Latest / The Accounting Leads Now Podcast / His George Costanza Moment at Intuit Changed How He Builds Everything | David Leary

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His George Costanza Moment at Intuit Changed How He Builds Everything | David Leary · The Accounting Leads Now Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Welcome back to another episode of the Accounting Leads Now podcast.
0:03
SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, James Donovan, and today, I'm not gonna lie, I'm a little fired up about this one.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: My guest today has spent over 22 years deep in the QuickBooks ecosystem.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: He's helped shape the next generation of accounting professionals.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: He's bridged the gap between developers, small business owners, and accountants in a way that nobody else really has.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: His network is insane.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: His influence on the industry is undeniable.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: And right now, he's building one of the most innovative platforms in the accounting space and CEO and co-founder.
0:35
SPEAKER_00: Today we're going to dig into something every firm owner deals with.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: How do you actually know what's working when you're spending money on Google, Meta, LinkedIn?
0:43
SPEAKER_00: How do you stop guessing and start measuring?
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Plus, he's got a George Costanza moment from his days at Intuit, and I absolutely need to hear about it.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Not to mention, he also happens to co-host the number one podcast in the accounting world.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: Ladies and gentlemen, with no further ado, David Leary, welcome to the Accounting Leads Now podcast.
1:04
SPEAKER_01: James, thanks for having me.
1:05
SPEAKER_01: I appreciate it.
1:06
SPEAKER_01: Happy to be here.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: Really excited for this one, David.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: Really excited to see you in a couple weeks in GrowCon.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: Looking forward to hearing what you have to say from stage.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: Right off the top, give us the 30-second version.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: How did you go from working inside the QuickBooks world to building platforms and becoming one of the most connected people in accounting tech?
1:26
SPEAKER_01: I don't think it was anything on purpose.
1:28
SPEAKER_01: I think most of the is just doing it, right?
1:30
SPEAKER_01: I started into it when I was young.
1:32
SPEAKER_01: I was 21 years old.
1:33
SPEAKER_01: I was just doing tech support.
1:35
SPEAKER_01: I did five years of tech support, took 10,000 phone calls probably in five years.
1:39
SPEAKER_01: Spoke to thousands of accountants, 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 small businesses.
1:43
SPEAKER_01: So just having that basis and that lid to everything else.
1:46
SPEAKER_01: So you really know QuickBooks.
1:48
SPEAKER_01: Then tech support kind of evolves and bridges well to quality assurance.
1:52
SPEAKER_01: So quality assurance, you're doing a lot of testing, that kind of starts to bridge to engineering.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: And so I kind of got in a little bit of engineering roles, but then I got into uh some marketing roles and product management.
2:02
SPEAKER_01: And I kind of joke like I have a PhD in customers and product from Intuit after 22 years.
2:08
SPEAKER_01: And it just applies well to everything else.
2:10
SPEAKER_01: So where it got me now later on in life, Blake and I started, at the time it was called the Cloud Accounting Podcast.
2:17
SPEAKER_01: And this is before I left Intuit.
2:18
SPEAKER_01: So 2018-ish, we started this podcast and it grew so big that people started asking to get CPE for listening.
2:27
SPEAKER_01: And Blake, just on the show one day, just blurted out, we're going to do it.
2:31
SPEAKER_01: We're going to figure it out.
2:32
SPEAKER_01: And then basically listen to customers and be and the result is we have this app called Earmark that lets people listen to podcasts, but not just podcasts, anything with the play button.
2:41
SPEAKER_01: So a YouTube video, webinar, podcast.
2:43
SPEAKER_01: If there's a play button, we probably can turn it to a CPE course in our app and get people their continued education credits right in our app.
2:50
SPEAKER_01: But a lot of it is just evolved.
2:52
SPEAKER_01: It's a result of listening to customers at the end of the day, right?
2:54
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
2:55
SPEAKER_01: And also listening to customers and build product.
2:57
SPEAKER_01: And the reason it's easy to listen to customers is when you've talked to 5,000 of them, it's just really easy to do.
3:02
SPEAKER_01: I've seen a lot of companies and product managers that are, you know, they'll build a product and they talk to three customers.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you have to talk to so many people to actually understand what their needs are.
3:13
SPEAKER_01: It's really hard with just two or three.
3:14
SPEAKER_01: Or I've had product managers that don't give the customer my email address.
3:18
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, you should embrace that.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: That should be your most important thing you do as a product manager, is talking to the customers and understanding how they're using the cut product.
3:26
SPEAKER_01: What are the problems they might have that you can possibly solve?
3:29
SPEAKER_01: And it just evolves and builds that way.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: Even just mention how people don't want to share, or the product manager always want to share their email with the customer.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: I think there's a lot of firm owners or business owners in general who they don't even want to share their number.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: They don't want to share their contact information.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: Like it's a big secret.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: Make it easy for someone to get in touch with you.
3:46
SPEAKER_00: You're running a business.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: That should be the first thing you want to give out.
3:49
SPEAKER_00: Like the more people have access to your number, to your contact to get a hold of you, to buy what you're selling.
3:55
SPEAKER_00: I'm always baffled when people are like, oh, I don't, I don't want to have my stuff online.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: I don't want people to get in touch with me, but I want to grow my business.
4:01
SPEAKER_01: I've seen firms do both extremes, right?
4:03
SPEAKER_01: You'll go to some firms, you'll go to the our team page on the firm's website, and every person that works at the firm will be there with their email address and their desk phone number, possibly.
4:12
SPEAKER_01: Then you have the other people that you can't get a hold of anybody at the firm.
4:15
SPEAKER_01: You're lucky to find an info or a contact email, right?
4:18
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, both extremes are happening, but there's probably a happy balance in there somewhere.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: But you shouldn't avoid your clients, you shouldn't avoid customers.
4:24
SPEAKER_01: You should you have to listen to them and solve for them.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: 100%.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: So, David, I I gotta ask, when you were growing up, you were younger, were you anticipating being who you are now in the accounting space, running the number one podcast in the accounting industry?
4:39
SPEAKER_00: Or no, because what were you anticipating to uh what did you want to be when you grew up?
4:43
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm old, right?
4:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm old.
4:45
SPEAKER_01: So all the jobs I have now did not exist when I graduated high school.
4:49
SPEAKER_01: If you think about it, actually they didn't even exist when I was in college, right?
4:53
SPEAKER_01: I mean, podcasting didn't even come around until 2007, 2006, you know, arguably.
4:59
SPEAKER_01: So these things I never really set out to have a career that way.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I had an interest in accounting, an interest in computer science, MIS type stuff, but I didn't have like a defined path.
5:09
SPEAKER_01: I never set out to be an accounting education.
5:11
SPEAKER_01: And that's what we kind of fell into on accident.
5:14
SPEAKER_01: But it was never set that way.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: It's just you kind of have to listen to the universe and the market forces, right?
5:18
SPEAKER_01: And go where a problem needs to be solved.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I tend to do, I think, is I find problems.
5:24
SPEAKER_01: I've done that a lot in my careers, I've and then figure out how to solve them.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Very cool.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: So we briefly touched on it in the intro.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: I'm a huge Seinfeld fan.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: I grew up with my parents loving it.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: Once I was a little bit older, I then I realized how funny the show was.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: When they watched it, I didn't get the humor, but I've been waiting for this one.
5:41
SPEAKER_00: So you told me that your proudest moment was your George Costanza moment at Intuit.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: Would love to hear the full story on this one.
5:49
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
5:50
SPEAKER_01: So as I said before, I was an Intuit.
5:52
SPEAKER_01: I started doing tech support.
5:53
SPEAKER_01: And then that led into quality assurance.
5:56
SPEAKER_01: So one of my last stints in tech support, I think I was like on the payroll team.
5:59
SPEAKER_01: And then I got into quality assurance for like two years.
6:01
SPEAKER_01: And then we went back and listened to phone calls.
6:03
SPEAKER_01: So I went back to the call center one day and just sat there.
6:06
SPEAKER_01: And you could basically have two people plug into a phone call.
6:09
SPEAKER_01: And I just sat there and listened to the phone call.
6:11
SPEAKER_01: And 10 of the 11 phone calls I listened to that day were the exact same phone calls I took seven years ago, eight years, 10, 10 years before that.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: And I went back to my manager and I was like, oh my goodness, everything we're doing is wrong.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: We're not doing anything right because there's all these structures where, well, a customer calls in for a tech support issue.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: There's a layer of management that like prioritizes the issues, that goes another layer of management.
6:35
SPEAKER_01: And then somebody has a liaison that talks to the developer product manager, then that product manager maybe prioritizes it and maybe changes it or fixes something, gives an engineer to fix it, then it gets in a code.
6:46
SPEAKER_01: And it's like a seven-year cycle to get a bug fix into the product.
6:50
SPEAKER_01: Right.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: And so I just told my manager, I said, the next chance I get to build anything, I'm doing it the exact opposite.
6:57
SPEAKER_01: Every single way we've built products so far, I'm going to just do the opposite.
7:00
SPEAKER_01: And it's very like a George Costanza moment.
7:03
SPEAKER_01: And I got involved.
7:04
SPEAKER_01: And at this time, it was right around uh right before actually the project I worked on, it was called Do My Paycheck, is actually in the Lean Startup book, the appendix for that book.
7:13
SPEAKER_01: But so Lean Startup wasn't a book yet.
7:15
SPEAKER_01: It was just like that.
7:16
SPEAKER_01: There was a community kind of thinking those things.
7:18
SPEAKER_01: And so I didn't really like call it lean startup, but essentially I was.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, in parallel, Intuit launched this huge, gigantic product.
7:27
SPEAKER_01: It was called Zapingo.
7:28
SPEAKER_01: It was basically, if you think about it, it was uh Yelp for small businesses.
7:32
SPEAKER_01: Intuit built this whole product.
7:34
SPEAKER_01: It was just gigantic product, huge marketing launch, tops down.
7:38
SPEAKER_01: So it so it was not customer driven, it was the founder of Intuit, Scott Kirk.
7:44
SPEAKER_01: It was tops down, forced upon people, and it failed.
7:48
SPEAKER_01: And so, and this happened a lot intuitive.
7:50
SPEAKER_01: Big launches, big launches.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: And so going the opposite of that, it's like, oh, why don't we just build something, the minimal viable product, and throw it out there and then learn, then learn.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: And be comfortable that you don't have all the answers.
8:02
SPEAKER_01: Like the people that think they have every answer to a customer's journey or problem from day one without actually testing it, kind of delusional.
8:12
SPEAKER_01: And you have to be okay that like, I don't know the answers, but I know how to build just good enough something.
8:19
SPEAKER_01: If I can get one person to use it, I'm gonna learn really fast.
8:22
SPEAKER_01: And so that was kind of that model.
8:24
SPEAKER_01: And that that really is the way a lot of startups now operate.
8:27
SPEAKER_01: But there was no book at the time when I had this George Costanza moment.
8:30
SPEAKER_01: It was like, all right, let's just build it and fake it.
8:32
SPEAKER_01: Like the very first version, somebody sent their CD and I typed it in and I sent, okay, send your employees to this website to go look at it.
8:39
SPEAKER_01: And then after that, you threw it away and then you do the next one.
8:42
SPEAKER_01: And I remember struggling with people at Intuit.
8:44
SPEAKER_01: They think, oh, we need to do a marketing study first before we build this, or we need to do, you have to have like a support person and a documentation person and all these other people involved.
8:54
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, no, we don't.
8:55
SPEAKER_01: People thought I was crazy because I made engineers fix bugs.
8:58
SPEAKER_01: Because here's what if an engineer takes a or make, I'm sorry, not fix bugs, but take tech support calls.
9:03
SPEAKER_01: If an engineer takes a tech support call, they take that call three times, they just go fix the code and you never take it anymore.
9:10
SPEAKER_01: And so we were able to really scale the product up with almost no support because engineers were fixing the code.
9:17
SPEAKER_01: Many times the reason going back to when I said, oh, I went back to the call center and these issues never got fixed, it's because the developers never knew these things were broken.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: Like it never gets to them.
9:28
SPEAKER_01: Developers will fix stuff, but they have to know.
9:30
SPEAKER_01: And the only way they can know is by talking to customers, being involved in the support cycle.
9:34
SPEAKER_01: And it's just, you just build better products that way.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: And it's it's kind of freeing.
9:38
SPEAKER_01: If you can admit, I don't have the answers.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: I have a direction I'm rowing, and I'm gonna start building the boat as we row it, and customers will tell us what to build next.
9:47
SPEAKER_01: And by the time you get to the finish, you'll have something kind of directional you thought you were gonna build.
9:52
SPEAKER_01: But it's probably you wind up only building the useful things customers need.
9:56
SPEAKER_01: You're not building dreamy features because you know a founder wants it or it's cool tech or whatever it might be.
10:02
SPEAKER_00: It's so interesting what you're talking about now and just all of those steps and what you listened for in the past and what you did and who was getting involved, where AI can do so many.
10:12
SPEAKER_00: Like the thought of, have you thought about that where like everything you were doing back then add into it versus now where you could just have AI almost like one person could reach out and have you know different platforms do so much of what you just spoke about?
10:27
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think with vibe coding, right?
10:29
SPEAKER_01: That's huge, right?
10:31
SPEAKER_01: Because you could just vibe coding in a way is taking that development cycle and compressing it down to a day or a couple hours, right?
10:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah you previously you would say, hey, build this thing.
10:42
SPEAKER_01: An engineer would build it two weeks later, they give it to you, they show it to you, you play with it, you give feedback, they go away for two weeks, you get another one, and it takes months to get something out the door.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: But with vibe coding and writing your own apps with a lot of the AI tools now, you can take that two-week cycle and turn it to an hour and a half, a 90-minute cycle.
11:00
SPEAKER_01: Hey, make it do this.
11:02
SPEAKER_01: You know, it works for eight minutes, then it gives you something, you're like, ooh, can you take that and you know, tweak it?
11:09
SPEAKER_01: Or can you fix this thing, or I found this not working?
11:12
SPEAKER_01: And you're just compressing that development cycle to get yourself to, you know, minimum viable product or working app so much faster.
11:19
SPEAKER_01: But it's a double-edged sword, though, like I think at the industry.
11:22
SPEAKER_01: Actually, I think I put this on LinkedIn today.
11:25
SPEAKER_01: Like the whole ability to scan a receipt or a bill that's kind of been solved since 2018.
11:31
SPEAKER_01: There's been apps that solve this.
11:33
SPEAKER_01: Now it's built into QuickBooks, it's built into HubDoc.
11:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, it's built into zero via their Hubbock HubDoc acquisition.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: So this is not like something new, but now that AI exists, I've seen like a hundred startups all build these new AI receipt scanning tools.
11:48
SPEAKER_01: And it's because it's very quick to build now.
11:51
SPEAKER_01: So what's happening is people are unfortunately they're solving problems that have already been solved.
11:57
SPEAKER_01: It'll be really exciting when people start prototyping and solving problems that nobody's even thought of yet.
12:03
SPEAKER_01: We're just not there.
12:04
SPEAKER_01: So instead, we have I've probably seen a hundred AI receipt scanning apps that have popped up in the last four months because you could now build an app in three weeks and bring it to market.
12:16
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's very doable.
12:17
SPEAKER_01: But the problem is, is everybody's doing it.
12:20
SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that's productive for us as an industry or not.
12:24
SPEAKER_01: Like, does having 700 solutions to a problem that's already been solved a decade ago better any of us?
12:30
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: It's definitely a bit of a shiny object where like it's I don't know, for me, I definitely catch myself jumping into Claude, Cloud Cowork, using open claw, and I'm playing around and building things, but it's like, is this really driving the business forward versus this is just a lot of fun?
12:46
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, maybe I'm solving for something that I don't know, spend 10x the time on it that if I just went and did it manually the one time, it probably would have been done and moved on.
12:55
SPEAKER_00: How how do you see firms leveraging AI?
12:58
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's there's so much talk now, just in every industry about AI, but what do you see as one of the most practical ways a firm should be utilizing AI or looking at AI to put in their firm?
13:10
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think we talk about this on the podcast a lot.
13:14
SPEAKER_01: Like there's different phases of your relationship with your client, right?
13:17
SPEAKER_01: One phase is just getting data, getting things from them.
13:20
SPEAKER_01: And then when it gets to you, organizing it so that your team can work with the data.
13:24
SPEAKER_01: I think AI is really good at that.
13:25
SPEAKER_01: It can nag people in emails, hey, upload all your documents to this drive.
13:29
SPEAKER_01: You can have AI figure out what the document is, give it the proper file name, right?
13:33
SPEAKER_01: Put it into the proper folders where you need.
13:35
SPEAKER_01: And then the next level past that is like using AI to take it and do the data entry for you.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: Right.
13:40
SPEAKER_01: So there's different phases of this.
13:42
SPEAKER_01: But I think in general, for a lot of account accounting firms, especially if you're doing small business accounting, bookkeeping, for all the efficiencies you might gain over here from AI, I think you're going to get bit on the other side from clients building stuff on their own.
13:54
SPEAKER_01: So if you think about it, the old world, people would buy QuickBooks or buy zero, and they would get four or five apps, but there's kind of a known quantity in your own network, could be like, hey, has anybody ever seen this app before?
14:05
SPEAKER_01: And you would know somebody that has, and you could get some help or assistance and figure out what something's wrong.
14:10
SPEAKER_01: Your firm could standardize on a tech stack for your clients.
14:13
SPEAKER_01: We use it, we're a QuickBooks shop, and we use the uh Dex for our bill scanning, and we use uh Emilio for bill pay, and we just have a tech stack for our firm.
14:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, now with this vibe coding in AI, clients are just gonna build their own stuff.
14:27
SPEAKER_01: So now you're gonna have every small business client you have is gonna have three or four custom built apps doing stuff, maybe correctly, maybe incorrectly.
14:36
SPEAKER_01: But how are you as a firm gonna be able to s to serve that client?
14:40
SPEAKER_01: Because the old days you would you would control their tech stack.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: And now with AI, they might have four custom apps in that tech stack that you don't have control over.
14:47
SPEAKER_01: That's gonna be a challenge.
14:48
SPEAKER_01: So you're gonna AI is gonna help your firm over here making some efficiencies, but you're gonna lose it on the other side because clients are gonna be or wait to think about it.
14:57
SPEAKER_01: Like people do bad data entry to QuickBooks or Zero, right?
15:00
SPEAKER_01: And you have to fix those things.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: Now imagine if they made their own app that doesn't really work great or uses bad logic and doesn't post things correctly.
15:10
SPEAKER_01: Now you're troubleshooting somebody else's app, not just their data entry, not just their accounting GL.
15:15
SPEAKER_01: And that so the efficiency you gained over here, you're gonna replace by troubleshooting clients' messes over here.
15:19
SPEAKER_01: It's good though, because it's just gonna create a lot of work for accountants at the end of the day.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: I feel like I saw a post recently from you, and maybe it's this one you're talking about, but it's it's jogging my memory.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: I feel like I saw a post from you recently talking about AI on LinkedIn and how it is kind of almost creating some some of it to a degree is almost creating some more work for the accounting industry.
15:42
SPEAKER_00: So I as you mentioned that, I feel like it might be that post that you're talking about, but it's definitely jogging my memory and it makes sense.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: If someone builds something that's broke, not only do you have to try to fix their broken app, but also the the data that went in that's also not correct.
15:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, because I think what drove that is I saw a viral video of a guy that built Grand Theft Auto 6, which apparently is like this video game that may never come to market.
16:03
SPEAKER_01: It may come to market, right?
16:05
SPEAKER_01: And he just created one script, one paragraph prompt, and it built this video game that was playable.
16:10
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, is that where we're at?
16:12
SPEAKER_01: Like, are we like at that level already where you could do one prompt and you have a full functioning program?
16:18
SPEAKER_01: Or I'm gonna use air quotes here for those of you who are not video, full functioning.
16:22
SPEAKER_01: And I was like, so I basically tried to build a QuickBooks with just one prompt.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: It took like two or three, but in like 20 minutes, I had kind of a version of QuickBooks and AI created QuickBooks.
16:33
SPEAKER_01: And my theory is people are just gonna do that on their own.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:36
SPEAKER_01: And then you as the accountant are like, well, how are you supposed to do that?
16:40
SPEAKER_01: You can't have clients on 15 custom GLs.
16:44
SPEAKER_01: Like, how are you gonna manage that?
16:46
SPEAKER_01: Do you have to just tell them sorry, you have to switch to RGL?
16:49
SPEAKER_01: That hasn't been solved yet, but you're just gonna see more and more of it.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: One nice thing about us doing the podcast is I have a bunch of search terms, right, that I've been using for seven or eight years of doing the podcast, and I have not changed them.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: But I get to see the results that happen from these search terms.
17:05
SPEAKER_01: And every week I'm seeing five or six, I built this, and it's whatever receipt scanner.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: I built this inventory program.
17:13
SPEAKER_01: And these are just one-off people that are blogging about or talking about the thing they built with AI.
17:19
SPEAKER_01: And it's all things that were arguably in the app ecosystem connecting to QuickBooks and Zero already.
17:25
SPEAKER_01: And so now the app ecosystem is like this unlimited size because it's all custom.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: Like, how's an accountant supposed to deal with that?
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's such an interesting vantage point.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: I I truly did not think about that until senior post.
17:39
SPEAKER_00: And now hearing you elaborate that on elaborate on that a lot more.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: I mean, everyone wants to build their own thing, and that's just yeah, that will create a nightmare for accounting firm owners.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: I the solution might be an app that can, I don't know, pull it, pull in everything from the other apps that are made to try to consolidate it and funnel everything down, but that will be a problem to solve for.
18:00
SPEAKER_00: That it's gotta be happening in marketing, right?
18:02
SPEAKER_01: Like there's these apps for like managing social media posts.
18:06
SPEAKER_01: And now I'm seeing people like, I built this thing to have perplexity, just create my social posts and post them for me.
18:11
SPEAKER_01: Like people are recreating apps that already exist.
18:15
SPEAKER_00: That's happening.
18:16
SPEAKER_00: I would argue that on the flip side, like all of the data you're putting in for accounting and for your taxes, like that needs to get back to the IRS and the CRA in a standard format that needs to be done a specific way.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: You can you can post a million different ways on Facebook, but I do, I do hear what you're saying.
18:35
SPEAKER_00: I think the exciting thing for me that we've been trying to leverage is just how to not even build something new, but how to just leverage what already exists in a more automated way or create more from what already exists.
18:49
SPEAKER_00: Sure, there's there's definitely people who want to create something brand new, but I get excited about how do we, how do we essentially build an AI agent or how do we use what are what are our current processes in the business and leverage the software that we already have to then just amplify what we're doing.
19:06
SPEAKER_00: That's the stuff that gets me excited right now.
19:08
SPEAKER_00: The building something new just feels like it's more headaches.
19:11
SPEAKER_01: And I think that Blake talks about this on the podcast all the time.
19:14
SPEAKER_01: Like implementing AI in a firm is just gonna expose the firms that have weak processes.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: This bill went off at me a long time ago as far as like automating.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: You just can't say like I'm gonna automate a process.
19:23
SPEAKER_01: You have to manually document the whole entire process, or like Blake likes to call it like a human API, right?
19:29
SPEAKER_01: Here's all the things a human has to do, and then you pick one of them and be like, why not this, these three steps here, why don't we automate this?
19:36
SPEAKER_01: Or why don't we use AI for these three steps?
19:38
SPEAKER_01: And then maybe over here is a step, you replace that.
19:41
SPEAKER_01: And but you don't have to do the top-down automate everything.
19:44
SPEAKER_01: That's very, like you said, that's very, very difficult.
19:46
SPEAKER_01: But you just look at all your processes and you start seeing which one you can polish the stone, right?
19:51
SPEAKER_01: And just make it a little bit better.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: Now, something we just did the other day that I'm I'm quite excited about, and maybe listeners are already doing this and I'm very late to the party.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: But we took, like you mentioned, our our most up-to-date version of an SOP, walked through all of the steps within Claude and built in prompts to have quality check.
20:11
SPEAKER_00: So every single step that is required in that SOP, rather than a new hire looking at it and there's say one to 70 steps and there's just on a Word doc, Claude is only releasing one step at a time.
20:23
SPEAKER_00: And then they have to upload a screenshot in to show that it was done correct, which I think will really help eliminate things dropping through the cracks or needing to reach out to a manager.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: You almost like we have built-in quality control now with that SOP.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: So what you said about AI and putting it into firms, that's very quickly going to show the gaps in the business.
20:44
SPEAKER_00: And I think marketing is the same that a lot of firms overlook.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: You start running paid ads, you start pushing your word out a lot more to bring in clients, it's going to quickly expose other gaps in your business.
20:56
SPEAKER_00: It could be the sales process, it could be your onboarding.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: But a lot of times this is stuff that firm owners may not be thinking about on the front end.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: But anytime you enhance one in one position, it yeah, it will expose elsewhere.
21:08
SPEAKER_00: And that's not always a bad thing either.
21:10
SPEAKER_01: It's just something else to solve ultimately.
21:13
SPEAKER_01: And that goes back to my Costanza moment, right?
21:15
SPEAKER_01: Like you can't solve problems you don't know exist yet.
21:18
SPEAKER_01: Everybody thinks they can.
21:19
SPEAKER_01: Wall designed this perfect thing.
21:20
SPEAKER_01: And then two years later, it's like, well, it didn't really work.
21:22
SPEAKER_01: Well, I wonder why.
21:23
SPEAKER_01: You didn't know what you needed two years from now.
21:25
SPEAKER_01: So if you could just build a teeny bit or swap out one step and a workflow, then swap out another step, and the next step to do will happen naturally.
21:34
SPEAKER_01: It'll tell you what to do next.
21:36
SPEAKER_01: But you just have to get into that habit of swapping out a step, improving it, swapping out a step, improving it.
21:40
SPEAKER_01: Don't try to like, we're gonna automate our whole entire workflow at our firm.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: It's highly likely it'll fail.
21:47
SPEAKER_01: You have to do it, you have to really do it in chunks.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: Now, David, you're you're giving accountants free CPE credits just for listening to podcasts.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: That's well, technically they have to do more than listen.
21:58
SPEAKER_01: They have to take a quiz and prove.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Prove knowledge.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
22:01
SPEAKER_01: It's not just listening.
22:02
SPEAKER_01: You have to take a quiz and prove your knowledge.
22:04
SPEAKER_00: My mistake was jumping the gun on that.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: How has that changed the way that you think about building an audience or even content that's getting produced and who you're who you guys are bringing on under your mark?
22:17
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think for like our podcast itself, we're like a news roundup.
22:21
SPEAKER_01: We haven't changed much on our podcast.
22:23
SPEAKER_01: But we have a podcast production company and we produce other podcasts.
22:27
SPEAKER_01: And we specifically produce podcasts based on gaps in our course database, right?
22:33
SPEAKER_01: So we have our app, we have about 3,000 courses in there, but there wasn't enough IRS CE or tax things.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: So we launched a podcast called Tax in Action.
22:42
SPEAKER_01: So people could that talks about tax topics.
22:45
SPEAKER_01: We launched, we did an attempt at an audit podcast.
22:47
SPEAKER_01: That one didn't work out too well.
22:48
SPEAKER_01: We're probably gonna we'll try to do another one for that.
22:50
SPEAKER_01: So we're really we're we're creating content based on the gaps we have in our app where we're listening to what people need.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: We actually just revamped our app.
22:58
SPEAKER_01: We had a new version go out and we have a search bar.
23:00
SPEAKER_01: So when you search now and you don't find the thing you want, I have a button at the bottom that says, tell me what you're what you're looking for.
23:05
SPEAKER_01: And the theory behind this is we'll get feedback if we build our processes right.
23:10
SPEAKER_01: 48 hours later, I'll email you and be like, hey, there's a course.
23:14
SPEAKER_01: Like that's the marks, like where we can almost instantaneously build courses for people when they're missing the piece of content.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love that.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: That's very exciting.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: What gets you the most excited about the future of the accounting industry, David?
23:28
SPEAKER_00: I mean, there's there's so much going on now with AI.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: What gets you excited?
23:33
SPEAKER_00: I mean, what what are some of the other things that you guys are working on?
23:35
SPEAKER_00: What's next for Earmark?
23:36
SPEAKER_00: What's next for you?
23:37
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think for Earmark, it's it's we want to start doing like live webinar CPE.
23:43
SPEAKER_01: We're starting to do live events now, so we're branching out.
23:46
SPEAKER_01: I also think that maybe we could be an events app.
23:50
SPEAKER_01: It sounds silly, but we will put somebody's event in our app and they send me their what do you call Eventbrite page.
23:56
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, we're just like a field away from being an Eventbrite page.
24:00
SPEAKER_01: They don't need an Eventbrite page, they could just set their app up in us.
24:03
SPEAKER_01: And then it really bridges that next level with the for CPE, we have to have like descriptions, learning objectives, and all that.
24:09
SPEAKER_01: And a lot of these other apps don't do that.
24:11
SPEAKER_01: And then if you think about conferences, right?
24:14
SPEAKER_01: When you go to a conference, they make you install an app.
24:17
SPEAKER_01: That app probably costs that conference organizer$10,000,$20,000.
24:21
SPEAKER_01: Three days later, you uninstall it.
24:23
SPEAKER_01: Like that's a lot of spend and a lot of effort for an app that people just don't keep.
24:28
SPEAKER_01: And the more I think about Earmark is we could just be a conference app for all conferences.
24:33
SPEAKER_01: Like you show up to an accounting conference, that a conference is you can you never take Earmark off your phone.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: Right.
24:38
SPEAKER_01: And and you know, I kind of joke, like I'm a PDF map away from being a conference app, right?
24:44
SPEAKER_01: But now I won't build all the features of a conference app, but I probably know just the small amounts we need.
24:49
SPEAKER_01: We need a PDF map at calendar integration.
24:52
SPEAKER_01: That's probably it.
24:53
SPEAKER_01: I get like it's closer than we think.
24:54
SPEAKER_01: But that's kind of what excites me is this concept of how does Earmark just become the everything app for CPE?
25:00
SPEAKER_01: And then obviously we're going at new UI, new changes, uh customer-facing stuff, teams plans, you know, so firms can onboard their team more seamlessly.
25:08
SPEAKER_01: Self-serve.
25:09
SPEAKER_01: Because we have a lot in email.
25:10
SPEAKER_01: We have a lot back and forth in email and separate app for contracts.
25:14
SPEAKER_01: So we just want to build it all into the app.
26:03
SPEAKER_00: We keep going back to AI, but with AI now, I'm sure that everything you just spoke about, that's not that unrealistic to like spend an afternoon dunk continue dumping all of that into, I'm sure, what you already have for some prompts or projects and just making that text become a reality.
26:21
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think like, let's say you want to learn about accounting marketing, and we don't have any courses in the app.
26:26
SPEAKER_01: In theory, we would be able to take that, use AI to create an outline, use AI to create a script.
26:31
SPEAKER_01: We could use AI to record a podcast episode, put it in the app, and the quiz would be there.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: So in theory, yes, we could do end-to-end AI and create this.
26:41
SPEAKER_01: Now, we've been talking about this for a while, and we still haven't done the very first proof of concept, right?
26:45
SPEAKER_01: These things, it always takes longer than you think it's gonna, and it's so easy on paper.
26:48
SPEAKER_01: Like, oh yeah, just use AI to create the outline, AI to create the script, AI to record it.
26:53
SPEAKER_01: And then you start realizing some parts are harder than others.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Doing a straight up hour-long AI recording of audio is not super reliable.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: So you got to do it in like little five, six minute chunks.
27:03
SPEAKER_01: Then you have to then you still need a manual editor to put it all together.
27:05
SPEAKER_01: Like it's not all the promise of it is there, but it's just really not there yet for a lot of these things.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: That's fair.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: I was building an AI executive agent not too long ago.
27:17
SPEAKER_00: And it's pretty cool, it works, it does some pretty neat things, but it definitely took a a lot longer than I anticipated to build and get it accessed to everything it needs, and then to continue training it over and over again.
27:30
SPEAKER_00: So that's something else when it when it comes to AI.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not just the one prompt and boom, it's gonna run and solve all of your problems.
27:38
SPEAKER_00: And it's like, wow, I wish I wish I had this 10 years ago.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: It still requires a lot of time and a lot of training and resources.
27:45
SPEAKER_00: And similar to what you said earlier, if you're not putting, if it doesn't have a good SOP or it doesn't have solid processes, you're just gonna kind of get a garbage outtake from it.
27:55
SPEAKER_00: So that's probably the other stuff that listeners need to be aware of is just you need to still be the brains of the AI for for the most part, at least when getting it off the ground.
28:04
SPEAKER_01: And the nice thing about things right now, the procrastinators will be rewarded, if it makes any sense.
28:09
SPEAKER_01: And what I mean by that, like I remember when AI first started coming out, and I don't know if you have kids or not, but anybody who has kids gets these scenarios where they send home a yellow piece of paper with important dates on it, or you get an email and it's a PDF.
28:22
SPEAKER_01: Like they don't actually send you calendar appointments, right?
28:25
SPEAKER_01: And somehow you have like if you're busy professionally, you need to get this into your calendar, right?
28:30
SPEAKER_01: And I was like doing all these AI things and like two different AI tools, like scan it, extract this out to a table, create the calendar, imports, shove it on my calendar.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: And I saw during the March Madness tournament, Google Gemini had a commercial, and that's the commercial.
28:45
SPEAKER_01: Like, so it's just built into the model for free now.
28:48
SPEAKER_01: You don't even have to train it.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: You just like take a photo of the kid's flyer, you say, add these to my calendar, and it just does it.
28:54
SPEAKER_01: I fought with that to get it to like 90% there, and it never really worked great.
28:59
SPEAKER_01: Today, somebody could just get it right out of the box.
29:01
SPEAKER_01: So the procrastinator actually probably gets rewarded long term.
29:05
SPEAKER_01: But you also have to like learn about these things.
29:07
SPEAKER_01: Like, I don't know how if you're not playing with it, you can learn.
29:09
SPEAKER_01: But chances are what you're working on today and trying to build or experiment with is just gonna be in the model for free three months from now.
29:18
SPEAKER_01: Like, like, why waste your time?
29:19
SPEAKER_01: Just wait, it'll just come for free.
29:21
SPEAKER_01: You're just gonna get to use it for free eventually.
29:22
SPEAKER_01: You don't have to build it, it's just gonna be built in the model.
29:25
SPEAKER_00: That's such an interesting take.
29:26
SPEAKER_00: The procrastinate the procrastinators will be rewarded.
29:29
SPEAKER_00: I do think, as you mentioned, there's value in like knowing what's going on and at least getting familiar with how to use AI.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: But yeah, like people were all in the rave about OpenClaw and buying Mac minis and building these agents.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: And then Claude just, I think it was the middle of last week, was like, well, now we just have AI agents built right into Claude.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: So that just completely wiped out everyone who went out and bought all these Mac minis and built agents in OpenClaw.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Like Claude just said we're gonna do it ourselves.
29:57
SPEAKER_00: So again, what this will look like in three months, six months, in a year from now is it's crazy to consider.
30:03
SPEAKER_01: And we've seen this even internally.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: So years ago, we built, because we have all these standards for the CPE.
30:08
SPEAKER_01: So we built our own internal chatbot that was built on all the NASBA standards.
30:13
SPEAKER_01: Our team, if we had a question, is this in compliance, not compliance, we could interact and get the answers out of this chatbot.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: And it, you know, it's built off this PDF of like 75, 90 pages or whatever it is, all these requirements.
30:23
SPEAKER_01: Well, now I don't even use it because ChatGPT-5 just does it out of the box.
30:29
SPEAKER_01: So even though the models are not, they say they won't use your data.
30:34
SPEAKER_01: So they're not going to use what I uploaded, but they know what I'm using it for.
30:37
SPEAKER_01: And they're just going out and finding the exact same data and uploading that to their model on their own.
30:41
SPEAKER_01: So now I can ask questions about NASBA CPE directly to ChatGPT-5 and not have to use our little chatbot that we built custom with our custom knowledge base.
30:50
SPEAKER_01: And where this is interesting for firms, there's all these startups that are popping up that are like train on like the IRS tax models, right?
30:59
SPEAKER_01: So that way in your firm, you can like get a chat bot specific that's an accounting firm chat bot with knowledge about taxes or something.
31:07
SPEAKER_01: My bet is three months from now, six months from now, that's just gonna be in the model for free.
31:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, so again, the procrastinators like don't buy an app, don't commit to an app.
31:15
SPEAKER_01: Month trials, do one month at a time.
31:17
SPEAKER_01: Do not do a one-year commitment to anything, do not pay for anything for that long.
31:21
SPEAKER_01: A one month trial at a time.
31:22
SPEAKER_01: And but just assume whatever you're paying for today or you've custom built is gonna be part of the model for free tomorrow.
31:29
SPEAKER_00: Or come soon.
31:31
SPEAKER_00: That's uh sound advice.
31:32
SPEAKER_00: David, for the listeners, the firm owners listening now, what would you say is the number one actionable thing they can leave this episode with when this is done?
31:42
SPEAKER_00: They need to go implement in their business or listen to, watch, study.
31:47
SPEAKER_00: What is the number one thing they need to go do to continue driving their business forward?
31:52
SPEAKER_01: It's easy to say, like, oh, start playing with AI or test with AI.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: Take a step back and make sure your firm's processes are documented.
32:00
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't done that, don't even play with AI stuff because all you're gonna do is just create more mess in your firm and stress people out and you don't even know where to start automating.
32:10
SPEAKER_01: Like, document your processes and then pick one small thing.
32:14
SPEAKER_01: Just get a small win, a small win, a small win, because they all stack up.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Most firms have not documented their processes.
32:19
SPEAKER_01: And when I say document it, so that way you could just bring me or a stranger off the street and they can click, click, click, click, click, execute whatever this process is.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Because if you can't break it down to the click, click, click, click, click, you're not gonna be able to have AI do it.
32:33
SPEAKER_01: Or even three or four of those clicks, if you call it clicks, processes, data movement, whatever you want to call it.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
32:39
SPEAKER_00: Fantastic piece of advice.
32:41
SPEAKER_00: David, thank you so much for coming on the Accounting Leads Now podcast.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: We got pretty deep into the AI conversation, which is a lot of fun.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: It's definitely going around every industry.
32:52
SPEAKER_00: Maybe didn't cover some of the other things we initially thought we would, but I really enjoyed the conversation.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for coming on and really looking forward to seeing you in a few weeks in Salt Lake at GrowCon.
33:01
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we'll have a beer together.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: We'll see you in two weeks.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: Awesome.
33:04
SPEAKER_00: Appreciate it, David.
33:05
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: That's a wrap on another episode of the Accounting Leads Now podcast.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: If you got something out of today's conversation, do me a favor, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave us a review wherever you're listening.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: It genuinely helps this show grow.
33:19
SPEAKER_00: And the bigger this community gets, the better the conversations we can bring you.
33:24
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the part I actually care about most.
33:26
SPEAKER_00: If you're running a firm and you're still relying on word of mouth to bring in new clients, I want you to hear this.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: Referrals aren't a growth strategy.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: I'll say that again.
33:36
SPEAKER_00: Referrals are not a growth strategy.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: They're a hope strategy.
33:40
SPEAKER_00: If you're ready to stop hoping and start building a system that brings qualified prospects to you consistently, go to accountingleadsnow.com and book a call with my team.
33:51
SPEAKER_00: We work exclusively with accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: We'll look at your situation specifically and tell you what we would do if it was our firm on the line for bringing in new clients.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: And if you want to go deeper on your own first, I wrote a book called Book Solid Digital Marketing Strategies that actually work for accounting firms.
34:09
SPEAKER_00: It's the digital marketing playbook built specifically for accounting, bookkeeping, and tax firms.
34:14
SPEAKER_00: Link to grab a copy is in the show notes.
34:16
SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch you on the next one.