EP122: Rhamy Alejeal - How To Trust Your Employees

Trust.

It can be hard to earn especially if you're a bookkeeper who has never hired anyone before or has trouble letting current employees make their own decisions in fear they'll mess up and cause you more work and frustration.

The process of taking an employee that knows nothing to one that will eventually know something to one that becomes someone you can trust takes time.

Our guest, Rhamy Alejeal understands this.

He has worked over 10 years in the payroll, benefits, and HR industry. He is the CEO of Poplar Financial which provides solutions to some of the toughest problems facing entrepreneurs today by providing products and services that can be catered to fit their business needs.

He also has a best-selling book, People Processes: How Your People Can Be Your Organization's Competitive Advantage which was recently featured in INC Magazine as one of the top 10 leadership books in 2018.

During this interview, you'll discover...

  • How to let your employees make decisions that you can trust

  • Why value judgement is important to your staff

  • How changes can make your business grow

To learn more about Poplar Financial, click here.

For Rhamy's LinkedIn page, visit this link.

To buy his book, here's the website.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION

Michael Palmer: 01:20 Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. I'm your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a fun one. Our guest has worked over 10 years in the payroll benefits and HR industry. He is the CEO of poplar financial, which provides solutions to some of the toughest problems facing people and businesses today by providing products and services that can be catered to fit their business needs. His bestselling book, people processes how your people can be your organization's competitive advantage was recently featured and ache magazine as one of the top 10 leadership books in 2018 Rhamy Alejeal, welcome to the podcast.

Rhamy Alejeal: 02:02 Aw Man. Glad to be here.

MP: 02:04 Hi, I'm glad to have you. And I said it was going to be fun because I've seen you speak in the past and you are a heck of a lot of fun with amazing stories as well as gold tips for business owners.

RA: 02:15 Oh man, I appreciate it. I had a great time, Huh?

MP: 02:18 Yes, yes. And so Rami, before we get into talking about what your company does and how you help people and how you can help our listener, can you tell us a little bit about your career journey leading up to this point?

RA: 02:31 Oh Man. I, um, I grew up in insurance. My mother was an insurance agent. My grandmother was an insurance agent. They may not have been the, uh, the most successful ones around, but they, they were in the field. And, uh, starting at age 13, I actually started cold calling to set appointments, uh, for my grandmother. And that's been my, uh, that was the start of the journey when I was 22, uh, my wife and I got together and started our current company, poplar financial, uh, 10 years ago now. And in that we focused purely on the employer benefits space. So when we started, all we did was help companies all over the United States find a major medical, dental, vision 401ks for their employees. And over the years we acquired other companies and built the internal expertise to extend into providing the payroll services around that. And then finally the in depth HR consulting needed to actually do all of this in a compliant and effective manner. And uh, that's, that's been my journey. It was, uh, it's been a a long time coming now. So you said 10 years in the industry, but I think, uh, technically I'm coming up on my 20th now having started at age 13.

MP: 03:40 No, exactly. And I think that's fantastic. He, what was really interesting about your story is you, you found a love for what you, you, the work that you're doing today, you found a love for it when you were 13 years old, which was, everybody was like, that's bizarre.

RA: 03:56 Absolutely. Oh people, you know, there was someone saying, and I was at a CPA conference and they were like, you know, if I, if I told my 14-year-old self or you're going to grow up and be a CPA, ah, what would I, you know, I, I had, I had, I had to change my life. I was 14 and like, no, I'm going to grow up and be an insurance. It's going to be awesome. I got a bachelor's in economics and an MBA, a focusing on economics as well, mainly industrial organization, which is how companies are structured. And the whole time I'm like, oh, so I can start, can be an insurance agent. It's going to be amazing. So I've, I've always loved this industry. I think it's a great place to, that you can have a real impact on, on growing companies. The, the, that dream of, of, uh, owning your own business and building it out. A large part of that is how you take care of your people.

MP: 04:41 Absolutely. And you, you, you, it has not been rosy all the way through. And what I, what I was really excited for you to share with our listeners is some of the, the ups and downs of growing a business because you've built your business from nothing into what it is today and, and an incredible growth story that you have every single year, which creates a lot of strain on your organization, a strain on your people. I mean, that's why you're highly qualified to write the book that you wrote. Um, tell us a little bit about that journey and some of the pitfalls when you were growing and how you got through it.

RA: 05:15 Oh Man. You know, you ask a guy with a business, you know, where are your mistakes? And it's a long answer. We've had a lot of rough times. You know, when I, when I started the company, like I said, I was 22. I've been in insurance for a while and I had just graduated my undergrad. I had saved up $95,000, uh, which was a good pile of money for a 22-year-old. And uh, started the company six months later. I had about four and a half thousand in the bank and a payroll due. So not a great start for my first year in business. And I did everything wrong when I started. I tried to buy leads and, and marketing from other companies instead of developing our own acquisition, we way overspent on shiny office furniture and a quarter floor in a high rise because of course you've got to have a shiny office, otherwise, you're not a legit business.

RA: 06:08 And, uh, it was a, it was a total beading coming up on that payroll where it couldn't, couldn't really even afford to pay people. I had to lay some people off. I went into kind of emergency room mode and started cold calling every person I could think of and managed to keep the business from going under just barely. It was, it was a rough time. My, uh, my wife and I started the company together. She actually had to go back and go to an actual job for the first year, uh, after that six months where things didn't go so great. And uh, we just kinda had to force our way through that time. During that first year and a half, I learned the kind of first main point, which is that you have to differentiate your product and you have to own your product. You know, an insurance, we're kind of selling, but as a brokerage anyway, at first we were selling other people's products, right?

RA: 06:58 It's like, come to us and we'll find you the best one of these things. And until you really create your own way of doing that, until you really create a market differentiation, there's no reason to go with some 22-year-old kid over your old golfing buddy. Even if your all golfing buddy doesn't know anything about the industry. At least he's been doing it for a while. It took a, it took that first year and a half to really develop and create our own proprietary ways of doing business that we could then market and generate business from. So I think that's the first lesson of business. That's the harder, you know the, no matter how you get into it, you got to figure out how to make it uniquely yours and structure that in an environment that has either a price advantage or some sort of market advantage, whether that's a new feature or some other way of doing it.

RA: 07:45 We started growing then, which was great. I mean it finally worked. We started making money and I then read the books that everybody reads. Do you know the e-myth revisited and all the other kind of how to, how to scale your company scaling up and had to learn how to add employees and, and that worked for a while, but three or four years in, we've continued to grow. We had a great product and we had a team that we could, you know, that would do the processes that we had written. But sometime around that year for four or five, we realized that that wasn't enough either. There was kind of an additional step beyond it that we had to get to. But we knew that because despite having standard operating procedures and despite having a product and service that was growing and selling, I as the business owner and my wife as well, we couldn't sleep at night because we were so stressed. So we kind of realized about halfway through that there's more to it than just standardized procedures and hiring people. And that's where our company grew.

MP: 08:43 Yeah.

MP: 08:52 and with the, I mean that's very interesting. With that. Was it that you actually added? What was the attention you gave to the business that had you start sleeping better at night 12 it's Kinda two part and see on one side it was that as you add more people, your administrative burden grows. We wound up spending more and more time or having to devote more and more resources just to the internal coordination of the team and the onboarding of a new employee became slower and slower. You'd hire somebody but it was a five man shop or a 10 man shop. You hire a guy, he like works with you or she works with a manager directly for like a couple of months and then they know everyone, they know everything, but when you start growing and your business becomes more and more diverse, that ramp and the amount of work you'd have to put in from bringing someone on to their, a competent, trustworthy member of the team just seems to get longer and longer.

MP: 09:48 And despite having taught them standard operating procedures and them having a reference guide and a knowledge base, it didn't actually seem to create a consistent product. The thing that actually does is what we call the company culture, what everyone calls company culture, whatever that means. But it's this process by which you take an employee from someone who knows nothing, to someone who knows what to do to someone who you trust to do what is right. And that process, it turns out that the time investment in most companies, including my own, was so high that you just don't do it. You just wind up churning through employees. So we developed automated processes that require minimal administrative time with the idea of being from the moment we hire somebody to three months later, we can go out of town and that person's gonna know what to do and more importantly know how to learn what to do.

RA: 10:44 No, when something comes up that we've never trained them on that we didn't know what happened, that we can't expect. They'll make a choice that we agree with and that's the final step. More than getting them to know what to do or where to look it up. It's being able for them to make decisions that she'll trust. And that's the, uh, that was the step that took us up to our, our ability to grow and yet still only work 20 hours a week, most weeks. It's exciting. I love it. I love it. And is that covered in your book? So what the book hits on is I think most people kind of have an idea of how to develop those things in, in, in kind of a more in depth way is once they hit 10, 15, 20 employees, they just don't have the time to do it.

RA: 11:30 Uh, they just don't have the, the um, the administrative overhead to invest in it. So what the book covers in its first two-thirds is understanding all the components that make up a system like that, including the cultural communications, what they should look like, what they can look like. And then the last third is a roadmap to automate like 90% of them. So that things like timekeeping, things like getting people paid, right? Things like, uh, collecting all your paperwork and enrolling them in benefits that that happens in a very effective and automated manner so that people who were spending 30 hours a week before handling stuff like that can now spend the 30 hours developing the training and cultural communications about why we do what we do, how to make decisions that, that are not covered in a standard operating procedure. And the truth is, that's about the last chapter.

RA: 12:27 We're just like, now that you have time, now that you've figured this stuff out and automated 90% of your human operations, now it's time to turn your attention to developing those cultural values. The number one complaint we get from our clients is that they don't, you know, before they come to us, is that they don't have time to, to plug the hole, to stop the leak because they're too busy bailing out the ship. Right? Or turn it off the fall, sit because of water's overflowing and they have to, if they have to, multiple floors, that kind of expression. I, it's so funny. I hear it all over the country. I hear it from hundreds of different people because the auto z everyday work is taking way too much time and they're not able to focus on working on the business. So the book is about automating all that everyday work. That's the people processes so that you can then kind of figure out how you, how you go more in depth with your employees.

MP: 13:17 I love it. We love standardized operating procedures around here. We love automation. One of the things that I find intriguing about your, your message is this whole idea of culture developing culture and such that, I mean who wouldn't want to have an employee come on? You go through some processes, go through training, but then get to that stage where you can, you know, leave them the keys to the kingdom and they, you can trust them and their trust that they're going to make the right decision and trust that they're going to do what's right for the company. A lot of our listeners run smaller businesses, not the 22 plus businesses. They would have clients that do that for sure, but they're smaller businesses. Can you share how they can, uh, create that kind of rapid growth into a core and into their culture and ha and get their employees to where they can trust them?

RA: 14:07 Yeah. So when you're working with your, let's say you're a one-man shop and you're bringing on your first person, that person is going to learn you. He's going to learn about how your company works and what's at values. Because you're going to have beer with that guy on Wednesday night, right? They're going to become a part of your family. What you need to think about beyond just training them to do the bookkeeping, you need to think about training them on their decision making if there is no sop. So I love processes. Literally, my book is people processes. It's what I, you know, we have to, you have to have them, but as you grow and as you get bigger, more and more things will happen every day that have never happened before. I think business owners have this idea in their mind that as they, as they grow, they'll see more and more and then it'll just all become old hat.

RA: 14:57 It's not the case. You can tell some work that way. I mean we have payroll benefits, HR timekeeping, just these four things and as you start adding on, when you, when your bookkeepers get to that point where they're bringing on instead of a client a month, a client a week or a client a day, when they get to that kind of world, you will start seeing things every day that it's just brand new. It just has to be in the beginning it's all brand new cause you're new. But in the, in the long run, as you grow, you just wind up experiencing so many new things. So the thing that you need to focus on with your employee, even your three man shop, your four man shop is not just how to do that everyday stuff, but what are the values and the guidelines for making judgment calls.

RA: 15:52 If you don't have a sop and I'm not here, you can either call me and bug me about what to do and I'll make the decision. Or you can know that first things first we get the clients, whatever done on time. We'd rather submit something. Maybe, maybe, maybe in the case of your organization it's, we'd rather submit something that's wrong and then let them know we're going to amend it. Or maybe in your business it's, we never put out anything that's wrong. We tell them it's going to be late, we'd rather it be late than wrong. You have to put those values in place and communicate them and then live by them. And if you do that, your employees will very rapidly, if you can spell it out, be able to make the judgment call that she would have made. You also have to start as a [inaudible], even at the three man company stage, giving that control to your employees and not punishing them when they get it wrong.

RA: 16:52 It's your name on the line, it's your butt on the line. When they screw up, even it may even cost you thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars when they screw up. And it's one thing if they screw up because of negligence, you know, I took that to the mailbox to mail and I just left it in my car for six months. Okay. Yeah, fire that guy all day. But if they, if you empower them to make these judgment calls, you have to internally be at that, that, that stage that you can go, they may make the wrong decision. I would rather they make the wrong decision than me. Make the decision the first time around and if you can get that mindset in place, you'll move beyond trying to write out written instructions every, for every little thing, every time in your business. Not that you shouldn't have standard operating procedures, but you can move beyond that so that you actually wind up with a company of people who can, who can make decisions, who can help you grow your company and you can focus on other things.

MP: 17:52 Absolutely.

RA: 17:53 I think one of our guests set said it really well. It's in his standard operating procedures he's using, he's, he's trying to remove 80% of the things that he should never have to tell anybody in and document that. But then it's those that, that other 20% that's changing every day there. The higher the fee, the higher problems to solve, the higher things, the things that you really just couldn't document because maybe you only see it once or twice or maybe never. You've never seen it as you were saying. Uh, but that by doing that, it gives you the bandwidth to actually be able to do the things you're talking about, which I think I completely think is inspiring for anybody who has a business to say, look, you want to have people that can think like that. It's going to start. That's the pathway to freedom is, is it's if you, if no one can make a decision, well it's never gonna grow past yourself.

RA: 18:44 Right? And you can almost break decisions into two categories of like how to do something like maybe we haven't made a template for this, for our standard operating procedure, and you need to have the internal expertise to figure it out, right? That's one type of decision. And that comes from competence and experience and training. But there's another decision which is the value judgment of is your employee gonna actually put their neck on the line and try and figure it out? Or are they going to defer responsibility up the chain? Right? That's the judgment. That's the value thing and you have to state it explicitly. If you can state that explicitly and actually follow through on it and give them the freedom to do it, two things will happen. Well, three things. One, your employees will actually stop bugging you about the little stuff. They'll actually start making decisions too.

RA: 19:36 They're going to get it wrong sometimes and you're going to totally regret this decision in the first place, but eventually three will happen, which is that your employees will make the right decision. You won't have had to micromanage it, and this is the key part. Your employees will love it. It's an amazing return because not only are you freeing up your time and the and the client is getting a better response faster than if it has to be run up the chain. Through management, your employees start to take ownership. They start to care about their decisions and that will lower your turnover like crazy. That will get people to stick around like crazy. It's, it's one of those where if you sop them to death, uh, and then any judgment call has to be deferred up, then they realize very quickly that they are something that should sure be replaced by automation in the next 30 years. It's the judgements of making those things that give people meaning in their job, less doing the work, more that judgments of whether to do the work or how to do the work that actually are going to give you longterm employees.

MP: 20:48 Completely agree. And now it's not. And this is really, you know, that's the concept here is very simple, right? You, you, you have your give, give more responsibility and encourage them to make decisions. But it's not easy to do, especially for people that have never done this before. Perhaps, you know, feel very responsible for the customers and the, and the people who deal with, I mean that, we talk about that all the time. It's like, you know, the fear of, of letting, uh, staff work on other clients that what if they make a mistake? What advice would you give in terms of, you know, taking that leap to, to be able to say, look it, the, it's going to be great when you get there, but you know, it's going to be a little painful perhaps in the beginning. What would you say?

RA: 21:32 I completely understand. I was there, I've been there. There's two thoughts around it. One is are you building a job for yourself or are you building a business? You have to make that decision internally. You have to think about what your longterm objective is. The first seven and a half years of my company, we brought on clients and did not lose a single client. Every single client came on state and renewed at forever, which compared to the industry average of like 84% a year, stay on 16% drop off. We're, we think we're knocking it out of the park and we are in a way, on the other hand, if we're retaining 100% of our clients every year, no matter what, what that means that we are doing something wrong. I was actually meeting, it was the CEO of, um, of a major hospital chain and we were talking about business and I told him that as kind of a selling point because I was so proud of it.

RA: 22:34 I was always talking about it. And he said, you realize if you're, if you're keeping everybody 100% of the time, that means you're keeping even the crazy ones. You're keeping the ones that are no longer a fit for you. You're keeping the ones that, that as your company has grown, are not a great fit anymore. And uh, he was right and we were bending over backwards. And by we, I mean my people were doing their job, but if anything looked a little crazy, I would intervene and I would save that client. And I felt great about it. I saved it. I'm, I'm so good and I've delivered my promises 100% all of that is true. All of that is a reasonable thing, but the truth is in the long run, hey businesses, success is a mixture of two things. What companies they bring on or what clients they bring on and what clients they lose, and you have to weigh your ability to attract new belt business against your ability to retain all of your old business.

RA: 23:30 If you are, let's go to this, there's this idea of Pereda optimality or price's law. If you have a hundred clients, right, like 10 of them are costing you 90% of your time, maybe it's 2080 but you're spending some ridiculous amount of time on just a few of them at another time. 10 of them are probably providing you 90% of your income and the other nine are not paying it near as much. The question is, are those numbers exactly aligned and a lot of times they're not. I say this all to give people the confidence to say you have to build a company, design your products and prices and recognize that along the way you may make changes that not everybody's gonna like, but those changes are going to free you and your company up to acquire many, many new clients. It's a sad thing, but the way you do business is going to change and the perfect fit for you is going to change and in the end it's going to increase your growth rate.

RA: 24:27 To the extent that losing a client or three a year is the cost of doing business. I don't want to say that it's okay to make mistakes and screw your client's books up. That's not what I'm saying. It's that you have to view it as a retention cost versus an acquisition cost in terms of time. If you free up 15 hours a week of your time because you're letting your employees do their job, what can you do with those 15 hours and could those 15 hours get you 50 clients and maybe your employees doing it every day? Maybe they won't do it as well as you at the beginning and you may wind up losing a client or two. It would be really sad, but in the end you're going to wind up with a lot more clients.

MP: 25:10 Yeah. And a future that you're happier with. I would, I would assert, you know, it's it. I love, I love this conversation because it's, it is very much, yeah. I would say our listener right now, many of them is, is at that point in their business where they are busy to the point of maybe even pulling their hair out. And this concept is really powerful in that there's people in your business right now that are pulling you away from the future that you truly want to have in your business, whatever it may be, your big why, where you're trying to get your business to. There are people in your customer and client base that are pulling you away from that. And unfortunately, we've all been there. We think that's a good thing that we have them as clients because the client is a good thing. And so this is, this hopefully is more, um, confidence to actually take that leap and, and make decisions about your business, about your customers that actually leave you with that extra time at anytime you get rid of a client, there's going to be time and bandwidth to do better things in your business, right?

RA: 26:15 And, and also the way to think about it is if your employees doing it at 95, 97% perfect, and you would do it at a hundred, you can have five, you could have 50 employees, you can handle a lot more and there's going to be some loss, but it's going to be so much better for your organization. And there's one more thought. It's going to be better for your clients. Don't think that this is purely a selfish act. Your ability to scale your company is going to bring more and more knowledge and opportunities inside your organization. You're going to get better. You're going to have the money to afford better hardware, software people as you grow. And as you become bigger, you'll be more competitive. Uh, if you do it right now there, there may be some diminishing returns. I don't have 5,000 employees, but I know some of those companies seem to have some real troubles. But getting from that five to 20 man, 20 man to 50 man room, your product is going to get better too. And it's, it's always limited by your time. You're never going to be able to put the time and actually making a better product. So you're gonna wind up by making your, your life better. You're gonna wind up making your business better. And by definition, if your business is better, your clients are going to wind up benefiting from it. trend.

MP: 27:40 Fantastic. Rami, this has been, this has been great and I love this. I love this thinking and I, I hope this is encouraging our listener to think differently about their business. One thing I wanted to touch on before I let you go is you, you have grown this business from nothing with you. You, you're, you and your wife started this, but you, you, for your, you have always been somebody that's out there. You even said it in this car and this conversation around just actually getting on and calling people and growing your business. For those, for those that are, you know, ambitious about growing their business, what, what advice would you give around being able to just go out there when you need to and make those calls and, and May, you know, go to the networking events and, and doing what you need to do to bring on new customers. What would you share with our audience?

RA: 28:31 I would say there's, there's two thoughts. One is fear motivates more than the possibility of gain. People learn that in sales training one oh one and they mistakenly apply it to their clients to try and acquire them, scare them into getting you as the bookkeeper it needs to be applied to you. Look out one year, think about one year from now where you could be at if everything went great, write it down. Then think about where you're going to be in one year when everything goes to crap because you're afraid to make that call or you're afraid to walk in that door. At the end of that exercise, having written that down, you're motivated, it's done. The motivation is, is a temporary state that allows you to do things you don't want to do. Do the exercise I just talked about. Review it twice a week.

RA: 29:25 Schedule it on your calendar and that's going to actually make it less a punishment when you're not feeling motivated and something you just do twice a week. So examine the bad and the good, compare them and that's going to make you do it. Most people who have a trouble with are simply afraid to even think about where it will take them. And that's the act. You have to actually sit down and think about what your life's gonna look out one year, two years, three years from now. If you don't move and you're going to be motivated at the end, it's also gonna help you direct road you need to go. Cause as you think about what you want your life to look at, that'll become more and more crystal clear, which will help you kind of envision how your company needs to run. The second thing I would throw out outside of pure motivation is as you're trying to grow your company, this is the number one thing I, I could tell you, focus more on your product.

RA: 30:17 I, I, I can't tell you the number of small businesses, so I opened this talk with that about making your product better. If you took half the time that you spend, just go into networking events and passing a card out and all that and instead spent it actually making your product better. What you do for the client, how you do it, how you would price you can do it at actually improve your product and process internally. It's gonna get easier every day. You can think of marketing, especially cold marketing or networking. It really is almost a, it's a, it's a, it's a stop gap. It's, I don't have the business coming in right now. We need to go generate business. It's, you consider it hunting almost. You have to go out and find some food. Working on your product, actually making what you do better will spread through the marketplace and at some point you're going to get to this point where every one of your clients is going to refer you every other week.

RA: 31:23 If you have the perfect, if you've created a product that is actually competitive in the market, you'll feel it. It almost happened overnight for us. We made tweaks, some tweaks and tweaks and we kept working on the product, kept working on the product, trying different things and just one day we woke up and realized we were getting many times the number of refferals we, we, we were possibly able to prospect and our sales team was unnecessary. Pretty much. I mean we needed to close business but it changed so quickly and I don't think that will ever happen. If all you do is think about as the business owner, my job is to go out there and find your clients. Your job is to go out there and make a better product and that's your real investment. Getting the new clients is the temporary stop gap until your product's so good that people come to you.

MP: 32:10 MMM. So fantastic goals, whole bunch of goals, and then two really solid pieces of gold right at the end there. I absolutely love that. And I know there's a lot of listeners who, who have, who do work on their product and you hear it in, in this industry, uh, being referred business, uh, constantly. They don't need to do any marketing, they don't need to do any networking. The business is just coming to them. So good. Good for you if you're there, if you're not sage advice, and that's a topic of another

MP: 32:40 podcast, but I said that, but sage advice from, from, from you. Thank you so much. Uh, Rami tell, tell our listener a little bit about where they can find out more about you and what you do for companies that they might be interested in learning about.

RA: 33:58 Well, you can learn more about the stuff we talked about today and people processes.com. That's our podcast. It's twice a week. It's very compliance-focused for HR people. So it's kind of a nerdy one, not super, a great just for business ideas, one on one. But if you have someone on your staff that's growing and you want them to keep up to date with compliance update to check out people, processes.com my company is poplar financial. You can find us at Poplarfinancial.com. We have five products. We help people find great benefits. We can automate HR processes, we can provide HR information consulting, we can do your payroll and we can automate and generate and create timekeeping platforms for cheat and track of when employees work.

RA: 33:42 Those five products, they work together really, really well. Um, and that's kind of what we provide to our clients. Now we work with CPAs and bookkeepers all the time as their partners and their clients wind up getting discounts or we can do revenue shares back to the CPA's and bookkeepers. So if you have clients in the United States, unfortunately, we are in the United States only. So, uh, one thing to, to know there, if you have clients in the United States and you are interested in checking us out there, go to poplar financial.com drop me an email, uh, at service@poplarfinancial.com and just say, Hey, I'm interested in the partnership thing. We'll set up a meeting and I'd love to have one of my team members or myself walk you through how we could help your company grow.

MP: 34:27 It's beautiful. Thank you so much for, for generously giving us your time today. On behalf of our listener, I thank you. I, it was a wonderful time.

RA: 34:35 Thank you so much for having me.

MP: 34:37 Beautiful. And with that, we wrap another episode of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast. To learn more about today's wonderful guests and to get access to all sorts of valuable free business-building resources, you can go to Thesuccessfulbookkeeper.com. Until next time,

MP: 34:52 goodbye.