Growth Almost Broke the Firm: Right-Sizing and More with Chad Davis

0:00Hello and welcome to the Unique CPA with your host, Randy Crabtree. Our commitment is to our thriving community of accounting professionals who are physically and mentally healthy, fulfilled, and energized by their work, with the ultimate goal of elevating the reputation of the best profession in the world. The Unique CPA is brought to you by RandyCrabtree.com, log on to learn more. Big thanks go out to Magnetic for back in the show. First day I tools only handle basic forms, but Magnetic prepares the entire 1040 with industry leading form coverage. So your team just reviews and signs, MagneticTex.com. Well welcome everyone, we're here at the Unique CPA podcast hosted by Randy Crabtree. Today we have someone who shouldn't be on the podcast, but has been invited within what 30 seconds of being asked because the other person dropped out, is that how it works? Well kind of, there's some scheduling issues, so I'm like, I got to get a new show recorded

1:03really quick so that we can have one scheduled for next Tuesday. No I did say, you and I have been friends for a long time, and at the end of the day you've said, I'll have you on as soon as I need somebody to come out. So like you are living up to your like original ask, and I'm just glad that I was available. So this is really cool. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Am I glad you're available? Do we actually introduce you yet? It doesn't matter. Well, you're going to, okay, I'm Canadian, used to living in our V for eight years, currently moved to Spain to kind of chill it in Europe for a bit, have a firm called Live CA, almost broke it at 120 people, it's really great now at 60 people, been to all three BTGs and not very happy that I can't go this year because it did decide to go to Europe, but this will be the first year where I kind of don't go to any accounting conferences. So if I did have to go to what it would be yours, but I've said no, I've said no to all.

2:05It's not mine. It's the world's conference. I just happen to be, I just happen to be the guy that hosted, I suppose, and do you have a name? Hi, my name is Chad. Isn't it called a Randy Con though? Some people call it Randy Con. I pretend I don't like hearing that, but I do enjoy the, not going to lie. Well look, what are some topics you'd like to cover today? I think if you don't mention AI on an accounting podcast, either you have everybody loving it or everybody hating it. You can cover the firm stuff, we can cover BTG, like whatever you want. Well, I think it will just see where this goes, but that one thing, you mentioned pretty much everything about you, but just again, just to reiterate, Chad Davis, co-founder of live CA, once was 120 person firm, now 60 person firm, crushing it at 60, probably some pains

3:09at 120. And so maybe we should talk about that a little bit. Let's start there. Let's just, you know, you started this from what, 13 years ago or something. Yeah, this is my business partner, Josh Swag. He was living in, he was overseas, when I met him, and I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and we had never met when we had a bank account together and the company was started. Early days, it was, I think, Will Lopez, who made the introduction to Josh and I, which is crazy. Yeah. It's kind of started in like really early 2013, and him and I had our own firms in 2012, but we brought those together and just kind of rode the wave of kind of cloud accounting from there. Yeah. Cool. And then, so let's just go right into the, sorry, do I sound like an official podcast host, rather than a good friend of Chad's right now? We should probably just go to good friend mode instead of podcast mode. It'll just be me and you listening to it anyway. So we have thousands listening on a daily basis, so at least that's what I believe in my

4:14mind. I don't think it's accurate, but we do have thousands listening on a monthly basis. I know that. That's great. Congratulations. That's at least. And you've been running this for many, many years. Yeah. I honestly don't, we're in our seventh year, if that's the right way to say how many hundreds of episodes. So this, what we're recording right now is probably around 260, I'm guessing. When we first started, we were twice some, no, we were every other week and about four years ago, three years ago, I have no idea. We went to weekly. So, you know, I guess if we did the math, we'd be able to figure that out, but I'm not going to do math right now. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's go into the pain. That's what people want to hear about. How does screw this up, Chad? Yeah. The pain is interesting, but it's a learning to think. So there's, so I look at things like that is like, hey, you know what, you're never going to be perfect and you're going to learn from it. And obviously you did because you, like you said, you're crushing it.

5:14So, so you've never said that, I said, I'm enjoying it. That's the most important thing is you're enjoying it, crushing it and enjoying it. Look at you. You're living how you want. You live in a camper for years. Now you're living in Europe. You're having fun. Your kids are experiencing the world. It's not going to be any better than that. But okay, you just said, let's talk about the pain. What happened when you got to 120? So it was really weird. Between 75 people and 100 people, it just felt like a conveyor belt. So the more people that we thought we needed to serve customers the way we thought we were supposed to serve them, because they never really looked back at all of our procedures and said, how can we massively change this? We just kind of used the same things that had happened all the way through. Even though we thought we were innovative, it's really hard to get that many people to kind of move. I really feel for the firms that have thousands of employees, like I can't imagine that very easy at all. But what happened was like too many people doing things in a way that shouldn't have been

6:16done that way, and needing to fill the pipeline with new customers in order to pay for the people. So that recipe was a disaster. And what ended up happening was we were bringing on probably 10 to 20 clients a month. And what I didn't tell you was that our client profile is in American dollars, like a million dollars USD and up in revenue. So like no small companies, but also no like 200 million dollar companies either. So when you're taking on that much complexity over that many people, you have to have a lot of middle management, a lot of training, a lot of education, a lot of coverage, a lot of people leave. Like it was just a recipe for disaster and it broke because people couldn't get their work done in a regular amount of time. There was just always too much. So what happened was it was like my business partner and I were over at the expense of my thing in Italy.

7:17Oh, don't rub it in. That was so fun. Me and George clearly and being there on the surprise dime before they went to F1, especially if you want to do that again, that would be really great. It would be. My goal was to get to the next one and there hasn't been a next one, so your money went to F1. But when we were there, things were blowing up. And I remember, we rented a little small car and in Europe, everything is a manual car. So I was driving it all around the countryside and Josh and I were like, we have to come up with a new business model. So we're just trying to think about, like at what level is there not so much middle management, but there's enough that it's supportive. And at what level could we make enough profit to keep investing back into the company? So we just modeled out those different things in five or 10 person increments down from 20 all the way up to like 100 people. And all the math pointed to 60 people. It was just blatantly obvious for us.

8:21And we realized, like, oh, people could go home and we could probably, what's the polite way for exiting a relationship with the client? So for him, my Diana Crawford says, inviting people to be successful elsewhere, there. That's it. So we went through the whole exercise of going from value pricing to budget at hours, which then was the crux to reprice everybody and meet with every single person to explain the change. And through that. Save it again. Because I missed it. Do it again. What was the change? We realized that in order to control our capacity, we needed to sell capacity. So we moved from value pricing to budget at hours. And now every single customer is charged the same way at the same rate. So it means our team can now be involved in re-scoping and repricing that adding and

9:21subtracting things is directly relating to the price. That's the crux. Capacity management, new pricing model, very clear expectations with customers, aligned incentives to reduce price and not increase it, which is very like, I know a lot of accountants listen to this and hate me for that, but like, I really like aligning incentives with customers. And then from there, it all just kind of clicked. And then we could focus on the things that were super important to us, like internal databases and keeping data clean and figuring out what projects needed to be worked on through EOS. And like, that got us through all that kind of stuff. Like when you stack on four to five big changes and you allow time to go by and nonbrush yourself, it's a pretty cool outcome. And the result is that you have everybody aligned in the company towards what you're working towards. A far greater amount of people on the leadership and manager level aligned and contributing,

10:23more than it being top down from one person's vision. And now you have like a company of we versus a company of me and it's just like fun to be around. Yeah. All right. So I got to dig into a few of those. I don't understand the budget of the hour's thing. What's that mean? It means that we have a rate per service and then we have variables for the service. Let's use payroll, for an example. Payroll has a rate. That rate is then multiplied by a time. The time is calculated by a hundred different variables and a very sophisticated calculator. It could be based off of what provinces they're in or states. The tool that they're using, other stock options, are we doing 401k stuff? Like regardless of what it is, it's all calculated at once to come up with a number of hours per month. And that can be annualized items that are divided by 12, quarterly ones that are divided

11:24by four. You get the idea. And then all of a sudden you have a number. That number times the rate is what they're paying for payroll. And then as things change throughout the relationship, you change the variables and those variables then update the proposals and then you're good to go. Okay. I still don't understand, but I'm guessing people listen and do. I don't know anything. Where are you confused, Randy? You said there's hundreds of variables that go into this and I'm like, that's what confusing me. It's like, and then you explain that depends what you're doing in that payroll that could be different things happening. What makes it complicated, too, is that there's relationships. If you're using one tool with another HR tool and you know that that's a crappy relationship, then you've multiplied the time and effort that there is with that combo. And then you might have a conversation that says, and then I'll put this into US terms. Just move to gusto. Everything's under one roof. You can save some time and some effort because everything's now a little bit more streamlined.

12:26So it also helps with, if they really like you, then they want to keep working with you and they'll take like recommendations to help save them some money. And again, I know people don't like that because you're creating value and you should get paid for that and blah, blah, blah, blah. But I like what we've chosen because we have a lot of really happy customers. We have the right amount of profits built into every calculation and it's like super, super stable. So I really enjoy the stable factor more than I do the other side of it because I think I was like a therapist looking at this. I would say, yeah, you've been burned. So you have an aversion to being burned again. So you are finding comfort in the absolute versus the risky. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you don't even need to go see a therapist now. You've done self therapy. I really do. All right. Well, I've done it before. I think everybody has heard that story. So it's been, it's been, it's been good for me. So. All right.

13:27Well, then there's a few other things. I'm curious about this because you went from one 20 to 60. You obviously got rid of clients, you got rid of people. Well, the first thing that comes to my mind, how about the, were the people self-select leaving or was this a process that you had to go through and ask people to be successful elsewhere? Both. Yeah. I would say a lot of people self-selected because it takes a certain type of person to want to go through a complete change in a company. Oh, yeah. When they're not quite sure what's there for them. And we were going through this at a time. If you remember 2022, 2023, that was sort of like the end-ish of the employee market, like where it was, like you could get a job anywhere and get paid a lot of money. But it was like towards the tail end of that. So people were self-selecting out and getting great offers elsewhere. All right. And then the people that stayed, I mean, they're all, they're thriving now.

14:28That's what my next question was. Sorry. We really, really appreciate them and then have made the company a good place to work. And because they contributed just as much to making their, I think they could see the impact of their efforts very clearly. And did you and Josh actually go through and say, hey, these are the people we do not want to leave. We don't want to make sure that we can keep these people. Was that a process you went through? I mean, nothing I want to talk about, but at the end of the day, you can't really control people. And I think we've learned that a long time ago, you just have to create an environment where they can contribute, and hopefully you want a team that wants to contribute. Exactly. And I think that's what's kind of cool about this is that, you know, you do look at any single one person and you can understand why they're here, and as long as that aligns with why you created the company in this current version, like you're just, you're just laughing. Yep. And then how about the people now? Are you? I mean, you don't have an office. Do other people have us? Is everybody remote?

15:28Is everybody working from home or wherever they want? Yeah. I mean, some of my best friends have offices and they love them. Yeah. Island early on, not to judge people based on their choices of how they want to run their firms. We just have never wavered, but not even one conversation about being 100% remote from the very beginning of the firm. Okay. So let's move on then. So it's, you've got the firm, you love, you're enjoying it. You teased at the beginning about your vagabond life living in an RV for a while, currently living in Europe. Is this, I want to hear the backstory on how all of this began and how it ties in with the business. Yeah. I think the overarching reason why we have the business is that people can have a meaningful life outside of work and out work. So if you think about like every single person here, they should be able to live up to that. So for us, we just wanted to lead by example. And this was exactly the way we want to live, like by business partner does a lot of hiking

16:30and mountaineering and cycling, like he did kill him in gyro and then like a 2,000 kilometer African bike trip in the same week, like he's not. He's the kind of guy that will take the bar and just like, you know how you, you can walk up the air with the calisthenics and like adds the steel. Yeah. That's him. Oh wow. Just like you. I think you could give Roman, I think you could give Roman a, what do you call it, a kick at the can of being like the fittest, like having a note there, but like he's a machine and he loves it too. So like he's, he climbs a mountain every year. He did the Antarctica, now then center whatever it's called, trip a year or two ago, you know, spends a lot of time in Argentina and hiking and like having like business owners go down and do hikes and stuff with him, he's incredible. But then you look at the rest of the team and like they get to do that too. We currently have a guy that's doing that highway from Alaska down to the bottom of Mexico

17:35on motorcycle. And he's working. Like that's kind of cool. Other people have just done the same thing like travel and work, there's a woman right now kind of working from Portugal and like at the end of the day, that's what we wanted to be known for. It's like a place where accountants could go and still have a good life and it just takes a lot of effort to kind of get to that because you always have to balance profit and investment and growth and stagnation or whatever you want to call it. For me, we just wanted to do a quick trip in the RV that was in 2018 or 17 or more and then it turned into, you know, stopping in sort of mid to late 2025 and then we just we checked out, checked out Spain or like, Jesus, a really nice place. We should probably come here for a little bit and then it's have never left. So you've got, I don't know how much you say or don't say, but you're going to be there a while I suppose right now, huh? Yeah, I'll, all signs point to that. Yeah. That's cool.

18:36And we were texting yesterday or two days ago about our Norway trip we just got back from. Are you actually officially going to Norway? Maybe. I was sending you screenshots of the flights from here to the different airports. And what was the cheapest one like 23 euros to go to all? Yeah. It's like nothing. Yeah. It's crazy. I was like, and to go to the one that you liked with the Northern Lights, I think it was like 60 or 70 with two legs or something. Yeah. So I think there's just another thing that just my brain can't rack my head around because in the US and Canada, I like to go anywhere. It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars in Canada. It's worse. Is it really? In American dollars, probably like $500 US, just to go for two hours. Yeah. So I don't know. It's just a weird thing to rack your head around. We're just taking it slow and just trying to enjoy the culture and the Ciestas and the time zones. Okay. This is the coolest part. I get to wake up, be with the kids, take them to school or sleep in my wife, contain

19:37the school. I have pretty much until three o'clock every single day with my wife. Yeah. It's just insane. And then I can work from three to whatever, taking some breaks to be with the kids. But it's like, I had never thought about that before. And now that I'm living it, it's like, holy cow, I'm getting so much done when no one else is around that I get to work on projects I want to work on. Like just today, I spent two hours building out this five week cohort. So accountants can learn how to use code and cloud co-work and cloud for Excel. And it's launching Tuesday. I don't know when this is going to, going to air Tuesday. Yeah. Tuesday. This is launching too. So that same day. Oh, seriously? Yeah. Go to agents dot automation town.io. You could absolutely come on board. But yeah, we're going to launch that April first. And our first guest host is Bo from Australia and he's going to kind of teach some cloud

20:38code stuff. We've got some other like super heavyweights in the accounting world coming in to teach the cloud ecosystem to a bunch of people and, man, it's just, it's so fun. I don't think I'd be able to do that much unless I had like the free time in the mornings like this. Well, I just did some re-subscribed to cloud. So maybe I need to get on there and every time I need something, I won't have to reach out to you and say, Chad, can you build this form here? Can you? Because you did, you did mention PTG and you've been on the advisory committee the last two years and technically are this year, even though you can't be there. And you are a member emeritus. Is that the right way to say it? Of the advisory committee. Member in the shadows. And then share those tools. Yeah. And so I thought, would you did mention at the beginning about AI and all that? And we should probably, because you are the, in my mind, the accessible AI guru and the profession. There's another guy out there that's hard to get a hold of, but he will not be named,

21:39but he's awesome. Yeah. He is awesome. That's who you wanted to have on beforehand, wasn't it? No. I'm done asking. He was on once and that's enough. So he's got his 22 city road show coming up. So he's got to prepare for that. I wish I could go to some of those. Those are so fun. But I think, I think everybody is going to be just like, it's just going to be as accessible to people that are just curious about tech. I think that's, we're getting point now where you can pretty much learn anything with a little bit of time and a little bit of, a little bit of nudging. So it's like some of the coolest learnings have been, for me anyway, personally, is like just talking to other people in our industry about how they're approaching certain things and huge on locks. And I think the focus for this year and conferences and events, even though it'll come up all like how we're using AI, but it's more, I think it's going to be deeper than that. Like the people that have closer relationships are going to spend more time really trying

22:41to learn from each other instead of mass complaining about how it's not working. Yeah. Because it's easy to complain and it's easy to say it's not going to be helpful. But I think the closer and deeper you have like these relationships with people, like you meet people for the first time and that's what you kind of build your relationship on, it's kind of cool because like we're all going through this at the same time. The tech is pretty new at this level that we've never seen before. And the accountants are so, they're going to take that thing that they've done for so many years at conferences and events to be collaborative and helpful to each other. And they're going to just take it to the nth degree and you've got some, like some people sharing on socials, some people sharing in groups, some people sharing at conferences. A lot of people just sharing amongst their friends and like that's the real unlock. It's just getting ideas from other people and sharing. So to everybody that is sharing like kudos, like I learned a lot from you and please keep doing it because without it we're all just going to, I don't know, not be as far along as we could be. And speaking of that, as far as long as we can be, I mean, I assume that you're constantly

23:45tinkering and building and for the firm. And so I assume that you're living it with live CA and so what's that done? I mean, have you created a lot of efficiencies in the firm with the AI tools? Yeah, I think the real win though is in changing people's mindsets. If you have somebody who's also like pushing for it, you're eventually going to do something about that push and it doesn't have to be mean. It just has to be just, oh, do you see this? Oh, do you see this? Oh, like this is possible because 60 people is nothing like the 100 person or the 300 or the 800 or the 1000 person firms, but there's still more than two people and like you have to get buy in and you have to like navigate the human condition of like not wanting to change very much. So I think if I look back and think about all the like tech efficiencies, I'm like, yeah, cool. We've got some great scripts. We've got databases. We've got tools. We've

24:46got scripts. Like we got all the things that kind of save us time. But the biggest wins are like when your director of tax says, hey, can I talk to you? And he's like, I'm just feeling a little bit like behind or like I'm just curious why you're so excited. And you talk to them for an hour. And then like like he leaves invigorated to try anything. And then his people in his team will feel more invigorated to try any things. So I think we we often overlook the impact of just the human to human assistance and over index on the efficiencies because you can still be incredibly efficient, but also incredibly hesitant, if you don't even know. You can have all the tech, but if people don't want to be involved in it or maintain it or give you feedback from how it's working or be invested in improvements, it's probably not going to materialize into anything great. Yeah. So the thing that based on what you said there, and you said it earlier and you

25:50just said it again with change, you've somehow you become a leader that's allowed people to accept change or embrace change. And that's a hard thing to do. And so I think that's one of the big whatever AI, whatever going from 120, but the fact that you've been able to create this firm and create this atmosphere and this culture where change is cool and acceptable and appreciated by people. I think that's one of the biggest wins that I could see of this whole situation. I think the biggest win is seeing like new faces on LinkedIn and in Twitter and in like conferences. I think that's that's cool too because you hear the same things from the same people over and over again. You tune them out. I think my favorite thing about LinkedIn is that I can see who follows or like unconnects from me. So like when you see or when you see your friends doing that, you're like, okay, what did I post? What did I do? So that's why I'm trying to like connect with more

26:50people that are posting for the first time or that are like putting themselves out there. And like one of the guys that's doing one of the sessions in Automation Town for the for the Cloud Code stuff is they've just John from zeroed in consulting and he's quite new to the kind of put yourself out their face. And he's just sharing all kinds of cool stuff. And like I think the more we can lift up people like that that are trying to like teach the profession and give different points of view like the best. But tell my friends that unfold beyond LinkedIn and no hard feelings. I still love you. Right. I didn't know you could do that. Is that because you're the you got this special LinkedIn paid version or something? No, you could. So you're allowed to get your own follower list and things like that. So I just every day have a script running that brings in all their connections and followers. And then I just compare it to the day before. All right. So I'm on your web page or your LinkedIn page right now. So if I unconnect with you,

27:54if you want to follow me, I'll see you tomorrow. All right. I'm not going to do that though. You totally can. No, but that was also kind of fun too. It's like I never thought I'd be the person that posts daily on LinkedIn. Yeah. I can ask about. Yeah. I didn't want to. But my business partner Josh was just like, dude, you had nothing to lose. Like try it out for like a few weeks to see what it's like. And honestly, it was it was more fun than it was an issue. And then it becomes a habit. And then the habit, if it's enjoyable or enough, like something happening from it, you're like, oh, I'm going to keep doing this. And for me, it was never about the tech per se. It was like, now for some reason, the connections I was having with like people that didn't unfollow me. More like way stronger. And like it was just cooler to be at events and like to hang out with people more. And they're like, oh, I saw this. I saw this. Like you start a conversation from a point of like shared stuff. Right. We at the beginning, we talked about the

28:54fact that I have whatever, this is episode 260. I mean, you've done with the daily videos, you're well past that now. Yeah. But also some videos are like, hey, do you see this new feature at JetGPT? And you're like, oh, I'm like one of those people is like the stupidest thing ever. But like the reason I do some of those things is because like I feel like I got something out of them. So I'm like, oh, this is actually a cool feature. I wonder if there's like anybody that hasn't seen this. And then I just started trying to make the videos more about like what I was doing. And like how how they can be helpful because we do not need more people telling people that there's new crazy features that are like not actually having it stand up with actual helpful things that you can do with it. And there's just even the whole idea of like automation, it's kind of weird because you don't want to be like the community person sometimes or the whatever. But then I look back and like actually, I really want to be part of the community stuff because that's where

29:57you can help people in this like safe space. And even if it's just for a couple people a month that are getting something out of it, like you're making something. So until that turns out to be so bad that it is like hurtful, then yeah, maybe we'll stop it then. But for now, there's still people posting that they're learning and they're getting help and there's stuff, which is why I wanted to do this cohort thing for five weeks because if we can just sit down together as accountants and build, there's a million YouTube videos out there. But wouldn't it be cool if you were like all talking about the QuickBooks connection process and the zero MCP together and like how to use co-work to do this. And that and like having real security conversations with other accountants, like I feel like that's where the value is. Yeah, but you already cover my head just those words you just said. So I'll get on and I'll listen. You should come. I should come. But I have people to do that. Is that

30:59like Jed Davis? That was good. What are you spending your time doing now? I saw the post online about taking your conferencing and your coaching stuff. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Oh, okay. So now you're the host, which is cool. Yeah, I'm just leaning into. So what I'm most passionate about is this profession and educating this profession and finding ways that we can build the best accounting profession we possibly could be. And that just doesn't mean the profession. It means the people and how we can treat people right and how people can have this. I just got back from Norway and I posted on this and, you know, I don't know a better word but work like balance right now, but I got to find it. But just live in your life like you're doing. And so if I can at least show people that you can actually enjoy what you're doing and have a life at the same time as you're working, you don't have to wait till you're 65 years old and retired. I have a life that can happen today, things like that. And so the more that I can lean into those things, the more I can be out, I love being on stage,

32:03I love speaking and it's that sounds selfish, but it's it is somewhat from a standpoint that every time I'm on stage and I get emotional, which I do off and on stage, someone comes up to me and talks about how that's having a positive impact on them and how they didn't realize they can make this change and how they could, you know, seek help or whatever it is. And so if that's what you're passionate about, which I am, how could I not lean more into that? I mean, and so that's really kind of the direction I'm going. And then I have to balance that with, you know, if I am out speaking and I am on the road, that's a moment, that's a second, that's a minute, that's an hour I never get back with family. And so that's the kind of the balancing act that I'm working even though that's important to me to be out there. Family is the most important thing. And so how do I balance those, there's that balance board again. How do I balance those two to, you know, make sure that they get fulfillment out of both? And so that's, boy, I don't know, did I answer your

33:05question? That's kind of what I'm where I'm going. I feel like a lot of people are moving towards that. And before we go on, like, just know that people come to bridging the gap for you. Like, we love going and hearing your stories and giving you the hugs and like seeing what you're up to because like creating that environment where people can connect with each other in like less of a professional environment, but more of an emotional one, like, you'll always have that on the profession which is incredible. So thank you for that. Thank you. But also the, the idea of, I don't even care about using whatever the word is, it's like prioritizing what's important to you. You, a lot of people are like that whole concept of rocks and sand and pebbles and all that kind of stuff. Like however cheesy it is, it's like really true. And it feels like you're picking your rocks, right? Like you're, there was four of them, like two could be the, the speaking and the, the conferences and two

34:05could be the family things. And you just, you pick those as part of the year. And you like, don't waver no matter what it is. And then the rest just kind of falters. And like, that's how we always did the RV trips. I pick three to four major stops through the year. And the kids could pick, I could care less where we went. Like if they had an interest in going to a cave somewhere, cool. Like if they wanted to go to the desert, awesome. I want to go to snow, sweet. It was awesome. Because it didn't matter. Because we were like doing the rocks that we really, really wanted. Right. And I guess maybe that's the one of the final questions is like, I can imagine with your family growing up now, that's going to take more time to be home. Could you want to be around all of the, all of that? Yeah. Yeah. But what are the three or four accounting things that you want to make sure happen this year in 2026? Accounting for me or accounting in general, relating to your new focus. Like the speaking stuff. Yeah. So there's a brand new subject that I want to start talking

35:12about. And I probably will start it this year. In fact, I was talking with Kenji Koremato about this as well. Because he's kind of living a similar life as me. You know, he just transitioned from one thing to another at his early the mid 50s. Kind of what I did to. And it's a session about, it's a keynote with everyone to call it a story. It's a could be a workshop on just leaning into your skills at different parts of your career. And what's the best use of your time for this profession for you, for your firm at different stages? And there's studies out there that shows, you know, depending on your career, but technical skills wane quickly. You're the arbitra, arbitra, arbitra, your technical skills are like growing. It don't say arbitra. I think that's a bird. Yeah. But I think that's where it says that's like the rare thing. You're the rare thing. Your technical skills are like going through the roof with everything. But technical skills in

36:12general just start to leave you pretty quick. But there's so much knowledge you gained during that time and sharing that knowledge and being a mentor, an educator, a leader, whatever, a shoulder to cry on, whatever it's needed. And so there's different stages, different parts of your career. And everybody, you know, can be a little different. But there's a really good book called From Strength to Strength. We're kind of talks about this. And so I'm going to build a new talk because I think in the profession, there's so many things that I see that we can be better at and everybody's different. But I think often we just hang on to be trying to be this technical expert way too long. And a better use of our skills is going to be this leader or this mentor, this educator. And so I want to just build out this, let's talk about this and how this can be beneficial to you, how that you can look at yourself differently. It's not bad that maybe you don't have the skills you had before. It's something that now you get these new skills in this knowledge base that you can share with others. And it's going to like everybody better. So that's one thing I want to

37:17try to start leaning into a little bit leadership in general. I'm going to continue to talk about and be part of. I want to see, you know, the two years ago or so I started talking about vulnerable leadership. That's always going to be key. But there's different ways to say that leaders are afraid to make mistakes often, you know, without mistakes. You know, you learned a lot from, I don't know if I'm going to call a mistake, but from the growth you had, you learned a ton. And so learning from mistakes and showing what you've learned from that are important. So things like that, there'll be something new that'll pop up this year that I'll just get passionate about. Every year, it's funny. Every year, it does happen. It just don't know what it is yet except it is this one, most likely this leaning into your, the best use of your time at different stages of your career. I think what will be really cool is if you can bridge the gap between that message and like actually how to apply it. Yep. So like you're lucky. You have a platform where

38:19people, they love you, they want you at the events. Like that's your outlet to share this information. There might be some accounts that have been accounts their whole life. And they don't have those opportunities. Right. So how did they do that? And I wonder if you can give them guidance. And yeah, and I can. I think I can. But the thing is, this is the story I've told before a hundred times. And it's my story of how I found this out back when I was 51 years old, you know, transitioning from mangy partner to something else. So I have to find a different way to say it. It's a different message. It's kind of the same path that I've gone through. But it's now this is another thing that's been a benefit of this path that I've been on. So I just got to figure out how to create that story because the story is, again, it would tie us into everything. Hey, try me or grew it. Try me or became one of the fastest growing companies in the US. It, you know, we have a great culture where people stay. All these benefits and part of it is,

39:23you know, I'm not saying it's me, but I made a change and that change of how the positive impact on me and that's seen to have a positive impact on others. So it's that same story, but it's a different way of saying it. I don't want to reiterate that same story. So there has to be a better way to educate on that. And so that's what I'm working with Chachy Ptian to try to figure out the best way to share this information. And I can go straight from Arthur. Was it? Arthur Brooks wrote the book from strength to strength. I'm not going to go straight from him. I'll give him credit for these ideas, for sure, because that's where I got these ideas. And same thing, Kenji read the same book. That's why we were passionate about talking this together. But it's just a matter of now figuring out the best way to educate on this. And then, you know, show the benefits and show the implementation of this. And you know, the stories could be, hey, this, this implementation made this benefit for me or for Kenji or forever. I'm talking about, you know, real life stories. Maybe I need to start interviewing people that have had that career or that

40:27job role change in their profession and the impact. I mean, you're probably one of them. You've had different stages of your career and then sharing other people's stories on that. Do you know of any, I want to say industries, but like associations or groups where retiring or people towards the end of their careers can like help other firms because they feel like in the age of this like, agentic work, there's going to be a lot of firms pop up that are really small and they can handle a lot, but they're going to miss the 30 years. Yeah. Do you know of anything like that? Were these like newer firms or these younger people could get support from someone like that? Off top of my head, no, but funny. I had the same conversation yesterday with Kazman Nikolesco, who is the founder of a crew. I've mentioned a crew to you before because I asked, I asked him a question. I said, right now we're going to, you know, hey, things you're doing

41:28with AI and things you're doing with tax and you're going to automate a lot of the front end stuff and you're talking about how a tax return, a complex tax return was going from 100 hours to 10 hours is the time that the people were putting in now. But then I thought the process was, okay, so there's that 90 hours where, you know, we've always looked at that was a learning phase for new people in the company. And now how do we start training people if we get to skip this whole aspect of the data entry and the analysis and research and whatever and just go straight to the advisory. Hey, did we got 10 hours to finish the tax return, but now I've freed myself up to be more this advisor. I can spend a lot more time on having an impact on this client rather than reporting what happened with this client. And he was talking about how what they're doing is they're looking to build tools in that just helps people become educated quicker through this whole process. And so they're doing it with tools, but I think you can also figure out a way, like you're

42:33saying, retired old people like me can be out there in the, in knowledge sharing, like you're doing with your five week, you know, session, something like that. I think we've, man, you're getting me going here. I think we too often thought the training, the education, the training process is a lot, long ribbon that really is. I think people learn a lot quickly. And we've always had this. It's just the selling method that the county has, same as last year. We've always thought it takes 10 years for somebody to get to a level where they can move up from this role to that role in 15 years before they could be a partner. When reality, I think that all can be truncated with different tools and different methodologies. And we just never spent the time and effort to figure out what those are. Do I have the answers? No, are the answers out there? Yes. And do I want to see if I can be part of that? I think I do. I think it'd be cool. There's also this major opportunity now for, like every time something happens, it could be a review, it could be a teaching opportunity,

43:33it could be an error that's found, it could be an opinion or a judgment that was made. If those can start to be documented, could you imagine getting people that are tech savvy to organize, catalog, turn those into skills, and before they would be knowledge bases and stuff, you don't need that anymore. You literally could have someone in charge of the skills and knowledge of the firm. And I'm not saying that you would sell that or it would be a service that people would pay for, but it's like at a bare minimum, a firm operates in a specific way with a certain level of judgment and ethics and values and all of the things that make people unique. It's like, how cool would that be? If most firms started thinking like that at every learning opportunity so that that knowledge gets captured forever, I know we're doing it at our firm. It's a slow take off, but I think once it becomes more part of your habits, it could be really, really beneficial.

44:38Yeah, it's funny. I had another conversation yesterday kind of on that sharing the ethos of your company, especially when we have these rapid growth going through M&A or private equity or whatever and probably knowledge and everything being distilled down. We just don't know what everybody's doing. And I'm not going to give away with this guy because he has a plan of doing something, but he just wanted to get my opinion. I'm like, yeah, I think that'd be pretty cool to try to have nothing else. It'll have a positive impact on the culture, but it's also going to be a way to share knowledge and make sure that you have more of a cohesive firm and people feel more connected. And so he has an idea. Again, I'm not going to share his idea right now. Maybe I'll get him on the podcast and we'll actually discuss that when he feels comfortable about it, but he just wanted to get my opinion. But I think there are people out there already thinking about this process or this, what we need to do. Well, people's dog walks or

45:42bike runs or runs are probably over now. So what do you think we should wrap this up? I think we should, but I could talk to you forever. And so it only took probably, when did I first meet you? Was it 21 or 22? At least five years ago. Yeah, I'm going to say 21. It was, did I meet you and into a connect? You paid for dinner at a beautiful restaurant. That's right. One of the fruit. But like, who is this Randy guy? And why is he bawling around buying people dinner? It's like, I like him a lot. I forgot about that. That is where we met. But it's also where you and Jason and Jake were walking around together and you were the first guys to tell me about this chat GPT thing. And I'm like, what about 2022? Yeah, I think it was, I think it was October 22 is when that or, you know, in 22. Yeah, that's right. Because it would

46:42have been a QuickBooks connect and there was a, it came out at the end of October. Yeah, so you're right. Yep. And so that's, that's when we first met. So I'm glad that that happened. I'm glad that after five years of you, me asking you to be on the ship. No, I haven't asked you that often lately. Right. I haven't asked you in a while. But you said at some point we will do it. So I'm glad that we've got this done in the last second. Oh, we literally had six minutes to prepare. But it was the best, it was the best news to get on a nice Friday afternoon. And again, thankful to call you a friend. And I'm sad that I won't be able to see you this year in person. But thanks again for this and for all the WhatsApp conversations over a few days. I look forward to them. Yeah, well, and don't forget, there's a chance I'll be in Madrid in the fall. So if that's the case, maybe we do need to get together this year. I'm just five hours away. Let's do it. There you go. See you ready. All right. Well, Chad, thanks for being on. Thank you for joining us today on the unique CPA. You can find the show notes for today's episode

47:46and book Randy for your next keynote or event at RandyCrabTree.com. Remember to subscribe and leave a five star rating on your favorite podcasting app. And join us next time for more expertise and insights on the unique CPA.