The Problems Plaguing our Profession with Blake Oliver (Part 2)

In a previous episode of the Big Four Transparency podcast, we talked about how much money some accounting firms are saving already by moving away from credit card processors and the fees that those come with and moving all of their payments from clients towards ACH and other forms of direct bank transfers. Now I've worked at a startup that didn't have any kind of tracking or any kind of a real solution around that and it made accounts receivable and accounts payable an absolute nightmare. But look no further because the sponsor of today's podcast is Forwardly. I met the awesome people of Forwardly over at Bridging the Gap conference, did a demo of their product. I am disappointed because personally I can't work with them unfortunately because of some restrictions on Canadian banking. But for any US listeners who are looking for a new solution for your accounting firm, Forwardly is a great solution for you to handle all of your payments, AR, AP, as well as great approval workflow. So check them out. They're linked in the podcast description. Thank you very much. So in that sense, like a traditional firm is a great business model, but it's only a great business model for the people who aren't providing the service. The people who are providing the service have to work a lot of hours in order to make money. So it's great for the managing partner. It's great for the managing partner, but I wouldn't say it's great even for the partners because you might be raking in like $800,000, but if you're working 60, 70 hour weeks all year round to do that, that's a pretty poor realization rate or effective hourly rate I should say. Yeah, no, it's terrible. And I would not exchange my current situation where I can work four hours a day and my goal is to work less than that every day because I can automate my own job. And if you're on an hourly model, no matter what you do, you always have to work more hours. Yeah. No, we both talk about that a lot. And I think like the new generation is kind of realizing like, hey, I don't actually need to make $800,000 necessarily. Like I'm cool with three. I'm cool with three and a good life. Move out of New York, leave Chicago, get out of LA, come to Arizona, Florida, Colorado, New Brunswick, Idaho. You look like a king. Go to New Brunswick. Yeah. I mean, I live in the fifth largest city in the country, Phoenix, and my cost of living is like half of what it was in Los Angeles. And I feel very wealthy. Now, if I wanted to feel even richer, I could go live in Tucson or I could go live in Flagstaff. And there's plenty of ways to reduce your cost of living so that you don't have to make all that money. I just feel like the rat race in the major cities is silly. I mean, I lived in LA. I lived in LA in a very desirable neighborhood. And I worked at an office where I had a... I actually had a corner office when I worked at Armanino that faced the Pacific Ocean. And I could see the ocean every day and I'd see the sun setting and it was so beautiful. And then I'd see the cars piling up on Wilshire Boulevard as they built this line going towards the 405 freeway. And it would grow and grow and grow until it almost went to the ocean. And then I would, in the dark, get into that line and drive home. And I never went to the beach. Never once when I worked there did I go to the beach in Santa Monica. It's not worth it. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, accountants generally, they have that freedom, depending, right? There is this kind of push for back to office, but in a lot of places, you have that freedom. Can we talk about that, Dom? Let's talk about it. How dumb the back return to office requirements are? It's insane. Yeah. I mean, I run a remote company. Sorry. Go ahead. I was going to say, I run a remote company. Like we are building a business that is worth millions of dollars that doesn't require an office. It's totally doable. Sorry, you were going to say something though. I was going to say the worst configuration for it is in these places that were at one point kind of built to be remote and are now being forced back to office, where like your team might not even be in your office. So like they're making people commute, buy a lunch, buy Starbucks, buy this, buy that. And like it costs a lot of money. Some of these places like you might be paying 20 bucks a day for parking to go into the office to sit on Zoom, to talk to your coworker and you can't hear them well because you're sitting beside the sales team and they're on Zoom all day too doing their calls. It's awful. Yeah. My wife was just telling me exactly what you're saying. She works for a fortune 50 company and they have a return to office mandate. She was hired fully remote. Now they're making everybody go to the office. Luckily it's not far, but it's the same situation. She goes in there and she sits on Zoom calls with people on the East Coast on her team because nobody on her team is in her office. And the executives, like they must be living in a dreamland because they're saying, oh, we need these spontaneous interactions. Well, when it's a company with tens of thousands of employees, you're not going to have a spontaneous interaction with somebody in your office who's on a completely different team because you're never going to collaborate on anything, right? And so, did you see that story about the Wells Fargo employee who died at her desk? I don't know about that one, but I've read a lot of stories in general about that. This was a local story here in Phoenix, a Wells Fargo employee was found dead at her desk in the office down in, I don't know, South of here, I want to say Chandler or something. She was there for four days before anyone found her, four days, because she was in one of these offices where people come in, they have to come in like a few days a week, but they don't all come in on the same day. So the office is like empty. She's in a cubicle that's off the main aisle. She slumped over at her desk and died and people noticed the smell, but they thought it was like a sewage problem. So it wasn't until four days later when a security officer found her. Now, if that doesn't encapsulate the stupidity of return to office, I don't know what does. No, that's crazy. And yeah, like you said, that draws attention exactly to like, this woman's not interacting with anyone who doesn't notice that she's there. No, I think it's a bummer. And the thing is, I'm the easy one to win over on this because I am like, I feed off of interaction with other people like I need that. And so like, I actually like when the tech company I previously worked for, like, mandated, you know, return to office two days, I was like, fair enough, like, I want to be in two days. That's okay. But it's like, who I had interactions with. It's because I happened to be buddy buddy with one of the devs and one of the guys on sales and one of the guys on the accounting team. I never worked with these people. Nothing productive ever came of that. In fact, probably actively counterproductive. You're distracting each other, right? Studies show that people are more productive at home in most roles. My entire team was across the country. I want to say that I'm not opposed to in office work. And I think for certain types of businesses, it's really helpful, but it has to be your team that you're with. And it has to be like 100%. Or maybe, maybe since we're accountants, we say it has to meet like a threshold of like 80 or 90% of the team needs to be together in the office for it to make sense. Otherwise, it's just a waste of time. Yeah. And even if most of the team is there, like if you have like Becky who needs to call in on Zoom. Oh, God. And like it's like, no, just don't do it. Right. Like do it all on Zoom from home and it's fine. Yeah. So I'm very much with you on that. And I think it's insane. And the bigger the firm, the more of a problem it is. Right. Again, if you're a 10 person firm and everyone's in, that's cool. Like I got the best mentorship at Deloitte because I had like a really, really, really good mentor and coach. And I would just kind of like go and walk over to his desk all the time. And you know, yes, that is important. What's that? Yeah. But if if my mentor happened to be like in some other state, like what are we doing here? Right. Yeah, it's like, you know, and I'm not saying there aren't disadvantages of remote work. There's definitely challenges that are hard to overcome. And I face them every day with my team, which is spread out all over the country and the world. And it's exactly what you said, right? It's maintaining culture. It is doing mentoring. Because spontaneous interactions don't happen, like going to somebody's desk and saying, hi, you have to manufacture them. So it takes effort. It takes a lot more effort, but that doesn't mean you can't do it. And I just feel like there's a whole bunch of boomers who have zero interest in learning how to do anything different that are making these policies. And, you know, and and and it's to the detriment of these teams. Yeah, no, I think it's a bummer. And you need to be careful about what you, you know, what you what you talk what you talk negatively against, because now you're going to get some some manager at a firm where they just implemented RTO and he's going to come after you and say, that's disgusting that you're talking out of against. Come after me. It makes for the best episodes. I love getting listener mail. You can send that to the accounting podcast at earmark.me. That's the accounting podcast at earmark.me. Yeah. Oh, man. Okay. So for some backstory on that, you talked about some audit deficiencies at EY and some EY manager, Connor, came at you pretty hard. Like, why do you think the Kool-Aid at these firms is so strong? Like where, like, why do people just bleed for their firms like that? Like, what, what is that? I think if you are going to dedicate your life to a company, it has to have some cult-like aspects to it. And we know that the big four are really good at brainwashing people. I mean, we even say very commonly in our profession, drinking the Kool-Aid, which is based on a cult where they all drank Kool-Aid and died, you know. It's very morbid when you actually look into that saying. Yeah, it is. It's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a cult kind of thing. And, you know, these firms have learned how to do this because they make more money when people work more hours. And so they, they incentivize people, you know, with the culture to do it. They, they reward the high billers. How many firms send out a weekly email where they list out the top billers every week? It's a very common practice and they wear it like a badge of honor. I remember when I was at the big firm, the people who build the most hours were like looked up to. And if you had a high billing week, you'd be like, yeah, I did it. I build a lot of hours. Right. And, and so you create this sort of like culture where people are sacrificing their health, their family, their mental health, physical health for the firm. And so what do you end up producing? You produce managers and directors who have like nothing outside of the firm. And those are really valuable people to the partners because they bill a lot of hours. They make a lot of money for the firm, you know? Um, so it's just, it's just a consequence of the business model, right? That's, that's what I guess they pass that down, right? Like if you have no interest out of work, then all you do is engage in that stuff. And then you kind of pass that down to the next generation of people. Right. And I guess that that's interesting. Like that, that kind of is like the topic of where I was going to be. Like, they're so like, people are so siloed. Right. There's no critical thinking. There's no questioning that happens. Right. Like, especially if you work in audit, which is where Connor works at EY, it's like, you don't ask questions about why are we doing this? Or, you know, what's, how are we benefiting investors? Your job is just to get this audit done and then go on to the next one. And you're just churning them out. Right. You are sitting on that assembly line and you are making widgets and, and, you know, you'll think about it when you get to partner, but then the, the trick is that once you get to partner, it's really the same thing. Um, yeah, you, you, you make more money, you share in the equity, but you're still a producer. You're still a, essentially a contributor, right. An individual. Well, and they're siloed too. Right. Right. Like, so the partner that I keep touch with from, from Deloitte, from when I was there, like I was telling him, I was like, Hey, babe, you know, I started this podcast like a number of months ago. And I was like, I'm talking to all these like really cool people. Like, you know, have you heard of the accounting podcast? No. Have you heard of Jason Stats? Never heard of them. Have you heard of, you know, just name any big name. And it's like, nobody's ever heard of anybody. They're heads down. They're heads down. And there's, yeah, and there's good, there's good internal assets. Like, don't get me wrong, like Deloitte and I'm sure the other big four and, you know, probably top 50 as well, have tremendously high quality internal assets. But like at the end of the day, yeah, people do need a diversity of ideas and inputs. And I think that that's severely lacking. And to be a whole human being, you need to have something outside of work. You gotta have hobbies and it's gotta be more than just golf that you do with work people, you know? And it's just sad to me how many people sacrifice family and vacations and life for work. Why? The money is not worth it. You don't need that much money to be happy. And there's proof that once you achieve a certain income and you've got your basic needs covered, more money isn't going to make you any happier. If anything, it'll just give you more problems. Yeah. I mean, I have some questions about some of the thresholds. They, I think it's old numbers, but it's like, oh, after 80,000, you're all good. And I'm like, I can tell you we're not all good. Well, I'll tell you this, like my wife and I are in the top 5% of income earners. I don't need to be in the top 1%. Like I'm, I've got everything I need here. You know, I can, I can work from home in my own little home office. That's in one of the bedrooms. I can go swimming. I can ride my mountain bike. I can, uh, I can, I can go on ski vacations. I can travel to Europe. Like what, what do I need? A yacht. Do I need my own boat? No. Do I need to fly charter? No. Like you don't need that to be happy. And you have the time to enjoy all the things, right? Like I followed closely when you were on the pod, you're talking a lot about like your health journey and you're, I'm swimming every day and stuff like that. And I'm like, that alone is, is a tremendous luxury. Like, even if you're going to the YMCA, do it like, that's pretty crazy. And I'm sure you're not, but well, no. So, um, this is the nice part about leaving LA for Phoenix. I live in Scottsdale, which has a really incredible municipal government. I've never been happier to pay property taxes because there's an aquatic center. In my neighborhood, a city run facility. I pay like a hundred bucks a month to go swim every day at a beautiful pool, like an Olympic, like quality pool. And it's fantastic. And like you said, because I have a flexible schedule and work from home, I work out 90 minutes a day and I've been doing that for a year and I've lost 20 pounds. I could not do that in LA without sacrificing something really important, like time with my family or my friends. I got really fat in LA on my commute. It was very unhealthy. I weighed like, I'm five 11 and I weighed like 240 pounds at one point, which is pretty hefty. I'm down to 170. Yeah. Right. Like I feel better at age 41 than I've ever felt in my whole life. I'm more fit now than I was in college and I can do that because I have the time and I just feel sad for managers and directors and partners at these big firms who are living very unhealthy lifestyles in service of what? Yeah. In service of what? Trying to get to the next level of money? No, it's, it's, yeah, I think it's truly unfortunate. Yeah. And like, again, different people have different priorities and I'm not mad that that exists. Right. Like, um, some, you know, whatever, you're some first generation immigrant and you, or something like that. Right. And you've seen so much hardship through lack of financial means. And you say, I want to change the fate of myself and my whole family and whatever. And I'm like, I have respect for that. That's fine. And I'm happy these places exist. I just, I do think it's unfortunate that not more people are aware of the options that they may have where there's a sliding scale where it's like, again, I have no interest in sacrificing that much for 800,000 where I would be far happier at a path that will lead me to maybe $300,000 a year where I can, I can own my time. Yeah. And, and, and there's so many great options to get to that point where, you know, honestly, if you live in a lower cost area and you make that kind of money, you can live pretty darn comfortably. Right. Yeah. And, uh, and that's basically my situation. Right. And you can do that running your own firm. Most small firm owners make like 200 to $300,000 a year. So you could totally own it yourself and do that. Um, you could, uh, go work for a smaller firm, a regional firm that gives you flexibility and lets you work from home. There are plenty of options. I'm not saying like accounting is a bad place to be. I'm just saying that. I, I think that the big four, uh, unless you, unless you really know what you're doing, you are going to sacrifice so much for those firms and they don't care about you at all. Yeah. They don't. Yeah. And some people within the might, but like the firm itself is too big. Yeah. You are a cog in that machine, you know? So, so, and, and people should know too, when they go in, there should be like a disclaimer that like less than 1% of you will become partner. Yeah. Your odds are really stacked against you. Right. Yeah. That's a very important disclaimer for sure. Um, so changing gears here a little bit, like I find you, I mean, some people will take that as offensive, right? Because this is their only, like, if they're not flexible in their thinking and their mindset, then any kind of affront to the, their, their way of thinking is, is offensive to them. Right. Sure. But I think what you do is, is not attacking the, the industry whatsoever. I think you are advocating for it and the people within it, um, to a very strong degree. And you talk about the AICPA a lot, um, which I think needs to happen because I do think there is this like incentive misalignment there. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of issues of, yeah, who's, who's paying most of the fees to the AICPA and all that. Yeah. Um, your career has really been in acts. I find you did like, you know, the accounting firm thing you did like bouncing around some like accounting tech companies. Now you're kind of in founder mode. And then would you ever consider like what we might call a fourth act of, of leadership in the AICPA? Well, I just applied for the CEO job and unfortunately, unfortunately I was declined. They didn't, they decided not to interview me. I don't know why I feel like I have such strong credentials, but, uh, I did, I did write them a letter. And, uh, I have all of my recommendations here. I've got actually 10 recommendations for the AICPA. Can we hear those in like bullet form? Sure. Yeah. That's going to be my followup. Yeah. I'd be happy to share them with you. Um, and for context, I want to say that like, I think the AICPA and the big firms, they're the responsibility for fixing our pipeline problem in accounting. Yeah. And the reason is that two thirds of accounting grads, accounting majors end up going to work in audit and the vast majority of those work for the big four. And what is happening is that they are going in, they're doing a few years at the big four and they're saying, oh my God, this sucks. And they are leaving and they aren't just leaving to go to other firms. They are actually leaving the profession entirely and going to do other things. So, so it's up to the big four to fix their business model in order to stop these people from leaving. Uh, I, I, and I also believe the universities have a lot of blame, uh, to put at their feet. Uh, I would, I would say that traditional accounting education drives people into this grinder of the big four, uh, and doesn't expose them to other opportunities. And the AICPA... Oh yeah, no, I would have, I would have felt like a, like a loser, uh, when I was doing my co-op or internship programs, if I didn't get in at a big four. Right? Like... Your professor will tell you that. Some type of framing. Well, actually one of our professors, interestingly, was a partner at one of the big fours. Of course. And I was like, that's a weird use of your time. And then I was like, actually, that's a brilliant use of your time, uh, if you think about it. But anyways, yeah. Yeah. So, so these accounting programs are funded by the big four. A lot of these department chairs are endowed by the big four. So their salaries are getting paid by the big four. What do they do? They direct their students into the meat grinder of the big four. Uh, the big firms then work them crazy hours and destroy their love for accounting, and then they leave and they don't go to industry like they're supposed to, because there are plenty of other opportunities now. And so I think the AICPA could lead in this matter. The problem is that the AICPA, where does it get its funding? From checks written by managing partners at the biggest firms, which are built on this business model of abusing their staff and overworking them. So that's, that's one of the things we have to confront as a profession. If we want to really fix this problem, um, is somebody has to have the courage. To clarify the flow there. So people don't think this is some crazy conspiracy theory. It's not that the managing partners are writing a check under the table to the AICPA. It's really that, you know, there's so many people working at the large firms and they each pay their dues within that. And it is a employee benefit that the firm will pay the dues on behalf of the employee. There you go. So, cause I've, I've, I've, I've seen someone online be like, Oh, what do they think this is like this bribery? And I'm like, no, no, no, you're not understanding. Yeah. Yeah. It's not bribery. It's just, it went, yeah. When you work at a large firm and I think almost all of the big ones do this. It certainly was the case when I worked at a top 25 firm, my AICPA and state society dues were paid by the firm. So, you know, the AICPA, I might be the member, but who's paying the money. Who's paying the salary of the executive director and all the staff there, the 2000 people that work at the AICPA, their salaries are paid by the firms. So that is who they listen to the most. It's just natural, right? You listen to your customers and your customer is the firm. That's, yeah, that's my theory for why all of this happens. And when you look at the policies that the AICPA promotes, it tends to be for the benefit of the firms, such as opposing overtime wage protections for staff accountants, which they have done in the past explicitly, and they said it's because it will hurt firm profits. Something that would be probably good for individual CPAs who they claim to represent, they opposed because it would hurt the profits of accounting firms. So. Sounds like you were going to say something dumb. No, I just, I'm, I, I'm very frustrated by the overtime thing too. Like, I think that that to me, like, that's crazy that there was not actually any advocacy for the other time for people, because like my experience early on in my career was that like, I had a ton of part-time jobs where I was extremely well-paid. And so I would work my 50 hours at the accounting firm and then I would make half of my week's pay Friday night at the bar. And so like, and like, I'm not a super short term thinker. Like I, I am thinking and planning out my career and stuff like that, but like at a certain point, there's such an acute level. And that happens early on in your career where you're like, Hey, this is like a crisis. Like I can't afford rent. Like this is crazy. Yeah. And a very large portion of like early accounting folks, I know in firms, as well as an industry, like everyone's got a side hustle and that's not good for the firm. But it also is indicative of like, people just can't, people just can't get by on like what they're getting paid in the early years. Right. And then there's a level of saying like, Oh, that's only like short term. But like when there's a balance between short term thinking and like actual, like acute discomfort. And when you're in acute discomfort and you're like, Hey, I can't, I can't get by on this. That's when you like, start to like, look at makes making some changes. Right. And, and you can go find a job in sales where you'll do pretty okay right off the bat. And so it's, it's pretty tempting to convert. Right. Yeah. So, um, yeah, this is the number one problem facing our profession is that, and this is what young people are telling, telling us. salaries are too low, entry-level salaries are too low, and the hours are too much. So, how do we address this problem? I think we should probably address it head on. Okay, hours are too much. We can actually fix that, because as a profession, we could say we are not gonna work overtime without getting paid for it. That will create a financial incentive for the firms to figure out how to work less hours and hire more people to do the work. And improve processes, have more admin staff. So, as the CEO of the AICPA, I would work to get all the firms to pay overtime. Pay one and a half times for overtime. And if a legislative solution is needed to eliminate the exemption for accountants, maybe we should do that, right? Pro-labor would get more people in. Maybe accounting needs to unionize. Perhaps that would be a solution. Those are a few approaches. I just think it's, how is it justifiable that firms work people 60 or 70 hours a week or more? How is this moral or ethical? Yeah, and why do you think unionization has never happened in the accounting space? That's gonna be a spicy topic. A lot of people call for it on Reddit and stuff like that. Because the way the firms work is they bring you in, they work you a few years, and they churn you out. So there's not enough people sticking around to build a union. And the people who stick around have drank the Kool-Aid. The partners who are making twice as much what a staff accountant makes, still not making enough for the amount they're working, but hoping to get to partner. And they're on that hook of, someday I'm gonna get to partner, right? But they still only have a small chance of actually ever making it. But they bought in to the dream. So they aren't gonna vote for a union because they think they're gonna make partner, and the union would hurt the profits of partners. The problem is you have partners who are making $800,000 a year, and the staff are making a 10th of that. The partner in a typical firm has a team of 10. And that partner makes as much money as all those 10 people put together. Yeah. So it's a really unequal system. And I think a lot of partners don't know this, but they would be happier if there were a tipping of the scales, right? So we looked at this in the data that I collect, is the hours for partners in the job satisfaction are really, really bad. Yeah, the partners work more. The partners work more than the staff. Yeah, worse than others. And it's like, well, again, at a certain point of wealth, I think you're actually better off making some trade-offs there. And the job satisfaction numbers are so low. That actually tells a lot of the story where it's like, well, if there were some tipping of the scales, obviously in a silo, nobody is gonna want that conversation. Like, hey, what if we all got paid less? But ultimately, that does trickle down and change some things where you'll probably have better retention. You won't have, like, you'll have more buy-in from staff. People are gonna care more about what they're doing, and then less stress trickles up to you. I mean, if the partners agreed to get paid like 20% less, which is a really hard ask because they've worked for 15 years to get there, and now they're finally raking in the dough, right? And they're thinking, I just gotta make as much money as possible before I retire. Well, if they just took a 20% pay cut, you can increase staffing by 20% on all engagements. And what would that do? That would make a meaningful difference to the team, and it would allow the partners to work less. Yeah. Yeah, and like, beyond just having 20% more bodies, like, they'll have more institutional knowledge because people won't churn out at the rate that they do, right? So, yeah. And you'll have higher audit quality because when people are overworked, they can't do good audits. And that's why you see the big four, even the big four have pretty disappointing deficiency rates with their audits, you know? Anywhere from 20 to 40% of audits are so deficient that the PCAOB said the firm should not have issued its opinion. That's insane, yeah. That, to me, is crazy. So, you think about the young people entering the profession. Why would you wanna go work in a firm where they're getting, like, at best a B minus and at worst a D on their audits? Like, that is not, that's not something exciting. That would be like, I wanna be a doctor and I'm gonna go work for a hospital that kills 20 to 40% of its patients. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's crazy. Or makes them worse, you know? Or, like, doesn't help them. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's a complicated profession. And, like, the incentives, the issues, all of that is very difficult to fix. Like, it's clear that something needs to change, but it is difficult. It's hard for someone who's been through the meat grinder to be like, okay, I'll be the one to take the cut and kind of make this thing better, so. Somebody, somebody has to take the pay cut. And it's gonna have to be the partners. They have to take a pay cut if we wanna pay the staff more or we wanna add more bodies or we wanna reduce the hours. Yeah. And I just don't think they're willing to do that because the sort of people who make it to partner at the big four are very monomaniacal. They have one thing that they think about and that is doing more audits to make more money. Now, I, to be honest, I haven't met a lot of big four partners. And so I would love to, and if any of them are listening, you can talk, I would love to talk to you either on or off the record and understand more about why you do what you do and what you think the problems are. Because I think the, but I think the problem is, Dom, is like they're so busy working that they're not like listening. Like, I don't know if any partners listen to my show. I have no idea. And if they do, they never write. Yeah, I think, like I said, like a lot, the bigger the firm, the more siloed I think they are. And it's tricky because I know a lot of like big four partners that like, I really like, which is what's tough where I'm like, I don't think you're like a psychopath or anything. Like some of these people, I'm like, I know you truly care for me, but they're just like, you know, like the one that I had the conversation with when I was leaving, like, he was like, yeah, like you're going to have a tough time here up until like senior manager. And I think you'll be great beyond that. But he's like, I understand what you're doing. And like, I like keep in touch. Like, I really want to follow what you're doing. Like, he's a really cool guy. I really like him. And I don't think he is like maniacal like that at all. But at the end of the day, when it was like cards on the table, this is it, this model doesn't work for me. He just goes like, yeah, I'd love to keep you around. I'd love to keep you happy. But like, I don't have that power internally, right? And that's the thing is the partners are just as much prisoner of the system as everybody else. Because once you earn the equity, it's not real equity. It's only equity, you only get paid out when you retire. And they lock you in for so much time before you can. So like, I don't really, that money is just paper money. A lot of it. Because you can't spend it because you're so busy working, you can't go on those amazing vacations. Or when you do, you're just thinking about work. Like all the memes on Big Four Accountant are true, right? That's why they're funny. So, you know, I have a good story. I worked with a guy at one of these tech companies who was a Big Four in the Bay Area guy. You know, auditing tech companies and whatnot. And when he was younger, in his senior days, his sister was getting married. And he asked the partner if he could leave early to go to the rehearsal dinner. It wasn't like he had to go on vacation to do it. He just needed to leave early from the audit to go to the rehearsal dinner. And the partner said, all right, but if you do, don't expect to have a place here when you come back. Oh my God. This guy was hardcore. And my friend chose to go to the rehearsal dinner. And when he came back, he was still employed, but he knew he didn't have a future on the team. Jeez. That is not uncommon, as far as I know. There are some sociopaths who work in these partner roles. And there's nice people too. It definitely, to get there, you gotta have something going on that helps you get there. And being obsessed with work and not giving a crap about other people helps. Sort of like- Yeah, there's this selection bias that happens of like who ends up there and then who makes the decisions down the line, which is tricky. And so you have this situation where you have groups of partners who are really sweet people, who are very passive, who let those sociopaths run the show, right? And all it takes is a few jerks in a partner group to prevent anything good from happening. That's my theory for sociologically how it all works. So you can have a situation. You can have both situations, right? You can have good people and you can have bad people and the bad people can ruin it for everyone else. And if the business model is set up that way, so. I'm gonna have a existential crisis for the rest of the day. But hey, I wanna say before we wrap up Dom, I always get criticized for this. People are like, you're so negative about accounting. You hate accounting. So I have to say- I don't think you are. I love accounting. I freaking love it. If you are in the right place in accounting, the right team, in industry, running your own firm, in a small firm, doing tech, like there's unlimited opportunity. It's just that there's this part of it that gets so much attention, that gets all the memes, that sucks, that drives people away. So I want to give people more pathways. Give them more options. Don't send them to the meat grinder and let the big four shrivel up. And maybe we, you know, it's generally bad in an economy, in a capitalist system, when you only have like a few companies that provide the product. It's called an ogilopoly or something like that. Oligopoly, yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna let you say it cause I can't. And it reduces choice and it makes things worse for workers and for customers. And so like breaking up the big four, I think would be great. Yeah, yeah. No, and for what it's worth too, like I said, I really don't think that, and my perception of it is like, I really don't find you to be negative on the industry. I just think that it is when you have such a rigid way of thinking, like some people do, when it feels like that's under attack, it feels like a personal attack. Whereas instead, like once you're kind of outside of that, you're really like, no, like this is actually like some pretty important discourse for the industry as a whole. And calling things into question matters, right? Oh yeah, yeah. It sort of reminds me of the Catholic church. I was raised Catholic. And when all that stuff was happening with like the lawsuits and the priests and the kids and all that, there were a lot of people that like could not reconcile that with their personal belief system and how they had grown up. And you saw it. And I feel like it's the same thing with the abusive practices at the Big Four. Same but different, important categorization. Connor's gonna come for you. It's abuse either way. It's abuse either way, right? And it's just not healthy. Yeah. Yeah. No, I like it. I think that what you do is a very important service to the accounting community, both with earmark and the podcast. So thank you for that. You are inspiring a lot of people, myself included. I'm one of many new accounting podcasts. And so it's great to have you on and have been platformed as well through you guys. Like I think that's another thing that's beautiful in a lot of this kind of sub-community is that like it does feel like more of like an abundance versus scarcity mindset where like people share, people will like shout each other out and whatever because it's not this feeling of like there needs to be one ruler or four rulers or whatever, right? That's right. And that's the problem that we've had in the past is that all of the communication has been top-down and the leaders of these firms and the ACPA and NASBA have controlled discourse. And that's going away. They can't control podcasts, right? The people are speaking and there will be grassroots change. I really believe that we can fix these problems. We can restore the profession to its original integrity. The accounting profession is noble. We protect the public. We need to remember our mission. It's not about enriching ourselves. It's about serving the public. And if we do that, we will make money. I agree. I love that. Before I let you go, last thing, can you quickly talk about this new community? So I talked about kind of a lot of the service you do to community and through earmark and you have a new community going on through Circle, I believe. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? And then at some point I'll need to have you back on, honestly, because this is one of those where I'm like, okay, we're well over our time, but it feels like I'm nowhere near done. So it's like, it's one of those. And I'm like, where did the time go? Yes, happy to talk about it. So we have created a new community. It's called earmark community. Go to earmark.community in your web browser and you can join for free. And that's important. It's a free community, just like the earmark app. You can use it for free. And we hope that our earmark members will use it to connect with each other, to post about job opportunities, about how they're using AI, suggestions to improve the earmark app. And then we have spaces for a number of the shows. So like, if you're a listener of the accounting podcast, my podcast, you can go in there in that space and you can chat with me and David and our other listeners. Same thing for like, Oh My Fraud and the unofficial QuickBooks podcast. So the idea is that there's a lot of these communities out there that are very expensive and niche and exclusive. And I feel like we need a place for accountants who don't have the resources to pay that kind of money. You work in industry, it's not like your CFO is gonna pay for your membership in a community or your CPE. So that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to serve the vast majority of accountants who they need good resources to learn and they are paying for themselves. Awesome. Cool. Well, I'll make sure I link that in the show notes. I'm going to be joining it as well. I love everything you and David are doing. Like I think that, like I say, I've said it a lot here today already, but I think what you do is very important for the accounting community at large. And although it is a business, it's a business that like, I think is hugely beneficial to everybody involved and even people who aren't necessarily funding or part of the business. So I think that that's important is that what you do kind of helps the common good as well. So I'm going to make sure that I link that. I'll be in the community as well. And I'm looking forward to kind of checking that out. Thank you so much for joining me, Blake. Dom, thanks for having me. This was so much fun.