The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

116 ⎸ [SYSTEMS] Jetpack Workflow with David Cristello

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In this SYSTEMS episode, I chat with David Cristello, founder and CEO of Jetpack Workflow - a company that specializes in assisting bookkeeping, payroll, and tax firms in streamlining their client work and automating deadlines.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • David’s inspiration behind building Jetpack Workflow
  • how often you should review and tweak your processes
  • how to migrate to new softwares/tools efficiently to avoid overwhelm
  • the importance of understanding industry needs to tailor services and marketing strategies

Resources mentioned in this episode:

About David:

David Cristello is a game-changer, ushering new ideas into accounting, a profession that’s been around for thousands of years.

He’s an innovator, leading the development of Jetpack Workflow, an award-winning workflow software for accounting and bookkeeping firms. As a non-technical founder, David relied on customer-centric ideas and empathy to help pre-sell and then grow the company from a spare-bedroom idea to being ranked on the Inc. 5000 (#676) within the first four years of operation.

He produces and hosts a popular podcast series, “Growing Your Firm,” and is a respected writer of blogs and eBooks, and co authored the best-selling, “Double Your Accounting Firm: Lessons Learned on How Top Firms Grow Faster, Build Stronger Teams, and Increase Profit.” In a focused and impactful way, David is helping others embrace the modernization and changes that are redefining the accounting industry.

Connect with David:

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if you're growing I don't have the exact number in front of me, but I want to say if you're growing 30 to 50 percent year over year, if that's your trajectory every six months, You know, a non trivial amount of your processes will need to be updated or changed because you have a new inflow of either complexity on the customer front. You have headcount and you need to think more about either redundancy or handoffs. And so, you know, the process is not a stagnant thing that you put in the business. And so, you know, a process that worked two years ago that hasn't been reviewed, you know, will be stagnant and there will be issues. And And then how it manifests itself is like, well, it's stagnant because it hasn't been updated, but the people operating within it have probably then created, for lack of a better word, derivatives of that system. And so, system was documented 2 years ago, it worked perfectly, then hasn't been reviewed, hasn't been updated, hasn't been... tweaked or nurtured or the weeds haven't been pulled out of it. And the team might start to deviate from it and kind of create their own new little workflow, their own new little steps. And so it's very easy, especially when you're going quickly to feel like something's solved. And then you wake up a year later or review it 18 months later. You know, and You take a look and you go, what is going on? Like, I can't, I can't believe, you know, we're, we're a workflow business. I can't believe that, you know, this process is, is, is missing, For the last two months, if you've been following along on the podcast. You may have been listening to our special niche series where I interviewed. Many accounting firm owners who specialized and niche in a certain industry or a certain software. And hopefully you gained a ton of value and took away lots of ideas that you can implement in your own bookkeeping or accounting business. This month, we are doing a series on systems. Again, I will be interviewing experts on systems as they pertain to bookkeeping and accounting. I hope you enjoy. If you've been enjoying these special series, please take a screenshot, share them on the socials. Tag me at ambitious bookkeeper. And let me know what has been your biggest takeaway? Another great way to support this is to go ahead and review our podcast and drop a question in there for me, because I have something special dropping, as well around little Q and A's. So if you have a question you'd like answered, please send me a DM. And I will record a short and sweet podcast episode and maybe you'll hear it on the air. Thank you so much for supporting the show. I truly appreciate you tuning in each week. And as does my team, we put a lot of effort into producing these shows, and I hope that you are finding tons of value, inspiration, and learning a thing or two. Alright, now let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast. Today we are interviewing another special guest for our systems series. And today I have David Crostello on the line or on the zoom, I guess from jetpack workflow. So welcome David. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yeah. Well, first off, thanks for having me on So I'm the founder and CEO of Jetpack Workflow. We help bookkeeping, payroll and tax firms standardize their client work, automate those deadlines and help them track. Across the firm in our, in our cloud based platform. You know, much like you were big fans of podcasts. So we also run our own podcast on top of the platform called growing your firm. And, date we serve well north of a thousand firms and, excited to talk about maybe our, lessons learned with, working with the community and wherever else we want to go. Awesome. Yeah. So one of the questions that I had, and I, if you're not a listener of, David's podcast, you might not know the story yet. So I did want to kind of touch on like, what, brought you into helping the accounting industry? What's your connection there? Because before we hit record, you did say that you don't have a coding or a software background really. So do tell. Yeah, well, this will be fairly humbling, I suppose. So well, I guess it started with I, understood that entrepreneurship, but I think like you and probably your listeners could be this really creative freedom based endeavor. Where you can really design a life that you want. So I was kind of emotionally bought into this world of entrepreneurship and I was hosting events, uh, around, around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and, doing some, you know, one off marketing services. And I came across an interview and, and this gentleman, you know, kind of mentioned this belief he had, which I since adopted, which is, you know, to build a great business, go out and solve painful problems. I'm like, Oh, I love that because, you know, here I am, you know, I am, You know, social worker with a lot of side hustles at that time. And, and so it just immediately hit home that it could be really fun to go out and, you know, find who are the, who are kind of the. Underdogs of the economy who might need solutions that are kind of being ignored and I was thinking about maybe different industries that that made sense. And if whatever reason accounting came up and I, I just thought, well, you know, this is really interesting there. They, you know, accounting and bookkeeping, they're really the glue of the economy behind every one of these firm owners. There are dozens to hundreds to thousands of individuals or small business owners. They're mission critical providers. And we've been saying that pre COVID came and everybody realized this is a mission critical service that needs to be, be offered. And so it's like, well, I think there's a lot of pain here. I think they're being ignored. I feel like if I get them on the phone, I can start to learn about what it's like to operate a practice. Now I'm not an accountant by, by trade. But I grew up in a small business. I've been around small businesses. I've worked in freelance to many small businesses. So I had a real heart for the small business owner. And I started interviewing all these accounting and bookkeeping and payroll firms and started to find that there's a real challenge with. You know, checklists and deadline management, client work falling through the cracks. And originally when I started to hear this, I tried to convince folks to just use something that was already available in the market. It's like, wow, this sounds really painful. Good news. There's other things you can use. And for a bunch of reasons, I couldn't use it. It was clunky. It was not industry specific, whatever it may be. And so from there started sketching out the solution of what would later become Jetpack workflow, got your, the customer's base off of that. We started raising a little bit of money because like you mentioned. I can't code either. And so we ended up getting some investment capital, started building out the technology team. And yeah, that that's, so we're really, you know, kind of outside in, you know, I always have to remind myself or remind the team and remind everybody participating at the company is we've learned a lot, you know, we've been in this market for, for eight years, uh, in total, but. You know, we have not operated these firms, which is why we talk to our customers a lot. We take the requests seriously. We have the podcast series where we interview people because we're always trying to learn from great practitioners and operators and trying to bring that lesson back into the product, back into our content or wherever we needed to go. Yeah, that is so smart and like such a a market research hack that I never, I mean, like it's a byproduct for me of having a podcast, getting to talk to people like you and other firm owners and like glean information. But I didn't set out to do it for that reason, which is really interesting. Like our listener could basically just take that and be like, Oh, this is a good way to like learn what my clients. Need, right? Start interviewing them or people that aren't even on your podcast because everyone wants to interview on a podcast. It gives you visibility, right? So it's like a benefit for both sides. So you pick, if you, if you're able to identify a market. You know, like, I guess, twofold. Well, I didn't have any market. I had zero, right? So, I didn't know where to go, but I thought this was a really interesting one. So, I started researching it and became quite fascinated with the problem because it's a logistics problem. It's a business operation problem. It's really fun and nuanced to solve. You know, if somebody's listening and you have a client base, there's probably some representation of multiple industries. And you can kind of create this mental Venn diagram of like, you know, people I love, industries I love working with. You know, how, how painful is it of what I'm providing and then their willingness to pay for that. And then there's going to hopefully be one, maybe two where you're like bullseye. I love it. Like there's high willingness to pay. I'm really solving acute, painful problems for them for, for whatever reason. And I love talking to them. Like I can picture myself going to conferences of this industry. Yes. As maybe a vendor, but also just as a participant, cause I love. X industry so much. And yeah, if you, if you kind of have that focus, you can go out and interview them and really design hopefully an experience that feels very personalized and delighted for them. And that really moves you from maybe a commodity service to a very unique one in the niche that hopefully you, you love to be in. Yeah, that's a great way to look at it. So thank you for that insight. So when you started, I didn't realize Jetpack Workflow It's like, as you get older, time just starts to speed up and I'm like, I started my business maybe like a couple of years after you started a pack workflow, but it felt like you were very established at that point when I started my business, because I've been listening to the podcast for a while. So it's just interesting to like, to know that, like, yeah, it's just crazy the way time works, I guess, when you run a business, it's like warp speed. Yeah. And you think, yeah, I mean, you, overestimate what you can do in a year. You underestimate what you could do in a decade. I like even saying that number out loud. I'm like, goodness gracious. That's like a long amount of time. Like, it just feels like I've been working on this forever, but I mean, I can't recall the year you started, but you know, maybe, maybe we started designing 2014. I went full time in 2016 because like, again, I can't cold. So I was self funding and investing, getting investors to self fund the technology build out. And then, you know, there's been kind of peaks and valleys, you know, since 2016 and then going through COVID, it's just a giant blur that three years has felt like one week. Right. And so, yeah, time, time absolutely flies, especially when you're running a business. Yeah. I started my, my bookkeeping firm around 2017. So during the, during 2016, though, I was like attending lots of like free CPE and learning about all the cloud technology out there before I really started my business. So I probably was exposed at that point. and that was probably when you were ramping up marketing efforts. Yes, that was, you know, we, we had spent a lot of marketing between probably 2017 to 2019, 2020 you know, we definitely a little bit of the, and I truly mean a little bit of the product of a zero interest rate environment. So there's a lot of investment capital. We didn't raise maybe a ton, certainly relative to our competitors who have each raised over a hundred million dollars, but you know, the directive was grow. And You know, and so we, put a lot of dollars into, sales and marketing during that period. Yeah, that's pretty typical for a startup. So when you started Jetpack Workflow, what was your ultimate vision versus now? And has that changed? Well, you know, when you start something, the vision is to not go out of business. I didn't have a, I didn't have it. You know, I had been a social worker. I had. And realize it just wasn't where I want to go. I default stuck and I was just trying to find, you know, a place where I could build. It's funny coming out of social work and moving into, you know, like business. This is typically you go the other way, but I wasn't being very, I wasn't very fulfilled. The role I was, I was, it was in prior and I was trying to find. Something that I thought had a lot of creativity and a lot of meeting associated with it. I just felt like building products to solve painful problems. Gosh, that's like really fun. And so, you know, mission number one, don't go out of business, have something that stays around and have something that I don't have to keep self funding, you know, and then from there, it was really about trying to drive growth rate. And, you know, kind of the place I'm in now is, you know, I look at each stage of the business is like there's different lessons you get to learn along the way. And, you know, I'm in, you know, kind of a lesson where I think we've reached an interesting level of scale, but I really need to build a stronger infrastructure to scale. Beyond me. And so we've done a lot of rebuilding a lot of our, our leadership team. And there's been a lot of lessons I've learned to do that, to, to kind of get to the next point. But I mean, we have, we have revenue goals just like anyone else. You know, so that's certainly part of the mix ultimately are kind of. Target is we want to be the platform that helps professional firms get recurring client work done on time, every time. And there's a lot of pain points that are underneath that from client collaboration to kind of how you think about reporting to how you think about integrations and automations. So we still feel like we're a bit away from. to reaching some of our you know, mission against that, phrase. And then, you know certainly have big plans in terms of product as well. But we're, we're, we're trying to think about the business now in a lot more sustainable effort, right? So, you know, first period. Don't go out of business. Second period. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. It's like, great. We have a really wonderful customer base. And now it's like, okay, everything has shifted in the world we're living in in terms of the capital environment. So how do we maintain and build a business that be sustainable indefinitely. And I think that's essentially where Every technology company is in right now, but this is just the season for us. That's a bit different. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that you brought up is like building out a stronger infrastructure. And when I, when you first said that, I was like, does he need processes in place? But then you said leadership team. So that was reassuring that you probably have your process in place because you are a workflow systems Well, process goes stale, right? You know, and so if, if you're growing I don't have the exact number in front of me, but I want to say if you're growing 30 to 50 percent year over year, if that's your trajectory every six months, You know, a non trivial amount of your processes will need to be updated or changed because you have a new inflow of either complexity on the customer front. You have headcount and you need to think more about either redundancy or handoffs. And so, you know, the process is not a stagnant thing that you put in the business. And so, you know, a process that worked two years ago that hasn't been reviewed, you know, will be stagnant and there will be issues. And And then how it manifests itself is like, well, it's stagnant because it hasn't been updated, but the people operating within it have probably then created, for lack of a better word, derivatives of that system. And so, system was documented 2 years ago, it worked perfectly, then hasn't been reviewed, hasn't been updated, hasn't been... tweaked or nurtured or the weeds haven't been pulled out of it. And the team might start to deviate from it and kind of create their own new little workflow, their own new little steps. And so it's very easy, especially when you're going quickly to feel like something's solved. And then you wake up a year later or review it 18 months later. You know, and You take a look and you go, what is going on? Like, I can't, I can't believe, you know, we're, we're a workflow business. I can't believe that, you know, this process is, is, is missing, but you know, it's happened, I mean, to be, to be honest with you, it's, it's, it's happened and it, and it happens because, you know, either it hasn't been reviewed or maybe I made a mishire and I, you know, I, I put too much trust and not enough accountability in monitoring how that, you know, if you have a process, you should be able to monitor it and kind of understand the metrics against it. And, um, you know, the, the downfall of growing quickly. is, you know, it's very easy to lose sight of a lot of the nuts and bolts of, of, you know, what got you there in the first place or just the operational basics you need to have to, to run efficiently. Yeah. So that brings up the question. What, what would you suggest for an accounting firm? Like, I don't know, like rhythm or drumbeat, whatever you want to call it for how often you should review those things. And part two of the question is who do you make accountable to reviewing and updating those processes? Yeah. So the review cadence I think is dependent on how often you're doing the service. So I look at something like tax that, you know, don't let, don't let a chaotic tax season go to waste. So as you're coming out of, you know, April use may to review the process to tweak it. Because then you're going to have to roll out changes. And maybe sometimes it's a simple change. Maybe there's four or five changes you want to roll out. Don't do it at once. You might need two quarters to roll them out. And then you wake up and you're like, it's almost. The next tax season. So for something like that, where you have this high pressure three or four months, I would do it right after for something that's like monthly recurring, you know, take a look at it twice a year. If it's on fire, look at it a lot more. Right. But I would say at a minimum, do a mid year and end of year check in. And I think the ownership would be whoever's head of that function. So if you're running a firm and you have head of tax and, you know, head of bookkeeping and head of this and head of that, well. They should have ownership over refining and tweaking those process for a lot of, you know, early business owners. It's like, well, you know, I am, but I'm also the CEO or the principal and I'm also the head of marketing and also the head of this. And so. If you find yourself in the, in the position where you're like, well, I'm head of sales, I'm head of marketing. I'm head of bookkeeping. I partner with another firm. They do tax or somebody else does tech. My partner does tax. So they do payroll. So, okay, they do it, but you're the head of so many different things. And, you know, this is where you have to like, consciously figure out which one's the, the, the, the biggest bottleneck in the business. Like, you're not going to do all of them. Start with the most painful one. If your month end close process is, is, you know, causing you to suffer from a quality perspective or current causing clients to call upset, like start there you know, cause I'm not, you know, what I'm not saying is if you're have the head of hat for six different functions, you know, don't do 12 reviews in a year, right? Because it's very different from a 30 person firm to a three person firm. I would actually then do that on a quarterly basis and just pick process. Process bottleneck month in close or our sales process or upsell process or the tax return process. I would just kind of pick one off. So it's a little contextual to the size of your firm. If you have somebody you hire to own it, let them own it. And if, and if you don't just be very conscious of your own time and own capacity to change everything all at once. Yeah. That's such a great piece of advice. I think a lot of us get hung up on Wanting all the processes in place and wanting them all to be perfect, especially as we start to grow before you hire. And that's, that's one thing that I coach a lot of bookkeepers through. They're like, I need to hire someone. I need help in this role, but I don't have any processes in place. It's all in my head. So like, I want to make sure I get everything documented before they start. And it's like. Take that piece of advice that you just said about figuring out what the biggest bottleneck is. So in this instance, it would be like, okay, just document the month end close process. As you're doing it, maybe even as you're training someone, but it's, it's like this level of perfectionism that I talk about all the time on the podcast constantly comes up where it's like, I feel like I need everything perfect before I can go and make that higher. I don't want that other bookkeeper to come in and be like, Oh my God, this woman's a. You know, a mess, a hot mess you know what I mean? So it's like, there's that level of like the mindset of like, Oh, what is that person going to think if they come into this business thinking I have my stuff all together and then they look behind the scenes and it's a complete disaster. Well, I think, I think, you know, maybe a couple of things come to mind. If you're a firm owner, you know, if you haven't documented it already, you might not be prone, you know, I I've come across from owners that. they're going to document no matter what, like they just, they're just, they need it for themselves. They're just super organized. They want to jot down everything. That's probably in a spreadsheet or in a, word doc. It's somewhere. It's not in a perfect state. So maybe they do suffer from perfectionism. They're like, I've documented 80%. It's just this last 20%. It's like, it's probably fine enough to get this new employee on board. And then you have the other ones that it's like, they dread doing it so much. They just procrastinate on it. You know, forever. And I think your comment of, you know, hopefully the new hire knows like the firm size, like it's me plus two other people, or, Hey, it's just me, your first hire, but good news, bad news is good news is you're going to help me really architect what this looks like bad news is it's probably going to be in a state of a little bit chaos, like at the beginning. So if you thrive in that environment, wonderful, if not. Just, I want to know if it's not a good fit today which is a hard thing for, for first time business owners to say, but I think it's important. You tell the candidate upfront and then yeah, have them help you document the process and, and, and help build out the playbook. So when you hire the second and third person, it's in a, it's in a better state. Yeah, it's interesting because I think back to basically all of the roles I ever was in and in corporate and small businesses where I was doing the accounting and I was always required when I came in to document the process because it wasn't documented. Like, so people in our industry accountants and bookkeepers, they should probably have already experienced that. And we kind of. Forget that and I've forgotten that too, because I've been in that same position where I'm like, I'm capable of documenting this. I want to document, but before I bring this person on, so they're doing it exactly how I want. Yeah. But the truth of the matter is, is like, if they actually do have some experience in the accounting world, more, more often than not, every role that they've gone into, they've, they've had to clean up a mess and document the process. And that's where I thrived too. Like I would, I loved rolling up my sleeves, cleaning everything up, documenting it as I was cleaning things up, establishing a process. And then at that point, when everything was running smoothly, I was like, I'm bored. I'm out. Yeah. Well, it, it also brings up a good point where, I mean, I think it comes down to the type of person you're hiring too. So I think sometimes, and at least what we've seen in our community, you almost prematurely make a hire. And because, and the, and the, and the symptoms of that is because you haven't reached a revenue threshold. You try to get somebody for as cheap as possible. So you might get, I'll just pick on recent college grads. Somebody that might be very smart, has a ton of potential, but you almost have to, you have to teach them so much about just how to work and how to show up and like, you know, document things and process. And so I, you know, if you've reached a revenue threshold that affords you to have somebody that has a little bit of, tenure in the industry, if they're, you know, you know, this can't be their first role, it could be three, four, five years into the industry, then yes, they should be coming with. Some level of skillset where they've done this before. And I think it's worth the firm owner waiting in most cases, even though it's very enticing to come in and get help. And actually, you know, it's also a nice little vanity metric. You can tell people you hired somebody feels really good, but just wait, you know, grow your revenue, you know, 20, 30 percent and more, I know that's not easy, but just grow the revenue. So you can invest in a slightly more tenured hire. It's going to make the world of difference and your nervousness about everything, everything buttoned up. We'll go away when you feel like you have a little bit of a stronger bench that's coming in to support you. Yeah, that's a good point. Absolutely. I love that piece of advice. And then I'm looking, I'm thinking back to like how I structured my first hire and the reason it worked, even though, like, I wasn't really to that quote unquote revenue threshold that most people recommend to be at before you hire. But before we hit record, I was telling you how the amount of hours I work is by design and it's always been that way. So I did hire very early on. Thank you. And so I've always shared a lot of my revenue with my team. And so I was used to that. So it's no big deal. Like I know my margins and all that kind of stuff. But my first hire was a quote unquote junior level bookkeeper, but she had. Work experience and other industries and she's a problem solver so it can still work like you can still get an affordable employee that has maybe not this industry experience but experience managing projects working with a team working remotely, especially if you have a virtual firm like definitely hire someone that knows they're able to work remotely. And having those. work skills already established and, and that'll help a ton, Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it sounds like you hit the nail on the head where, where, you know, I, I think the trap I was speaking to is like, you know, sometimes the firm owner will start, they're like, they're, they're going to hit, they need, they need to replace probably maybe. A certain salary and then as soon as they get a little bit above that, okay, like I want to make one 20 year because I used to make one 20 year. And then as soon as revenue gets to a place, I don't know, 175 or 200. They're trying to go out and make a higher, but they're trying to have a little margin between those 2. And it's like, oh, boy, you're cutting it so close. Like the, maybe the candidate you're going to get, you're like, you're squeezing too thin right now. And so yeah. and then it's a reactive hire. I mean, what you did was very proactive, intelligent designed against your firm, knowing that you had an hourly workweek target, and then you brought in a problem solver. I mean, I think that works exceptionally well. It's a good, it's a good take on the concept. Yeah. And she's still with me, so it worked out. Yeah, so that's always like a big question mark for people of like getting to that next level of growth. It's always going to require in this industry, even with the automation and the stuff that we have. When you add clients, there's always a point where you have to add another body. And it's very intimidating for a lot of people who maybe never have been in a leadership role in past careers. Or. whatever the issue is like, yeah, it's intimidating to hire people and have to like be responsible for their, their pay and their work life and all that kind of stuff, but it is worth it if you can get the right people. Yeah. A hundred percent. I mean, the, the biggest, the biggest advantage. You know, anybody who's been in the industry has is if you yourself either through your own work, know what quality looks like, or you've worked with teammates in prior roles. And you're like, that's the person I need on my team. Like just the, the, the faster you can pattern match to kind of build out your little tribe of bandits endearingly, right? Because there's just going to be a handful of people in the trenches early on. Like the better. And yes, I am, you know, we are cloud based software. We look at tech all day long. We love technology. It's great. Yay. You still need to hire people, you still need to bring people on board, whether it's full time, fractional, onshore, nearshore, offshore, it's people. People are people, and you're gonna have to, it's gonna have to be a core competency of your firm in order to become successful. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the questions I have for you was. do you think is the best way to grow a firm? Cause that was one of the questions that, or one of the topics you submitted in your, your podcast intake was like, love talking about growing firms. So, and that's the name of your podcast. So what do you think is one of the best, I know there's lots of ways, but what do you think is one of the best ways to grow your firm? Yeah, so I'll put it on the context, and it'll be a little redundant, so apologies in advance, but I'm assuming you have a client base, my favorite way is to kind of Segment clients, ABC, figure out, you know, the revenue impact against the industries, figure out the service spread against those clients. So, you know, we serve a lot in landscaping. We serve a lot of construction. We have a little bit in like technology startups. Okay. You know, what's, what's the revenue impact of that, that client base? What are the industries they're in? And again, which one kind of lights you up in terms of trying to serve? I think. niching down. I know you just had a series on niching down. So hope everybody listens to it because there's some great examples there. But I think when you do that, everything about growing afterwards becomes exceptionally easier. So if it's landscaping then you, then you're, you're You're, you're going to walk the walk and talk the talk of landscapers and landscaper problems. You're going to design services that are specifically meant for people that, you know, have the inventory that they have that travel like they have, you're going to understand the industry applications and conferences and periodicals and journals. You are going to eat, sleep, breathe the life of landscapers. You're going to be able to talk to them as such when you create content for your website, or when you sit down with them in a meeting, they're going to feel and hear. that you understand their business better than anybody else. And by extension of that, you're probably going to start creating services that, that meet their needs. The most common iteration of that is, you know, when they start to niche down, creating customized dashboards for your industry. Like we see this all the time, which is like business owners, they're not looking at their PNL. They're not looking at their balance sheet. They're looking at their bank balance. If it's, if it's an okay state, they feel okay. And then after that, it seems like most of them just want to like. I don't know. These five metrics is a green, yellow, red, some version of like a contextualized KPI report for their industry. And you can do that and you could figure it out once you've niched down. And from there, that sets the stage to make your marketing that much easier. And so when you're, you know, for the landscaper example, well, Okay, let's, you know, let's see, is it, are there things on Google for, you know, CPAs or accountants or bookkeepers for landscapers, right? Or you can run ads against it. You can write articles against it. Obviously, showing up to the conferences, probably not a lot of firms are showing up at the conferences. That's a great thing to do. Your word of mouth is going to improve and increase because you're so hyper focused on this industry. So that, that to me is the foundation for everything. I think where people run into kind of traps is they kind of say, well, like small businesses are, is our target, or we've operated this local ecosystem. So we kind of service, you know, a 20 mile radius around Pittsburgh. It's like, Okay. Then you will get price shopped probably at the end of the day, unless you have that level of focus. So everything stems, I think, from, from that initial decision and that initial research. Yeah, that's a good point to talk about like local marketing. That's one area that like I've dabbled in a little bit, but when I started my business, I didn't, I mean, I've only ever worked with local clients a couple times and it usually doesn't work out cause they're not really in our niche. And And yeah, I, I, I want to network locally because I still want to like be involved in the community, but I'm at the same time, it's like, I don't really want to hand out my business card because probably going to be too expensive for them and they're not going to be in the industry. Yeah. Unless you, you know, you know, again, I was Pittsburgh example. Unless you want to be like Mr. And Mrs. Pittsburgh, like we had a firm that we worked with. And this guy was like the mayor of his hometown. He was out about all the time. He just, he just lived for his hometown. Hometown he was, yes. And he, everybody knew, he knew all the business owners. He was, he was, he would go everywhere. He would run events. He would be at, you know, he had, he had kids in the area and he just loved it and it lit them up. And it was just like, that's, that's the niche, right? It is, it is that 15 mile rate. And nobody knows that area better than him, you know, whether, whether it came from accounting and tax implications for that area, or just knowing, you know, probably all the other providers that person would be working with, it's really hard to probably compete with him on that axis. You know, to some extent you know, you, frankly, me, like I'm not, I, I want to find my community virtually and that's where it's always felt appropriate and right for us. And obviously we've gone to conferences and things like that, but you know, I, it's much better to just pick the lane you love to be in, then kind of feel obligated to do many different things at once. Great piece of advice, especially because, I mean, hopefully this gives, gives permission to the bookkeeper. That's like, I don't want to like network in person, Yeah, it doesn't mean don't market doesn't mean you can't, you know, you have to sell you have to market doesn't give you permission to not do those things to not get in front of prospects and put your message out there and, you know, position yourself appropriately and get your site together and get a sales process together. But, yeah, you get to pick I mean this is the thing you're building your own. The goal is utopia. Sometimes it feels dystopian, but this is your own sandbox. You get to make these decisions. That's that's the joy in the journey of kind of building something from scratch. So like you get to make these calls and if you don't want to network, I don't network, you know, but but also don't neglect building your prospects, you know, either, you know, find find your own version of that. Right. So we talked about like a best way to grow. That was a great piece of advice. Now when it comes to implementing systems, since you have a workflow software, we should probably talk about systems. What do you find is one of the biggest mistakes? Firm owners make when they are either researching for a new workflow system or implementing throughout that whole process. What do you think is, 1 area that you see pitfalls happen? Yeah, I'll take it from an implementation perspective. And it's it's overbuilding the initial. rollout of the program. I think there's a lot of hype, some of it warranted, some of it not. about products and technology. And you look at all the promises and you look at all the features and you look at this giant buffet and you're like, Oh my gosh, I want, I want the entire buffet. I'm going to turn everything on. I'm going to say yes to everything. I'm going to try to use every data field, every which way. And much like overeating at a buffet, you're just like, you just feel terrible afterwards and your, your adoption suffers from it. And so you know, depending on where you're at today, like if you're using a tool today, and I'll just kind of pick on one, if you're using a monday. com and you're like, well, we really built out monday. com and we're all using it. And we're using a lot of these bells and whistles. Okay. If you move into a tool like jetpack workflow, Great. Let's use all the bells and whistles and jetpack. You're used to it here. Let's put it over for there. And it's, you know, makes sense. You're used to it. Now you've already built a muscle. You've built the nervous system of relying on a cloud based system. We could probably do that for the far majority. It's, you know, you've tried a legacy application. You might be on a spreadsheet. You've tried other generic tools and they didn't work. And if you're moving from a place of. We tried this thing and it's not really working or we've been using the spreadsheet, but we've hit our limit in terms of how it can be used. I would say, identify the quick wins when you're implementing the tool. And that means probably the simplest version of that software you can use day one. Knowing that when you circle into year two, you can then evolve and grow with it. Certainly as you're reviewing your processes, you can then go back to your vendor. And say, like, we're looking at updating the tool this year based on what, you know, some of the feedback we're getting a process, can you work with us to, to, to drive these changes in and, you know, most vendors will do that. Most vendors, frankly, will do it for free. So start simple, start small, try to get a 30 day win. If you have a team that's been bruised up a little bit by past implementations, this is even more mission critical to just try to build a little bit of momentum because workflow tools. CRM tools, project management tools, you really need early momentum to drive change. I love that piece of advice, so that kind of brings me to the question of you kind of already touched on it, but your recommendation when moving from. If they're already using a software moving into something like Jetpack workflow. And what do you guys offer as far as assisting in that? Yeah. So we, we do two things. Well, let me answer the first question. So when should you make the move? I think it's dependent on how satisfied you are with your current application. If it's just not working you know, and you have the time to, to tackle this, like let's start right away. Like, you know, it depends on how detrimental or how, if this is the bottleneck. Let's start right away. If you need to clear out something else, like, Oh, you know, month end closes the end of this week. Okay, let's get through this week. And then next week, let's start or whatever it may be. So start right away. If, if something's working, but it's not great, you know, you can identify, you know, when you believe this will be the bottlenecks or maybe two quarters from now and you can start the conversations early. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. And, you know, have the have the timeline be a little bit extended because of that. In terms of what we do to support the migration or set up. So we kind of offer two lanes. One is a lane where we say, you know, we're going to teach you how to drive. We're going to be in the seat next to you and we'll be your driving coach. So we offer four implementation sessions for free. So you come to us. you know, we'll, we'll get on a screen share. We'll talk about the build out. We'll help build out initial templates for you. We'll help you roll out things and we'll train you on how to set up the application. That's completely free and included. We have great customer support, sub 10 minutes response time. We have Jetpack U where you and your team could be trained on how to use it and certified on how to use it. If so, that's all free. That's all lane one. Lane two would be. That all sounds great. I don't want to be trained on how to set up. I'd rather just figure out a way to have somebody else set it up and I show up and you just hand me the keys and I get to drive. And so we have paid setup packages from 299 to about 1, 500, depending on what needs built out and the complexity that built out. It's a one time fee. Each one of those comes with like a guarantee. On, on successful setup. And, you know, we have a number of firms that just say, look, we just want you to do this. And then, you know, once we're done building out, we'll train your team and we'll, we'll host as many sessions as you need for your team to feel comfortable using, using the application. So we have kind of the complimentary route and then we have a bit of a premium route, depending on where the firm owner's at. So that premium route, is that, does that include migrating them from another system or is that like a fresh start setup? No, that would typically be a migration. So we would, we would request ask, or we would even in some cases research how to pull data out of their current system. We really just need spreadsheets. Sometimes people send us pictures of like, if they have a whiteboard, great. Send us pictures. We can, you know, if they have their checklist on a whiteboard. But we just need things out in whatever spreadsheet format you can get them into. And then our team will go through the process of making sure they're tagged appropriately for the right services. They get assigned out to the appropriate person. Your standardized service is documented in each one of these. steps has a QA process. So like we'll, we'll get your templates in there. We'll review. Looks good. Okay. We'll get your client list in there. We'll tag it appropriately. How's it look? Looks good. Great. We'll assign out the service templates to the clients. Now you have a real work backlog. We'll review. Good. Assuming each one of these steps gets the green light, we'll go right into team training. So, you know, we've, we've done a number of pull data out of systems, but it's typically. You know, Chuck over the fence a bunch of spreadsheets and we'll build it out for you. Yeah. there's gotta be some cleanup in there for sure. Yes. Yes. Right. And if you, if you use the paid service, it's like, just, you know, frankly, send it all to us. Like, just tell us what you want us to clean up. And we're happy to take on some of that admin overhead for you. You know, it just really depends on what level of process dad or organizational debt you have. Some people don't have that much. Some people have a lot. We'll kind of work with you in, in either instance. Yeah. So what are some of the newer features that you've released? and then we'll, I'll probably have more questions. Yeah. So the number one I want to talk about, and it's a bit behind the curtains right now, but we've built the most adaptable and flexible process management system in the market. So we, we have been, we have been architecting a way for firms to look in the future, understand the workload, understand what services are coming up, but if they need to make a quick change for a client, because they're have unique needs or they're in a unique industry. You can have a cascade down. And so it's much like you can think of it as Google calendar or Outlook calendar. What's really cool about those tools is if you want to change the event, it'll say, do you want to do this one time? Or do you want to have it to cascade down to make that happen? If you realize you're taking two weeks off in December, you can take a look at all your events in December and say like, cancel, cancel, cancel, ask you to cancel indefinitely, just this one time. This process comes up a lot in the firms we work with where. You know, you do want to have the ability to forecast your workload, but a lot of things come up where, you know, client work gets deferred or you need to reallocate it. And so we've been feeling the pressure to have a system that makes it really easy, much like a calendar to adjust work on the fly or make changes for clients on the fly. There's been a lot of vendors, myself included, that have tried different ways to solve this. And it's a bit behind the scenes. If anybody wants to take a look, email me, david at jetpackworkflow. com. I'll show you what we started to build out. It's in the early version, but it's, it's, it's an exciting foundation. And, you know, we believe is going to be the new industry standard once it comes out in the market. Oh, that's exciting. So I guess that was kind of on the roadmap, but are there any other things that you want to share about what you're working on developing or something that was recently already released that you just want people to know about. Yeah, I'll give two quick shout outs to things that were released. So we do have a, this really wonderful visual team schedule view and jetpack workflow today. And so you can kind of drag and drop what your team is working on. If you need to move it to a different team member, drag drop, it assigns it to a different team member. If you need to move things out an additional week, you can, it's a really quick way to see. You know, how much work is sitting in unassigned? How much work is sitting in a team member's queue? And then we also provide a, a little bit of a, of a trend line of how much work's getting done by, by team in a given week. So if you want a quick snapshot, you're like, okay, this person's 83 percent done. This person's 22 percent done. This person's 10 percent done. And, you know, maybe that prompts a one on one or maybe that prompts you to quickly reassign work out or defer it. Uh, it's a view we call plan inside of Jetpack workflow. Uh, it's been pretty popular since the release and it's kind of known for its ability to like quickly move work around and get a handle on what your team is doing. Oh, that's really cool. So in the same realm, do you have a similar view that gives you just an overview of all the client? for example, the month end process, can I see a snapshot of where all my clients are on July 19th? Yes, 100%. Yeah. So we have this, I mean, it's our bread and butter view is this place called the jobs tab and it's kind of like a spreadsheet on steroids. It is the view of the forest where you can slice and dice, you know, various questions you have about your firm. So you can run a service search against month and close. You can then filter by do this month. And then you can either sort by date, you could sort by status, or you could start running filters against that. So show me all month end close, do this month, and then I want to filter by everything that's either marked as urgent, or waiting on client, or at risk. You can create all these customized labels to kind of color code how things are progressing. And we show you that on this jobs tab view, but it also shows up in the dashboard. So if you want to open up your dashboard and you would just want to. So you're like, Oh my gosh, how many, how many jobs do we have in motion that are waiting on a client? You can quickly pull that up. So we have that. I wouldn't call that a new view, but it's a very, very, very popular view of the jobs tab one. Yeah, that's, that's always been like my biggest sticking point is like I just need a snapshot of where everything stands as of today. Yeah. Yeah. But Well, hopefully we have it solved. I'll follow up on it. You know, I'll, I'll, I'll shoot a loon video, send it your way and see if we solved it to, to how you think it should be solved. awesome. Awesome. So a few minutes ago you talked about. When we were talking about, system implementations, you briefly mentioned like, as an example, CRM. So it sparked like this random question I have of what is your recommended or favorite CRM for for a firm that is maybe smaller, but trying to grow and build their client base out quite a bit. Yeah. If you're looking for something, when I say CRM, I'm thinking, you know, cause we have client profiles on our tool. You can assign tasks and projects and notes to a client inside of Jetpack Workflow. I think if you're looking for something that's a little bit more sales centric as a CRM and demand your pipeline and your prospects and all those good things, I really like PipeDrive. It's quite affordable. I think it's 10, 12 a month or something like that. Really simple to use, really simple to get up and running. PipeDrive is really great. And then we're also fans of HubSpot. So I think HubSpot offers a free CRM. Again, if you're looking for something to just quickly manage your client or your prospect funnel. I think those are two really great tools to check out. Awesome. Thank you for that. And then my other question is, Does your system integrate with any of those, or is there a system that you integrate with that you recommend your customers, other bookkeepers and accountants to have for that and or proposal type situations. Yeah. you know, typical response to that is we integrate with Zapier, Zapier integrates with, I think, 5, 000 applications. So HubSpot's on their pipe drive is on there. Proposify's on there, Pandadoc's on there Ignition is on there so if you want something where like somebody signs proposal and a client's created and a new service template is applied to them in Jetpack, Zapier can create that automation. if you're running your marketing through HubSpot or MailChimp or Aweber or ConvertKit or whatever, You know, there could be a system you set up in Zapier where it's like every time they're added to Jetpack, add them to customer list inside of my marketing engine. So that would be our go to place, like depending on your technology stack, like you can interface Jetpack through 5, 000 different apps using Zapier. Oh, awesome. Very cool. Okay. Well, we are pretty much at time. So one last question for you. Because our audiences, a lot of people who are coming from corporate and wanting to start their own business, or maybe career changers and people in the early stage of. running their accounting business. What piece of advice do you have for someone just getting started? Kind of, it can be general as far as like starting a business or more accounting focused. But would love to hear what you say. If you're just getting started, it's all about getting your, your initial set of clients together. And so we paint a picture where processes are tight and services are well defined and you never have scope creep. If you're starting out, these things aren't going to be defined. Your pricing is not going to be perfect, but. You know, like I mentioned earlier, step one is don't go out of business. So, you know, build your initial client base. Those first three, five, 10 clients, you know, you're not going to price them perfectly. You're probably going to put too much into the service packages. It's not going to be right, but the goal is to. Start charging for what you're delivering and you're going to learn the rest as you go. So don't delay, you know, for so many, you only have so much runway to cushion yourself financially. And so the number one thing you need to be doing if you're in that place is talking to prospects, meeting folks and trying out everything you can to make that happen. So if you're in that arena, that's what 80, 90 percent of the time, because I believe you can deliver the services and you'll figure out pricing, but go out and, you know, get the clients. Yeah. Such a great piece of advice. Thank you for that. Okay. So if someone wants to connect with you, where's the best place they can connect with you? Obviously your podcast, but where, where should people connect with you? Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn, just my name, David Crostello, and then jetpackworkflow. com. So if you want to take a look at the product if you want to look at the podcast, everything's linked up from jetpackworkflow. com. You can start a free trial. You can talk with us, or you can just jump into the podcast. In our footer, we've linked up a bunch of great resources. So we have 32 templates. So if you want to jumpstart your process journey, go into the footer at jetpackworkflow.com. We have 32 spreadsheet templates you can download for free. We have a digital copy of our book in that footer. So jetpackroof. com when in doubt, that's the best place to go. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you.

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