When I was 19, I spent two years in Australia as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. White shirt, black name tag, the whole thing. I have never seen the Book of Mormon musical (I hear it’s funny), but that’s definitely what I looked like.
My schedule was the same every day for two years. Wake up at 6:30 a.m. every day, go teach, knock doors, serve, and then go to sleep at 10:30 p.m. If you want to talk hard, it is brutally hard work. Have you ever been happy to talk to someone knocking on your door? Almost nobody wants to talk to a 19-year-old about God at 2 pm on a Tuesday. They are busy, they are skeptical, and they already have a life that is working fine without you.
So, you learn how selling actually works, fast. You have to identify needs and show how what you have can solve the problem. It was great for many things, but learning how to sell was one of them.
I think if you can sell religion, you can sell anything. You are asking someone to change how they spend their Sundays, how they spend their money, and how they see the world.
Not only did you have to be good at getting people’s attention, you had to be good at helping groups of people progress. You do not knock on one door and find one person. You knock on hundreds. You have people at every stage. Some just met you. Some are curious. Some want to learn more. We had a planner to track all of this, and we spent every day trying to help each person take the next step forward. That is a sales pipeline. I just did not know what it was called yet.
Then I tried to get married.
Fast forward a few years after my mission. I lived in Utah, worked full-time at Divvy (later acquired by BILL), and grinded through online school at the same time.
I wanted to find a great girl and get married. But I really didn’t have any time to casually meet people. I was working all day and going to school at night. So, I worked backward.
To get one wife, I needed a few serious relationships. To get a few serious relationships, I needed a bunch of second dates. To get a bunch of second dates, I needed a lot of first dates. And to get a lot of first dates, I needed to meet a lot of people.
So, I built something that worked on my mission: consistent parties. Every Sunday at 5 pm, I had 50+ people over for crepes at my apartment.
During the week, I would invite 10 to 15 girls, and they would bring friends. The guys always showed up (guys always show up when there is free food and girls). By 5:30 p.m. I would have 40 or 50 people in my apartment.
Crepes were the perfect vehicle. Dirt cheap. Easy to make at volume. And I had a roommate who loved making them, so I outsourced the entire kitchen to him and spent my time doing the thing I was actually there to do.
Over the course of a night, I would have 5 to 10 real conversations. Nobody thought they were on a date, because they were not on a date. They were at a party. But I got the exact same information a first date would have given me, in a tenth of the time, with none of the awkwardness.
You know in about five minutes whether it is worth going on an actual date. So at the end of the night, I would have one or two people I wanted to ask out, and I would ask them out.
Then I did it again the next Sunday and the one after that. I can report: it’s how I met my wife, Ellie. So, I stand by it.
I am telling you all of this because the math is the same. Compliance work is getting squeezed. Software will continue to drive down margins on compliance work.
You’ve heard it a million times, but the work that holds its value is advisory. It's being the person a business owner calls before they make a decision, not after.
But advisory relationships are high trust and high effort. You do not win them off a cold email. You win them from a relationship that already exists, usually one where you have already done good work and earned the right to say something bigger.
Which means it is exactly the same math I ran in my apartment looking for a wife.
Work backwards. How many advisory clients do you want this year? Then ask how many existing relationships you would need to have in motion to get there. Then ask how many bookkeeping, tax, and compliance clients sit underneath that. Then look at what you actually have.
You also cannot run this out of your head, which is where the crepe night analogy breaks down. I could keep 50 people straight because I was in the room with all of them every Sunday. A firm with 300 clients and 12 people on staff cannot do that. The context lives in scattered meeting notes, in one partner's memory, or in an email thread from March. So, the opportunity gets mentioned once and then evaporates.
Every client conversation your team has already contains a signal about what that client needs next. You need to capture it and put it where you can act on it, so the firm can see its own pipeline instead of guessing at it.
Pick the number you want. Work backwards. Build the thing that gets you volume at the top. Then pay attention to who is ready for the next step.
I still host people constantly. It is my favorite thing. The only difference now is that Ellie is the one handing out the crepes.
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