The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

117 ⎸ [SYSTEMS] Scrutinize with John Rea

• Serena Shoup, CPA • Episode 117

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In this SYSTEMS episode, I chat with John Rea - creator and founder of Scrutinize, an automated bookkeeping file review tool designed to assist bookkeepers in three main areas: evaluating inherited books, conducting monthly reviews, and performing quality assessments.

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • the inspiration behind Scrutinize & a detailed look at its features
  • best practices for ensuring security when using cloud services
  • various use cases for implementing Scrutinize

Resources mentioned in this episode:

About John:

My name is John. I grew in a small town in north Texas and moved to Austin at 17 with plans to be a rockstar guitar player. It turns out you actually have to practice to be a rockstar, so that fell through. After spending a few years idling about, I decided to get serious and finished my BA in Finance at St. Edward's University.

I spent most of my career in various roles across the accounting and finance functions, learning as much as I could about how to use data to drive more strategic decisions that led to better outcomes for the businesses I worked with. In 2018 I started my own fractional CFO and bookkeeping firm, which is where I ran into the idea that eventually became my current focus - Scrutinize - which is a platform we built to provide bookkeeping quality assurance by automating ledger reviews.

I still live in Austin, TX with my wife, son, and dopey Staffy.

Connect with John:

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Maybe this isn't simple for a lot of people, but maybe this will help a bookkeeper that doesn't charge for a diagnostic understand, even if you're just going to charge 100 for a diagnostic, , it creates that financial transaction where they realize that This is not for free like it sets a precedent that the work you do is valuable and if they're not willing to pay a measly hundred dollars to have someone diagnose the state of their books, how do you think it's going to go when you try to present them a 7, 000 proposal? Right? Yes. So it weeds out people and that scares other people too, right? And I do the same thing with my discovery calls. If someone comes to me cold and tries to book a discovery call, they're charged for it. 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. As part of our systems series this month, I have a special guest, John Ray from Scrutinize on the podcast. Hello, John. How are you? Hi, Serena. I'm doing good. It's finally starting to cool off here in Austin. So getting better every day. Yeah. Awesome. So we met at, Well, I guess the only time I've met you in person was at Zero Con in New Orleans. Right. Yeah. So like a year ago. Yeah, more than a year ago, or yeah, about, about a year ago. All right. And I was introduced to you by the girl I roomed with, so that was pretty cool. And obviously like I, like you have. a passion for making the bookkeeping industry better as a whole. So can you explain to our listener exactly what scrutinize is and kind of how you got into creating this? Software and company. Yep. So scrutinize is an automated bookkeeping file review tool. And you could think about file reviews in an infinite number of contexts, but we sort of think about it in three buckets. There's the, I've just inherited a set of books from somebody else, either another bookkeeping firm or, you know, my client who is DIY and I need to go about. Kind of systematically getting my hands around the state of the union, so to speak of these books and figure out what's potentially wrong. What kind of scale of activities going on and use that to inform my, you know, pricing and scoping process. And that proposal process. The 2nd category is that recurring kind of monthly review that you do. Do we do the things that we do them correctly? Right? How do we keep things ticked and tied as we walk things forward? And then the third sort of major category review is just a regular recurring quality review. So something you might do with your team once a quarter, two times, one time a year, just looking back on, you know, a client's file for the entire year and saying, okay, are there any patterns we could see here that, that we should surface that may be related to, you know, training gaps or process breakdowns. So that's kind of what scrutinize is happy to also tell you how it came about. Let's go there. Yeah. So I traditionally really am like a finance person that was like my background in school. When I got out of school, I was like, I'm going to go, you know, do corporate finance. Didn't really want to go to the banking route. So actually ended up working for a sort of investment. Holding company. And this holding company would invest in a bunch of different types of businesses. And I joined as the accounting manager at that sort of holding company level. And that was great because it gave me a bunch of different looks at a bunch of different types of businesses early on fast forward about a year in, we run into a situation where we find that this lady had stolen like 200, 000. And it turns out that, you know, after a bunch of forensic accounting and stuff like that There was something in my head that was like, how did we not find this? Like, why is there not a system that was like, you know, in place where we could like manage and track it, set up, you know these searches for these different patterns that, you know, eventually were uncovered as, as being fraudulent and so that's like that got parked fast forward to 2018 and as we started to add the bookkeeping service segment to our fractional CFO offering. We kind of ran into this recurring problem, both of the front end of engagements, like I mentioned, getting our hands around the state of the union, and then also making sure that our people were doing what we were supposed to do and getting everything done correctly month to month. And so then it was kind of this. Aha moment where I was like, okay, , this past experience plus this, you know, current experience. How do we kind of get our hands around, you know, building a system internally that we can use to check for all these different conditions. And then after building that internal tool and talking with other bookkeepers it turns out that this is like a common sort of challenge a lot of people face. So we decided to kind of spin that internal tool out and that is what is now called scrutinize. Awesome. Yeah, there's definitely a need for this. So, if someone's listening in on, like, this and kind of interested in Looking at the tool, what bookkeeping softwares, accounting softwares, do you guys integrate with? So we directly integrate with QBO and Xero. And then we also have a, an Excel file upload tool where you can export certain collections of reports from a QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks online and upload them in Excel format. And we'll adjust it and give you, you know, a similar level of analysis. Interesting. All right. Very cool. what are your thoughts on, if someone is interested in implementing a tool like this, like, where should they be in their business, quote, unquote, when are they ready for something like this and whatnot. It definitely depends on the primary use case that's bringing you to feeling like you have a need, I tend to feel like for the scoping and proposal use case, that's pretty much widespread. Like, if you are you know, 1 person shop or a 400 person shop, you need some kind of rigor around that process of getting your finger on the pulse of the books that you're inheriting and using that to inform. Capacity pricing, right scope and scale of the engagement for the recurring reviews. A lot of times that generally, you know, from what we see happens when you get to more than about five people on the team under five people, it's generally kind of a high trust environment. People tend to have a high level of confidence in their own work, you know, and in a small group, it's easy to kind of spot check things. So some of it's, you know, the size and then some of it's just client complexity. So if you're running into clients that have, you know, thousands and thousands of transactions every month, even if it's just you doing the books, you sort of get to the scale and in a, in a transaction volume or from a complexity viewpoint where one person reviewing all of that is just not. Tenable, right? It's not your it's not that you've made mistakes. And that's the other thing. I like to say, too. It's it's not always you like, you know, we're not selling this so that you could find your mistakes or your team's mistakes. It's like, we live in a world where you've got integrations with 10 other systems that are hitting a set of books and you've got other people and and you know, sources of truth that are piped in through bank feeds and things like that. So it's not always necessarily checking for, like, did you do something wrong? It's like, is. Is this environment set up correctly? Yeah, and that's kind of really anybody could use that. Yeah, absolutely. I like, I'm glad I asked that question because it's, it is true in a very small team environment and a small client base people have time to do. You know, spot checks and, and reviews and stuff. But as the team grows and as you, the owner, assuming the listener is the person who owns the bookkeeping business, you begin to be come out of touch with the day to day of each of your clients, and you still need to make sure that you have a process in place to ensure accuracy and that things are caught. And and all that good stuff. can we talk about exactly how The proposal scoping thing works. So you just connect it to a QuickBooks or a zero when you are doing like a diagnostic before you sign on a client. Is that how generally the workflow goes? So exactly that, that's the, that's the front end is you get on a scrutinize, you get whatever level of access that you need to that ledger system to pull the data in. Or if they, sometimes people are like touchy because they're like, I don't want to let my current bookkeeper know. So that's where the file upload tool comes in. You can just say like, we'll just run these files and send them to me and I'll get you a quote. But the, the kind of processes is broken up. Into three main segments and the first is what we call assess and assess is all about okay. What you know, in general is the state of these books. And so we're looking at things like transaction volume, reconciliation status across different accounts historical transaction volume, but then also the different types of transactions by count line amount, things like The way we like to think about that step is that Everybody's got their own different pricing methodology. Some people are you know, they go on transaction volume. Some people price based off of, you know, percentage of revenue or percentage expenses. So, whatever that end state is for how you're going to go about. Getting a number that you're going to send in your proposal is sort of separate from this understanding of what's our actual cost to service, right? Because regardless of what the client's going to pay us, we need to know what it's going to cost to service this, this client, and then hopefully charge more than that. Right? So this data that we give you in the assess step, which is this 1st step is really all about how you could triangulate the different types. Of activity that you're going to inherit and have to do and, maintain so that you could start building up and say, okay, there's 50 invoices a month with two line items each, that's going to take me, you know, on average, like two minutes, each invoice to put in. And you could kind of go through and start build up your, you know, estimated hourly time to, to service this client. And then back into the math, whatever your cost structure is there. And so that's like the, I would say the meat and potatoes. And then the second and third step are really about kind of just other things that we might want to identify as potentially wrong or just potential for cleanup. So the second step is what we call housekeeping. And that's going to be like, how are the vendor and the customer and the accounts get lists getting used? And how do we. Clean all of that up when we inherit this set of books so that we're a not inheriting some kind of like crazy structure that that doesn't make sense for us to continue to maintain. Or B, it's like. Everybody's seen the movie where you're scrolling through the bank feed and there's 400, 000 vendors And you just click too quick and it's not the right one, right? So the the cleaner we could keep those lists over time the better And then the final one is what we call the sniff test. So it's the Ar and ap aging it's the balance sheets the pnl Just looking for like do we have a collections issue that we're going to need to help advise our client on? some kind of bill payment issue are there any weird patterns in the balance sheet and pnl that we need to be aware of to help? You know, maybe advise them on maybe it's not actual bookkeeping errors, but it's it's things. It's like, hey, I'm seeing that gross margin keeps going up and down. You know, maybe we need to look at at making sure that your accruals are being done properly. So we can track that some stuff like that. Yeah. So is that piece automated too, or does it like flag these issues and you have to kind of understand how to talk about it and advise around it? Like, what is the scope of the program about that? So a lot of the first stuff is, so the first two sections is going to have what we call, you know, insights. And so it's going to give you the data from that client file, and then it's sort of going to breadcrumb you and say, Hey, here's why you might want to look at this. And, you know, here's how this data might be useful so that you get primed or you get that context when you go to look at the actual data with what actually what patterns am I am I looking for here? we've not got that built out for things like aging reports or the balance sheet. Variance some of that's just more like using your contacts and your knowledge as a bookkeeper to assess, like, is there an actual problem here? But it's certainly somewhere where. Over time, we want to continue to inject quote, unquote, smarter analysis on those boards. And is that something that you're, I guess I'm like jumping the gun here and gonna make you talk about something that's in the pipeline that is a secret, but like, that seems like a good job for AI. Yeah. And what isn't these days, right? Everything's, everything's AIable. No, there's, I, the thing I really like about. Let's take chat GPT, for example, is that, you know, ultimately it's a, large language model. And the thing that makes that good is that when you think about. Even the account structure, right? We, we come up with account names, which is language, right? This is the type of language, whatever language you're using. And so the layering of chat on to something like ingesting financial data, I think is a really good use case. In addition to other kind of proprietary models that we could build over time. On top of the actual fundamental or underlying financial data itself. But it's a good use case in providing some of those nuggets that you could then take from the platform and then go tell your client, right? So maybe it's ingesting this data and then it generates these insights based off of what it's seeing and then gives you some bullet points that you could then take and go out to your client with. So those are the kinds of things that we're thinking about implementing on the. analytical kind of advisory quote unquote side of what we're doing. Yeah, I can see that as being super helpful, especially not having to like, the thing that scares me is. With all this talk with like AI of people, like uploading financial statements to chat GPT and having it like just floating around out there. Whereas if it's within a software like this, that's secure it's safer to do that kind of stuff. So I would recommend making sure that. People aren't just like willy nilly sending information out into the world wide web just to get chat GPT to do your job. Yeah. I also do not recommend that. And there's ways, I mean, some of the concern with chat GPT too, is they say that. You pretty explicitly that, like, oh, you know, things that you upload are not going to be used to continue to train the model. But they also said that it was open and then made themselves a private company. That's for profit. So it's sort of like, how much do we believe the marketing promises of what they're saying? And there are ways to take those same models and self host them so that you do have a closed and. Where, you know, our client's data or customer's data, for instance, is staying within our data structures and not then going out and being used to train, you know, chat GPT, the wider chat GPT model going forward. Yeah. So can we, can you talk a little bit about the security of systems and what people should be looking for when they're looking at adding on something that's linked to their QuickBooks or Xero file? Yeah, I think a lot of it's just around without getting too technical. It's like take things that your favorite apps or like the big apps are doing. So think about the types of security that bill dot com or QuickBooks or these other ones have implemented. It's MFA, it's permissioning, it's different like roles and controls that are kind of baked into the, into the app and then use that as a model to kind of assess some of the other apps that you're using. And it's. You know, it goes really technical behind the scenes to, like, how deep all of these different security configurations are actually set up in their infrastructure. A lot of that, honestly, is going to be a black box. Even if they say, you know, oh, we do this, we do this, we do this. So you're looking for things like, is there infrastructure built on SOC compliant, SOC compliant, standards and so for us, for instance, we architect everything on a W. S. and in a W. S. they essentially have a framework that you can use for ensuring that you're using security best practices, turning on these scanners that are constantly scanning your infrastructure for weaknesses, vulnerabilities, old packages or libraries that you're using. Right? And so. You know, in terms of best practices behind the scenes, that's all stuff we're doing. The way that we kind of present that as like, Hey, we're going to offload in a lot of ways, our security onto AWS, whose entire thousand person or whatever security team is going to fix and find and manage all of this stuff, right? Because we don't want to be in charge as an app of trying to roll all of this stuff ourselves. So yeah, I would say just things like that are, are things you could look forward to get more comfort. But honestly in a not great way. It's still just a black box. It's like, you know, yeah, you are putting your trust in, like for your, for instance, for you, AWS and putting your trust in their securities capabilities, which you can double check on. Like we mentioned the sock report. So there's a sock 1 and sock 2 When you're in a public company and you have other softwares that you heavily rely on, your auditors are going to ask you if you've received those reports from those softwares, which basically means that they are upholding their security standards, right? In layman's terms. Like, I'm trying to break this down for people because not everyone has that background, but I do have a blog on this. because I get asked that question all the time when I'm teaching new bookkeepers or people that are leaving corporate to come start their own business and we're doing everything on the cloud. Now they're like, well, how do you ensure that like that's secure? And why do you use Google workspace and all this kind of stuff? So it's like, well, this is how, but you can also take your own security measures. Like for instance, I pay for an. Yet again, another software add on that backs up our zero files, our clients, zero files for us. So if we ever, I mean, you can do this manually too. You can literally export your zero file, but nobody has time for that. Yeah. But but yeah, so that's one thing that, that you can do to maintain peace of mind. And then if you have a business insurance, especially cyber insurance, they're going to give you a checklist of things that you should have implemented within your. Business and and that's a good place to start 100%. Yeah. I'll note that at least from my reading on the subject, the vast majority of cases where somebody is able to access a system that they. quote unquote hack into it is some form of social engineering, meaning they have tricked somebody with access to that system in a way that gives them the credentials that they need to log in. And then they can have, you know, there's other patterns where they can escalate permission. So even simple things like, don't reuse your passwords, have a password manager with, you know, basically the, the full extent of The level of complexity that that system will take as far as the password goes. And the more of these things that you layer on the harder of a company or whatever attack point that you become. And so people will just move on. Right. They want to go, hackers want to go to high output for the amount of effort places. And unfortunately, because of the world we live in, especially as bookkeepers, like we have access to tons of data. So there's, there's a lot of, potentially. It's a target rich environment in this space, but if you just make yourself like a little bit harder to penetrate than Josh mode down the street, they might try. And then they're going to go. Nah, it's not worth it move on. Right? So that's kind of what you want in the best case scenario. Yeah, absolutely. That's just like another reason why I prefer bookkeepers to not like do bill pay and stuff for their clients unless they're using something like Bell. com. Like, don't have access to your client's actual, you know, real bank login that gives you access to transfer money and do bill pays that way. Especially as you start to grow your team. That's one simple, simple security measure that you can take is just not allowing your clients to give you their bank password, like make them set you up with a statement only access of you only access and limit your own, like your own risk there. It's so wild too, because it's so client specific, but I've had clients on the one end of the spectrum that are like, I don't want you to have access to any of our systems. I'm like, well, I need, we need access, you know, and I've had other clients that before our proposal or, you know, was even signed, they're like texting me log in and password. And I'm like, dude, do not do this. I don't, it's like, I don't want this. I don't want you sending plain text passwords or text messages to me. Also, we don't even have a signed agreement yet. Like, so it's just, it's just wild, you know, the spectrum. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So just a little side note. I do have a older podcast where I dive into this cyber security type stuff with an insurance broker. And I'll link that in the show notes. So if you want more resources on that. So. What is on the, like, what's on the road map? I mean, you kind of alluded to it, but what's on the road map for scrutinize? Where, like, where are you trying to, if you want to share, where are you trying to take this thing? Yeah, so the way that we think about scrutinize is. It, it is over time going to become like, a more robust platform and we're going to do things outside of just. You know, we're reviewing the books and those things might be like how do we improve or like 10 X, the experience of setting up bank rules at a firm level and then being able to apply that, you know, where it makes sense across your clients or how do we improve the experience of cleanups by building more robust, sort of like bulk action cleanup tools. Smart tools like that, but the way that it will kind of be structured over time is more like a series of modules that you could turn on or off for any given client that you're servicing. So, instead of a take it or leave it, it's all or nothing. And the price reflects that over time. The way that we, we sort of intend to build it is, hey, we've got. You know, assess, which is our quality review module that we built out. And if you need quality reviews, you could turn that on. And this is the price structure for that. Oh, if you need these bulk cleanup tools, you could flip that on. If you want the bank rules engine, you know, kind of stuff that we're building, you can flip that on. And so over time, it'll be kind of like the toolbox that you take to a job. And it's like, you don't always need the wrench, but you got a hammer in there. You got a screwdriver in there too. And you kind of pull out that specific combination that you need for. Whatever that job is that you're doing in that moment. I like that. That's really neat because I'm just thinking about my business model where I could see us needing the assess tool a lot. But typically, when we get in there, like, our types of clients are fairly simple and straightforward. So it's not like, I don't think we would need that bulk cleanup situation. You know what I mean? So it's like, it's more of the assess tool, just figuring out that we've making sure we've priced things correctly, right before we do that. And then getting a, decent look at like, what does need to be cleaned up. But yeah. Whereas someone who maybe works with a volume heavy type client with inventory and all sorts of things like that might need that bulk cleanup tool, because if something is wrong once with the inventory, likely it's a widespread problem. Yeah. Yeah. Ecom gone wrong. That's a horror movie that we've unfortunately seen. Yeah. so reporting, I guess, since you're building out like you have kind of the analytical tools. Do you, are you planning on doing something with Yeah. Linking to a reporting software to feed information in or like adding that piece in. Do you, here's another question. So I'm sure my audience will want to know when you do the assessment, does it spit out a report like a checklist that you can like. Have as a deliverable to a client, if you're charging for diagnostic reviews or things like that. So on some of the, let's say, like, 3 statement reporting that's definitely where you're going to create a financial package and send that off to your client for the period. That's definitely something that we're more interested in partnering with people that are really great at that. And just being able to send you know, lightly editorialized data, maybe over to that system. And so they could package it all up and send it. Now, where I think we do excel and will on the reporting front continue to deliver and expand what we do is on our exports. So right now, the way it works is depending on what type of review or workflow you run and the different configurations that you have for that. So you could customize the sections or you could create custom queries against that data. Right? Yeah. Whatever you could figure there is exportable to Excel and the way that we tend to, you know, recommend that you use that is that especially for let's say, like, scoping a cleanup, you go run it over whatever the cleanup period is you export all of that. And then a lot of times it's helpful to tell clients or give clients. The reason why all this stuff is messed up and so you could go to each of the tabs in that export and say, hey, here's what I'm seeing here. This is why we're going to need to clean this up. This is why this is important. We can't glaze over it. And what you do is you come up with all these different tabs that you've kind of lightly editorialized and you send that with your proposal. And what I found, at least when we were, you know, setting more proposals at the firm was that especially for cleanups people choke. You're like, Hey, it's going to be 7, 000. And they're like, how, what, you know? And you're like, well, here's an Excel file with all the things we're going to need to clean up. And you kind of lightly in a good way. And the only way I ever recommend is lightly overwhelm them at the front end. An understanding of how messed up their books are, which justifies the cost. And so definitely making that whole process a lot more streamlined and having the editorializing maybe happen in scrutinize and maybe like a nice PDF version. Of that, you know, generated in addition to the Excel file. This is stuff we're looking at over time. Yeah, that is because that's something that when I do a diagnostic, I, I basically give them like a summarized checklist of like, these are the accounts that we're going to be working on. These are kind of the stats with them. So for instance, like if your bank hasn't been reconciled for two years, we're like 24 months of bank reconciliation, you know, like let's make it a little, like Make them understand that it's a monthly thing, not an annual thing, right? But it's also a deliverable that where the way we position it is. Because we charge for a diagnostic. So when you come to us, if you have existing books, the first step is a diagnostic there's a fee to it. But if you engage us for the cleanup, we will roll that fee into the cleanup price because we've already done a lot of the heavy lifting at that point. I don't tell them that's why, but that's my explanation for bookkeepers when they're like, why would you roll that in? Because, like, one of the hardest parts is analyzing where all the problems are but if they don't decide to engage us, they feel like they've walked away with something of value. And that's like literally a PDF of a checklist. And I'll say, if you don't go with us, you at least have a checklist to give to another bookkeeper to have them try to figure it out. But I'm not guaranteeing that they're going to do it the way we would or correctly. Yep. I love that. and I love that you charge for it. And then, cause that's, that's something I feel like a lot of people are, sort of giving away. But as you said, it's like half the work is getting your hands around what's wrong to begin with. And then it's just sort of like, okay, we need to execute on like clean this, clean this, walk this forward, whatever. Yeah. I like that a lot. I like the crediting idea. Cause it's sort of like they have nothing to lose. They have nothing to lose. And they're still, they're still kind of at the top end of that funnel. So it's like, you've begun this economic transaction. So they already are exchanging money for value, right? Which is the whole thing. And then it's like, Hey, by the way, you stay with us. Like, it's just a nice sort of foot in the door. and the most, like, simple part of it is that, like, maybe this isn't simple for a lot of people, but maybe this will help a bookkeeper that doesn't charge for a diagnostic understand, even if you're just going to charge 100 for a diagnostic, , it creates that financial transaction where they realize that This is not for free like it sets a precedent that the work you do is valuable and if they're not willing to pay a measly hundred dollars to have someone diagnose the state of their books, how do you think it's going to go when you try to present them a 7, 000 proposal? Right? Yes. So it weeds out people and that scares other people too, right? And I do the same thing with my discovery calls. If someone comes to me cold and tries to book a discovery call, they're charged for it. There's a backdoor situation where I don't charge for discovery calls, but you've already been vetted at that point. That. And a qualified lead. So it, that scares a lot of bookkeepers when they're used to getting lots of, lots of leads, but I'm like, well, how many no shows are you getting on those discovery calls? Oh, I get people not showing up all the time. I'm like, well, do you want to change that? Cause that's a waste of your time. And same with the diagnostics I've had when I didn't charge for getting diagnostics or waited to bill them until after I completed the diagnostic those people ghosted I never got them as a client. that only took me two tries of realizing this isn't good. It's not going to work to not charge them. And it's not going to work to wait to charge them until I deliver the report. They pay up front. it's so like deep, I think ingrained in a lot of people that, that do bookkeeping as well to Where, you know, and I'm not like casting aspersions because I think it's easy to do in in any field where you become more competent. It's easy with the curse of knowledge to start to devalue or undervalue what your expertise actually is worth to people because behind the scenes, you're like. You're like, well, it was easy for me to do. That's what we hear a lot. Well, it's, it's easy for me to do. So I just do it, you know, for free. It's like, it's easy for you to do because you've been doing this for 15 years and you know how to do it. Right. But it's not, in relation to the value that you're providing this person and how do you sort of think about this relationship in terms of not how easy it is for you to do or how much time it took you. It's like, how much value are you creating and how do we capture some of that? Right. I like the way you frame that. And also calendar abuse is so real. It's like people think nothing of it. You're just like, okay, well, I guess, I guess I'll just go eat lunch. I kind of did that to you, but I did email you. No, I'm talking to the no call no show. Not, not, not like people get busy, things like that. I have no problem with people being like, I need to reschedule or whatever, but literally. Three, maybe a week on average, just people that are like, because my calendar links are all over the place and people book it I'm not, you know, In that sort of realm. I'm not charging people for like a demo of scrutinize. Maybe I should it's a deposit. You'll get it back when you show up. It's like when you, I use this example the other day. And it's same with the discovery call thing. Like, if somebody did book a discovery call and ended up signing on as a client, I would probably credit their first invoice. But for that amount. But the truth of the matter is also a lot of people book discovery calls that really just wants a consultation and they should pay for it anyway. And I give a lot of value on those calls and everyone feels better about it. They don't feel bad about asking all the questions they have in that situation. But one of the examples I recently used probably on the podcast was like, when you go to a bar and you are trying to play pool and you have to give the bartender, your driver's license to get the pool balls. Yeah. Yeah. You're bringing them back. Yeah. You could do something similar. Like you pay a 15 deposit and you'll, I'll refund you after the demo. Yeah. Whoever cracks that. Yeah. If you, if somebody out there is listening and wants to crack that problem, I will pay you. Money to solve that. Yeah, maybe there's an AI tool that like crawls the Internet to find how many times this person has booked other demos and not showing up. Yeah. Yeah. You could sort of just like blacklist them. They're like, they're not on the good list. Yeah. But anyways. Okay. So if someone is interested in. Having a demo of scrutinize and it is actually going to show. Where should they go to do that? And do you have any other special things to share and how to connect with you and all that good stuff? Yeah, so as far as booking demos, starting trials just general questions, you could go to scrutinize. io and different buttons on that site that you can click to either book a demo or go right to starting, you know, your free 14 day free trial. If you want to connect with me elsewise, you send me an email to john@scrutinize.io, or I hang out on text Twitter a lot. So @johnrea88, so J O H N R E A 88 over there, DMs are open. So, you know, even if it's like just a talk shop, or you've got questions, or you just want to nerd out on quality control and bookkeeping with me, then I'm always down to do that too. So awesome. And before we hit record, you said that you have a special discount code for our listeners when they do sign up for Scrutinize. So you get a 14 day free trial. And then after that, it sort of nudges you to sign up to one of the paid tiers. If you do choose to sign up to one of the paid tiers when you go through the checkout, if you enter AMBITIOUS25. In the like coupon code section, you'll get 25 percent off your entire first year subscription. Wow. That's a really generous discount. Thank you. And we will link all of that information in the show notes. So you don't have to rewind and relisten to that. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I have one last question though, since you were a firm owner. And you kind of get all this. What piece of advice would you give someone who is just starting to go out on their own and You know, something that you wish you'd have known when you started that would have maybe fast tracked you that even after, you know, years and years and years and years and years, all of those questions that you have internally that are like eating you up around, you know, am I going to be found out? And it's like, Incompetent. Is this price too high? Like that will always kind of stay with you. And the best that you could do is just challenge that and make that voice quieter over time. and maybe that's not like a positive message that voice stays with you. But the way I see it is that it's just sort of like, I felt like when I started everything was new. I was super insecure about my pricing, my process, you know, how I would handle all of these different processes, parts of running the firm. And I continuously changed all of it. Right. You're continuously growing. You're continuously changing. So just start somewhere, even hanging your shingle on the door and putting yourself out. There is really the hardest step that you could take. And after that, you know, you'll get a little momentum and everything will start to feel, a lot easier to kind of tweak as you go. Yeah, I love that. And you're not going to be able to improve unless you start. So I love that. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much again for your time. And we'll talk to you soon. Yeah, that sounds great. Thanks Serena.

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