personal life, but out in my professional life, which has been awesome. Yeah. Yeah, that's really cool. You kind of answered my next question, which is like, yeah, what are some of the, the concrete things that you've gained from hosting these events? Because one of the big people that I find myself influenced by in the business world, which isn't necessarily accounting, but Sean Puri, he talks a lot about like the, the importance of hosting. And, you know, if you can be the person bringing together all these incredible people, you just kind of by proxy end up getting all these benefits and, you know, you're the kind of most real example of that I can think of. So would, you know, you mentioned learning being one of the biggest ones. Have there been a lot of other kinds of opportunities or personal growth moments that have come from that? Yeah. So there are, there have been big opportunities to, I've been asked to mentor quite a number of people during my tenure of Running Reconciled. As early as, you know, a few years into Running Reconciled, I've, I've had formal mentoring and coaching relationships that have paid, you know, people paying me to have those relationships and to get advice and get that consistent accountability from walking with me. And growing up meant mentorship and mentoring was a really big part of my life. I had a lot of different adults that poured into me and mentored me and taught me life skills and life things. Especially since I grew up, I was born and raised here, but I grew up in a very different home. I grew up in a home of refugees. So my home life was not very American or very Western, but outside of that, I had to be Western. So I kind of was operating in these two different worlds and it took a lot of mentors to help me navigate what that looked like. And so, you know, being able to give that back in, in this industry, I benefited from my brother-in-law mentoring me and from other individuals who taught me how to be an accountant and a CFO. And so being able to give back is really, really big, meaningful for me. And then, you know, the other, the other side of it is I get, just get asked or pinged for a lot of questions or references or referrals. And right now, you know, a lot of it's been a lot of people asking, Hey, I want to sell or transition my firm. I transitioned out of my firm. What's some advice you can give me? Is there somebody I could work with? You have resources or people I can talk to? And as you can imagine, that is of high, of high honor to be asked like, Hey, how can you help me with this? To have, to have, to help somebody transition the, the thing they've spent their life building, the thing that's creating the biggest wealth of their life and provide the biggest meaning they want my advice on how to transition. That's a big deal. Right. And so I don't take that lightly. And I, I feel really honored when anybody reaches out and wants to get any kind of advice from me, to be honest. Yeah. Because I feel like I'm just like a normal guy going about my life. And the fact that I get to influence other people is, is, is an honor, honestly. Yeah. I think 25 people just paused the podcast and went to your LinkedIn profile to send you a message because I get a lot of like inbound flow of people being like, Hey, like I'm looking to buy. I'm looking to buy. And I go like, I don't know, listen, I I'll introduce you to 20 other buyers, but like I've and so really right now is, you know, an accounting is like a seller's market. So if people are coming to you to sell their firms, that really means they trust you because everyone's throwing themselves at them to try and, you know, help them through the sale already. Yeah. That's, that's really cool. Um, and so shifting gears here a little bit more to like what you're doing with Reconciled and what led to this. So Reconciled is a very kind of CAS heavy practice, but before that you were doing more specifically virtual CFO and management consultant. I don't know if that was as a solo practitioner or if that was a small practice. Um, what kind of drove you to change directions of what you were doing a little bit towards more of the kind of CAS driven firm? Yeah. I, I had spent before Reconciled, I had spent about four years providing CFO and fractional CFO control level services to companies in Vermont where I was living at the time and throughout New England and also my contacts in Seattle where I'd lived before in Arizona was born and raised. So I was serving these companies and I, every time I went to a business and mostly it was small businesses. So think about businesses doing well under 5 million a year in revenue and occasionally I would get a fractional CFO work at a much larger company, you know, doing 20 north of 20 million or 30, 40 million. But most of the clients I have are small businesses and every small business that I've dealt with has this problem. It's called the trusted but not trained problem. So the person handling books is trusted. It's usually the owner, the owner's spouse or significant other, a board member, a receptionist, an assistant, an office manager, but it's almost never a trained accountant. And that's, that's what I witnessed in almost every small business. So I'd go in as a fractional controller CFO wanting to do my work and the books are a mess. And it's because look, look, what, what are most organizations, you know, most business owners trying to do when they start, if they don't wake up going, I'm excited to do accounting today. No, they wake up going, I'm excited to sell this product or service that I think the world needs. And rightly so. And they should be spending every waking moment doing that. That's the biggest value they can provide. Everything ends up being the fifth or sixth or seventh priority for them. And then they give it to somebody they trust because they don't want to give it to any employee or any individual. They don't want that person see, they want everybody seeing everything. They want a trusted person, pretty much you're seeing everything about the business owner's life. Not only the business, but the way they spend their spending habits. Are they taking distributions or not? How much money are they taking home? It's a big fiduciary, confidential, you know, issue around that. And it's also held tight to the chest in the West. Most individuals in America hold that information very tight and are not quick to share it with anybody. So that, you know, I would go in and a trusted person would be doing that. And so in order for me to get the CFO or controller work started, I'd have to spend my time cleaning the books. And I'm charging, you know, high rates, $150 to $300 an hour to do bookkeeping cleanup. And that's just a waste of value in my time. So after doing that for a number of years and realizing this is a common problem and very rarely would there be a small business where the books are super clean when I go in. So I decided to launch Reconciled to solve that. And at the time, I didn't know it would be called Reconciled. I could only afford reconciledit.com. It was like a $10 domain I could register. Reconciled.com was owned by somebody else. And I think at the time, I had to bid like $10,000 or $12,000, which I didn't have. Because I didn't know what this was going to become. So I ended up calling it Reconciled It and registering that and then set up a $100 website by myself on Weebly and got a $10 logo off of Fiverr. And then that was it. I was like, okay, off to the races. So that was the genesis and start of Reconciled. That's cool. So yeah, instead of working on weak foundations all the time of trying to come in and do this high level work that requires clean books, you just kind of dug a little bit deeper and said, why don't I do that kind of more foundational work to get things in order? And now since then, you've kind of expanded Reconciled a little bit. So I was going to your website before this and just making sure I had a grasp of all the offerings. And I did notice tax and advisory. So you mentioned that some of those service lines kind of came from subsequent acquisitions that Reconciled made? Yeah. So accounting or bookkeeping services, that full stack had always been a part of the beginning. And in the beginning, when I started, I was thinking, oh, this is going to help me be a better CFO. And I can just get more CFO clients faster and do that work faster. Well, the demand for our outsourced services grew very quickly. And so we just began growing rapidly. And I was the de facto CFO service or advisor at the company providing that. And I had hired one and then two bookkeepers within six months to provide the bookkeeping side to my clients, to our clients. And then so then as we continue to grow, and we started acquiring smaller, more brick and mortar traditional firms, starting in November 2020, we acquired our first one in Florida. Almost every single firm out there that is traditional has tax as a component, whether it's a minority or majority. And so when we were out looking for firms to buy, we had first started with, I want only bookkeeping firms, but that limited the pool and the number of firms to buy. And I wanted firms doing well over half a million dollars a year in revenue at the time. Now that number is much higher when we look at something, but at the time it was above half a million dollars. And so I needed to open up tax services, at least as a minority service, because almost every traditional brick and mortar bookkeeping or accounting shop has tax as a big component. So yeah, the first firm we bought, I think it had about 20% tax services revenue out of the total revenue. And then the second firm we bought had like more like 49% tax services revenue. And the third firm we bought was the first one that had no tax services revenue. So we did that. We did that purchase from November 2020 until July 22. We bought three firms in a row, which was definitely hard work. I would not recommend it to everybody, especially if you're doing it on your own with no private equity or backing. I did it all through debt capital and equity and did it pretty much on my own with my team, Reconciled. We built our own in-house team to integrate those while everyone's still doing their full-time jobs inside Reconciled. So it was definitely a lot of hard work. We learned a ton, but then ended up inheriting these additional services like tax preparation and tax services being one. And then we do a small amount of HR admin and HR consulting work as well, which we inherited from the third acquisition. So yeah, so it's just been a continued component of growing the business, but we still lead with and get inquiries about our outsourced accounting services. That's really what we're known for. And if you did a search for that service, you might find us. If you search for tax or others, you probably wouldn't find us very high on the rankings, which is not historically been offering that service. Yeah, but I mean, it's a great cross offering, especially like the kind of compliance type tax work because everyone's got to do it and you're already in the door, you're already trusted and so it can be a really good cross sell across your existing product. It is cool to hear you talking about the debt and equity financing to acquire those because a lot of the conversations I've had most recently, the last podcast I did was with Frank Longobardi and we were talking about private equity and how the opportunity for private equity to step in has been because too many accounting firms are absolutely optimized around short term and immediate partner distributions. And so there's no room for that kind of maneuverability. And people are building for, again, cash flow and retirement value versus building for enterprise value and growth. And you seem to be absolutely kind of on the other side of the coin of that. You have grown very rapidly, very aggressively, and you have kind of gone and done the financing for those acquisitions. So was that always in the plans or like how did that come to be and would you recommend that more firms take that approach? Well, so I did not have a grand plan when I started the business, for sure. The first couple of years of the business was figuring out what is this thing going to become? Is this just a side hustle, a lifestyle business? Is this... Am I just going to hire a few bookkeepers and then I'll just continue to do CFO work? What is it? And it wasn't until we started getting recognized fairly nationally in 2018, we were awarded the US Firm of the Future by Intuit and their Firm of the Future contest. And so to get that recognition was a big deal, but also to see, okay, there's a very large opportunity here in what's traditionally called the cash space. But if you think about the online global bookkeeping space, I think Intuit, when they launched QuickBooks Live, they had estimated that the global bookkeeping space would be about $10 billion a year in value at the time. And so it's probably grown since there, but a global TAM of 10 billion is pretty large. And so that meant that I could build a very big business and be a drop in the bucket of the whole addressable market. And there could be a dozen of me and there'd be a small drop in the total addressable market. And there was really no dominant brands providing this service. There's not one brand where every single business owner, when they think about bookkeeping or accounting outsourced accounting service, they immediately think of that brand. It does exist in the big four, the public accounting firms that exist. People can mostly name the big four or know who they are. When it comes to bookkeeping or small business bookkeeping, most people have, you know, they have all these options across their neighborhood and across the world now to do so. It was a few years in when we began this bigger vision and I actually put together, we call it the culture document. It's a two page document that I put together when I got that recognition from Intuit. And then that's the time when I actually rebranded as Reconciled and bought the domain name reconciled.com because we got afforded by then. And so we put together this culture document and the culture document outlined kind of our big vision and Reconciled's big vision has since then has always been to be able to serve 10,000 entrepreneurs on a monthly basis and impact 100,000 jobs in the communities of those entrepreneurs. And so for us, that means probably, you know, roughly 700 to a thousand employees as a business when we get to that vision, but also means 100,000 jobs that we're helping sustain in the communities of the clients we serve. And that was the big vision I put before the team and that's what got us really excited and that fueled and funneled our growth because you got to get, you know, to get people to come join you for something, you want to give them a big vision to say, this isn't just about Michael and about my distributions or my profitability, this is about something bigger I wanted to build. So I never, because I didn't work in or grew up in a public accounting firm, I didn't think to think, hey, I need to focus on just maximizing profits for myself and then growing this very slowly to execute short-term capital growth for myself and then eventually, you know, 30 years from now sell it to hopefully somebody that wants the same kind of thing. I always thought of Reconciled as a brand to be something of value and if we could get to our vision, we would, I would end up making money along the way and I would end up making money at a bigger event at the end of it. Now, that doesn't always happen. That's no different than any startup or any small business when they try to grow enterprise value sometimes you, it's a roller coaster, it's not a linear line on the way. It's definitely a roller coaster and it has been on the way, but thankfully. I'm on that roller coaster, I can tell you that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and, and so yeah, you just, you just work at it, but I, I wouldn't necessarily say it's, it's for everybody or some people it's not. If your first identity is that you're an accountant, the first model generally works for most accountants, right? If your identity is I'm an entrepreneur in the accounting space, well, there's an opportunity for you to grow enterprise value and have a larger event. And that is a route to go that, that not many take right now in our industry. Interesting. Yeah. No, I like that a lot. And so being in CAS, like you're a huge proponent of tech, obviously in the, in the influence that tech can have on one's business. So since you started, you started Reconciled in 2016, I believe around then, how, like to what degree would you say that like efficiency has improved as a result of technology evolving and like would have been the biggest contributing factors? Yeah. So the, the first, I think the, when we first started, you know, QuickBooks Online was really coming to its fruition and becoming an actual good product to use. The first iteration of QBO, not many, not many accountants or small businesses liked it. But when they came out with the refreshed UI, left-sided bar UI and, and a product that looked more like a modern product and a user-friendly, that's when we started seeing it. And so I, when I started the firm, I really was riding the wave of growth of QuickBooks Online because they were adding half a million and then a million, a new small business users a year on their platform. So if I could capture a hundred or 200 of those a year, I had a big, big growing business. So, so I just happened to be lucky on, you know, lucky writing, you know, writing that way. And then the things that began, began being introduced or the products that were early on were, you know, a lot of OCR technologies that was reading receipts and reading physical documents and capturing that data so that we didn't have to manually input them in. So at the time, Receipt Bank was a big part of our tech stack, which is now called Dext. Receipt Bank was a big part of our tech stack, Bill.com was a big part of our tech stack. Anything that could help get physical information and digitize it over to us from our clients and from small businesses that we worked with, that was a big help. And then you, you know, you saw this slow change from people pretending they were offering automation or artificial intelligence, what I jokingly call Asian intelligence. It's like they were using a call center in the Philippines or India and telling, saying it's artificial intelligence. But then you've seen this movement now in the past few years since generative AI where actual artificial intelligence and artificial intelligence agents have been being offered inside the space. And that's transforming the speed at which transactional work can occur. And obviously all the, and then all the advances and integrations through API of all the bank feeds for different accounts. Yeah, that's huge. That was a huge thing. huge jump, right? A huge leap. You saw that a little bit of that in QuickBooks desktop, but it was still a little clunky and it wasn't a real time and you'd have to click download and wait for it, you know. But in QuickBooks online, it's in real time and you're able to connect with the majority, if not almost all, you know, banking institutions and credit cards. And so that really changed the game. But I think that where the innovation has to occur now is why are we wasting any time in the bank feed at all, right? With Generative AI now, Generative AI, there should be a way to automatically categorize all the information. And it's a two-sided approach where obviously the language learning models have to learn, well, how do we read this information from the banks? But secondly, the banks and credit cards institutions have to start sending the data in a standardized way, which is going to take a while in my opinion. So, but that's where I think a lot of innovation is going to go towards. And also these AI agents that are actual software and not, you know, a call center somewhere where they're actually, it's actually doing the work at speed and there's no real waiting time other than a few seconds. So that's the innovation we're starting to see and we're, we're trying to implement and test inside Reconcile now. Yeah. Yeah. I always like laugh at the, at the like fake AI. I forget who had coined it, but yeah, they're like, it's AI, A, actually Indians. You know, it's like, cause it's people on the other side half of the time. And it's like, this is actually, yeah, this is actually just being outsourced versus now we are seeing real AI, which is cool. I still find in a lot of the demos I see and a lot of the you know, a lot of the demos and a lot of the discussions around AI, I find it very sort of high level and it's, you know, it lacks that kind of concrete example of what's happening. So is there anything right now that like concretely you could say, like, is an AI driven process that you think is, is very transformational for the business? Yeah. So we, we were like one of the first customers, for example, of a product called Combinely and shout out to Combinely. They just actually made an into Y Combinator recently. Oh wow. Okay. Combinely, you know, approached me and they found me and wanted feedback on their product. And what they were first building was a tool that integrated into your Google Workspace or Office 365 and it read all your email communication with customers. And then it would predict, it would predict whether the client would churn or if the client had a positive sentiment with you. It also would tell you the employee's communication style and whether or not the employee was responding in a timely manner or not to clients. And so that fact that those small pieces were helpful for us because we were dealing with a churn problem when we first, when Combinely first reached out to us and we didn't know how to solve it. And so Combinely's tool gave us a big insights because it literally is predicting before a client is even considering churn, it's predicting which clients to talk to proactively instead of reactively. Right. And so once the columns are reactive to, oh, this client's all of a sudden churning, but they don't realize like you haven't even talked to this client in months or in six months or even a year, of course they're churning. They don't think you care about them or want to work with them anymore. Or your staff members not responding in a timely manner, or this client sent you four emails and you haven't said anything to them or you haven't provided any answers. So Combinely's really helped us be proactive about that and lets us drive a, you know, basically a customer retention meeting every single week where we were able to review the analysis that Combinely provides. Now since they've gotten to Y Combinator, they're building some other really cool new tools that leverages artificial intelligence. So super bullish on them. And I ended up making a small angel investment because I was so bullish on them as one of the first customers. So that was really cool. And then another one is called Legix. Legix is a startup. This guy named Josh is building. He's local to the Phoenix area and he's basically trying to attack the fact that the bank feed is where a lot of bookkeepers spend their time now on. And it's slow. It's a waste of time. It's full of human error. And it's also full of like duplication from when the API and the bank feeds work incorrectly. So he's trying to automate that whole process and outside of QuickBooks Online or outside of the accounting system and then push it back into the system. So just automate it fast, push it into the system so that the speed at which bookkeepers can move and the amount of books that they can manage goes up. So there's a lot of innovation happening. And I think there's more. There's a lot more to talk about. But those are the two that I've been personally interested in and invested in because I'm just so bullish about what they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. It feels like accounting tech has become really hot over the last couple of years. And I'm always kind of curious of like, is that just a factor of me actually being plugged into the industry now and knowing what's happening? Or has there truly been kind of like a resurgence of like, you know, tech is now hot. And, you know, even just looking at Combinely being in Y Combinator, you know, I don't know if the 2016 through 2019 cohorts of Y Combinator would have had any accounting tech companies. And I could be wrong on that front. But as someone who's kind of actively investing in the space, like, what are you seeing in terms of trends there? And what are some of the kind of other challenges that are being tackled that you're most excited about other than those two we talked about? You know, I think there's definitely been, there's always been founders since I started Reconcile, I've always met founders building the accounting space. And there's an abnormal amount building out of New Zealand and Australia because of Xero's presence and also out of Toronto. And so there was an abnormal amount building, but they're building for the U.S. audience because the U.S. is the largest market of small businesses and accountants. And so there's always that, but there seems to be acceleration. It's mainly because it's never been easier for somebody without an accounting background to jump into the space and leveraging generative AI or leveraging the AI tools to build for the space. And, you know, there's never been easier time to rethink. How do we rethink what the GL looks like? How do we really rethink? How do we serve clients? How do we rethink the efficiencies and workflows inside an accounting firm? And if you think about the markets that are really hot right now is almost many of the industries, there've been tools being built for years and years. And now we're venture capital and we're private equities going into is, are the industries that seem to still have really high profitability, accounting being one of them. It's one of the two highest profitable industries in the country. And so accounting firm owners and lawyers when they do, you know, when they did the surveys, they make the highest EBITDA on average of all the small businesses in the country. And so private equity VCs go, okay, they make so much, they have very little automation in these industries. They're slowest to adopt change. They're slowest to adopt technology yet they've driven such high margins. What is it? And that's, what's attracting a lot of people to it. And then because of the repetitive nature of accounting, transactional work, there's rules. It's pretty simple, right? There's rules. Well, that's what you can leverage AI to do and software to do. And so that's, I think that's why you're seeing a lot of non-accountants come in as well as former accountants, people who, you know, were practitioners decide, I want to shift and become a software founder or a technologist and start actually providing more automation to the industry because they're so close to the problem that they've been working on. Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, so just before we wrap up, the last thing I'm curious about is, so what does a lead ambassador do for Ignition? Cause I'm, I'm super curious about that. I find that's like a really interesting model of like having someone who's a practitioner or, you know, essentially a practitioner, kind of being a lead ambassador for product, kind of being an evangelist of the product without necessarily being a part of the company full time. So what does that actually look like in practice and what made you want to do that with Ignition? So I have been, Reconciled has been a customer of Ignition's for, I think, eight plus years. So almost the beginning of Reconciled, when I was looking for a solution to get out of creating a Word document proposal, converting it to PDF, getting a signature through DocuSign or electronic signature, I really wanted something to automate the process because I went from proposal creation all the way through billing and it was very manual, that whole process. And so I ran into Ignition, was super impressed with what they built and began right away using it. I think the second or third year of the business, just used it, started using it. And so I've been a long time customer. Well, a number of years ago, they started an ambassador, you know, advocacy program where they wanted to pick customers that were across the country, accountants who were using the product that could speak to the voice of the accountant and speak for the company, to the accounting community. So I got the privilege of being able to join that. And then more recently, you know, the head of global marketing approached me and said, Hey, we're thinking about this lead ambassador role. And that was being filled by Jenny Moore, previously out of Canada. And Josh Lance was also someone who passed away a few years ago. He was also the North American or the U.S. ambassador for the U.S. And so Jenny Moore stepped down from that role recently. And so when they were thinking about how they wanted to move forward with it, they immediately thought of me, which was such an honor and a privilege. And really what they were saying was, Michael, we already know you operate naturally in this way. You tell people about the products you love. You want firm owners to not waste their time and use technology to build their practice. We want to just kind of come behind you and be a part of what you're doing. And that's really what they said. I said, you know, is this something that you'd be interested in? I said, of course, like I'm a big fan of Ignition. And if there's anything I can do to help Ignition, but also help reconcile them myself, then I'm happy to do that. So yeah, so I'm a contractor doing that work with them. And that means going to the same conferences I speak at and show up to. But now I get to wear Ignition at and help them have a face into the accounting community. And I'm definitely honored to be a part of that. That's cool. And I think that's a really good program. Like as someone selling into the accounting space personally, like the biggest thing is referrals and other accountants saying, oh, hey, I use this and it was successful and I work well with it. I had an episode with Rob Brown where he shared like the stat that was astounding to me where accountants were the second most sold to profession other than only doctors because of pharmaceutical reps. And I was like, wow, that makes a lot of sense. And so people naturally have their defenses up. And so when someone sort of just in passing without it being like a hard sales pitch and that's very much your approach, like you're never like going around being like, hey, what are you using? Why aren't you using this? It's just people will ask you because you are successful running a great practice and, and ultimately sharing their experiences. Like that is really how a lot of accounting firms buy, which makes it difficult to operate in the space sometimes and sell because people really are very guarded and you know, in the profession we are kind of the guardians of trust and, and you know, we are trusted by the client. So we need to be making sure that every step of the way we can, we can stand by what we're working with and what we're using. So I think that's a great approach by Ignition and, and I think you are a great ambassador for them. So, uh, yeah, great choice. Well, it's fairly new. So, you know, I'm trying my best to be a good steward of that role and representative. Um, but yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's a kind of a natural part of what I do anyways, as I'm always, I'm always sharing and talking about the different tools Reconcile uses anyways, and whether or not there's an arrangement to do so. Um, and so I'm doing that anyways. And so it's been a really fun journey with them and I'm looking forward to what the rest of this year looks like working with them. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining the pod, Michael. I, I really appreciate it. We've all, we've had a lot of conversations, but they've, they've always been kind of brief because you're a popular guy and, and there's a, there's a lineup that forms when I'm chatting with you. So, um, you know, I appreciate you taking the time and, uh, it's great learning more about everything you're up to here.