Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
In this podcast series, Derek Distin, Vice President of Community at Rightworks, sits down with several of our RightNOW sponsors to discuss the state of the accounting profession and its future.
The RightNOW 2025 is the ultimate mid-year conference for accounting and tax pros. It will be held May 19-21 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Register today at www.rightworks.com/rightnow2025.
Hey, welcome back to the Write Now podcast.
My name is Derek Distin, vice President
of community here at Rightworks.
Works, you know, the accounting profession, uh,
can trace its roots back quite literally over 7,000 years.
Back to ancient Mesopotamia.
There's probably not a culture in the last 5,000 years
that hasn't been supported in some way, shape,
or form by accountants.
Some of the most prominent figures in culture
probably have the title accountant
or some variation of that alongside their name.
As with anything that has lasted this long
evolution has been the key to sustainability Today,
we see this rate of change accelerating more
rapidly than ever.
Wright Works has a mission to help the profession
continuously progress, and we certainly can't do it alone.
Joining me today is talk more about this
as we lead up to right now.
2025 is the co-founder
and chief Growth officer of Safesend, Andrew Hatfield.
Andrew, thanks for joining me today.
Thanks for, thanks for having me on again.
I, I, I appreciate the opportunity to do this.
Um, we did this last year and I thought it was a valuable
and wonderful experience,
and I appreciate you letting people like me have the chance
to get our information out to the industry.
Talk about what's going on. Well,
Let's, uh, let's talk about the differences
between the last 12 months
and now big changes for safes send.
Um,
Big, big What, what happened?
Yeah. So big changes for Safe
and, um, big changes in the industry,
big changes for Safes send.
And then I'll also say there's still some
of the same things going on that we need to,
that we need to talk about in address.
Um, so the big news for Safes send is that in January, uh,
January 2nd, 2025, uh, we were acquired
by Thom Reuters.
And I'm happy to dig in, uh, a little bit more as we go
through this about, you know, why that was good
for the industry we believe, and, uh, good for the companies
and what the decision process was like
and why we decided to do it.
At this time, we feel like it's the perfect
match at the perfect time.
That hasn't always been the case,
but it just seemed to everything align in a way
that we could solve some big problems
that we've been working on independently
from TR and combined.
I think we have a really nice path to be able to get there,
and like I said, I'm happy to dig in
as we go through more about that.
Yeah, I mean, let's, uh, let's start with, um, sort
of the point of inflection that
made this the right decision.
Now, what Macroeconomically Big picture wise
changed in Safe Senses history
or perhaps tr R'S history that said to you,
yeah, this is the right time. Let's do this now.
That's right. So I'm gonna be extremely transparent about
this and the, the decisions are,
should be very obvious when I lay 'em out.
But lemme give you a little bit of history.
A Safes Send was founded in 2008. Okay?
So, uh, we were in existence for, you know, over a decade.
And the, a ritual goal of Safes Send back then was to help
automate and integrate the tax return process.
So the workflow that goes on inside a firm
and the collaboration with the client from everything from
gathering the documents you need to be able
to prepare returns to ultimately deliver complete
and file, uh, the tax returns.
So that's always been our goal.
And along the way, uh, we became a category king in
what I would call the last mile
or the back end of that process where we were involved
with the delivery and collaboration with the taxpayer,
the client of the firm to complete the tax return process.
And we did a really good job over the last decade at,
at solving that problem.
Now, we've been partners with Thom Reuters
for almost five years, a little over four years.
And that partnership led us to some integration points
and a more understanding of each other.
But I would say that like the inflection point
and the really important thing that happened is
that we realized you can stitch together this vision
of an end-to-end automation
and integration of that tax process, which is the problem
that needs to be solved
and the problem that the industry, uh, desires
to be solved and that firms need.
And you can do that with different logos, sort
of stitching together through these partnerships
and relationships, but you can't really get there in a deep
and meaningful way, uh,
without being under the same umbrella.
So three things happened that were really important.
Okay, one, Thomson Reuters had a shift
change in their leadership.
Um, they brought in the head up tax, Elizabeth Bistro, who
I will just say wonderful things about as a person,
and also as somebody with the same vision
and the same mindset that we have at Sasin.
And through the last few years of having a relationship
with TR as a, as a partner, we really got to know her well
and her leadership team,
and there was a sense that they wanted
to solve this problem.
Now they created action on that when they acquired Shere
a few years ago, right?
So the acquisition of shere was really important
because they were able to get their tools
and bring them into that TR portfolio of products.
And once that happened, we knew
that we were the missing piece at Safes send to be able
to complete the front, middle,
and back end of that tax workflow process.
And so in January, 2025, all things aligned
that we said, if we go underneath this umbrella
and we really get our teams integrated deep
to get the integration across the product, sure.
Prep TR and us, we can actually solve this problem.
And so that was really the catalyst
that it was the perfect match at the perfect time
and was the right time to do it for the market.
Well, that's phenomenal to hear.
And, uh, I mean, point of fact, congratulations,
obviously co-founding this 2008 to 2025,
January 2nd, 2025, that's 16, 17 years
of your life dedicated to this.
Um, I'm assuming it's gotta feel really good
to see something come to fruition where, as you said,
allows you to integrate
and automate end to end on this system.
Yeah, you know, it's, uh, it was, we never thought
that the problem that we were trying
to solve in the beginning was gonna be as deep as it was,
and it just turned out to be a vast ocean of workflows.
I say that, you know, building software is death
by a thousand workflows instead of paper cuts.
And, and as you amass client base,
you just get their feedback on
what problem needs to be solved next.
Now, I couldn't sketch out all the problems,
uh, that needed to be solved.
It takes a client base to tell us that.
And over the years, it takes time to build client base,
get more feedback, and then start building
what the clients in the industry are telling you to build.
Um, but we wouldn't, I can tell you it's, it's,
it's amazing from the standpoint of, yes, we broke a company
for 16, 17 years, we're able
to have a really positive outcome, uh, financially,
but it's really, uh, the icing on the cake is that you get
to also solve a problem that you were dedicated to solving.
And we wouldn't have made this decision if we didn't feel
like their roadmap aligned with
what our roadmap was intending
to do over the next several years as well.
Um, and what's been fun,
and of course now I'm spending a lot of time
inside the Thomson Reuters walls
and with their, uh, team
that's working on stitching these products together in a
meaningful way through integration.
What's been interesting is that the SIM team has come in
and really integrated well with the TR team,
and there's this alignment of the desire to go forward,
innovate, and solve, uh, that problem.
And so now it's just more resources
and more people working on something
where we have a bigger product portfolio
to actually accomplish it.
Yeah, it's a little bit more resources to, um, address
what obviously clearly you guys saw
as an opportunity in the market
because of a lack of something.
So, quick question for you.
You mentioned being able to hear from the client base,
for lack of a better term, being able to hear what some
of those pain points or processes or workflows are,
and then to address them early on.
What was one
unexpected hurdle that you guys discovered
based upon feedback from your clients?
Yeah, so, wow.
I mean, this could be a, this could be a long set if we,
we actually, we, so we do something kind
of interesting every, every year historically, uh,
the other co-founder and myself, we would have a state
of the union call three times a year
where we would invite any of our clients that wanted
to attend, and we would take live questions.
We kind of go through, you know, here's the roadmap
that you asked us to build.
Uh, here's the features that we actually built.
Here's where we, you know, screwed up
and didn't get this right,
or we didn't, we weren't able to build these things,
but let us explain why, you know, the,
the importance level change.
And we would've very open communication
with the client base, good, bad, and the ugly.
Well, we would actually take that call off of mute,
and I know it sounds a little scary.
We would let our clients just, you know, raise hands
and ask questions, and we'd just sit there and,
and feel the, and we built a list of thousands
of requests that the challenging part wasn't actually having
our client base tell us
what was problematic that we needed to solve.
The, the problematic part was trying to prioritize the, all
of the requests and all of the things
that needed to be solved.
Like I give you something simple.
So when we first released the product, we supported, um,
10 40 returns as part of our process,
and we supported CCH, um, as the tax program.
And what happened is, very quickly we had clients, well,
you know, I have 1120 and 1120 s
and, uh, we do, you know, x, y, and Z return,
or, Hey, we are actually doing local returns
and state returns in, um, Cincinnati, Ohio,
and we can't actually e-sign these.
They have to be manually signed,
but they're going inside of a big batch of returns
with other states and federal that need to be e-sign.
How do we break these up and separate 'em?
And how do we solve for this local jurisdictional
issue on this form?
And so you started to realize
that it wasn't just broad features,
it became very narrow features from federal state to local,
and depending on the jurisdiction in the district about
how you would handle all of this information.
And then outside of that, it became about the client,
the complexity of the client, the type of client,
the client living out of the country.
Are they in the country? Do they have a family office which
has a different set of rules?
How do you handle K ones? I could just go on and on there.
There was no lack of it.
It was more about prioritizing what we did first, second,
third, and fourth rather than, you know, um,
generating a very large list of things to do.
Would you say that the initial sort of
founding hypothesis was, Hey, we can create a,
maybe not one size fits all, but one size fits most.
And as things evolved,
you realize there's a lot more complexity to this,
but yeah, we believe we can solve all these.
We realized very quickly
that on the surface it seemed like an easy task.
So for example, um, you want to deliver a tax return
that's been completed to your client.
Okay, so that seems, so you can do that, uh,
through the mail, right?
The US Mail, you can do that as an email attachment, uh,
with some, you know, password protected PDF, you could do
that through a portal.
Uh, you could also complete that task,
do something like a secure file, uh, sharing system,
like a share file for example.
But then when you send the return, the question becomes
what are all the workflows
for the different scenarios that are gonna happen?
And we hit very simple ones at first.
Like eSign solutions, believe it
or not, didn't use to let you send to a taxpayer
and a spouse and, you know, on a 10 40 if you need
to get it completed, it has to go to a taxpayer first review
and sign and the spouse separately to review and sign.
And, and this was a, a crushing problem for firms.
They couldn't get mass adoption on e-sign
because the products
that were out there were very broad based and surface level,
and they didn't handle these workflows.
And that's just one example. We used to do a PowerPoint
that had like 38
or 39 points of crisis sending an e-sign document
that would break down the process,
and you never get full a hundred
percent adoption with your clients.
So to your point, it seemed easy.
There were actually products in the category
that we'd win very surface level,
broad-based type solutions.
And once we started seeing the depth of it,
we knew we were in for a decade of work,
Decade of work. And you
probably feel like there's decades
still to go for work. We're
We're still not there. I
mean, we, we've been working on this particular backend
return, uh, solution product for, you know, over 10 years,
and there's another 10 years of work to do.
And what you're trying to do is get a, a blanket
that covers every situational example
and they just keep coming.
It's, uh, it's like raising children. Yeah.
You think you know all the answers
and you realize you don't even know
1% of what needs to happen.
Yeah. And you know, we see, so, uh, uh, one side comment
with, with AI
and AI tools, we see a lot of companies
that come into the space, A lot of
outside companies actually that didn't grow up
as accountants who didn't come from inside the space.
That's a lot of the private equity money coming in here.
That's a lot of ai wanting to go industry to industry,
AI based, um, funded, you know, startups wanting to go
around and disrupt and change, you know,
old antiquated processes.
And you see these companies that, you know, say, well,
you know, with AI tools, we can build faster than you could.
It took you 10 years, but we can do it in two or three
because, um, the tooling is so good.
And what I've, what I see is that there are,
there is an ability for somebody to actually solve problems
that companies like Sure Prep or Safe Send or tr
or CCH had spent a long time solving, little Faster.
But the problem is, is that we all have the tools too.
I mean, we're using AI and all the modern tools,
and the difficulty isn't really whether you can
program the solution solution.
That's not the difficult part.
No takeaway from the great development teams out there.
It's that you have to understand the problems at depth,
and the workflows still have to be solved, you know,
one at a time, and you have to know what those are.
And that really becomes the hard part of it.
It's classic Dunning Kruger effect on that.
You know, you think you see it from the outside
and you like, I can solve that.
And you realize, all I was seeing was the first peak.
There are 10 more peaks beyond that,
but I still have to scale to get to a solution.
That's right. And how do you get all that knowledge,
and then how do you slice and dice that into something that,
you know, the the next challenge is, can people use it?
So if we built the best automated process for a firm
inside the firm, they love it.
They, they can train their staff, they can take time to,
to learn and understand the process.
They can adopt their processes to change to be better,
you know, based on the technology they're using.
But when it collaborates with a client of the firm,
what we term a taxpayer,
then you get into this different arena
where they don't care if you, how you're
actually creating a solution.
They don't care if it's AI based.
They don't care what great technology you have.
They don't care any about any of that.
What they care about is, is can they get
through the process without being frustrated?
And what the firm cares about is can my client interact
with this tax return we sent them without calling the firm
and complaining about the process, or being confused
or asking why are we making them do this?
And are we asking them to do many ta too many tasks
or too much manual work on their side?
Because ultimately that client experience becomes a part
of your brand good experience, good brand, bad experience,
bad brand kind of thing.
And we are really committed to that side of it.
So making things that are difficult for somebody
who has zero training to sit down for the first time
and complete is a really hard task.
I'd say that's probably one of the hardest tasks for us,
and what we focus a lot of time
and energy on is can we have somebody who's never interacted
with safes in before, for example, be able to sit down,
open the return up, get through the things we're asking them
to do, and get it back to the firm
in one shot without having a problem or frustration.
It's the iPhone analogy, it's Steve Jobs, you know,
I want this to be so simple to use that nobody ever wants
to examine another option on top of it.
That's right. And, and it turns out
that's pretty hard to do
Both making a phone and making a process. Yeah,
Just making it easy for somebody.
I mean, there's so many different profiles of people
that are tech savvy, not tech savvy.
I mean, uh, you know, people do this now from their phones,
they do it on the fly, they do it fast.
And, um, there's lots
of good experiences in people's lives when they interact
with collaborative technology
that if you have a bad experience, it stands out anymore.
Um, and I think, you know, post pandemic,
we all know there's a lot more people in that bucket
of digital and remote and willing to adopt
and use things that they didn't before.
Well, I mentioned it, uh, in the intro,
and then you just mentioned a couple things
doing this from your phone.
You mentioned ai.
We've, we've talked about private
equity coming into this space.
The last time that you were on,
I asked this similar question,
what has changed in the last 12
to 18 months from an industry perspective?
So taking a step back from Safe Send and,
and thinking more holistically, you know, um,
software solutions, picture of the industry in the last 12
to 18 months, what do you think has been the biggest change?
Um, well, first of all, we, we continue to see lots
of mergers and acquisitions in our space,
and a lot of PE money coming in.
Um, not only funding software companies,
but you know, buying and emerging firms, right?
And so there, there's that whole thing.
You still have this shift to advisory, which is, you know,
trickling down into a much bigger pool of professionals
who are trying to make a move to be, uh, more in
that advisory position.
That's been going on for some time,
but still it's a, it's a massive shift.
Um, I hate to be like so pragmatic here,
but it's the, the staffing crisis.
I mean, we're still pledged by an aging workforce
and, uh, declining interest in the profession.
Um, firms still struggled to recruit new talent,
and so there's all of that stuff going on.
But there's also this other thing going on called ai,
which is moving really fast,
and it has all sorts of different positioning in
what it means to affirm.
So, you know, some are the tools, the AI tools, um,
you know, the chat bots, the, the things that can help you
actually do your work faster and cleaner
and write an email for you or a, you know, a document,
or you can go to research or advice, do ai.
Those are the things that I think professionals need
to really clinging onto because they're extremely helpful
and many my professional life.
And then there's the other side of ai,
which is moving really fast that, you know,
we'll be replacing people in their jobs.
The reality is that that is not happening
as fast, I don't think, as people might, might assume,
but what is happening is we're able to use AI
to help uplift the staffing crisis
by actually having digital people that, that are doing work
that maybe you might use to outsource or, or offshore.
Um, you'll find that there's gonna be, uh, AI technologies
that can help actually have some buddy do that work,
who is a digi person, a digital person.
Um, and then where we are really, uh, focusing on ai, just
because I know it's kind of a black box, sometimes it's
for ai, like real examples.
And, and I think everybody's thinking about it the
last 12 to 18 months.
And for us, for a company like Scent don't, you don't have
to sit there and worry about what AI is doing.
It's helping us uplift our products to become more accurate.
It's helping us to be, um, better at the things
that we do from a development standpoint,
a resource standpoint.
But I'll give you a very clear example.
So Safes, um, built
a AI Gather product, okay?
So it sits on the front end of the tax process,
and it's all about gathering the data
and documents that, uh, a firm needs from their clients
to be able to go to the preparation stage
and preparing a tax return.
And for years, this problem really hadn't been addressed in
a meaningful way because the technology wasn't accurate
enough filled OCR technologies and,
and the way that we would read documents
and data, we never attacked it
because we didn't think we could
be a hundred percent accurate.
The AI tooling uplift helps us classify
and identify documents in a more accurate way,
pull the data we need,
and then be able to, uh, put those situations
into better context to understand how
to solve them than we ever have before.
Now, what does that mean to a firm
that really doesn't mean anything to you from having
to learn about ai?
What it means is, is that you'll get a easier,
more meaningful gather process that your client can go
through without as much frustration.
That information you're getting
into the firm is more accurate.
And somebody doesn't have to manually go through
and create a list of here's what we needed from the client,
here's what we got, here's the data we needed out of it.
This will just populate automatically.
And so that's kind of like the uplift AI is doing in Gather
that I think is pretty significant
because gathering is, is a big problem.
You mentioned a, uh, digital, digital people
to be able to assist and, and, you know, staffing shortage.
I, uh, I believe the next time that you
and I talk, we'll have to sit down on a beach somewhere.
We'll record it, and then we'll just have digital people
looking like we're, like, we're doing this podcast,
you know, from studios or something.
Right. Um, so continuing on the topic of AI a little bit,
um, what do you see as the biggest opportunities for
a practitioner, if I'm not worried about the,
the company side of ai?
What are you doing with ai?
What are the opportunities for me freeing up
that cycle space for me to be focused on ai?
Yeah. Um, I, I think there,
I think there is an interesting category here.
Um, I don't know how advanced these companies really are,
but it's something to pay attention to.
So if you're a firm that is, uh, been outsourcing
any work, and I know that a lot of firms do, right?
There's a staffing crisis.
So you have to uplift technology,
but you also gotta find staff somewhere,
which a lot of firms outsource.
There's a lot of companies in that business.
When I mentioned digital portions earlier, one of the places
that we're seeing AI being applied,
which could become very relevant if it's accurate,
if the work doesn't have to be, uh,
manually checked in a way that takes time from the firm,
where then it kind of like alleviates, like,
there's no point in doing right.
Let's just have a person do it anyway.
So the accuracy is gonna be very important.
But there are, uh, there's a few groups out there.
We're gonna see a lot more that are applying AI
to this sort of task.
And their pitch would be something like, um, you don't need
to outsource and have your client sign a 72 16.
You can for less money, get a more accurate result
without having to, uh, let your client know
that it's being outsourced
through the 72 16 document, for example.
I don't know where that's gonna head,
but you can see the disruption
because outsourcing is had its place for a number of years,
and especially with the staffing crisis,
it's continues to be there.
But this digital replacement of that is an interesting area
that if I was a firm, I pay a little bit of attention to,
because when that gets good enough, it may be something
that, um, is gonna be very valuable for firms to adopt.
Other than that, I mean, you know, I, I don't know,
do you have something clean up your emails?
I mean, I, I wanna be the best English, uh, person
that I can be, but, um, I, you know, it's helpful.
It's helpful just some of the things that are,
that the summary on your phone.
I mean, I have AI on, on my phone
and it summarizes my emails and messages very succinctly.
It's not perfect, but it's very helpful.
So I don't have to read through something.
I can get a one line summary
and decide if it's something I need
to prioritize now or later.
If we drill down and we begin
to talk about right now our conference coming up in May,
what are you most excited to talk about
or most excited for people to come up
and ask questions about there at the place?
Absolutely. So of course we expect, um, there
to be a fair number of questions about the Thomson
Warriors acquisition to face it.
Yeah. I'm sure you haven't gotten
any questions about that yet. We
Spend, we've spent a lot of time, uh,
educating our clients about what's happening
and, you know, there's a lot of fear there too.
Wow. You know, we were very, we loved the safe in brand.
They listened to us, they built things we wanted, um,
and we're afraid that that, you know,
we won't see the development continue in the products
and what's gonna happen.
So we're definitely there
to make people comfortable with that.
I think also we have
to show real progress in what we're doing.
So for example, we need to come out with more features
and more integration to show
that there is a development path that's real,
and it's not just talk
and prove that, uh, we're able
to do things a little more deep and faster
because of the acquisition.
And I, so that's really on us to show you in, in a demo
or in a conversation when you come by.
But there's two things that I think,
um, should be talked about.
One is, you know, we say
that we've developed the last mile at the end
of the tax process for delivery or returns
and completion by decline at the firm.
There's another piece of that called e-sign to E-file.
And for example, the, uh, acquisition of Safe
by Thomson Reuters will give us access to the APIs
that we need to be able to have an eSign to EAL process
that's automated so the firm doesn't have to do it manually.
So I think that's gonna be a big uplift,
and you'll hear us talk about that.
And then, uh, the market doesn't know as well as they need
to, that we built, um, gather AI
in 2024, less than a year ago, we rolled out Gather ai.
We already have 800 firms that have adopted it.
It's highly accurate
and it's getting really high marks right now.
And so I think if you don't have a really good front end
gather solution, that's definitely something you should stop
by and talk to us about and just see what's going on in
technology, whether we're the right option for you or not.
Just see what's possible in that area
to help ease some of that frustration.
That's fantastic. I'm excited to get a chance to sit down
and just take a look at Gather AI a little bit more.
It sounds, um, for someone who used to,
when I had my own business, keep the shoebox of receipts
and then have all the paperwork
and I'd bring it to my accountant
and he would just dread the day
that I was coming into the office.
Um, oh yeah. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot.
I mean, somebody's gotta do all of that manual matching
and classification and data extraction and work,
and I mean, it's, it's a big uplift.
It's a big,
Looking ahead to the next two years.
Um, Andrew, what do you see in your crystal ball
as big changes or opportunities
or even disruptions challenges? Yeah,
Yeah, absolutely. So,
um, I think, you know, last year when, when we talked,
um, I mentioned every year for the last few years, uh,
I've released something called the Future of Tax
and Accounting Automation.
They're just seven predictions.
We did one for 2024 and, and one for 2025 in December.
That's on the safes and website under our articles.
It's, it's easy to find.
Um, but just some of the things
that we mentioned in this article are again, you know,
automation, automation automation, streamlining workflows
to reduce manual tasks.
I know it sounds kind of boring
and the same, the same old, same old,
but go back to the staffing crisis.
It's just so important for firms to uplift the automation
with technology so that they can do more with less staff.
And it's not always less,
staff is probably not the right word.
It's usually a movement of the people they have into more,
uh, client interaction positions
for better service and uplifting that.
Um, like when I talk to admins
and firms, they don't wanna do some
of the stuff that they have to do.
So when you automate it, they're happy
to transition into something
that's more meaningful for the firm.
Yep. Um, the other is, uh, consolidating tech stacks.
So what happens
with firms is they get a little technology exhaustion.
They end up with a lot of logos, a lot of different tools,
and sometimes they just compile these tools
over a period of time.
So they need to kind of slow down,
reevaluate their tech stacks,
and they might find out that things that they're keeping,
uh, as a technology
and paying for are already built into
something else that they're using.
'cause sometimes technology
and a firm just is a feature set
of another platform that you're using.
And we see that all the time when somebody buys Safe
and we say, why are you using any signature solution?
It's included. Why are you paying that logo?
Or Why are you using a secure file
transfer solution that you're paying for?
Because it's already included.
And firms don't always know that.
So I just see consolidation of Tech stacks.
A lot of the CIOs I talk
to are big on consolidating the tech stacks right now.
Um, obviously there's AI that we talked about
that it's gonna continue, um, to be something
that you just have to keep learning more and more about.
We talked about some of the areas,
well, that'll be impactful.
And then I'm gonna kind of throw this one out there.
It scares people when I say it. Uh oh.
But my traditional tax organizers are gonna go extinct.
And, um, firms are gonna embrace alternatives
and won't necessarily need them.
Now I say that don't throw your organizers out if you're
still throwing some in paper
or you're even sending them digital.
It's not time to 100%.
Get rid of those across the board for every client now.
But you need to pay attention and understand that over time.
I mean, we offer an electronic organizer that,
and we'll probably offer that for the next decade or so,
because firms will want it and use it,
but it won't be necessary to use it.
Uh, it, it'll go extinct. Mm-hmm. It just will.
Um, so that's something that I, that I like to point out.
And, you know, again, don't get rid
of your organizer today if you don't want to.
You don't have to change today.
Uh, going from paper to digital
and an organizer is still a really important
leap for a lot of firms.
But they were, they'll be obsolete at some point.
The data will come in another way.
You ever been to Nashville before?
I have, actually. I've been to Nashville quite a bit.
It's one of my favorite cities. Okay.
Um, my, my family has a house, uh, in Hendersonville. Okay.
Outside of Nashville on Old Hickory Lake.
It's actually, it's, uh, you know,
where Taylor Swift is from.
Um, so we go out there quite a bit.
It's quiet and slow out there, but we, but we come in
and we go to Broadway and we go to, you know,
do things in Nashville quite a bit, concerts and things.
So I, I really like it
For an attendee to right now who's never been to Nashville
before, what do you say to them?
Absolutely. Make sure you do this thing
or see this one place.
Yeah. Look a absolutely.
So of course everybody's gonna go to Broadway.
If you've never been, um, you gotta go to Broadway
and walk around and check out the, the scene there.
Some people really like it and,
and some people you know, don't like it so much.
It just depends on
how crowded it is and how you feel about that.
But you gotta go and, and see Broadway
and check that out, you know, also just find a list of the,
the different music, um, venues and bands that are in town.
I mean, there's a Grand Ole Opry. Mm-hmm.
If that's something that's on your list.
It's a, a little outside of Nashville,
but it's worth the journey.
Um, and then I would always, you know,
the Bluebird Cafe is another one.
There's a, there's a place that is not historically, uh,
Nashville, but it's a place that I go
to a lot when we're on Broadway.
It's actually Justin Timberlakes Club.
It's called jps 1230 Club. It's the top of Broadway.
So if you're going away from the river away from the stadium
and you're kind of going up, it's,
it's a great place to get out of the crowd.
They have country music downstairs,
but on the third floor, they have an incredible supper club.
And it is just top-notch dinner. It's very nice.
You don't have to dress up,
but it feels like you're in a place where you would,
and they have great kind of sultry music from jazz to, to r
and b to just very, very good, um, supper club vibes.
And I like that course lot.
That's awesome. I'm gonna put that on my list.
Um, you may not know this,
but do you know,
will the Safe Send crew be bringing any swag with them?
So, I don't know
what we're bringing this year in particular,
but in the past, I mean, we've given away iPads,
switch game systems, golf balls are always very popular.
We bring the Yetis.
Um, we've always got things like hand sanitizer
and breath mins and this kind of stuff.
Um, we usually, we give away bags.
You know, we gave a flamethrower away at a tech
a couple years ago, and it was like a big deal to one
of our clients wanted in a, in a raffle.
And I, so there's no telling what they're gonna bring,
but they, we have loads
and loads of stuff, uh, we're stopping by and picking up,
Well, I'm gonna put in a plug for socks.
'cause when I go to conferences, that's the thing
that I love to do is get Oh, yeah.
Socks as much as possible.
I have an entire drawer full of my conference socks,
but I might change
and start collecting flame throwers now
at this point. I, that,
That was the, that was one of the strangest out
of the box things that we did.
And everybody remembers,
and I promise you, the guy who got it, whether
or not it has big Safe send brand on,
he knows exactly who you are. He's,
He's definitely told that story to a lot of
People. Absolutely.
Well, I asked you this question the last time
that we spoke, and your answer was, um, you would go,
you would give yourself the advice to find more mentors.
So I'm going to ask this question again
and see if your answer has changed.
If you could go back in time 10 years
and give yourself one piece of advice in 30 seconds,
what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Yeah, I do remember that my answer was find more mentors.
That's always really top of my list.
I feel like I found some and I wish I'd found more.
I think they're great for everybody, so I can't,
you know, say that enough.
Um, the other thing, I mean, it's a little cliche,
but just enjoy the little moments in the journey.
There's a lot of frustrations in the journey.
I mean, there's a lot of, uh, hair pulling moments,
building a software business.
Um, but you know what, the journey is, what it's all about.
And that's the fun.
So, flipping the question around then,
if you could go 10 years into the future,
and in 30 seconds ask yourself one question for advice,
what would you ask yourself?
You know, it would be 20 years ago, did I listen
to the advice that I gave myself in the last question?
And if I didn't explain why,
Explain why I, why I am still not listening.
I hope I would be better than that. Help,
Help me help you. Right.
Help, help, help me. Help me.
Exactly. Uh, Andrew, as we wrap up, uh,
again, thank you very much.
It's always a pleasure getting a chance
to sit down and talk with you.
Any closing comments, thoughts?
No, just look forward to, uh, seeing colleagues
and friends in Nashville.
Can't wait. You guys have a great conference. Always
Do it. Gonna be
awesome. I'm gonna extend the
invite to you, dear listener.
Um, keep practicing, keep evolving,
keep uplifting each other,
and please feel free to come join us in Nashville.
As Andrew mentioned, we'll be there May 19th
through the 21st for right now, 2025.
As a bonus for you as a listener of this podcast, if you go
to right works.com/right now, 2025,
you could use the offer code POD 300,
again, POD 300.
You'll receive $300 off your registration.
I want to remind you, there's an ancient Chinese proverb
that says, the best time to plant a tree was years ago.
The second best time is right now.
There's your queue, there's your opportunity.
The best time to make a change was years ago.
Second best time is right now.
Andrew, thank you again so much for your time today.
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. As always.