Have you ever wondered what a bookkeeper should be doing every month for clients
What about what a successful daily structure looks like?
Well, these are two questions I’ll be diving into today on the podcast.
I recently put a call out to the listener audience to submit questions you’d like answered on the podcast. You can still submit questions, either via email: support@ambitiousbookkeeper.com or by recording a question on Speakpipe!
In this episode you’ll hear:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper
For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:
Visit our website: ambitiousbookkeeper.com
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Click here to get the free First 100 Leads Training with James Wedmore >>
Have you ever wondered what a bookkeeper should be doing every month for clients
What about what a successful daily structure looks like?
Well, these are two questions I’ll be diving into today on the podcast.
I recently put a call out to the listener audience to submit questions you’d like answered on the podcast. You can still submit questions, either via email: support@ambitiousbookkeeper.com or by recording a question on Speakpipe!
In this episode you’ll hear:
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Thanks for listening. If this episode inspired you in some way, take a screenshot of you listening on your device and post it to your Instagram stories and tag me, @ambitiousbookkeeper
For more information about the Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast or interest in our programs or mentoring visit our resources below:
Visit our website: ambitiousbookkeeper.com
Follow the Blog: ambitiousbookkeeper.com/blog
Connect on Instagram: instagram.com/ambitiousbookkeeper
Connect on LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/in/SerenaShoup
Connect on Facebook: Facebook.com/serenashoupcpa
Thank you for your support of our show. If you haven’t left a review yet it’s super simple. Please go to: https://www.ambitiousbookkeeper.com/podcast and leave your review.
Podcast Publishing Tools we use:
Click here to get the free First 100 Leads Training with James Wedmore >>
probably the most underutilized feature, definitely within QuickBooks. And that's utilizing products and services or cost codes. So they're called items on QuickBooks Desktop. And what this does is it allows us to not only, you know, a lot of times we're going to use that for sales, right? So for rent. And so for different things that we sell, but we can use that for things we purchase as well. And so we can implement a system whereby we say, this is our list of cost codes, products and services. Investors love this. So rough, rough, electric, rough plumbing, framing, all those categories that they're budgeting for. Again, before they buy the property, they're going through that exercise and they're saying, I'm going to spend this much in these categories. And we can, within QuickBooks, establish those in our products and services. map them to the appropriate chart of accounts. So whether we're tracking to the balance sheet or to the P& L, depending on your customer, depending on their needs, we can assign that mapping. Welcome back to the Ambitious Bookkeeper podcast. Today I have a guest interview and I have Nick Faldo on today. He is the CEO of IncomeDigs and I'm going to let you take it away and introduce yourself and what you do and how you help bookkeepers and accountants. Great. Well, so, so great to be here. I'm so excited to, to talk with you today. My name is Nick, from Income Digs, as you mentioned. I'm a real estate entrepreneur. That's how I got started. And as I got going in my own business in real estate and construction, I started to implement systems and processes and kind of coach myself, teach myself how to use software for my own business. And I eventually started teaching others how to do that started on YouTube, built a YouTube channel with the Income Digs brand and got quite a following of other investors trying to learn my techniques. And one of the very specific processes that, uh, I was teaching was all about. Bookkeeping and accounting for real estate investments. So flipping houses, long term rental, short term rentals, all that. And so I was teaching investors and, a couple of years ago, my audience actually began to shift a little bit. And then we had a lot of bookkeepers coming in who were very good at doing bookkeeping and doing accounting, but there's really specific niche of real estate was a little bit foreign to them. So, uh, my audience has shifted and I'm teaching quite a few bookkeepers exactly how to tackle this kind of monster that is. Real estate investing and how to take on new clients and how to manage their books the right way. So that's currently, you know, what I do, I still have my real estate investing business and a construction business, but about 50 percent of my time is dedicated toward online education, teaching business owners, bookkeepers, accountants, how to use software, how to approach this niche that is a little bit complicated, a little bit nuanced. Yeah, I tend to get as we were talking offline before we hit record, I was talking about how I get a lot of students who are interested in pursuing this niche, or maybe they've landed a couple clients haphazardly in this niche, but then they're like, Oh, I know there's nuances. I know I need to figure out how to do the bookkeeping properly. Where are the resources to do this? So it sounds like you've created that. And you're going to talk about a couple of those nuances today with us so that people can kind of wrap their head around, like, what are the things you need to actually be looking out for and make sure you have a good understanding of, so, yeah, I'm super excited. Yeah, absolutely. It's like, it's one of the industries that it's unique in that. You can find any two real estate investors and they do things different call things different things. They have different terminology. So there's very different Complications that can arise with your bookkeeping clients And so being aware of some of those differences those nuances is important. And also it's an industry. It's As a really strong and important balance sheet component where not every business, you know, every single business, you have a profit and loss, you have a net income. And yeah, the balance sheet is there, but really understanding that balance sheet and having a strong. Control over that is essential. And I think that's where a lot of real estate investors fall short and they need help from bookkeepers to, you know, check that box for them. Yeah. So can you, if you were to explain to a business owner, the importance of their balance sheet, like how would you, especially in this industry, why is the balance sheet so important? Yeah. Well, the biggest thing is, is understanding what you own and what you owe. So as investors, we're. Often we're, of course, buying property. That's something that we're doing. We have partners that are potentially coming in to help us with that. So we have an equity component. Maybe we certainly have loans and liabilities as well. So just having an accurate understanding of I own this and I owe this. Buy property. And that's important, very important to a real estate investor. Buy property is essential. That's key. And as a business owner, what I was struggling with and, you know, kind of everything I teach is something where I scratch my own itch and like, I couldn't figure this out for myself. So I spent time talking to experts to figure it out. And one thing that was really killing me and my business was at any given point throughout the year, I didn't understand where I stood. It was only, you know, Eight weeks after tax season, after my accountant filed my taxes, I saw where it was. And as investors, we're quick moving where, you know, we want to get deals done, but we need the, to have the information at our fingertips to make those key decisions. So, as I mentioned, knowing what we own, what we owe, and not every business takes on all the loans and equity that we do. We have various different things. We have to slice and dice that information. And so it can get complex, especially if we don't think about the setup at the onset. So. it's 1 of those things. A lot of people ignore and you really can't. And in fact, some of the students that I have, they'll purchase property and they'll just freeze and that they won't enter those journal entries in their books because they're not sure exactly how to. They don't want to mess things up. So they'll just run the profit and loss on the property without seeing the property being on their books. And it's just like, we're missing the most fundamental component. Yeah. Yeah. I even come across, you know, bookkeepers who struggle with those journal entries too. So is that something that you've incorporated into your programs? Like showing people, okay, once you have the purchase agreement, this is the stuff that gets entered. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, so some of the training that we have available, we have our real estate accounting bootcamp that you know, show you everything. And that's really my entire system. And we start with purchasing property and the most simple purchase cash purchase. We, you know, if we had all the cash in the world and we can buy it without leverage at all, without any kind of loans, we talk about how we take that closing statement and we can just do a one for one match on a journal entry. Not that hard, but we just have to demystify what is a closing expense? What is debt service? What goes on the P& L? What goes on the balance sheet? we break that down and then we build off of those examples and get a little bit more complicated where we bring in financing. We bring in construction, escrow, private financing, multiple lenders, all that stuff. But if we start simple and start with the journal entry, that's another thing that definitely on the, the business owner side, those who are trying to do it and you know, debits and credits. I don't know. Right. So they'll try to create just an expense for the purchase of property. Well, purchase of property can be a complex thing. And so I always say bringing up a journal entry. I think it forces us to really think about it the right way and to understand all the components. We can always match it to our banking feed if we need to, but. Not being afraid of journal entries is, is just an essential part of that. So, yeah, to your question, we start with the purchase and we really go through many, many examples and break it down so that we feel comfortable with it. And then we can take it further to if we refinance, if we sell, or I should say, when we refinance, when we sell, because that's exactly what this business is. those are other journal entries that we demystify as well through our courses. Wow. That's awesome. I'm super excited that you found me and came on the podcast because I've said that I told you this before is I get these questions a lot and I don't serve real estate industry. Professionals or house flippers or anything like that. But I have few students that do, but they're also too busy to coach the other students on how to handle things. So it's great that you've created this resource and you're speaking the language of the industry. And that's another thing that like is going to help the bookkeepers and accountants, it's probably good that you don't really have a finance background. Right? So you've already translated everything so that it's understandable. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, that's really the idea. I, my background, I started as a consultant at IBM and just process improvement, system improvement, and it was really just through repetition of like doing it for my own and talking to my CPA and, and, Hey, if I did this with this work and I developed that vernacular, and I would honestly say students, my bookkeeping students have helped me to develop that as well, but I think where I'm able to serve is that I'm an investor myself. I teach that first and foremost, these business owners and the clients, uh, that your bookkeepers would take on, they need to have their financials ready to make decisions for their business. It's not just about tax prep. That's very important. That's essential, but that happens once a year. We want to be looking at our books more frequently and being confident that they're accurate so that we can. Move our resources in the right place to make better decisions. And so being an investor myself, and then doing my own, I do my own bookkeeping with, with some help, some from assistance and and administrative assistance and whatnot. I kind of see both sides of it. And I think that helps for me to, to bridge that gap between bookkeeper and business owner. Yeah. So can we dive into, before we get into the three things that we're going to talk about, like the nuances, can you share one of the, maybe some of the biggest mistakes you've seen happen with bookkeeping for real estate? Oh, great. Okay. So probably the biggest one, and this will tie into kind of like first tip is, having a chart of accounts. That grows vertically. With no end in sight. And so what I mean by that is, investors, and sometimes they're bookkeepers too, get really excited that we buy our 1st property and we learn that we need to split out that property. We need to split out the building, the land, the closing costs. And so what investors do is they'll do the property address 1, 2, 3 Main Street building, 1, 2, 3 Main Street land, closing costs, et cetera. Okay, so they have made 4 or 5 accounts for that 1 building, then they'll buy another 1, then they'll have 4 or 5 accounts for that building. And then what we see is that we have a non scalable approach. Our balance sheet or our P& L grows vertically the entire way to a point where we can't read it and we can't do math on it. So we have to understand that in this industry, we need to do things by property, right? So we need to have open up kind of that 2nd dimension. So the biggest mistake. Investors or their bookkeepers is they just add way too many accounts way too soon to make an unusable balance sheet or P& L. And that's something we can correct as we get into, you know, kind of that first tip is understanding how to differentiate projects. That's an essential part of real estate accounting, and you can do it in a number of different ways, depending on the software you use and depending on your clients, but. You need to have some kind of strategy to, to answer for your client. Like, okay, can I do a P& L by property? We need to be able to do that. And even a balance sheet by property. Okay. So that allows us to keep our chart of accounts generic. We can have land, building, closing costs, whatever those accounts are. And those are the specifics that we can dive into later, but whatever the case, four or five of those accounts, and then across the top in columns, we can have our different properties. And that allows our. balance sheet to grow in two directions. It's way more scalable and it helps that investors see these properties juxtaposed next to each other. So if you're using something like QuickBooks online, you're going to use class or use customer, you're gonna use some kind of differentiating tag, some kind of attribute so that you don't have to separate out different accounts within your chart of accounts. Yeah, and then whatever you choose, whether you're doing tags or classes, be consistent across the board. Be consistent and be thorough. So a big question I get is, you know, I'm, I always teach that your class. Or your tag, whatever is going to be for the property and the question might come through. Well, well, what do you do for those items that are general to the business? Right? And so should I just leave those blank? And you could, you could leave that blank. So, if you have a legal expense that is not specific to a property, you could leave it blank and therefore it show up as not specified. But I would suggest. We create a class or a customer or whatever called general, because then we can instill within our process that nothing can be not specified. That's not allowed, right? Because if we didn't do that, we can make the mistake of saying, you know, oh, well, that wasn't tagged. So that must be not specified. Well, is it not specified because I want it to be? Or did I intentionally put it there? So, No. Really being consistent, as you mentioned, and being thorough is essential. We want to be able to see the stuff that, you know, if I draw up that balance sheet, we want not specified to fall off. Everything should either be to a property or maybe to general business expense. yeah, I think that's a setting that you can turn on, that it doesn't allow you to book anything without that, or at least it gives you a warning in most systems. So, um, definitely activate that. Yep. For sure. So what's your next one? So next, kind of key if you're trying to break into this niche and understand this niche is understanding that the balance sheet and the profit and loss Are both really important and that your investor might have a different opinion on where things belong and be ready to move things back and forth. So the key example of this is with flip properties. So these are properties we buy. We renovate, we sell, it happens relatively quickly. A lot of your customers, your, your clients who do this are going to want to put everything on a P& L. And to a certain extent that might be okay to do. Of course, what that does is while we're flipping that property, it shows it's in our P& L throughout the year. Okay. So we have to understand, and the business owner needs to understand that will potentially throw off any kind of analysis you're doing on your business. So we have to think about that. At year end, if we haven't sold that property yet, we don't, we can't have that all showing up on that P& L. We want to store that for later and report the entire project as one whenever it sells. And so to carry that forward, we're going to move that to our balance sheet under something like inventory. And understanding that your clients might want to do that move Because we might want to, you know, monthly do that so that, again, if we analyze our business and I show, wow, negative 450, 000 profit. Is that accurate? Probably not because I, I've invested in my basis, but investors are so used to having it. They'll use in QuickBooks, the projects portal to see. All your expenses in those categories that they really want the P& L. And so I enable that, but we teach them that, hey, you might want to be moving things to your balance sheet with a really simple journal entry. Really simple. We credit the expense. We debit the, the the asset. We bring it back over. We can reverse it really easily. It's not a big deal. We can copy it for the future, but just Knowing as the bookkeeper that you have to have some flexibility on where those things are going to go and have mirroring accounts where it makes sense is, is really essential. A lot of us get, I know this to be a fact, a lot of bookkeepers come to me and say, listen, my client wants to put things on a P& L. They got to be on the balance sheet. Well, they eventually have to be on the balance sheet. Play the game a little bit. They want to see things on a P& L because that's, that's how they're used to analyzing a property. Look at any flippers analysis sheet. It's. It's revenue minus these costs gives me my profit. And so they kind of want to see it like that. So play that game a little bit and then teach that client of yours how we need to move things over to the balance sheet so that we get the proper reporting. Certainly. For tax time as well. Yeah, that's a really interesting. I never thought of doing it that way. I just, in my mind, I'm like, oh yeah, you're going to have business owners with their own spreadsheets going on for each of their property. He said nothing's ever going to tie to the, to the P& L or the balance sheet. Yeah. Yeah. if you can create an aha moment for the real estate investor, we all have the spreadsheets when we analyze it'd be like before we buy a property. And I think the goal is to move. I think those are always going to exist before they buy property. If you can successfully move that investor from going to the spreadsheet after we buy the property, meaning we've bought it now let's track actuals and let's use QuickBooks, let's use Xero, let's use our accounting system to track that. I think you've done your job from really going beyond just helping with tax prep. get them off of the spreadsheets. When it comes to tracking actuals, that would be a huge, huge plus. And being that investor myself, I cannot imagine tracking actuals and spreadsheets anymore. It just, it's, you know. We're in QuickBooks anyways, we have the banking feed coming through and you know, to be able to scale our business we just can't be in spreadsheets and so as a bookkeeper that should be your goal for your clients. Yeah. As a side note, before we get in, or a side question, I guess, before we get into the third key, Is QuickBooks typically the system that you have your business owners set up on? Yes, that's, really the one that I push the hardest, just because it's the one I know the best. So almost all my students are on QuickBooks. There are some that are using Xero and they're just applying those concepts, but everything, I, I also teach by doing, I'm a big time demo person. So if you're on, if you ever see my YouTube channel, it's very little of. In slides or anything, it's almost all of me within QuickBooks. And so I find that I can be, I can go really deep into that, by kind of going all in with QuickBooks. Awesome. So what is key number three for bookkeepers and business owners, honestly, to be aware of when it comes to their accounting and real estate? the third thing is probably the most underutilized feature, definitely within QuickBooks. And that's utilizing products and services or cost codes. So they're called items on QuickBooks Desktop. And what this does is it allows us to not only, you know, a lot of times we're going to use that for sales, right? So for rent. And so for different things that we sell, but we can use that for things we purchase as well. And so we can implement a system whereby we say, this is our list of cost codes, products and services. Investors love this. So rough, rough, electric, rough plumbing, framing, all those categories that they're budgeting for. Again, before they buy the property, they're going through that exercise and they're saying, I'm going to spend this much in these categories. And we can, within QuickBooks, establish those in our products and services. map them to the appropriate chart of accounts. So whether we're tracking to the balance sheet or to the P& L, depending on your customer, depending on their needs, we can assign that mapping. Okay. And then we're tracking all those expenses to that level of detail. And we're getting kind of the best of both worlds where I have a nice, simple P& L or balance sheet. It's got one, two, three accounts. For example, you might have Construction materials, subcontracted services, and labor. Maybe three accounts, but if you dive into those and drill down, we might have 50, 100, 150 cost codes. So we're able to get a nice high level view at the P& L, at the balance sheet, and we can make decisions on our business as a whole. If we want to dive deep into the project, we can drill down into it and see how much we're spending in those very specific categories. And that's Really help to unlock for the investor. It helps them unlock. Again, I don't have to do this in a spreadsheet anymore. I can see that level of detail right within my accounting software and potentially even integrate it with a third party system. Buildertrend would be an example of one of those that some folks are using for. Project management as well. So that's one of those, and I think a really good value add too. If your bookkeeper can kind of unlock that and show their customer, Hey, you can use this little side feature here, you're unlocking a ton of potential when it comes to reporting. So that's, that's really, really huge. Oh, that's awesome. I never even really would have considered doing that. do you teach your bookkeepers or business owners how to like, to track a budget versus actual in QuickBooks, or do you recommend a different system for that? Or is that where it's like, yeah, you might be using a spreadsheet. yeah. So budget versus actual is very good for certain things. Definitely really good for long term or short term rental investors. Anything where we can establish annual budgets. The one problem with QuickBooks Online that they are changing, but right now it's a problem in that all their budgets are fiscal year time boxed. And that's an issue when we come, when it comes to tracking a flip. We don't necessarily have a budget. That for just the year for the flip, we have a budget for the project. And so it is something that they're addressing with QuickBooks Online Advanced, which is nice. But for those flip projects, managing against your actual or managing against your budget is tough to do within the system. So you would either need, you know, if you're using a third party system, Buildertrend has that where the budget is right there. Or another thing we can do, I know we don't like spreadsheets. I don't like spreadsheets for data capturing and entry, but if we dump the data into a spreadsheet, we can get some analytics out of it. So that's one thing that I do and I have in my course too. It's kind of an advanced technique where we, we set up a nice saved report that has all our transactions. Simple, you know, one minute process to dump it into a spreadsheet, and then we can have all these preset charts and graphs set up for it. So it is one small little shortcoming of QuickBooks when it comes to budgeting, but we do teach a few workarounds for it. Long term rentals, short term rentals, general business budgeting, we do teach that, and it is pretty strong within QuickBooks itself. Yeah, that's awesome. Have you explored using any of the systems like. Live flow, for example, like creating and just syncing the data. yeah, those are great. So we've, we've explored a few different business analytics tools and we, and I, I have done a few you know, kind of one on one implementations with some of our, our you know, kind of higher need students and customers to, to do some of those. So, yeah. The good news is that. The data's in the right place. The source of truth is QuickBooks. And if that's the case, then, you know, we can, we can pull that information out into various different places like, like BI tools or, or different analytics tools to, to really show us what is going on. So I think that's the essential part. Have a source of truth. It's QuickBooks online. It might not be perfect from the reporting standpoint, but as long as it's there, we can pull the information with, with some other tools that we'd use. Yeah. And that's just reiterating the whole, having a bookkeeper who understands what they're doing and making sure the data is accurate and clean so that you can use it in various ways. Other systems. Awesome. So this has been really awesome. I'm super excited that you have resources. Can you talk about the various Resources and levels of support that you offer bookkeepers and accountants as they are either learning this industry or getting better at it. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first place to potentially go is, is my YouTube channel. That's where I put out all of my demos. So that's YouTube digs is the channel. And that of course is all free and it's almost all on QuickBooks online. There's some other software that I teach. Um, there's some. Other processes I teach, but I'd say 90% of my content is there. So I would start there and that's gonna give you a taste of the way I teach and some of these concepts we've talked about. If you wanna take it a little bit further, we do have some courses which take those concepts and really dive deeper into them and make them more cohesive. So our signature online courses called Real Estate Accounting Bootcamp, and what I do with that. Is I purchase a brand new subscription to QuickBooks Online. I literally set it up from the ground up and build out various different examples, long term rentals, short term rentals, flipping, I purchased the property we purchased with cash, with financing, we go through pretty much the entire life cycle that would come. Go through for an actual business. And that is truly I think the best way to gain a full understanding of what this industry does and attached to that course, we have a community that you gain access to where you can ask questions, you can communicate with other investors, other bookkeepers. We have live Q and a sessions as well with me to kind of go through those nuances. So right now year end stuff, you know, we have a lot of folks who are looking to. Maybe they've identified that their books haven't been going the right way. They've gone through the course and they're ready to kind of make the switch over to say like a two dimensional chart of accounts. And so we're getting ready to like, okay, how do we use a journal entry to like fix the old stuff, right? And get ready for 2024. So we deal with that in the Q& A. So that course is great. And we have, coupon code that I'm sure we can share in the show notes. AB50. So we're offering 50 bucks off if anybody. Who is listening to the podcast, wants to purchase that course. and as I mentioned toward the onset, more and more of my students are, bookkeepers. And so what's really cool about that is we're starting to tailor some of our discussions specifically toward bookkeepers and even playing with the idea of setting up a marketplace for bookkeepers who kind of go through the course and we're looking for new clients. We are trying to make some of those connections because we're getting those. Requests from both directions. We're getting bookkeepers who want to learn how to do the bookkeeping for real estate. We're getting a lot of investors who want to learn the concepts, don't have the time to do it. Honestly, they shouldn't be doing it themselves. Right. So that community is really great. So. Long way of answering go to YouTube to check out my basic teaching style for sure and then IncomeDigs. com You'll see that of course their real estate accounting bootcamp and give that a try for just a really really deep dive end to end This is how you do accounting for real estate investors Awesome. That is incredible. We will link all of this in the show notes. And I have kind of an off topic thing that kind of came to mind that I'm very curious about. So you've built your brand on YouTube and the majority of the videos, you say you do a lot of demo, do you do a lot of stuff in QuickBooks on a screen share? Exactly. attracted a bunch of bookkeepers and clients this way. Yes, Walk me through your setup of like, when you started the YouTube channel, did you have that as a vision? Were you just trying to share knowledge? What did it start out as? Yeah, so I mean it came from I was a consultant like trained consultant. I was helping businesses Do things with their processes. And, and then I became an entrepreneur, like I left corporate world. I left the consulting world. I became an entrepreneur and I realized that we have all these new problems and I have to be my own consultant. And as I solve these problems for myself, I just. Needed to have an outlet for them. Like I needed to show, like I had aha moments all the time. And many of those were around accounting. That was the biggest one for sure. It was like when I, I had the bad year where it took me five weeks to get my taxes in order and my accountant hated me. Right. My CPA said, this is a mess. And that forced me to figure it out for myself. And once I did, and I found out, Oh, I can do a chart of accounts in two dimensions instead of one. I needed to get it out. I need an outlet. So I didn't really have a vision that it would become a business necessarily. It was more just, I know there's other investors was really what I was thinking. There's other investors out there who need this help. And so as I would post those, I would engage on the comments, questions would come through. What about this? What about that? Those questions led me to solve other problems and it just continued to grow and grow and grow. I had requests for one on one coaching and then. Actually, it became like, to serve as many people as possible, I need to keep doing the YouTube channel, but I need to bring this information to some kind of packaged content and that's where the courses came in because I just, I was finding success with coaching, but I felt like I had to say no to too many people. And so that's where the courses came from. But I think that teaching by doing for me is just. Is just the only way I, you know, my videos are not short and they get detailed and some people, you know, might, you know, get bored after a while. I'll tell you for sure. My wife can't believe anybody watches what I do. She thinks it's big time, you know, nerd, nerd zone, which I don't disagree with. But I just know that if I can show exactly how I do it, there's going to be some people that pick up on it and resonate and, and it's worked out well. And I've really enjoyed doing it. I don't, I don't dislike the act of hitting the record button and showing it. I'm not a blogger, you know, I don't like writing out my teaching. I like to just show how I do it. And, uh, that seemed to resonate pretty well. Okay, I'm so curious, because I didn't look at your YouTube channel before this, because you're, you're like, oh, my videos aren't short, so does that mean that they're not like super high production, or but you are definitely getting views. I'm, I'm always super curious about different YouTube strategies because I think that the common perception is that if you're going to do a YouTube channel, it has to be like, I don't know if you know who Jason Statz is. But he's a CPA in our space and he has very high production value YouTube videos that are funny, but you're basically just doing a screen share. It can be that easy yeah. And definitely to start, you know, my first bunch in 2016, you know, I, I sound nervous and, and it's the production values really bad. I didn't even have a microphone, none of that stuff. And, and we've upped our game to an extent, you know, we do some editing and we, we do some clipping and things like that to, bring it up a little bit. But I think more than anything, it's just like make good videos. I think that's essential. Like, the editing can always come, and the production value can get better, the content can't. I think that if the content is there, I think it's the absolute core. and again, that's Resonate. My top videos are those embarrassing ones from 2017 and 18 still. You know, those from seven years ago. Yeah, uh, even though, you know, I want to update them, and I do things a little different. So I'll link, you know, see this for an update, but Yeah, I think it's just really believing in what you're teaching and Being genuine, I think is great. And, and yeah, we get plenty of views. We get enough views, but I also, you know, we're not after a revenue share from YouTube, that's not interesting to me at all. It's, it's about sharing information, hopefully getting some clients from it. Of course, you know, that's, that's no secret there at all, but I focus on a good video every week and you know, yeah, some better production quality this year, for sure. are you starting to go back and re record older videos with a better quality? Okay. And when you're deciding on the weekly video content, I'm hoping this is helpful to listeners. Yeah. I'm selfishly asking questions here, but when you're deciding on weekly content, I know for me at my weekly con, my long form weekly content is this podcast. So a lot of my content gets decided based on who I'm having on as a guest, who I've curated as a guest, or a lot of times it comes off of like questions I get in my DMs, or in my Facebook group, or from current students that are like, I need help with XYZ, or how do you handle this, or What resources do you have around this? And it's like, well, if I don't have a resource, it's going to become a podcast, probably. So is that kind of how you formulate your content as well? without question, the best source of video ideas is questions from my audience, my existing audience, or either their students in my course, or their comments on the YouTube channel. I answer every single one, every single comment I answer. or reply back to every question that comes through the course. I answer and, and I say, you know what, we're going to do a YouTube video on that. And so I just keep in my I just click up to manage, you know, what I'm going to be producing. And every time I get one, I'll throw it on the list and I'll, mark it, what kind of level I think this needs to get out next week or, you know, save this for a rainy day. Um, but that's absolutely the best source is, you know, what are people actually asking about and what didn't my first video answer, you know, like, what are the comments coming back? You know, this doesn't make sense to me or, or what about this scenario or that scenario? Those are great ideas for, for follow ups and to kind of let them all branch off of each other. Yeah. Oh, I love that. I kind of nerd out when it comes to content creation, just to see how other people's brains work. But I don't know if you're familiar with human design at all, but I'm a generator, so questions are very helpful. Nice. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. And I think, like, I struggled for a bit because I wasn't true to myself when it came to the format and the medium and, you know, I tried, I was blogging and stuff trying to teach people how to invest in real estate and it was just, you know, doing a couple of YouTube videos, which I will admit I was probably a little nervous to start. But I just found that it wasn't a burden. It wasn't like, Oh my gosh, I can't believe I have to get this content out. I hit record and I just went for it. And 20, 30 minutes later, I have this thing that, it wasn't difficult to create. And I think that's essential to getting over those barriers. So you have to find out what medium makes sense for you, what you're good at, what you're natural at, and what you'll actually do. Yeah. That's, a huge key too because yeah, I, feel zero resistance about getting behind a microphone and recording a podcast. I try to do more video now with it so that we can repurpose content, but if push comes to shove and I just need to record something, I don't always do a video because it's like, I can get behind the microphone and I can talk. It's easy for me, but like you, like writing, I started out with a blog too and it, it's very time consuming. It's probably easier now with AI, but it's time consuming. You have to format things. And some people might think the same thing about recording a podcast or a YouTube video. So it's really just your preference. And like you said, what you're going to stick with because you, you have to say things as soon. Right. Unfortunately. Yeah. If you, and now if you, I will say, I think contrary to that, if you've like tried to record a, uh, maybe like a one minute more sales copy type video where you don't want to be looking at a script and you have to rerecord it like 30 times, that would be something that would be like, wow, why are we doing this again? Like, why don't I just write it out and nobody would. So there are times where it's like, man, this is tough. I'm on the whole time. You can edit and stuff, but there's certain times where you got to nail it and it can be frustrating, go back and redo it and whatnot. But again, for me, the pros outweigh the cons big time. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for such a wonderful conversation. where's the best place for someone to connect with you other than your YouTube channel? Do you do any of the other social media channels or anything? I'd say YouTube is absolutely the best. I'm on, I'm on plenty of the other ones, but YouTube is where I would say, you know, look at some videos, watch some videos, comment on them, and we're going to start communicating right away. If you want to go directly to the website, that's fine too. Incomedigs. com. Uh, you'll find, all of our courses available. We have plenty of free downloads as well. A free chart of accounts for real estate is a good place to start just to get an idea of what your clients might want. You can also email me directly, nick@incomedigs.Com again, it takes a little bit longer to get back to you, but I will answer every single email that I get. Awesome. I appreciate your time today. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. It was great to be on.