The Ambitious Bookkeeper Podcast

184 ⎸ Weekly (Micro) Reporting for Clients with Shea & Michelle

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In this interview episode, we're diving into the world of micro reporting and weekly client updates with Shea Keats and Michelle Röse from Breakaway Advising. If you've ever been curious about adding a personal touch to your client advisory, this one's for you!

In this episode you’ll hear:

  • what micro reporting is all about
  • how the concept of joy and compassion can revolutionize client relationships and business success
  • tips on picking the right clients and services to match your business model and achieve your dreamy work-life balance

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Meet Shea & Michelle

Shea Keats (CEO) and Michelle Röse (COO) are founders of Breakaway Bookkeeping + Advising, a company on a mission to bring joy to accounting for both the accountant and the client.

Connect with Shea & Michelle

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Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast. In today's episode, I'm interviewing again. Shea Keates and Michelle Rose the founders of Breakaway Advising. And I am having a different conversation with them this time about micro reporting or weekly reporting for clients that you're advising. And if you've been wondering how to add another level of a higher touch to some of your clients, Or you've been curious about getting into the advising space. This is going to be a great episode. So keep listening. And one more thing before we get into today's episode. You will hear them talk about breakaway advising, which is a franchise model. And they do run a cohorts throughout the year of bringing on new franchisees and their next cohort is going to begin mid-March. So if you are interested in joining breakaway advising after you listened to this podcast you can go to the link in the show notes. To apply and learn all about their program. All right. Let's get into today's episode. Welcome back to the ambitious bookkeeper podcast and welcome back Shea and Michelle. I'm super excited to have you. Um, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if you're listening in, , I've had these two wonderful ladies on the podcast before back in episode 144. So you can scroll back and kind of get to know them there. But today we're going to be diving into a different conversation. So I'm super excited about that. But first , Let's do a little like a brief background on who you guys are and how you help people in our industry. Awesome. Well, I'm Shea. I'm CEO of Breakway Advising and Breakway is a really unique approach to owning your own, bookkeeping, , but really advisory business, um, supporting small businesses. We are a franchise business model, which means that each of our advisors, which are our franchisees, own their own business. They have a ton of autonomy. They choose when they work, where they work, how they work, The type of clients that they take on. And then we provide all of their back office services., and what makes us really unique from other franchised accounting businesses out there is we have a no barriers to entry and a no barriers to exit model, which means you pay a 0 franchise fee to join. And then if you are not getting what you want out of it, you are free to leave whenever you'd like and to solicit your clients to go with you. If we're not the right fit. Yes. I mean, this was such a great option for me when I wanted to start my own CFO practice, because there's so many things when you want to start your own business, like website, general liability, legal letters for proposals, et cetera. It just felt like the thing that I love to do, which is help people. Businesses grow seemed further and further away. And so what's great about breakaway is that it's an assisted entrepreneurship model. And I really like it for the element, not only of the back office, but also the community that it provides for me. And also, the tech element, whether that be, assistance with onshore and offshore support, but also navigating the app mosphere. There's so many like new apps and tech, so it's nice to have other people vetting these, options with the influx of AI. Yeah, absolutely. I would have loved to have that when I started and Oh, we would have we wouldn't be here today. So, um, but yeah, so thank you for, for being that resource for people. I think it's amazing. So yeah, so remind me again, Michelle, what your position is in the company. Yeah, so I am the COO CFO, which is often the hat that kind of gets traded back and forth when you're sitting in those advanced controller and CFO roles is like, okay, so how are we going to implement these concepts? And so, Shay is really an innovator, comes up with really great concepts, and then I try and create metrics around those concepts and the rollout plan. Awesome. Great partnership. It's ideal. Um, so with that, so all of the, like what we were going to talk about today, like rolling out advisory services to clients and stuff. Is that a combination of both of you guys having these ideas and executing them together? Was it stuff that you tested out in your firm first, Michelle, like give us kind of a background on that? How this whole thing started. So Shea is a brilliant, she created our, mission statement and our leadership principles, which we run every major decision through our leadership principles. And we thought who better to man this ship than the person who created leadership principles. So when Shea. CEO, it made so much sense. And so really, if you want to talk about how you took this concept through the leadership principles to who we are today, it's a great story. Yeah. I mean, I think what's really interesting is that, you know, our number one core value and number one on our leadership principles is, is bring joy. And it's so funny because when we started breakaway, Going on five and a half years ago now, this whole talk about joy at work was not right? And this was, our founder, Kristen Keats. This is her kind of life motto of bringing joy to accounting. But, you know, as Breakway grew and we dove really deeper into these concepts, we said, okay, it's not just about how do we bring joy right to our, accounting professionals who are joining us, but also to our clients. And how do we make sure that when they end a week and they are going into their weekend, that they can find joy and contentment and ease and whatever is, coming next. And as we progressed toward, right, this, focus, the first thing that we did, and I don't want anyone to take us this the wrong way because we love bookkeepers and bookkeeping is still. So much the core of what we do, but you know, we dropped bookkeeping from the name of our business. So we started Breakaway Bookkeeping Advising and we switched to Breakaway Advising. Now, why is that important? Why am I even mentioning that when I'm also saying like, Hey, we love bookkeeping and we do a lot of bookkeeping and we offer it. But the reason is that that is important is your average small business. Sorry guys, doesn't really know the difference between bookkeeping, accounting, controller, CFO. They're going to use these labels and they're going to throw these labels around, but not really know what it is that they actually need or who can provide that. So as we dug deeper into how can we bring joy to accountants and how can we bring joy to small business? We started realizing it was really in providing these hybrid advisory services that touch on what we touch on everything but the taxes. So. You know, we've got some of our, uh, advisors who traditionally would be like, I'm a bookkeeper offering a couple CFO services. And we have CFOs who either do bookkeeping themselves just because they love it or because they have an amazing team that they coach and educate, through all of that. So as we realized that our packages that we were putting together for our clients in an effort to bring clarity, bring joy, um, figure out how everybody across the board can have really the best life possible, and have the most security and stability. We really started leaning into, A, these hybrid packages that were a potpourri of everything, but also into what we call weekly reporting, but it's called micro reporting. It's called lots of different things. And I will let Michelle, I mean, did I hit And everything in the story. I feel like there's so many stories we can tell. It's true. It's true. Like which, which story do you want about breakaway? But I think the really great thing about breakaway is that it's kind of like a pebble in the lake, you know, one person influences many. So it's really exciting. And what Shay is really highlighting on right now is the success we see in serving our clients. So we could talk for a while about the successes we see in providing, breakaway to the franchise owners or the advisors. But. Leapfrog on what you're talking about. End of week report. What's great is that what we were seeing when we were able to come alongside businesses and provide these weekly reporting, which I can unpack, is that they grew substantially, not just in revenue, but they were, very mindful of cogs and expenses. And so with the combination of increasing revenues and monitoring the related cogs and expenses, businesses were growing. On average 50 percent per year. Yeah. And so then that's great because we're seeing jobs. We're seeing people fall back in love with the business that they started. We're seeing success and we're seeing higher advisory prices, which is really, mutually beneficial for everybody. So. To kind of unpack like what this weekly report looks like for our clients is we tried to gamify it a little bit. So, you know, many business owners are now, millennials and we were raised on like Nintendo and, you know, all these things. And so we have a gamified mentality. And so I thought, how can I turn kind of financials? Into a game, right? And so what we did is it's kind of a combination of accrual accounting, forecasting, and cash based, financials. So how it starts is. What are our cash balances, right? And so we need to know what our cash balances are, what we have access to now. What are our upcoming expenses in the next week? Okay, some of those we have control over and some of them we don't. Against Fable we have control over. So that's stuff that we can play with. But at the end of the next week, so we're one week ahead. What does our cash look like with all the things we have to pay and, or we choose to pay? And if after those things are paid and our cash balance is higher than the week before, we win. Because that means that our cash, week over week, is higher. And that's great. And that's what we want to see. So that's that kind of cash piece, that cash based reporting. And then what we do is we go into accounts receivable, because let's say our cash looks really, really great. Well, that could mean that our accounts receivable numbers look really bad. Right? And so it's really important to juxtapose, not just how our cash position looks, but how does our accounts receivable look like. Also, so did week over week, did our AR go up or did it go down? And if it went down, that's not necessarily bad, right? It's just, how does this look compared to our cash balance? And do we have, futures coming in? So that's, the second thing. So the first one was cash week over week. The second was AR week over week. And the third is broken up into two parts. And it is imperative that you come alongside a business with either a budget, or some sort of expectation, for revenue and expenses. Now, you know, this is where we kind of get into the conversation of like, what is a CFO? What is a controller? What is a bookkeeper? And to a small business, like we need to just ditch the pride. I think that if you're putting plans together, like a forecast or a budget, and you're that owner's financial emergency contact, it's probably okay that you call yourself a CFO. Nobody cares. You know, it's like, good for you. That's fine. So once we build a budget or a forecast for a company, this third piece is in two parts. The first is how are we doing as far as revenue compared to the month complete? So if we're 50 percent of the month complete? Are we 50 percent of the way to our revenue target? So they're getting this week after week. So we're 20 percent of the way. Are we 20 percent of the way, which allows incredible clarity real time. So let's say we're 50 percent of the way through the month, but we're only 10 percent of the way through the revenue. We need to like maybe put some pressure on our project managers. Like we need to allocate maybe some help to different areas of the business to get invoicing out or, or whatever. But what it allows us to do is make data driven decisions to improve, like what's going on inside the company. Similar but different is the expenses. So we've got the revenue percentage of month complete versus, where our budget should be. Then we have expenses. What is the percentage of the month complete and how are we doing on expenses? Now expenses are very easy to manipulate in a lot of ways because it could just be doing a travel, freeze, you know, like we're not spending, we're not going to pre buy plane tickets. For three months out, all of these like minor things can be adjusted so that we can make sure that we protect our cashflow. Right. hmm. Mm That's it. It's as simple as that. Now we could make it more complicated. We could actually simplify it, but you know, I've had a lot of people come with really great ideas. But these are the things, these three things, which is how do our cash do week over week? How's our AR doing week over week? And how are we percentage of the month compared to revenue and expenses? Those three things, monitoring those on a weekly basis has changed. Everything. Why? Because there's clarity from top to bottom. We have defined expectations and people want to win. And it doesn't matter if you're the owner or, you know, you're someone that works part time for the company. Like you have this understanding, everybody is now rowing together. And so because of these goals and these things that we've set, We're seeing on average about 50 percent growth in businesses, and it's very exciting because people are falling back in love with their businesses and taking chances that are in line with their idea of success. I love that. And, oh, sorry. It's raining. Two questions. Go for it. I think what this really highlights for the accounting professional, right, is it's not about are you the best accountant in the world and can you create the most perfect financials because the robots do that, a lot of that for us now. So. It's learning really how to interpret that data and how to not just interpret it, but how to talk about it in a way that is meaningful to your average small business owner. And there's a lot of different amazing softwares and apps out there that are going to do that. Help you with this. We at Brickway, we've been using Liveflow. We're super happy with it. our team has built out a really, really beautiful, um, spreadsheet, using their, their programming. but again, we think about, okay, so whether this is, you know, the most highfalutin CFO, Or, you know, the bookkeeper and, you know, working on their first or second client, they can still use these tools. And where the level of nuance is going to come in is how good are they at the emotional intelligence part of it, of taking all of those amazing numbers and the beautiful spreadsheet with the fun little emojis that are going to show you if AR is a thumbs up or thumbs down this week. And talking about that in the way that the client is going to resonate with that specific client. And that's where the real talent in being a, you know, hashtag or hashtag, but quote, uh, CFO is good. or not is how skillful are you at that? And I think that that's something that's really new, for people in our industry who didn't do tend to be a little more introverted, figuring out both the, The technical piece of it, and then also the emotional, and education, almost piece as well. I would say that is probably the bigger issue with a lot of like students that I coach around, advisory and all that. It's like, they know what they're doing technically. It's, bridging the gap between, okay, I know what I'm doing in the technical aspect and then being able to communicate it to the client or communicate the right things to the client. Because. There's lots of KPIs that we could track. I got, I got sucked into this in corporate. I like built this huge spreadsheet of like all the ratios and everything. And, and then I was like, no one's fricking looking at this. Like, it's just taking me extra time to update it every month. So like, don't do that. Like don't get sucked into all the technicalities of like performing the work, just figure out what's meaningful for the client and build around that. But yeah, so is that something that you guys, As part of like your breakaway advising groups or franchises or whatever you call it, it's that coaching that you guys offer of like how to help explain these things and bring it to your clients. That's awesome. Yes. Yes. Yeah. So, uh, the benefit of being a part of Breakaway as well, we kind of touched on it, which is community. What's great about our community. One, you know, when we run into questions and we just want some opinions on things we run into, whether it's how should we amortize this certain expense, et cetera, um, But also we have ongoing training where we get together as advisors have their own cohort and then CFOs have their cohort and we unpack what's going on in our respective service offerings and collaborate on Things like mergers and acquisitions or, potential purchases talking about how much, should we have in reserves? How are you deciding, you know, how much money to put in marketing? I mean, these big things, and then these kind of like line item things, right? It's a safe space where people are really happy that people have a lot of, you know, Experience serving the client. And so they trust each other, on the information passed back and forth. Now, obviously we have to run it through the filter of the client's risk tolerance, but I think coming with options is so freeing to, our potential clients and we create for our advisors. We have, an education, workshop that we hold a couple of times a year called the client success wheel. And this is a really specific, I guess you call it rubric that we talk them through for figuring out how do you learn these things about your clients, whether it's in the discovery process of, proposing work to a new client or whether it's, okay, I've been with a client for a long time. And we've We're starting to get some dissonance. How do we bring everything back into resonance? It's a really, clear, skeleton for our, advisors to follow to get the answers to those questions so that they can then. Do all of that work and be able to interpret the data that we're showing them how to do technically and that we're talking about. And again, to jump off what Michelle said about community. So there's the coaching, but there's also so much that goes on between the advisors and when they say, Hey, I ran my end of week report and this is not looking good for my client. I'm really nervous to tell them this. Yeah. They can come to Michelle or I, and we can like, Cheer them on, but more likely they're going to bring that to their cohort and the cohort's going to say, Oh yeah, this is how I would have done this. Or this is how this has worked for me in the past. Or no, that's going to go terribly, but you know that you can come back and have a, you know, virtual beer with us when it's over and, it'll be okay. And like, we've got your back. And I think that that is. really important. And when you are a solopreneur accountant and you don't have any kind of community like that, or you have a community out there in the larger world that, again, and not to say that there's an inherent competition in some of these other organizations, but we have built something where Everybody's got your back and it's a really a completely non competitive environment. So therefore people are really comfortable coming and saying like, Oh, I really messed this up. Or like, I'm really anxious about this. Or they are able to set their egos aside and therefore we can, or they can really support each other quite yeah, Things are easy when things are going well. Like you never have problems with your clients when they're like, High on revenue and profits, you know, all those things it's when things get hard, but I think that's where trust is built. And so what's great about having a community is we can come together and say, man, this report is going to be hard to present. How can you support me in like delivering this? And we can help them. Put something together that's compassionately clear, because I think that's often what accountants kind of miss is like, this is everything to the business owner. So how can we come show up, be compassionate and clear. And here's the like cherry on top is what can they do about it? Like, don't just like. Dump a pile of mulch on their desk and be like, see ya. It's like, okay, this is what's going on. I, want to share this with you and here's some things that I've thought about that can help us in this situation. Now, what they decide to do, where they decide to take it is completely up to them. Makes them feel supported and like they're not in this alone. And so that's why I love the concept of being their, financial emergency contact or being their emotional support accountant, or, you know, really, advocating for them and coming alongside them both compassionately and clearly. yeah. I had a recent experience like that with one of my clients. In the last couple years, I've had two clients had to close their doors because they weren't heeding my advice. And so I was like, I'm not going to let this happen again. This one, this other of my client has been with me since the beginning. And Midway through the year, I mean, I'm not the one that reviews everything anymore. I have my account manager, but I see like the little Asana updates when he's doing the financial summaries. And so I get those emails and I'll just skim through them just to see like, where is everyone's profit at? And, I caught that like mid year, I was like, Oh, she is still not doing great. So I like. Was like, okay, I'm going to record a loom video. I'm going to like invite her onto a call, but I'm also going to record the video and show her like, this is what I'm seeing. And like, we've got you just, you just have to let me know. But these are my recommendations. Like, here's some ideas. And she actually didn't watch the loom video until. She reached out to me again at the end of the year and was like, I know I've been avoiding this. I saw that email come through and I avoided watching the loom video because I was afraid of the information that it was going to show. And I was like, it's okay. I get it. I'm here to help. But, but yeah, we came up with a plan to like turn things around and everything's going to be fine. Like one of the big things was that. Like her biggest expense is that she opened, a storefront and then she expanded that to have like an education space and the person that she was supposed to have, like do those education events that fell through. And so it's like, this is just wasted space. So she's like, I'm going to try to get out of that lease. So. Like, and that's going to be what saves our business. Like sometimes you just have to, like, it's business. Like you can go to the landlord and be like, this is what's happening. Like I, if you want me to continue paying this other lease for the next three years, I need to get out of this one. Otherwise you're not going to have any of it. So I, that's interesting. So I have kind of also seen the other side too. And I'd be curious to see if you've seen this. So, we keep an eye on those profits and the companies that might be having cash flow issues and really show support similarly, but different. I saw a company grow. They grew seven times their size prior year, same time. And I had a private one on one call with the owner. And I said, you know, I'd love to start this call by telling you congratulations, but actually I'm going to pause and say, How are you doing outside of work? And they just started crying. And it was one of those things where like, you can see people are about to bite the dust on both sides. And so showing support and compassion for both sides of that, um, is really important. And what's interesting is I've helped people through a purposeful retraction, which allows them to line back up with their idea of success and wellness. And so it's really interesting as, I think more accountants are getting in touch with mindfulness and what these business owners ideal idea of success is. And then saying like, profit isn't everything, you know, it's really important that you love what you do. And this was, you know, that eight year old, you would be proud of you today. And so helping, our business owners navigate joy. It really, that's what it comes back to and how we can both help them at the top of the mountain and help them. You know, when they're in the canyon as well. Yeah. I also think what All of this and what we're practically solving with the micro reporting is the ability again to be proactive, not reactive. And if you want to be the type of professional or run the type of business where you can feel like you are proactive and not reactive, Breakaway is a good place. To do that either as an accountant or as a client, because again, when you were telling your story and there was like all of this fear, so she doesn't watch the video for six months. Well that doesn't help anybody. And I think a lot of times what we're able to do by just saying like, whether you like it or not, you're going to look at it every week. It allows, us to kind of turn the light on. So like all the scary monsters in the closet just end up being Dust bunnies. And again, as, as Michelle was, it was illustrating, hopefully that creates less stress on both sides as we go. absolutely. Yeah. So one of the other questions I had around that weekly or micro reporting, because you mentioned accounts payable and accounts receivable, like who are the right fit clients for this type of service you found?. I think that it's kind of hard to put a revenue number. But if I was going to say like, I would aim for if you have about a million in revenue and, a fair amount of profit, let's say 10 percent or greater, I think that you're ripe for support. Now what that support looks like could vary. drastically because, you know, product based businesses have way different revenue numbers than service based businesses, for example. But I think that if you want, as a business owner, if you want support in advisory or CFO or want to have Compassionately clear conversations without looping in an employee or potentially someone who owns some part of your business. We're going to have much more vulnerable, clearer conversations because I don't have as much at risk. Like I am just coming with the perspective of like, I'm a business owner. You're a business owner. Here's what I would want to know if I was you. Right. so we being breakaway advisors have replaced entire financial departments. for large, let's say 25 million and above businesses, because they realize the businesses are realizing that like a lot of this work can be contracted out. And so we're absorbing entire financial departments. Or we're taking on maybe that like part time bookkeeper role and then growing it into advisory that looks like, okay, what does this mean for me ending Friday and coming into Monday? What do I need to know, you know, as a business owner? So it's those touch points. And even if it's a text message provides that kind of clarity, the ability to like think abundantly instead of from a kind of scared scarcity mindset. And so, when. Should you have someone come in as soon as you have like bookkeeping or you want the data to show you something because we're really like helping you with financial operations. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm just like, I try to like think about just like my client base and I'm like, who would be a right fit for that? Cause like, Some of them, not so much because they don't have as much volume. They have a really good pulse on like their expenses are very predictable and everything's like cash basis. Like no one has AR, no one has AP. They're just, it's mostly the business owner that has control of when things get spent. And same with like money being brought in. So some clients just aren't, wouldn't be a great fit for that because so much is just dependent on, That solopreneur or whatever, but it seems like, for anyone listening, like the clients that would be a good fit for this are the ones that have a lot more at stake. they've got payroll and maybe inventory and like there's lots of cash flow movements and maybe like AR and AP too. When checking your bank balance daily ceases to help you run your business, it's probably time for you to call us. Yeah. yeah. Well, I would also say, you know, I think for this particular, iteration of micro reporting or weekly reporting spot on, those are the type of clients that we're looking for. But, you know, for some of your listeners, Serena, who are dealing with smaller clients, They can look at what their client is doing and figure out what is one thing that that client might need to know every week or every other week that would really help them. So I think again, just asking yourself as a professional, what is, you know, one thing that I can let my client know that's maybe not running into the scope of work or, you know, isn't something that we talk about all the time, but what is one thing that I could let them know that's going to let them have peace of mind and just starting. I think, again, to create a habit of building a practice where you are working proactively with your clients, not reactively. and again, we talk about these bigger packages and what that looks like and advisory and the tech that we use. And that's amazing. And we want to do a lot more of that. So please come to breakaway if you're excited about that. But again, if you're like, okay, well, most of my clients are solopreneurs. They don't really need this. Well, there's always something that you can do. And one thing that we talk a lot about when we coach our advisors and franchisees in. Bringing a hostess gift, right? Whenever you meet your, clients or you're thinking about them, and something that can be really effective is saying like, Hey, I noticed that every Friday your, or you tend to. Recurringly be worried about this thing. So I'm just gonna send you an email with like a thumbs up or thumbs down every Friday, and you're gonna know what that means, you know, and it'll be something fun that you can do with them. And again, as businesses grow, allow you to grow into bigger types of regular reporting. Yeah, so I can see how this would be like if anyone's listening and they're like, I like only doing monthly bookkeeping and not have to, not have to log in every week to look at my client's bank account or whatever. So that's also something to consider too, is like if it's a family, For your own business model. I know personally I don't touch any of my clients on a weekly basis. I have people on my team that do on a couple clients because of their volume. So that's something to consider too, is like, you don't have to do this with all your clients. You could do it with like the one or two clients that you do touch weekly and see how it goes. And, um, we get in that mindset of like, Oh, if I do it for one, I'm going to have to do it for everybody. do think that Breakaway draws a more gregarious, crowd. And when being that we are people, people, um, our book is full with six clients and so, and smaller sometimes, and sometimes a little bigger, but, you know, I think our busiest advisor has 12 clients. And even at that, it's manageable. And what's great is like, we know their pet's names. We know, you know, what's going on in their lives because it's not like so many. And it feels good because the best part of our jobs are getting on and having these interactions. And so, If you're like a, like a social person, this feels good, but I agree with you when you're just like, I would rather maintain the monthlies and kind of hear from them off and on. That's absolutely fine. I think it would just break away. We happen to bring a more socially dynamic. For sure. Yeah. And I think also, you know, I, I love what you said to me about, like, there's a lot of professionals who feel like, okay, I have to have kind of this, if I do it for one, I'm going to do it for all, because I think there is, you know, a popular, Kind of advice that I'm not saying is wrong advice, but that you really want to systemize and everybody is the same and everybody's getting the same treatment and the same things. But one thing that we really work with our advisors on, again, because we're attracting a certain kind of person, a certain kind of accountant, is I say, what is the cocktail or what is the recipe for the type of life and business that you want to have? And it might be a I want to have 20 bookkeeping clients that each have 200 transactions a month that I'm going to, or whatever, you know, or it might be, okay, I want one client that I'm only meeting with quarterly because we're kind of doing coaching. And then I want three end of week clients. And then I want two monthly clients that are, I'm going to service in this way because that's going to keep me excited and interested. And then on top of that, we do so much coaching and work with our. Franchisees to figure out who is your ideal client? What is your ideal scope of work? And then what is the cocktail magic that brings all of that together? And I think that's really something, that a lot of solopreneurs struggle with, right? Is just figuring out what type of client do I want to work with? And what do I want my recipe for my ideal client? Cocktail of types of clients to look like. And we help people figure that out a lot, I think a lot more quickly. So when you join Breakaway, when you're offered a franchise and when you accept. Which we, are very particular about, but if you are offered a franchise and you join, you start with a cohort of people who are all joining Breakaway at the exact same time. The first exercise that you do as a new franchise owner is, what we call the economic model. And during the economic model, what's really great about it is it removes emotion. All that we're asking for is like, what are your financial goals? And what is the cocktail, like Shea was just saying, of price points that you're going to be offering services at. We don't need to know what these services are, but we just need to know about what you're going to charge for those. And so if they say, like, I want to make 200, 000. We say, okay, what is the list of services you're going to offer? And what is about the percentages of those services you're going to be broken up into, right? So it makes it easy. How many clients you kind of need at each price point to hit your revenue goals. So now without emotion, you've determined like, okay, here's what I need at these price points to achieve my goals. Now we get to say, okay, like, tell me about your client avatar. And so let's say you have, half a million dollar revenue goal, which a lot of our advisors do, but then in your client avatar, you say, I want to work with people that own boutique yoga studios. That is a disconnect. Like that's not going to work because your ideal client cannot afford your price points. Right. And so what's great is when we start with the economic model, it removes the emotional element of it. And so we get to see like, what's your economic goals. And then you build out your avatar. And so then you determine, do those sync or do I need to adjust one or the other? So it's really a great opportunity to make sure that our expectations align with reality. Oh yeah. I walk my students through basically the same exercise. It's like, all right, well, if you want to make all that money and you're helping clients working a hundred dollars a month or whatever, it's probably, you're going to be working a lot. So yeah. And then it also has to align with like, what are your goals of time spent in the business? Because it's like, Well, if it's not going to be you, it needs to be someone else. So now we're talking about your margins and it's a whole thing, And I think when we're looking at, you know, I think, so, you know, we're all in the same business of like, how can we make this industry and this profession better for people? And at Wrigley, we talk a lot about, we value ease, but that doesn't mean that things are easy. And, There actually is no easy button and I think a lot of times we give, you know, you give your students or we give our franchisees a real buffet of options and they choose not to do them sometimes because they're hard. You know, and, again, as Michelle said, doing something like the economic model takes the emotion out of that so that, okay, well, you got to do something. There has to be, the investment comes in somewhere. If it's not in your money, in, hiring a team member or learning a new skill or whatever, or paying for a course or whatever, it's going to be in your time to do the work yourself and to, find the clients and whatever it might be. So, I think that's a reality that when we're all out here peddling all the amazing things that can happen in this space. Industry and the amazing types of businesses you can build for yourself and that are imminently accessible. Like they're very, very accessible. And that doesn't mean that there's a fairy godmother. That's not going to happen and catapult you to year three. You know. absolutely. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of these wonderful nuggets. There is a lot in this episode. I hope anyone listening goes back and re listens and takes notes because even I was like, notes. I'm constantly learning too. And considering like, do I want to roll this out for like my top client? Maybe. We do their bookkeeping weekly anyways. So, so yeah, thank you so much for coming on again and sharing where's the best place for people to connect with both of you or either of you and learn more about breakaway advising. Well, you can always visit breakawayba.com/becomeanadvisor. Or just go to the homepage and click around until you find the becoming an advisor page. And then you can find me under my name on LinkedIn and Michelle as well. Yes. And, um, Rose pronounced like the flower, but I just have the umlaut over the O. And I love getting messages on LinkedIn. And as long as you're not selling me something, I'll probably reply to you. Same. I know we've told you this offline Serena, but I'll say it, to your whole community. We have just, every single person we've connected with from the Ambitious Bookkeeper community has just been absolutely incredible. Such a special. Oh, thank you. As we're seeing some synergy and seeing some of some of your amazing humans, come and join us at Breakaway. It's been, it's been really amazing. So we're, we're really excited. Thank you. Awesome. I will link all of your guys's links in the show notes for anyone listening in case you're driving, you can tap back in later. Thank you again so much for joining me on the podcast. Always welcome back. So, you know, we'll be back. All right.

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