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what do accounting firms actually need from their CRM I feel like we project actually a bunch of different types of things on crms is AI going to remove like the midlevel accounting firm can take a big old bite out of that because the big guys have the the tech and the money to invest in AI I made a silly tax deadline AI video some folks asked how I put that together it was pretty fun and then a whole bunch of podcast ideas for firms we did a podcasting episode on Monday a bunch of people shared their ideas for what they're thinking we're going to jam on that may give you a few new ideas come on in it is a pipeing hot Q&A edition of Jason daily [Music] Friday okay the CRM discussion uh we talked about this a bit recently like what do accounting firms in fact that was this week I think what do accounting firms need to track calls and emails and text messages and all these like various ways that we get information in right like our systems don't handle all this stuff very well and so we end up having all these different siloed sources of of client communication uh and the commission I think the commission net I think it was on YouTube comment hey Jason I just can't figure out the best CRM and I've tried them all if I were to go down the rabbit hole of everything that I do to to try to stay organized and on top of the projects clients you would think I'm crazy uh Mr net I absolutely don't think you're crazy I said this in a uh in a video I Shot recently but you're spending I think what I said was you're spending too much time working on what to work on and like how true does that feel right the amount of time that you have to spend just to figure out and decide what to do next and like it can be really overwhelming when we have like so much information in different places but specifically around crms like the the phrasing CRM is so noisy like there's so many people that say they are a CRM and have a different definition of exactly what a CRM is I would argue most CRM SAS tools these days are actually like sales and marketing focused they're actually more focused on acquisition not the management ongoing management of the client relationship which I think is the angle that a lot of accounting firms are coming from give me a place to organize all of the stuff to do with the client relationship as the acronym would suggest and as we talked about this week most of the practice Management systems do a really Half Baked version of giving us a place to track all of that stuff some of them like do CRM on like the sales and the lead side like a really basic version of it but not many but uh to the point of this commenter like how many times have you gone down that rabbit hole and you're like this these are not this is not the thing that I want like it does so many different things but ultimately I'm looking for this very specific thing that it does not do for me so I think uh he actually followed up and said uh I'm trying to build this in notion now and honestly I think this is the appeal these days of the hyper flexible like almost build your own software type of softwares and so apps like notion apps like Koda is another one their whole mission is to basically reinvent software and make systems that are so flexible that you don't need to go out and buy a software for a thing because it's so quick and easy to put together in a like put together exactly what you want and like an area where I'm super struggling with this right now is content management like if I if we produce a short uh like a you know a short portrait Style video I'm on like six or seven social platforms where we're posting regularly how do I track where that thing has been posted and where it hasn't been posted and like what if I want to resurface that 7 months down the road in like a newly relevant way there's scheduling tools but most scheduling tools don't work across all the platforms that I use and they're all missing various things and so how do you organize all this stuff in a single place and like what I've fallen back to is like well Frick like I'm just going to have to hack this thing together in notion because I'm comfortable with notion and I have a Clear Vision for like oh yeah we could totally build it this way with notion it's just not going to have all of the razzled Dazzle and the features of like a purpose-built tool uh in my case for you know content management it would be going out and like pulling engagement metrics afterwards and like that sort of thing and when it comes to crms like there is value in a CRM that does exactly what you need it to do like integrating with however you text people and however you make phone calls and having all that information in one place the service that you use for live meetings that is the big downside of going out and building your own thing so like while it is often times appealing to go out and be like oh I could I'm going to roll my own version of this thing from scratch the big downsides of doing that are you ultimately have to invest further in that if you ever want it to improve all the other tools we use they kind of improve without us having to do anything right uh but that tool of yours is going to be static until you invest more time and effort into making it better we are accountants so maybe that excites some people I like my tools to improve and then often times they're like kind of to what we were talking about they're like an 80% solution like they're not going to you're not going to have the native Integrations with like all the other stuff that works just the way you want it but to be honest sometimes that 80% version is better than what you're going to find anywhere else unfortunately so that's always a hard one in my early career days I went really quickly to building my own thing and I kind of enjoyed it and like the upkeep wasn't a big deal to me I will say in my older years uh as I mature as my children suck the life blood out of me I can say I don't have the same excitement for building my own things that I once did because I don't want another thing like to manage on an ongoing basis but I hear you on the CRM struggles man like I there's so many aspects of work life still where it's like what this doesn't feel like a hard thing why is everybody doing it in a way that I don't want it done that can be really frustrating there a lot of people say that with practice Management Systems where they're like I've tried them all and none of them work quite like I want to so there's certainly a a version that you could always build yourself and there's absolutely times to do that and I still have a bunch of custom stuff that I've built myself that I use a lot but I've also gotten more okay with compromising and with like opening my mind to here's the way I thought this would work it looks like they have a different methodology why uh that's something that maybe I wasn't always as open to as I am now is understanding their alternative methodology to getting the same thing done and maybe giving that a little more space than I used to in the past tell me what you think about this AI hot take from Ro Romeo in the comments I think AI could shift the structure of the next generation of firms slim down solo firms with little to no employees or on the contrary the product ey Services eventually price their products so low that they're leveraged to hell and force us all to be employees for our Consolidated overlords medium-sized firms get hollowed out and those solo firms get vastly simplified because they can use Tech to do a lot of that heavy lifting he says semi-serious but he sees AI kind of reducing that middle layer and I'll be honest obviously I've thought a lot about this and I think sometimes we fall into the traps of what automation has done in the past to inform the future like the the thing that you know I've seen way too much that is you know the old AI will automate the menial simple tasks the tedious stuff that we no longer have to do tomorrow do anymore and it's like yeah they might but they might almost they might also automate like the technical stuff like the one big difference with what's happening now is for the first time you have automation that's not just displacing the entry level people you have automation that can stand to displace everyone in the entire org chart and it's creating this really weird like social political Dynamic within big companies especially where pretty much everyone is equally at risk and normally with automation it's like oh we're going to we've got robotics to do this and that on the factory floor and it's like it's the entry level stuff it's the data entry but this is bigger than that like this is everything like we talked about that study where you had these really highlevel consultants and those that were using AI for the really highlevel Consulting tasks were like you know 40% more productive and like way higher performers and this is like big brain knowledge work kind of stuff but then they Ed the same framework for financial analysis using Ai and this financial analysis was fairly basic and they were actually worse when they used the AI and so it's interesting this like new kind of generative AI Wave It's disrupting stuff almost at like the entire skill Spectrum the other really interesting big difference with this one is for the first time everybody's largely using the same public AI models for this stuff and in the past it cost tens of Millions of dollars to train your own model generally not that there wasn't a cheaper way to do it but in the past it was like you know your Inuits of the world your Bloomberg like they were going to be the ones to invest their own money and training their own models and so that was just naturally out of touch for everybody else right and so in the accounting world you could say like okay maybe the really big firms are going to train their own models on their data and they're going to have this massive Advantage the reality is the intuits of the world everybody is using these public models from anthropic from open Ai and around that they are like wrapping kind of their own customization but at the end of the day we actually largely have access to the same tools and anybody can start using those models for free you sick of hearing people talking about AI yet you get into the office and you're like my inbox is still a dumpster fire buddy can you actually give me something that'll save me some time I'm ready same same bro listen client Hub today's sponsor you want to know their Mantra AI L Hub AI is not tomorrow it's it's today buddy it is it's already happening they're already shipping stuff in product that are super cool AI large language model driven Solutions they're not just talking about it and putting out webinars about how cool this stuff is like they've actually are are implementing it into their product in really meaningful ways in fact I don't know they're one of the only companies I've seen that have actually publicly put that road map out there to say gang here's the stuff that we are most excited about right now and here's the stuff we're working really hard on uh and they're even extending like early beta access to some of these features for the folks who are most excited to be on The Cutting Edge of things I know a lot of whom listen to this podcast picking your Tech Partners is as much about where they are today as where they are going tomorrow and the things that they are investing in you got concerns about whether your partner is investing in AI to out club might be for you link in the show notes you ever thought man a fly there was a portal for all of these portals one portal to rule them all the portal portal you know and we say this kind of tongue and cheek but also kind of not because we really don't like giving our clients fragmented experiences uh spoiler alert co-pilot sponsor of this video that's kind of their Mantra is uh the portal fre portals the notion that you can plug in any of the other tools that you use into co-pilot to give people a single place to manage their stuff totally customize like all of the options that the client sees within that portal even down to the client level like you can have different clients see different options down the left hand side cop's got a bunch of its own like built-in tooling but you can also embed a bunch of the other tools you use into co-pilot giving clients a single place that they can log in and see all that stuff all in one place which is the Holy Grail right uh I don't know like there's often times where one more tool for all of the tools isn't the solution but for portals I I can't think of a better solution cuz we're at like we've got all these different places we got to go log into all these things right so if that's something that you grappled with co-pilot might be for you check out a link to co-pilot and the show notes and so in today's AI era if everybody has access to the same tools what's going to make the difference at the end of the day the humans will right so if we're all using the same systems the differentiator and those systems may make us wildly more uh productive but if we're all using the same systems that make us wildly more productive The differentiator Remains us now what remains to be seen is in this this new sort of era of AI where we all have access to largely the same tools will people still be able to develop the same like tool-based advantages so will a big four firm be able to do something with AI that fundamentally I couldn't do in the past we would have said yes but I think we would have said yes because they had the money to invest in training their own models and doing their own stuff these days I'm not actually so sure because for all of the great things that big firm money and investment can enable it also does like the opposite when it comes to agility and adopting new tech it makes you really bloody slow and it takes you have these massive change cycles and you will arbitrarily get like stuck into like oh no we use this system for this thing because we have an agreement to do it not because it's the best system on Merit like in a perfect world yes like you're picking the best tool but big firms are complex they've got a lot more friction when it comes to changing those systems as opposed to little firms this is what I loved about running a little firm as we were super agile and we could pick up new stuff and it was no big deal until your staff riots that's always a problem but man stuff is changing so wildly fast right now I don't know there's like there's some upside to being a smaller firm now because you have that agility I mean we've talked about the stuff that's happened just in the last three weeks from Bing chat Enterprise a Totally Secure version of AI chat that we all have access to if you have a Microsoft 365 plan gp4 Vision like we're still figuring out like the crazy stuff that that can do this last week I was tinkering with using that to extract proforma data from tax organizers if you're tax Pro in the US you know what a big deal that is chat gpt's speech abilities the the ability to now talk with it on November 1st we're getting Microsoft 365 co-pilot they're like big Holy Grail software release that's supposed to completely change the way that we work that's coming the first of next month we're supposed to get Google Gemini this month still Google Gemini is Google's new large language model with it was supposedly trained on three times the parameters of gp4 three times and gp4 is massive the excitement around Google Gemini is you have all of this YouTube data that Google has that nobody else has that is this unbelievably rich source of information that has like contextual data that makes it even more helpful like how many people like this video versus dislike this video okay well we can pull this information into a model and for anybody else to include that information into in a model they would have to like scrape those videos and it would be like enormously data intensive so we've got this new Gemini model from Google that could like knock the socks off anything else that we've seen but this stuff is happening like every single week and I talk with software companies that sell into midsize and large firms and they're like they'll do a demo with a team and they're like we absolutely love it we'll talk to you in 9 months and that's just the reality of how bigger firms work so to be honest like my answer to this question of like does it remove the middle the middle of of accounting firms the answer is really I don't know just like all things generative AI like everybody's guessing and speculating it is so hard to predict anything beyond six like for example Gemini Gemini could be incredible could be way more powerful than gp4 and that really changes work really quickly Microsoft 365 co-pilot like maybe that is phenomenally powerful and it makes our lives way easier it's so hard to predict but it is interesting how this generation of AI is displacing almost all tasks on that like skill Spectrum equally and by displacing it's not like doing 100% of something but generally making people much more productive so if you have 10 people that you can make 50% more productive like the reality is that probably displaces things right or at least changes what people's responsibilities become if you got Gemini just around the corner you got Microsoft 365 it's really hard to say exactly like where we're going to go but we do know for sure that who's going to be rewarded are going to be the most agile firms right like the ones that are able to lean into this really cool new stuff that's exciting of all the years to be a tech nerd that stops running an accounting firm and creates Tech education content right like it's just absolutely wild and it gives us a lot to talk about I'm having fun speaking of silly uh Ai and Tech things so uh big tax deadline for us tax prepars my background my first decade in the profession I just did tax prep the firm I own did a tax prep so holds a very special place in my heart my body has still not recovered from the annual Cadence that is those busy seasons and all that like my brain has still not been mapped back to like a healthy annual cycle but on the 16th I pulled together like some of my favorite AI tools and I made like an AI music video that honestly I am very proud of like I think it really slaps like I think it is great but a bunch of people ask like how did I do this how did I put this together in fact I want to play it for you real quick if you haven't heard it yet let me figure out how to pull this up okay here it is the music video I put together for the tax deadline October 16th here two more to go nothing to fear but what's that a phone is ringing not a chance not today Satan dead CLI knocking at my door deadlines here I can't hear them anymore we survive hold my beard all together say with me now it'll go better next year quick question hey there's my text turned on I'm half in the B one more confirm and rip off to [Music] theing my dead here I can't hear them anymore we survived hold my beard all together now it'll go B next year hold my hand keep with me do not be from Steve voice light [Music] the okay pretty proud of that was produced 100% with AI tools so I've got a music uh a tool called chirp chirp CHP BYO that will let you gener music that is like like pretty convincing and so it is like all things AI right now where you see the output and you're like wow this is Magic and the reality is behind the scenes like there's a whole lot of duct tape and paper clips and like rrolling trying to get new better versions over and over again to actually get you to the good version but it like to ai's credit like while it is really janky to Cobble these things together and like internet thing people I think right now love to will sooner make like a Twitter Thread about how great this thing is and it's going to change the world then acknowledge that like oh no that was actually a pile of work your results will absolutely vary it's probably not going to work that well for you the flip side of that two ai's credit you know what I never could have done before is that make like a music video with like a song that's somewhat respectable just using AI tools so for the music it was chirp byso the imagery was it was some mid Journey it was some Dolly 3 which you now if you have chat GPT plus you should have access to Dolly 3 for generating images and then I used like Adobe Premiere to put the images in the video together but I tell you what like I mean it was pretty good we still need the music quality to get like a little bit better like it sounds very compressed like it's kind of crunchy but man we get that music quality a little better and then we can start working on now that's what I call accounting volume one right oh boy but it is funny so the the various reactions to putting that out there a lot of people are like is this AI I'm like yes what did you think this was me you think this is me singing this you think I actually know how to do this it was Ai and it's like it's just an interesting talking point of does it matter or is this like are we in this weird kind of transition period where we want to know it's like if somebody took a picture back in the day when digital cameras were coming around and somebody was like did you take that with a digital camera and they may have been like yes and now like we don't really care about that so like that's an example of something like kind of like that in the past is this the same I don't know honestly we've talked about the example before of if you go and read a blog post and it solves your problem and it was written by AI do you ultimately care that it was written by AI or not and I ran a PLL on Twitter and and Linkedin and it was like 80 to 85% of people were like I could care less if it was helpful great if it solved my problem that's all I care about about today's episode is sponsored in part by firm 360 checked out firm 360 at practice management system you know I could tell you about the razzled Dazzle features about how it gives you a 360 degree view of your practice everything you need all in one place but instead let me let me let the people talk the people who actually use firm 360 what are the users saying here's Joshua s about 6 months in using the tool he has a firm between 11 and 50 people firm 360 is a practice management solution I have been looking for in my 25 years in this industry I've used many different products all claiming to save me time money and be the best product for my business I've tested every other online practice management tool for accountants and all have fallen short except firm 360 finally a product that has everything is easy to learn and use and support that is second to none because you know what we all need little support these days right listen stuff's going to happen sometimes maybe there's a surprise maybe just just can't figure something out and you need a friendly person to help you work through it right that's why support is so important okay gang if you're looking for the supportive practice management system look no further than firm 360 this episode is sponsored in part by the fine folks at Cloud accountant Staffing do you hire accountants bless your little heart uh not the best part of the job in my opinion not something I ever enjoyed well listen you can build your accounting dream Team Dream Team with talented offshore accountants in the Philippines that work 100% fulltime for your firm their accountants aren't freelancing or Contracting for multiple firms they're all yours they work exclusively for you and are incentivized to stay with you and your team long term they're not going to get swiped cloud account Staffing is 100% dedicated to the accounting industry and founded by a former accounting firm owner that understands your business knows your paying points they had to hire some accountants and they said you know we're going to build our own pipeline in the Philippines going to pull in some super talented people and then open that up to other firms basically that's the story uh we been talking about a lot about Staffing building more resilient Staffing pipelines for your firms I I had staff in the Philippines it like totally redpilled me to like oh gez like we need to globalize the way that we get our work done uh check these folks out Link in the show description Cloud accountant staffing.com so it's interesting right now um how much certain things matter uh that they were done by AI or not and obviously the bad version of this is like theft or like replicating somebody's Identity or pretending to be something that you're not uh with AI and we may do another episode on this uh because I man I'm using a new like visual Avatar cloning thing called hey Jen and I posted this on social media last week literally spent 10 minutes creating an avatar of me and I gave it like a 10-second audio clip from this podcast and trained it on the video of that podcast and it created a video of me T saying that 10sec clip and I put it alongside the actual 10 seconds of me saying that clip and my wife could not tell which one was real like it's one thing for people who have never met you to know is this a real person saying this thing or not but the people that know you like they know your little ticks and your quirks and the way that you deliver things my wife could not tell if that was me or not and it kicked off this whole thing on social media actually Justine baitman retweeted it and then like all the Hollywood people jumped on it and like that got several hundred reposts and that side of things like man that is getting so weird the notion of like cloning somebody's identity uh and I'll save this for another episode but like the real hard thing for me to process was I have always thought turning up on video was the way that you protect yourself from like faceless videos and AI generated stuff and you know I've like I've turned a bunch of people on to like video deliveries with loom and all that stuff but if I can create videos of myself or anybody else well let's just say myself where people can't tell the difference is that ultimately going to Super saturate create video to where you have videos where you can't tell if it's real or not and once everybody has that power to create those videos are they going to make a whole bunch of them and then it's like nobody wants to look a video anymore like it kind of set me on this spiral of like well shoot I could literally honestly you could like create a version of this this podcast where you probably couldn't tell if that wasn't me or not now if you know what to look for like you can tell like it won't like you can't do ridiculous gestures and stuff in front of your face and like there's definitely limitations but this is the worst it's ever going to be and to bring it back to the question of doesn't matter if it was made with AI I think what we will enjoy and what we will consume and what we will engage with is just going to be different on the other side of all this because some stuff in the past that has been really hard will be trivialized it just became really trivial for me to create a video of myself saying a thing how should I feel about that I don't know what does it mean when that goes mainstream and everybody else gets their hand on the same thing and it's part of Snapchat and Tik Tok and all these other things does it devalue video I don't know it's going to be interesting to see and then last podcast man some of y'all shared some awesome stuff on Monday's pod Monday's podcast about podcasts if you haven't checked that out yet super encourage you to trying to make it as practical and not scary as possible to consider like should I make a little podcast for a very specific type of person the world doesn't need more podcasts but the world does need more podcasts for uh Millennial beekeepers and in Northeast Connecticut and when that one sees that there's a podcast for them they're going to be jacked and will not be able to imagine working with anybody else like that specificity maybe not that much specificity but that specificity is still needed when it comes to content creation and podcasts have never been easier than they are now to put together but a few things people shared uh jaada Lobby I'm sorry I'm sure I butchered that thinking about uh doing a pod targeted towards trade firm owners utilizing service Titan that's actually really interesting the notion of using software as the source of greater specificity my initial impression was like is there some risk in that like what if service Titan sucks in five years or or you learn that you actually don't want to use service Titan anymore like is there risk in building a podcast around that and I quickly talked myself out of this I was having a conversation with somebody else about this the other day who was like having to end a Content project and go on to something else and this can be a trap thinking that it has to be this for everything when the reality is it doesn't the value of producing content is building trust in one human being at a time and that trust stays so if I stopped this podcast tomorrow and went and did a new project the people who came and followed me and consumed that new project they would be the people who were jacked about the stuff I had done up to date and that is the value of doing that so like even if you have to change courses or you find out podcasting is not for you whatever the value in doing that is building trust in other human beings and those human beings the ones that are most engaged which are the ones that like you know buyer services and and stuff like that if you run a firm they will follow you and so I I don't know that you have to be that worried about you know what if we change course someday especially if that thinking a hundred years down the road is is What's blocking you from just getting started right now right so I think that's really interesting he's got uh so trade firm owners utilizing service Titan I think that software specificity is actually an interesting way to go further down the funnel and get super helpful for a specific type of person the profitable practice 887 love this episode CFO services for Private Practice mental health businesses I love that because that's specific enough where you could put out stuff that is really really helpful for that type of entrepreneur right like the problems they're going to have are so specific to their business that your pod the stuff that you put out will be really really valuable the other end of the spectrum when it's not specific enough the problem is your stuff just isn't going to be that helpful and same with same with the service Titan example also like that podcast is going to be really really helpful just because it is so specific Tim Krauss shared Target Target client we are going after Real Estate Investors especially those who are using syndications and funds making over 200k a year yeah and that's that 200k a year threshold is probably like who you want to take on as a client right now but the beauty of podcasting and of YouTube and stuff like that is is when you make that aspirational content you're going to get the people who aren't at that level yet but those are the people who will be there someday right like everybody obviously started there somewhere uh Alex Hermos meetball think booy entrepreneurship stuff like that online he said 80% of his audience has never built a business everything he talks about is building businesses so even if like one of the beauties of of content that is infinitely scalable like this the beauty to me is you're not only going to catch people who could be great clients today you are getting people who could be great clients tomorrow but are like early on in that development stage right and in fact this podcast more than any of my other channels this podcast there are more young people who are not firm owners who are thinking maybe I want to be a firm owner to day someday there are more people plugging this to any of my other content it's interesting the demographics are very different across the different things that I do and man I love that because this is what I needed to hear when I was like mid 20s late 20s like this is really exciting to me like I needed somebody to show me a path to doing a version of this that was going to be fun to me person that like thought like me that was of my generation and that's just one of the really powerful things about producing content is you're going to pick up a bunch of peripheral people who down the road they may have listened to you for years and they're like hey I'm in the game now and you know how hot that person is going to be to work with you like that's what's crazy about this stuff is through no additional effort from you they have been building this relationship with you for months for years and that is such a powerful thing that's really really cool man I had a lot of fun with this stuff this week um Monday I'm going to actually do a a pod that is a follow on to Sunday's video I'm really excited for Sunday's video and we're going to go deeper on it on Monday's pod like build on it further man it it's going to be a podcast we like man I wish I could have heard this five years ago it would helped me unwind so many like areas where I was stuck in my firm so how's that for a tease for you uh thanks for coming and hanging this week and I'll see you [Music] Monday