Practice Success Podcast

Dan Hood: Blockchain Fizzled, AI Won’t

• Canopy • Season 3 • Episode 23

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Editor in chief of Accounting Today, Dan Hood, joins host KC Brothers to look back at two decades of “whispers” in the profession that either reshaped accounting or quietly disappeared. From the long, painful march to the cloud to the hype cycle around blockchain, Dan unpacks what actually sticks, what fizzles out, and what that pattern tells us about the next 5 to 10 years for firms of every size.

Together, Dan and KC dig into the forces quietly reshaping the profession right now, including CAS, private equity, ESG, AI, and the massive wave of ownership transitions on the horizon. If you’re an accountant wondering, “What should I actually be paying attention to?” this conversation will help you sort the signal from the noise and spot real opportunity for your firm and your career.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

  • Why it took accountants nearly a decade to adopt the cloud, and what that pattern reveals about every “new” idea
  • How blockchain went from “this will destroy audit” to quietly being baked into tools in the background
  • Where AI is different from past tech waves, and why future managers will be leading both people and AI agents
  • Why CAS is still in the whisper stage and what it will take for it to become mainstream
  • How private equity, ESG reporting, and a generational handoff of firm ownership could completely change firm structures
  • The rise of lifestyle focused and solo firms, and why the barrier to starting your own modern practice has never been lower

Perfect for firm owners, partners, and ambitious staff who want a realistic, insider look at where the profession is actually headed next.

KC Brothers:

Welcome to another episode of Canopy Practice Success. I'm here with the one and only Dan Hood. Hello, Dan.

Dan Hood:

Hey, what's going on?

KC Brothers:

Not much. I'm excited for today. You have been with Accounting Today for over 20 years as editor or and editor-in-chief since 2011.

Dan Hood:

Right. Right.

KC Brothers:

Your knowledge of the industry, your access to the goings-on and the trends, the failures, everything is astronomical, I am sure.

Dan Hood:

We've seen a lot. We've definitely seen a lot. A lot's a lot of change over the years.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. I mean, even in that 20-year span, let's see, that takes us back to early 2000s. And that predates social media. So that's a whole thing of like accountants looking to each other and building communities there, even using it for marketing. Um, I mean, Facebook, speaking of early 2000s, looked very different in the early 2000s when it launched than it does now. And that same thing applies to just UI in general and tech in general and the advancements we've made in tech. So I'd love to start by maybe hearing a few stories of things you've seen through the years that like started as whispers, and you're like, hmm, what's going on here? And then it built to a larger, c larger conversation. And then I'd love to hear maybe one of each. One where you're like, okay, that fell off the map after the whispers died out, or or that got bigger and crossed the chasm and is now in the accounting canon.

Dan Hood:

Right. Right. Yeah. No, I mean what's funny is there are a lot. We have a sort of uh a rule of thumb here that that anything that's gonna change in accounting takes about five to ten years, and it goes through this period of everyone in accounting. Says, nope, don't need that, not gonna not gonna adopt that, not gonna that's not gonna change our firms. Whether it's technology or, you know, how you run a firm or you know, uh employee policies, anything like that, it takes anywhere from five to ten years, and it goes from nope, never gonna do that. Doesn't work in accounting, don't need it, don't want to bother with it. Some people are doing it, you know, whatever, but we'll never do it at our firm. I guess we have to look at this to all right, we'll adopt it and then this is great. We should have done this five years ago. And you can follow that, you can follow that for everything to varying degrees, and I'll give you as an example of one that that succeeded, uh is the cloud. It took a decade for accountants to get on the cloud. If if uh anyone from Canopy who was around at the time could tell you, but anyone in a software vendor could tell you there was a decade where they were just, what is wrong? Why won't they get on the cloud? Why won't accountants move to the cloud? It's so great. And this is all, you know, roughly 2000 to 2010, 12, somewhere around there. No one would get on it. It wasn't secure, it wasn't safe, our client data won't be safe. We'd rather have it in our offices. It's much safer at our offices, which was totally not true, but accountants felt that way. Um but it took and it just took them forever to get to adjust to it. They would say, no, I'd rather go to my clients' offices at the end of every month than clean up their QuickBooks on-site kind of thing. And it really did took, it took about a decade uh before accountants would get comfortable with the notion of having data in the cloud and working in the cloud. And now, obviously, right, it's huge. You can your CAS is entirely based on having accounting in the cloud and having software in there and being able to access your clients' data in real time whenever you want from wherever you are. Uh but for for a good good 10 to 12 years, it was uh they were constantly fighting against it, just rejecting it entirely. And for good reasons. I mean, they were concerned about s safety and security and their clients' privacy and all that sort of good stuff, but it meant that it took probably eight years longer than it should have for the profession to really start thinking about moving to the cloud in a big way. And now, you know, it's it's a fantastic thing. They're there. It it enabled modern practices in a way that you we couldn't even imagine uh in in you know early 2000s.

KC Brothers:

And the early providers at that time of not addressing that concern, or was the it just the accountants are just way more risk averse than most buyers?

Dan Hood:

Aaron Powell I I think mostly they're way more risk averse. There was definitely an element of the vendors not quite realizing how serious the resistance was, but I think mostly it's it's that the resistance was that serious. Vendors were like, you know, you're online with your own bank. Why wouldn't you trust your bank account's online? All you're doing is you're shopping on Amazon. Why wouldn't you trust this? And they I think they they they may have underestimated the degree to which accountants were one, risk-averse, two, change averse, and three, fiercely protective of client information.

KC Brothers:

Well, to your point, like even with those two examples you gave of your banking and your Amazon, your credit card information, it's yours. It's way riskier when it's someone else's information.

Dan Hood:

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, no question. But there's also definitely there was a lot of change resistance, just sort of knee-jerk change resistance going on there as well. But and then like you said, I don't think the software vendors cleanly understood because they were so used to everybody else sort of rushing online, right? We all as consumers rushed online and they'd be like, why aren't the accountants get there? It would be so much easier for them.

KC Brothers:

It's funny, as you know, an employee of one of these vendors, we do still list like cloud as a value prop of ours, which in any other industry I wouldn't do. I'm like, this is this is table stakes. This is uh and and even it's funny, I find myself trying to be careful with the messaging I also promote with that of like the accessibility because I my personal um worldview and my values are that yeah, I I have apps on my phone that are work-related and I'll hop on sometimes, but I'm pretty boundaried with my work. Um, I like that flexibility that cloud and modern-day SaaS providers provide, but I never want our customers to feel like because we're in the cloud, that means you're accessible day and night and you therefore you work all the time or you're on vacation working. But it's an interesting crowd to talk to about the cloud because you get some who are, especially with CAS, where as a result, they're spearheading the remote work approach. Um, and it's not uncommon that I do hear people who are like, no, I like taking my work with me on vacation. Um it's interesting.

Dan Hood:

And I think it's a lot of accountants who are like to be able to be accessible, like to be able to, you know, when a client calls, I want to be able to answer, right? It's uh it comes down to it's it's a virtue, right? It's the desire to serve clients really, really well. And I it's weird because you would have thought that would have been the thing they would jump on, that they would go, Oh, yeah, this is great. But they were like, man, I want to be able to serve my clients all the time, but only when I really want to. So uh it was a it was a it was a long time come.

KC Brothers:

Okay, so what's an example of one that knows dived that didn't make it past the whispers?

Dan Hood:

I did my favorite of this is blockchain. And I don't know if anybody remembers blockchain. We were the entire profession was sure that it was particularly gonna destroy the audit, uh the audit profession. It was just gonna, you know, with with that kind of certainty about where information is and how it's been uh changed and altered over time and the all the elements of uh the audit chain that would go into it and the that sort of thing, they just assume, well, this is gonna destroy the audit. No one ever really really mapped out the stages by which it would destroy the audit, but I think there was a a real fear of it, not necessarily a well-grounded fear, but an assumption that, oh, this could really be a problem for us because it will, like I said, create these sort of unchangeable, unalterable records that sort of audit themselves. I think that was the assumption of it. Disappeared. Uh there was a period where accountants were talking about it all the time, going to conferences about it, trying to learn about it. Sort of the way they're approaching AI now, right? There's a little bit of a frenzy around AI, and AI is the big thing and it's going to change everything. I do think AI will probably pan out in a way that blockchain did, which isn't to say that blockchain disappeared, right? I think it just got built into a lot of products, and we were like, oh wait, we don't actually have to do anything with blockchain. It'll just get built into products to make them more secure and and more uh more auditable. In a way, they created some some great tools for for auditors and for accountants, but not a challenge for them. Adapt or adopt to. So uh there was a period where it was on everybody's mind and then you know, top of mind for everybody, and everybody's lips, everyone's going to conferences, having sessions about it. And I, you know, I can't tell you the last time I heard blockchain in a in a professional capacity, in an accounting capacity, I should say.

KC Brothers:

To your point, though, about uh you know, blockchain being built into things, I feel the same way about AI though. The accountants won't have to learn AI the way like our engineers here at Canopy do, because softwares like Canopy all have board members and shareholders who are pushing and pushing tech companies to not only build AI, but to adopt it. Like we're feeling that within our marketing team of like, okay, how are we? And we're getting trainings on how to use AI and what are different use cases or applications, and hey, how can I help you with this? And and different things that I hope that means that accountants don't have to learn it, that it come becomes more of a how do I evaluate tech um that has or or doesn't have it?

Dan Hood:

Right. I think I think you're absolutely right that it will get baked into a lot of the the software vendors will have to do do a lot of the work with AI, right? It'll get baked into your tool. I do think that there will be some need for accountants to um embrace AI in a way that they won't have to, they didn't have to embrace blockchain, right? Blockchain just got built in and you never heard about it again. I think you'll find that there are, particularly as agentic AI becomes more prevalent, that what you'll find is you won't have to build any of this stuff, but you will have to learn how to work with it. And it'll be a different kind of working with it than just regular software because it'll be you'll be tasking them to do things and you'll need to understand what they can and can't do and how to make sure that they're doing the thing you want them to do and how to check to make sure that they did it the right way. You know, it's it'll be more of a less of a technology thing and more of a management uh uh task in the sense of I saw somebody at a at an AI conference talk about the fact that this is probably the last couple of years, the next two years or so will be the last time where managers solely manage people, that they'll be end up being managing people and agents or some form of agents, whatever age form that takes as they get developed, so that you will be as much as you're telling you know junior staff or people underneath you how to do a thing or what to do and managing their work and delegating to them, you'll be doing the same thing to an ever-growing number of agents, and that will be a different kind of management. And we're terrible at human management already. So I'm fascinated all the ways we could be terrible at managing agents, but well, at least there won't be emotion.

KC Brothers:

It could just give it its feedback and then it'll delightfully say thank you. That leads me to where I did want to spend the bulk of the conversation is okay, what are our whisperings today? I'm gonna list off a few and then I want to hear if there are some that you're seeing that I'm not aware of, which will be fun. I think Cass is still talked about in a whisper. Like people, I actually just met with a gal yesterday who I met in Boston, just talk to her more and understand things better. And Cass was new to her. I was like, we haven't been talking about this for three years, you know, and that's the extent that I've been at Canopy. I'm sure it's been being talked about more than that. Um, so I still feel like to your point about like that five to 10 year adoption, like I think Cass is nearing the end of that, hopefully. And I say hopefully because I'm a fan of it. I think another whisper I'm hearing is PE mergers, acquisitions. We could say AI is a whisper too, though I agree with you, I it's not gonna go anywhere. And like the sooner you face the music of this is gonna be a part of tech and stuff. Any other ones you'd like to add to the list before we delve into what the future of accounting is gonna look like?

Dan Hood:

Anyways, I would throw in uh ESG. Okay. I think it's on it's on the back burner now because the current administration isn't, it's not a priority for it. But I but the rest of the world is focused on that kind of reporting, uh, you know, reporting on environmental impacts, on social impacts, on governance impacts. And it's it is a huge opportunity for accountants in the sense of right now, auditing of financial auditing and establishment of uh financial statements and auditing of them is a huge business for accounts, right? Um there's there's a similar opportunity to create and audit uh statements, like I said, for environmental impact, government impact, social governance impact, sorry, and social impact. I think, and we're seeing this already start up overseas in a big way, and it's gonna continue there. And it's uh you know, it's the kind of thing where it's an entire other business, just as important as a financial audit, that's a natural fit for accountants in the sense of offering another service line that they're a whole yeah, a whole other service line of the same size and perhaps bigger, right? Because the whole thing is you've got you're gonna have millions of companies that have to come up with reporting around their ESG impacts uh and who's better at coming up with new reporting systems than accountants, right? And then they're all gonna have to get audited or uh, you know, have some kind of adaptation.

KC Brothers:

Or do you say that's only applying to like the top 500 companies in the US?

Dan Hood:

It's good, it's gonna be it's gonna be all of them to a certain I mean there may be you know obviously small mom and pop shops may get away from it, but anybody who works with a Walmart or any of the major corporations, right? Because a lot of those corporations, the reporting requirements go down to everybody in their supply chain. So small companies that are supplying Walmart with anything, you know, local, you're you're the guy who comes over when the Walmart's air conditioning goes on the Fritz, you may have some reporting requirements to Walmart because Walmart has reporting requirements to well, eventually they'll have it to the SEC. It's all this is all in the back burner in the US now, just from the from the new administration. It's not one of their priorities, but it's not going to go away because the rest of the world is adopting it and eventually it will come in in the United States. So even uh the SEC's uh original proposal, which is what sort of shelved or backburnered, included reporting requirements for that was for public companies had to have some reporting requirements from all of their suppliers and partners and the people they work with, which would come down to very small companies. So essentially, in the end, I think the overwhelming majority of companies will have some form of reporting here.

KC Brothers:

Okay.

Dan Hood:

And it's I think it's gonna be huge, huge, huge amounts of money available. And it doesn't have to be accounts, it's just they're a good fit for it, right? They do this kind of thing already. So it's sort of their opportunity to lose.

KC Brothers:

I mean, who else would do it?

Dan Hood:

Well, that's exactly. But I mean, you know, there's all kinds of, you know, uh there's software companies that say, well, we can do it, or you know, we can we can provide the systems to set it up. There's all kinds of uh business consultants who would say they can do it.

KC Brothers:

Yeah, and with their client base to your point, where it's not just gonna affect um the top big dogs because it it cascades, it dominoes down to the people who are their vendors as well. And a local accounting firm that services small businesses with revenues of five million to ten million will still be impacted.

Dan Hood:

Aaron Powell Some of it's, you know, we're already seeing in California has some reporting around this. Um it's easy to see that becoming a you know a a state-based sort of mandate if the federal government isn't doing it. And at that point, those reporting requirements are definitely going to be for companies of all sizes. So even if it's it may be direct, right? It won't maybe a direct regulatory mandate as opposed to sort of the indirect trickle down from a more federal level sort of thing. But it looks like, because that everyone else in the world is doing it, we'll probably end up doing it, which may be a little behind everybody. And if accountants don't do it, somebody else will.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Okay. Anything else to add to the list before we jump into my three? No, I think your list is pretty good. First one I listed we'll just go to PE funding.

Dan Hood:

PE is interesting. This is one when you were talking for an example of a thing that faded away. I was gonna uh give an example. When I first joined in 1998, it was sort of just the beginning of um this period of where they had all these what they called consolidators or roll-ups going on, where companies, non-accounting companies, were going all over the country, buying up accounting firms, rolling them up into bigger firms. They made a bunch of bigger firms, East Star Block was doing it, American Express was doing it, um, a bunch of other people were in the space, rolling up all these. It was a frenzy, it's a crazy frenzy, sort of the way the PE frenzy of right now is. That's when the actual, that's when the alternative practice structure was created, the one that PE firms now use when they buy accounting firms to but we have this agreement with the others where we get to sit in their offices and we get to use their letterhead and we get to use their HR functions and we get to use their secretaries and we get to be part of their health plans and all that sort of stuff. And it's it's a little bit of a regulatory fig leaf, right? I mean, it's still the same set of partners, it's still all the same staff. They're just for legal purposes, they're a separate thing. Okay. That was invented. It's very common now because everyone says, oh, yeah, when you're all by P, you have to have that. But it was created or or first really rolled into the accounting profession in 1999 when they had all these consolidators going on. It was huge uproar. I mean, just hundreds of firms were acquired. It was gonna change the face of accounting, it was gonna completely up-end everything, everything was gonna be weird. All these firms, no one was gonna be a regular accounting firm anymore. And by about 2004, it was all gone. Hundred percent all gone, except for uh UHY and CBIS were the only sort of uh uh remainders of that. Uh and C Biz both had uh alternative practice structures. C C Biz eventually became a public company, um, but those are the only two firms where there was any impact. By RSM, I think was still still had some issues, not issues, still had some connections to HR Block, but eventually the partners of RSM bought back their firm for HR block and became just RSM, just a regular old accounting firm. And so by call it 2009, really, almost no trace of this incredible, incredible wave of change that had come over the profession in three or four or five years. Basically no remnants of it all, except like I said, the sort of weird structure that UHY had where they'd always say, hey, we're an alternative practice structure.

KC Brothers:

So then did partners buy back from the private equity at that time, or what happened?

Dan Hood:

Yeah, it wasn't private equity. It was mostly it was a weird combination. Sometimes it was H and R blocks, it was a public company, and sometimes it was an Amex. So uh it wasn't actually private equity, but they operated very similarly, like they were acquiring firms, and the firms would occasionally do the alternative practice structure because they had to for regulatory reasons. But yeah, they basically just went back to being accounting firms. Okay, and so when you when you look at what's going on now with the frenzy of private equity entering in, you sort of have to ask, is this all just gonna happen? Right? They come in, they spend a lot of money, and then they discover, no, we're not, we don't really know what's going on here. Um we're not making the money we want to make. I don't think that's gonna happen, but it is the sort of thing you have to sort of look back and go, well, there was this time 20 years ago where we did the same thing where everyone was getting bought and there was all these outside players coming in. It was gonna completely change the face of accounting, and then it didn't at all. I mean, at all.

KC Brothers:

In the real world, when it came to them servicing their clients, no one would have known that there was all of this businessing happening on the back end.

Dan Hood:

Yeah, exactly. You wouldn't you wouldn't know, and the whole but the whole goal was, right, for American Express and for HR Block was the goal was like we'll have all these accounting firms and we'll be able to offer all of these other services through accounting firms.

KC Brothers:

And it just never quite panned out in terms of like expanding their market share and and increasing their bottom line. What do you see the angle is with PE? What PE is a little Yeah.

Dan Hood:

It's a little simpler, right? It's just they just want to make money.

KC Brothers:

Right.

Dan Hood:

It's not they they just want to you know get some of the profits from accounting firms. They think it's uh um a couple of different things. One, I think you see PE firms saying this is a steady earner, right? The long-term model of PE had always been we buy 10 companies, nine of them are bad investments, but one of them hits a is a home run, right? And we pay for pay for the other nine with the home run. That was sort of a standard. I think what they started to say is, well, how about we also buy some companies that are maybe not home runs, but also pretty reliable earners, pretty even in the worst of times, pretty steady cash flow, even in the worst of times, right? There's sort of a good, if you had throw a couple of those in your portfolio, suddenly you're not one winner and a bunch of losers. You're one winner, a couple of steady guys, and then some losers, because that's gonna happen. But the other big element for them is uh, and I think this is probably a little bit bigger for a lot of PE firms, is the notion that it's accounting as a very fragmented market, right? It's a lot of relatively small firms, even when you talk talking about the top 100 firms, they are relatively small companies. So there's a lot of fragmentation, and I think they look at that and say there's a lot of opportunity to build these, to put a lot of firms together and create bigger organizations that have bigger economies of scale and can do all kind all the kinds of things that larger companies could do that a smaller company can't. Uh when they put all those together, that's something they can sell. Right. When when three to five to seven years comes along and they want to get their money back, they've got a much bigger organization to sell. They've rationalized it, they've put some resources into it, uh, we hope, um, and built a stronger, larger, more resilient sort of accounting practice that you can then sell to another PR private equity firm, sell to any other kind of investor you can think of because you've done a lot of the cleanup work, put a lot of extra resources into it, and made it instead of having to buy 10 separate accounting firms with smaller revenues. Yeah, one big accounting firm that has a big regular stream of revenue coming in.

KC Brothers:

Yeah. Well, and then you layer on top of that all of the talk right now around pricing strategies. There are so many recommended best practices or ways to do it, historical ways of doing it that are being successful to your point of like in the worst of times, they're still profitable, they're still having cash flow. And then you also add on the delta, the the chasm, the talent crisis, the difference between those entering the market and and there being enough accountants to go around and the need, the supply and demand there.

Dan Hood:

Right. And that's a that's a much easier problem. One, uh, there's a there's that's a great point because there's a ton of different ways that impacts everything. But one of the big ones is it's much easier if you're a larger organization to manage that capacity those capacity issues, right? It's easier to have a big HR group, right? You could hire you.

KC Brothers:

I'm not even thinking about it in terms of capacity. I'm thinking about it in terms of opportunity, in terms of being tapped out of the market. They're not. There's plenty to go around. There's no way there's going to be stagnation because it's not like accounting services are ever going to not be needed, even with AI. And AI is just going to get firms to be more efficient to address the capacity constraints, sure. But looking through this from PE's point of view, they see that, okay, well, demand is outpacing supply right now. So huge opportunity. And then there are already all of these conversations around how to more strategically price your services to have a greater revenue potential. That that that really is just prime for investment.

Dan Hood:

Think about it. If you're if you're pricing as badly as a lot of accounting firms are right now, you could just easily make a lot more money. Think what you could do if you rationalized your pricing and got better at it. It's with no extra work and no extra time, you just suddenly are seeing a lot bigger return on your on your client. So yeah, absolutely. It's one of those things with technology and accounting, right? There's there's we're we're coming off a long period of time that kind of started in the late 80s, but really got it.

KC Brothers:

Um okay. To wrap up, I can't believe it's 30 minutes already. PSG, here to stay or will it die? I think your opinion was clear. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan Hood:

Yeah, here to stay. Uh it and and sort of really a whisper now, but gonna be much bigger.

KC Brothers:

Yeah, your prediction is it's gonna grow. Prediction for AI, gonna grow, gonna die.

Dan Hood:

Oh, totally gonna grow.

KC Brothers:

I couldn't agree more. PE, gonna grow, gonna die.

Dan Hood:

I I have no idea. I am genuinely, I am torn on this because like I said, I can think back, it could be like the 1990s, early 2000s. I think it will probably, you know, I'd probably it probably what will happen is I don't think it'll be PE. I think it'll become just this whole thing where accounting firms can be, it can change the structure of accounting firms so that you can be anything you want. You don't have to be a traditional accounting firm. You could be a PE backed firm, but you could also have venture capital. You could also be backed by, you know, a pension fund that just wants the steady earnings uh and you just report to them in a quiet way like that. It's gonna open up, I think, this is my guess, is that it will it won't be PE, it'll just be this whole new range of models for accounting firms. So that when you look at accounting firm, you have to ask, so what kind of accounting firm are you? You know, how are you organized? Are you one person who works with a lot of partner firms? Are you uh, you know, you know part of a weird network of independent firms that share work with each other on a much more serious basis than the current networks do? You know, there's just gonna be so many options. Are you a partner, an accounting firm that also has a law firm into it, right? We're seeing some of that in Arizona and some big firms getting in there. Exactly. You're gonna be part of are you gonna be an accounting firm within a wealth manager? Uh we've got a couple of big accounting firms that did that. So yeah, I think we're that's probably what's gonna happen. It won't be PE. It'll be some different, greater range of options of structure. China we're okay.

KC Brothers:

Last fun one because you talked about cloud hosting. Is it gonna grow or is it gonna die?

Dan Hood:

If it dies, and I don't know that it will, if it dies, it will take a long time. Because I think there's a lot of particularly smaller firms that that rely on it don't necessarily have the the tech savvy to to to take care of everything on their own or to rely on a vendor or to figure that out. I think so. Hosting will be around. At least if it doesn't last forever, it will last for a for a while.

KC Brothers:

Okay. Interesting prediction. I don't get that one. I as someone who's um grown her career in tech, I'm like, why? It's all the cloud. But like you just laid out uh for the first little bit of our conversation that die-heartedness with the security elements. And maybe it's just gonna, yeah, to your point, stick with us a little longer.

Dan Hood:

Aaron Powell And there's a lot of firms, right? But there's a lot of baby boomers who own firms still who are like, do I really want to spend a lot of time making a major technology revolution in my firm? Or do I just want to hang on till I retire?

KC Brothers:

To that point, my prediction um is very vague, but the next two or three years, I am beyond excited for because of that, because I we're gonna see so much ownership transfer, I think, in the next two or three years. I don't think it'll take five to ten, where we will see the people who have been averse to change or who are like, no, I'm holding on because I have an exit. And I wonder too to what extent we'll see that exit mentality change because of PE, where like, hey, I can get um cash out now, but still be in my career. I don't have to wait for retirement. I think that as a result, as people retire, people who have maybe been anxious for the the stubborn boomers to leave will then have this resurgence of tech adoption.

Dan Hood:

Yeah. I think we're gonna find a lot more people who are who were anxious for the boomers to leave who will say the heck with it. I'm just gonna start my own.

KC Brothers:

Well, I think we're already seeing that. Would you say that's a whisper, or do you think that's gained traction is now a full on the thing.

Dan Hood:

I think that's gaining traction for for probably longer than we've thought. I mean, I think that there's been more. But I think PE is is uh turbocharging a little bit because there's people who are like, I just don't want to work for the PE firm, not necessarily for good reasons or bad reasons, just they don't they have a bad, a bad impression of it.

KC Brothers:

Yeah, I think that that is a whisper we probably should have called out earlier too, of just people starting their own, because I think they're whether they're coming from big four and like I don't want 80-hour work weeks, this this kind of lifestyle, or if they're even coming from a smaller boutique local firm with an older partner that might be stagnant in their ways. I just think the the barrier to entry for starting your own effective firm is so low right now, to the extent that I have even thought about it. I'm like, I know I could be the operations founder of an accounting firm and just hire my accounting talent.

Dan Hood:

Yeah, no, I would this, yeah, this is a weird, this is uh it is the barriers are incredibly low, right? You don't need you you don't need anything. You can do it. I wanted to jump on you talked about, you know, lifestyle. I think that's one thing that's that's a little bit of a whisper now, and I think it's gonna become huge, is the notion of people saying, well, I don't have to run an accounting firm that looks like every other accounting firm. I can run an accounting firm that just if I'm just making enough for me, that's great. Uh a little bit of a whisper now, but a lot more accountants saying, no, I don't need to do all the work that comes my way. I need to to make enough money to live comfortably and to to offer opportunities to the people who work for me. But I don't need to be, you know, if I'm if we're all happy, we don't need to do more work just to do more work. Um and I think that's gonna be it's gonna become much more people are gonna get a lot more permission to say that um and to think that way.

KC Brothers:

I love that.

Dan Hood:

Which is which is gonna be much healthier for everybody, right?

KC Brothers:

Uh yes, we need more healthy accountants. They do such great work, and I would love to see their happiness score go up and not be on the top list of depression and we're here to help solve that problem. Give them good tech that can automate things that they don't need to do and get your time back. Go home at five.

Dan Hood:

Yeah.

KC Brothers:

Excellent. Okay. Well, thank you, Dan.

Dan Hood:

Cheers. Thank you, Casey. It was great.