It was April, a few days after the 15th deadline. That specific kind of quiet that only shows up right after tax season when the whole building just finally excelles. Terry, my business partner and I were sitting in our conference room eating lunch, just the two of us, no agenda, and we were doing the thing that you do after a war. Looking back at how the season actually went and looking forward of what we should do it differently next year. And our firm is at a strange pace place right now. We've grown to a size where we're stuck in a kind of no man's land. To get to the next level, we have to make real investments. Either shrink our margins and pour it into our own time and brain power to build it ourselves, or we go hire someone expensive, like a CTO, to build it for us. Neither one is comfortable, both cost something. And City under that whole conversation was one word, AI. What is it going to do to our profession in the next three to five years? What does better next tax season even mean when the ground is moving this fast? That's the lunch I want to take you inside. Because somewhere over that takeout, Terry and I stumble into something that I haven't been able to stop thinking about since. And if you sell your time for a living, any kind of service business owner does that, it's coming for you too. If you heard the last episode, that Self-Worth Battle, you heard me talk about why you undercharge, why you the hourly rate is a trap that punishes you for being good. And this is the sequel. Because that trap I described is about to get a name, and that name is AI. Now, everybody out there that's selling your fear about this. I'm not. So let me plant the flag right here and I'll earn it before we're done. AI is not replacing accountants. I train the ones who are going to replace the ones who ignore it. Sit with that for a second. Because by the end of this, I want you standing on the first group, not the second. This one's for the accountants, the consultants, the agencies, and the bookkeepers. Anyone who still sells their time by the hour and think that they're safe. You're not far from the edge. Let me take you back to that lunch and I'll show you the escalator you're standing on, in which way it's about to move. Every year around this time, Tara and I have a version of the same conversation about price. It's boring, it's predictable, and it only ever goes one direction. Up. Our costs went up. Inflation ran three, five, seven percent some years. We gave our people raises because good people deserve to earn more. So the math is simple. If it costs us a little more to do the same work, then the invoice nudges up a little, you know, to match. That's not greed. That's survival. If your price doesn't rise with your costs, you slowly go broke while looking busy. For 20 years, that number has gone one way. Up. I never had to think about it. But this year it was different because of that other thing on the table. AI. I told Terry, we're testing it right now, you know, dump the W-2s, the 1099s, and reach them and drop them into the tax software. Well, to come prepare an afternoon, it does it in minutes, and we're about it to be a lot faster. And Terry nodded, yeah, fast is good, right? And then I heard myself finish that thought out loud. So if we're faster and if we still build by the hour, then we just gave ourselves a pay cut. None of us said anything for a second. The room just got quiet and just in a different way. Because here's the math nobody wants to do over lunch. If a job used to take 10 hours and now AI helps you do it in three, and you charge by the hour, you didn't get more efficient. You just got cheaper. Same work, same results, one-third of the invoice. The one number in our business that has gone up every single year in our careers is about to get pushed down by the very tool we're bringing to get ahead. I really want you to sit with this because this is the whole point. Picture two escalators. The first one is the one that we've always been on. Inflation rises, rising of costs. They push your prices up a few percent each year. Slow, steady, out upwards. You've never had to think about it. You just is. Now picture the second elevator and it's moving down. That's AI. Every year the tools get better. The work they used to take days takes an hour, the hour takes 10 minutes. And if the price is tied to time, then every year that AI gets better, your revenue for the same job goes down. So for a while, you're standing on both the escalator of inflation and the down escalator of AI, roughly canceling out. You feel fine, right? Your prices look stable, but that's the lie. And here's why. The down escalator is speeding up. Three years from now, AI inside a firm like mine isn't a little better, it's dramatically better. The up escalator still moves 3-5% a year. The down escalator that could be moving 20, 30, 50 percent as the world collapses to nothing. And when the down escalator moves faster than the up one, you don't stay in place, you go down. You'll be forced by the market, by the competitors using the same tools, by clients who now know the tool did the work to charge less every single year. Think about what that means. The one thing you thought was permanent, that your fees rise a little each year, reverses. If you sell hours, the machine doesn't take you the job, it takes your raises. Then it takes your invoice 1% of the time until the work you are proud of is worth almost nothing. That is the escalator, and most of the profession is standing on it, staring at their phones, wondering why the ground is moving. So Terry Sam and I sat with that, and the fear is real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't, but that is the profession that we gave our lives to. But then we got to the truth, and it's the same truth from that last episode, just wearing a different coat. AI kills the commodity, it does not kill the council. So let me say it a little plainer. AI is coming for the doing. The calculation, the data entry, the return, the deliverable, that stuff is going to be free, hell close to it. If you were selling the doing, you were in real trouble. But you were never actually getting paid for the doing. You just told yourself you were because you could measure the hours. I had an intern in my office a few weeks ago, sharp young man, and I told him the thing I tell every new accountant now. For decades, they say, if you're good at math, be an accountant. That's dead. The computer does the math, the software does the math. That was never the job. The job is the three piece puzzle, people, purpose. The puzzle, you know, sitting with the client's mask, 15 plates spinning, and figuring out what's actually going on. AI will help, but you own the judgment. Then the people, and this is the whole ball game. CPA stands for certified public accountant. The middle letter is the people. A client told me literally the day before the interview with the intern came in. The way you explained, that made way more sense. Chat GPT didn't tell me any of that, and that's the difference. I know that client's nuances, I know their story, I know how they talk, I know how they'll actually be afraid of. I can take something complex and hand it back to them in a way that lets them sleep at night. A machine that has the same inputs can spit out the same return, but it cannot do that. And last, it's the purpose. I've watched a client go from one restaurant to five. You know, Sam, my older partner, he has a client that has seventh generation of one family. You're not filling a form, you're the person of the patriarch trust with the family's money. And when you save them taxes, they pour it right back into the people in their town. AI is not the answer, AI is the multiplier. You throw it into the mess, and you just get a bigger mess and faster. Throw it under a relationship and it makes that relationship unstoppable. The future accountant, the future of anything is less the doer and more of the thinker and the relationship maker. The machine takes the math. What's left is the only thing that was ever really valuable. Here's the way I say it now. In this profession, AI has stood for two different things: artificial intelligence and accounting intelligence. The artificial one is coming for your job. The accounting one, the judgment, the puzzle, the people, the purpose is your job. It always was. One of them, the machine now owns. The other, no machine will ever touch. The whole game from here is deciding which one you're going to become. What do you actually do Monday morning? You don't hide from the down escalator, you step off of it. And that crossroads Terry and I were sitting at over lunch, the builder ourselves and eating the margins or hire an expensive person to build it for us. Every growing owner hits some version of that. But here's what we realize the answer was never which one. Whether you build it or buy it, if you drop AI into the same old business model, you just get to the cliff faster. The real move isn't the tool or the hire, it's the redesign. So here's what it looks like: three parts. The first part is redesign around the machine. Don't bolt onto it. The firms winning with AI aren't sprinkling on top of the old process. They are rebuilding the whole process with AI at the center. So use the 1080-10. The first 10% is you getting a very fine information. That's the human judgment. The middle 80%, the grind, the data, the first draft, you hand it to the AI and your team. And the last 10% is you again reviewing, owning it, delivering it. 100% of the job done by you is a myth. 70% done by others, so you can spend your time on what matters, that's a hundred percent of a win. Number two is sell the outcome, not the hour. That is the whole reason the last episode matters. If your price is tied to time, AI is your enemy. Every efficiency is a pay cut. If your price is tied to the outcome, the peace of mind, the tax is saved, the problem's gone, the AI is your best employee. It does the work in tenth of the time, and you still charge for the results because the result is what the client was buying all along. Stop selling hours. The machine just made that by the hour the worst business model on earth. And number three, get on the front porch. My partner Sam and I were talking about how a couple of generations ago, houses were built with a front porch and neighbors actually knew each other. Then we build garages that open to the back alley. Everybody got air conditioning, and we all disappear into our own houses. Nobody knows their neighbors anymore. And that's what most service businesses have done. Hidden in the back, just shoving the work under the door in an AI world. That's a death sentence. Because the back off work is exactly what the machine does for free. Your job now is to get on the porch, be the human, deepen the relationship AI came fake. Because a relationship is the last thing on earth that doesn't have an escalator under it. So here's your one job this week. Not 10, 1. Look at your top services and ask Am I charging for the time or for the outcome? If it is time, you are on that down escalator, and every improvement you make from here on out makes you poor. Pick one offer and reprice it around the result. That's your first step. And I want to leave you with some to reframe that got me and my partners out of that fear that night. For years, I thought the tax return was the work. I built a business shoving returns out the door. And a part of me was scared that if a machine could do the return, then what was I even there for? But the returns were never the point. They were the warehouse. And AI is about to empty that warehouse for free. Which means for the first time, I get to do the thing I was actually valuable with the whole time. Sit with my clients, solve their puzzle, be the person they trust, be the thinker, not the machine. AI doesn't have to be the thing that ends your profession. It can be the thing that finally frees you from the grind of it. So you can be the advisor at the table instead of the technician at the keyboard. So you can be up all the way home at 6 p.m. Because the machine is doing the part you used to stay late for. Time is going to pass either way. In three years, that down escalator will have done those work. And you either be standing on it, cutting your prices and wondering what happened, or you'll be off it, on the porch, doing work the no machine can touch, charging for the outcome, and you're finally free. Now, here's the honest part. Redesigning your business while you're still running and stepping off an elevator that's already moving, repricing everything without losing your nerve, that is really hard to do it alone. It's the kind of thing you talk yourself out at 9 p.m. by yourself. And that is exactly why I built that intention operator mastermind. Remember the fact I planted at the top? AI is not replacing accountants. I train the ones who are going to replace the ones who ignore it. That's not a threat, it's an invitation. Because in this profession, AI has always meant two things: artificial intelligence and accounting intelligence. The artificial one is coming for your job. The accounting one is your job. The mastermind is what I trained, the second one. We don't get together to talk about tax softwares or logistics of the day. We meet every week to go to war on the things that actually decide whether you make it through the shift, leadership, high-level sales, the systems that set you free. And we dig into the dirt, that scarcity, and that self worth block that keeps you selling hours when you know better. If AI has kept you at night, good. That means you're paying attention. So reach out to me. Text me A06 337 0141. Let's make you the one who is impossible to replace.