Listen & subscribe on the platform of your choice
Featuring: Tony Wilson, Accquip
In episode 109 of Agency Bytes, I sit down with Tony Wilson, founder of Accquip and a financial powerhouse for agencies who want to stop flying blind. Tony shares his story of stepping out of corporate during the Great Resignation and stepping into his passion—helping agency owners build profitable businesses they actually love running.
We break down Days Till Zero, a simple but powerful metric Tony developed to help agency owners understand exactly how long their cash will last—and how to make smarter, proactive decisions before things get tight. Tony also dives into gross margin benchmarks, how overlooked they are, and why net profit alone doesn’t tell the full story.
Plus, we talk through:
• Red light, yellow light, and green light cash benchmarks every owner should know
• Project-level gross margin mistakes (and how to fix them)
• Why time tracking is about clarity, not micromanagement
• Smart investments vs. sitting on cash
If you’re ready to stop reacting and start running your agency with financial confidence, this one’s for you.
Key Bytes
• Tony Wilson's journey reflects the empowerment of agency owners.
• Accquip focuses on educating entrepreneurs about accounting.
• Understanding financial metrics leads to better decision-making.
• Days till zero is a crucial metric for agency health.
• Proactive financial management can prevent crises.
• Cash reserves should be monitored regularly.
• Gross margins are vital for assessing agency profitability.
• Identifying project profitability helps in resource allocation.
• Time tracking provides valuable operational insights.
• Agencies should prioritize selling over playing business.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Agency Bites and Tony Wilson's Journey
01:37 The Concept of Equip and Its Mission
03:46 Understanding Days Till Zero: A Key Metric for Agencies
08:54 Proactive Financial Management for Agencies
11:34 Cash Reserves: Understanding Red, Yellow, and Green Light Zones
14:39 The Importance of Gross Margins in Agency Profitability
18:21 Identifying and Addressing Overhead and Project Profitability
21:02 Tools and Systems for Effective Time Tracking and Financial Management
24:11 Rapid Fire Questions and Closing Thoughts
Tony Wilson’s entrepreneurial journey was shaped by three pivotal moments: launching a business with his brother in 2010, witnessing his roommate’s life-changing pivot from carpenter to software developer, and becoming a father—which ignited his drive to lead by example. In 2021, Tony joined “The Great Resignation” to help digital agency owners grow thriving, profitable businesses without sacrificing their well-being. Through Accquip, he is on a mission to empower agency owners to build the businesses they love without going bankrupt in the process.
-
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.083)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. Today, my guest is Tony Wilson, founder of Equip. Tony's journey from launching his first business to joining the great resignation in 2021 has been driven by his desire to help agency owners grow profitable, fulfilling businesses without sacrificing their wellbeing. Through Equip, he's empowering agency owners to create companies they truly love.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (00:01.24)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Gooberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. Today, my guest is Tony Wilson, founder of Equip. Tony's journey from launching his first business to joining the great resignation in 2021 has been driven by his desire to help agency owners grow profitable, fulfilling businesses without sacrificing their well-being. Through Equip, he's empowering agency owners to create companies they truly love.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:30.329)
I really love that mission, the fact that you have like empowerment in there and just how far that goes. Tony, it's great to see you. Thanks for joining me.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (00:30.518)
I really love that mission effect you had like empowerment in there.
to see you. for joining us. Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Steve. I really appreciate it. Yeah. So great resignation.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:40.815)
Yeah, so great resignation. I didn't realize you were one of the great resigners.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (00:45.102)
was indeed, you know, I'm here we are in middle of COVID and I'm walking around the park and listen to all these podcasts talking about financial independence, this financial independence, that, and this through line of start your own thing comes up. And I'm like, I'd wanted to be an entrepreneur forever. And then finally, I'm just like, I think it's time. I think it's time. And as we all know, great resignation, hop out into the you're working for yourself. And that was great.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:10.619)
I think that when the calling is there, it wakes up the entrepreneurship that's always been there, at least my experience and many others that I've spoke to, even if you're like listening to Gary Vee, things like that. And so I just think that when the calling comes, it's been there and you're finally like at a point where you can listen to it and like, know, forge whatever you need to forge ahead with. so congrats, my condolences, welcome all of the above. So.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (01:16.151)
Yes.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (01:34.894)
Very true.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:37.847)
So talk about Equip, I love the name also. What's the backstory and what are doing there?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (01:40.92)
Yeah.
Yeah, so equip is a combination of the word accounting and equipping. I'd always wanted, my vision had always been, well, I fundamentally believe that if you as an entrepreneur understand the language of business, which is accounting, you will make such better decisions in your business than if you didn't understand that language of business. And so just that core concept and that core kind of differentiator of being really education-
focused and education first. And I just I love to teach I love to, to have those light bulb moments both with clients, but also with my people, right? Like, when you see them flourish, because of the learnings that they're having. Yeah, it's, it's been super, super impactful. So started this off originally geared towards just creating educational content, and then realizing like, well, I also kind of need to put food on the table. And so being educational content.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:39.387)
Wait, educational content's not paying the bills? Come on.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (02:42.286)
Unfortunately, not yet. Apparently you need quite a bit of a following for people to want to buy your courses. So, decided that we would get into more of the done for you service as opposed to the DIY education. Because I'm the sole breadwinner in our family and we've got four children under the age of four. had to do something. Right. That's true. Under the age of four. Our oldest is three and a half.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:01.477)
the kids to work what are you doing come on wait four kids under the age of four
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:09.733)
Wow, and then you have twins somewhere in there.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (03:11.874)
We do. second and third are identical twin girls. Not yet.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:16.465)
Bless you, man. What a beautiful gift. But yeah, they're not earners yet, I guess. Yeah. So you're working with agencies primarily or exclusively? Yeah. And helping them get a grasp on their numbers and the financial health of their business or lack thereof. When you and I first had a conversation a while ago, you introduced me to the concept of days till zero.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (03:26.88)
I would say primarily, yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:46.533)
has kind of been spinning around in my brain since then. I've spoken to a number of agency owners where that's come up as a topic and talk about what that means to you and to the health of a business.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (03:57.87)
Yeah, so this is a metric that we came up with days to $0. It's this concept that especially in agency life, you always have a day in the future where your account is projected to hit $0. But yet, for whatever reason, we don't know what that number is. Instead, what we do is we try to get close to it by saying, oh, I have
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:14.907)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (04:19.456)
six months of expenses in the bank account, or three months expenses in the bank account. Or if you're like most agencies right now, because of how brutal 2023 and 2024 had been, you're probably like, maybe I've got a couple weeks in the bank before I run to zero. But I think this constant undercurrent and fear of not really knowing what that number is, drives us to make a lot of reactive decisions. And so what we like to do is we like to check in on that on a weekly basis.
so that you know how is that number changing. So again, you're making more proactive decisions. You're not waiting till like, crap, I can't make payroll next week.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:58.192)
Yeah. Yeah. Or, I should have let somebody go three months ago or two months ago. There's more of a proactive planning process. Too many P's there as opposed to yet being super reactive. What are the, I guess, what are the key factors that are feeding into this? Cause it's not just bank account and also sidebar question. Is that account that you refer to just the operating account or is it all the money in the bank? Like how do you play there?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (05:24.494)
Great question. So addressing that question first, what we'll typically look at is whatever your liquid, your liquid assets are relatively liquid assets. So we're typically just looking at your, cash or cash equivalents. If you've got an investment balance, that's just in like a, like a brokerage account that you can quickly liquidate, might include that number in there too. But if it's like tied up in a different investment that might take
months before you can get to it. We're not going to include that in that number. But yeah, if it's in a savings account, anything like that, those are all included in our overall cash balance. And then in terms of like what goes into creating that days to zero dollars or projecting that out, we think that pipeline data, CRM data, especially in agency life is critical to good cashflow forecasting. And so we actually get into what are the deals that you have in your pipeline?
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:12.497)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (06:20.93)
What are the what's the projected the estimated amount of that deal size, and then also based on where they are in the deal stages, there's maybe like a higher percentage likelihood that something's gonna close based on you know, if it's further down the pipe. So we factor all of that in. And then we marry that up with where what are you planning on spending in your business? So kind of a little bit of budgeting. You marry those two things together along with what's your current cash balance?
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:44.785)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (06:49.282)
and you get yourself to days to zero dollars.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:51.899)
Yeah, I guess the biggest difference there with what I typically see as owners keeping their eyeballs on is certainly there's the expenses and maybe they're mapping that out week to week in a column or whatever in a spreadsheet. But I don't see as often taking into consideration the value of my pipeline and time to, not even time to zero, but time till opportunity A is gonna hit and opportunity B is gonna hit and how they're gonna impact
what that days till zero are. How do you, agencies that are running on profit first, how does this integrate or coincide?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (07:25.038)
Yeah.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (07:32.034)
Hmm.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (07:35.778)
Yeah. Well, I'd say, you know, profit first being mainly a method of, of setting money aside so that you have money for taxes, or you've got money to, you know, make payroll and that kind of stuff. I think you can, it can certainly work because again, we're looking at the total picture of all of your different bank accounts where profit first is get you physically moving cash into different bank accounts. I think more so what people should be focusing on in this is
not making a decision, like when we're talking about like, you know, how many, what does our pipeline look like? We want to make decisions that take into consideration the fact that we actually have a really sizable deal that's coming down the pipeline. We can't afford to get rid of some of our staff, for example, because if we do, then we have no way of executing on all this really good pipeline.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:23.985)
Mm-hmm.
That's one of the most common kind of chasing tail challenges that I see agency owners. see this cliff coming up, we're gonna drop off and I can't get rid of these people because man, if all these deals close, if half these deals close, how are we gonna service them? So I mean, that's a massive, massive stress for agency owners. so days till zero, knowing that, all right, I've got that much cash reserve for four months, six months, what's your recommendation there on how many days they should have?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (08:54.53)
Yeah, great question. So we came up with these different benchmarks. So we say if you're less than 60 days, you're in red light territory. So when you're in red light territory, it's like all hands on deck. We're stemming the bleeding, all this kind of stuff. once you drop below 60 days, you're typically also going to be running into timing issues. If you're above 60 days, you're still going to be OK. You're probably well capitalized enough where
You don't have to worry about the timing of when payroll comes out. You start dropping below 60 days, you might go from 55 days to $0 to like, tomorrow I can't make payroll. So under 60, it's so quick. It's so quick. Yeah, when you're that low, it's really quick. So it's all hands on deck. So we're talking about things like we're making more emergency measures, whether that's laying people off. Although I would argue you probably should have been laying people off before you hit 60 days.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:31.685)
Yep. It happens quick when you're at that low. Yeah.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (09:50.472)
Certainly, if you have a line of credit available to you, you're probably looking at when do we need to draw on that line of credit and having proactive conversations with your bankers. Because that's another big thing. If I can just say this right now, being proactive with your conversation with your banker and the people who are holding your line of credit goes a long way in maintaining that relationship. Because if you come to them, because you're like, I can't make payroll tomorrow, I need this today. That's going to be a huge red flag for them versus, hey, you know,
we're coming up to our clients gonna pay us next week, but we have to make payroll this week. Can you is it okay if we draw on this, you know, to float that one week difference works a lot better for for bankers.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:32.357)
Yeah, talk through more of a bridge of a gap as opposed to I'm screwed. I need a bailout. They don't want to be the bailout. They want to be the bridge. Yeah.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (10:37.249)
Exactly.
That's right. That's right. And I think it's also really helpful to have this this days to zero dollars number in mind, because one of the ways it's been working for our clients is we start to frame decisions and money decisions specifically, in terms of like, how many days impact is that going to have, right? So, for example, when we're talking about, hey, I think we need to buy this one thing, or I think we need to start the subscription or something like that.
Can we afford it is always the question I'm asked. And if I look at their days to zero dollars, I'm like, well, currently you have 106 days until you hit zero dollars. If you make this purchase decision, it's going to be 104 days to zero dollars. And I'm like, two days, not going to make a difference. I'm fine from a cashflow perspective. And immediately it's like, I feel way more comfortable with that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:28.657)
Yeah. Are there other stages? So red light is 60 days. What's like 61 to nine? You're like, what are the different levels?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (11:34.309)
Yep. Yep. 61 Yep. 61 and 90 is yellow light. 90 to 120 is green light and then anything above 120 or like you're golden. Like if you're if you're 120 plus 121 plus you're in a really good spot. In fact, I would even argue that there actually comes a point in time. I'm going to guess many of your listeners probably are not in the spot.
But there does come a point in time where you actually may have too much cash in which I would say it's probably burning a hole in your pocket. You need to find ways to reinvest it back in your business. but knowing that many people are probably not in that spot and probably won't be for a little while, we don't need to go to that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:14.417)
So but in for those rare cases, what are the tax implications or just the dangers of having, I don't know, seven, eight months of cash reserves in the bank?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (12:23.692)
Hmm, great question. So when it comes to the tax implications, there's actually not much. It's going to be more so on the opportunity cost of that capital. Right. So we all know inflation is what it is. The last couple of years, inflation has been wild. It's been really, really high. So, so they say that, you know, any, any cash that's sitting idle that you don't actually need to use in your day to day business. this excess, the reserves, the savings.
effectively you're just losing money by having it sit there on the shelf. So the way that I liked like in this is, man, if I were to work with Steve Gooberman, I could probably track a certain ROI to the investment in the coaching that I get with Steve. And man, if, if the work that I do with Steve generates five times the return on whatever I'm spending on my coaching. Well, that is a way better investment than it's sitting in the bank account. So I'm going to be pushing my clients towards that end.
A lot of times what I see, we hold ourselves back in agency world. We hold ourselves back from doing the right investments in our sales and marketing because we just think of it as an expense. We think we're wasting money and we're not. We're just not.
Steve / Agency Outsight (13:36.913)
Yeah, they've got to be seen as investments and the point, one of the key points of profitability in a business like ours and a service business is to make it better, optimize process people, all of that. And so are you taking the time to re-examine your positioning, re-examine the systems that you're using? Can you bonus people out with some of that cash and increase morale and things like that? What are some of the other kind of red
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (13:48.728)
That's right.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (14:02.062)
Yeah. What are some of the other kind of red?
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:05.041)
I want to say red light, like alarming numbers that you monitor with clients through your process.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (14:10.754)
Yeah, so we're talking about the days to zero dollars mainly as a cash flow measure. Cash flow is always gonna be downstream from profitability, right? So to the extent in your agency that you are getting strong profits, you have a strong profit model, you're necessarily going to see eventually a cash flow implication of that strong profitability. So if we could just go upstream here for a minute, we'll leave behind cash flow.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:16.507)
Mm-hmm.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (14:39.47)
for just a second, talk about profitability. The number one thing that I see is a breakdown in the gross margin. And for listeners who aren't familiar, gross margins essentially your revenues less your direct costs equals your gross profit. Gross profit divided by revenue is your gross margin. The general rule, golden rule of agency life is anything less than 50 % is likely too low.
There's an argument made that you know if we're working primarily with contractors or if you are a large agency Maybe it's okay for you to be a little bit lower on that But certainly if you are a studio or like a more boutique agency I want to be seeing 55 % maybe 60 % depending on the type of work that you're doing So gross margins are a big one
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:26.193)
Interestingly, I know more agencies that really only focus on net profit. And so their target is like, oh, am I at 20 or 30 %? know, and if below 20, that's the alarm. I know very few agencies who as a practice, just through conversation and discovery are tracking gross profit. And I think that that's a huge miss because I think you can see a lot more coming sooner if you're tracking that on a regular verse, just focusing on the bottom line.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (15:30.946)
Hmm
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (15:47.243)
yeah.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (15:53.324)
Yeah. And here's why that that happens most of the time. If we're honest, most of the time, the reason why net profit is really the only thing we're tracking as agencies is because our chart of accounts and how we structure our accounting data or finance data is a dumpster fire. So what you get is you get revenues and you get expenses. And it's just a mess. I mean, you know what I'm talking about, right? And so, you know, what we what we
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:13.905)
Yep. Yep.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (16:20.302)
part of what we do in our work is we structure that data so that it's really easy to find what the gross margins are in a moment's notice. And why I think it's so wise, especially if you're a million plus in revenue, like there's no questions, you should be tracking your gross margins, is because you're really flying blind if you have a let's say a net profit margin of 20 % to your point. We could say, yeah, 20%, that's healthy.
But I don't know if that's 20 % because well, our gross margins are garbage. Oh, but by the way, we're also not spending anything on sales and marketing. Cause what really what you have is a 20 % net profit margin. That's eventually going to become a death spiral next year because you don't have any lead gen, rev gen, anything like that. have no rev gen engine at all. It looks great on paper today, but it's only a matter of time before your thing implodes. Conversely, if I know what my gross margin is, I could say,
I make an excellent gross margins and I'm reinvesting a ton of them and that's how I get to 20%. Now I have a healthy business model, but you don't know that if you're just looking at your net profit.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:25.333)
And the other kind of piece of that is, if I know I've got really healthy gross margins, but my net profits are tanked, I have a more clear picture that I can look at to understand why.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (17:37.484)
Yes, that's right. Yeah, it's not that you are underselling yourself. If you have strong gross margins, it typically means you're probably pricing yourself competitively. You're doing a good job pricing yourself and or your labor costs are commensurate. Like you're not overpaying necessarily. What it probably means is you may either have some too much overhead bloat or really inefficient rev gen systems.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:04.421)
Or both, yeah. Is there a, I don't wanna say formula, but kind of a best practice that you recommend to do a review on bloated overhead or see where there's redundancies in systems or things like that that could help increase gross profit?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (18:21.1)
Yeah, that's a great, well on the gross profit side. we're talking, now we're talking revenues and direct costs on that side of things. I, think typically what you find is rarely is it poor gross margins across the board. Usually what it is, is you have some incredible clients, incredible projects, and then you've just got these absolute garbage projects that you're working on that are just dragging everything down, right?
almost all the time that that's what's happening. So I would say probably the best bang for your buck is to get down at a project level to understand your profitability. Because that's when you can start to say with greater specificity, okay, these types of projects, whether it's the type of industry we're working in, or the type of work that we're doing, are just dragging us down. Meanwhile, these are 65 70 % gross margins, we're going to double down on this so that we can maximize our gross gross margins.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:14.417)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:19.587)
Most shops, is a specific delivery where they are bleeding on a specific, whether it's on an account or a type of project across multiple accounts. I would say the most popular is like over-servicing a PR account or customized web dev and pricing customized web dev wrong is just a, just a, they get just destroyed on profits. And then they do a post-mortem like, why did we lose so much money on this? Cause we didn't know how long it was going to take to build that and this and the other thing. So.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (19:41.72)
Yeah.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (19:47.97)
Yeah. Or simply put, like you talk about like web dev. I'm thinking about a web development client of mine is, you know, working on a project. And when we peel back the layers, we see, well, this one project, so these types of projects, we tend to just have really bad gross margins. What is happening? that's because they had like, the client just could not make up their minds about the website copy. And so we had to keep on making updates and yada, yada, yada. And so what you can do is now with a greater
precision, you can also update your process, your operating processes to say, well, part of our agreement is that you get X number of revisions. Boom. We've now put some scope and defining lines so that we don't have these massive overruns like we've had in the past.
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:31.825)
Yeah. And, or, you know, revising the process to say, we're going to use dummy copy until you know your copy is finalized in a Google doc or in a whatever other process. And we're not going to implement until any, any updates after that, his client responsibility or over, um, revisions, things like that. So yeah, you get, you get the opportunity to look back and say, all right, where are we losing it? How can we adjust it? So we don't lose it every time or any more times. Um, yeah, that's a big loss. Yeah.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (20:49.774)
Perfect.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (20:58.232)
Yeah, that's a big boss. Totally.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:01.553)
Talk about tools and things that you recommend agencies should be leaning into as far as time tracking, reviewing numbers, things like that.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (21:02.744)
you
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (21:11.788)
Yeah. Well, first of all, I would say time tracking is good. I know that that's it can be a dirty word, especially from our design oriented agencies, more creative agencies, rather. I will just say my heart behind time tracking on why I think it's so valuable is not because it's something we're going to micromanage people on because that's never proved to be helpful. But rather, it's just one more set of data that helps us to just have a greater insight into what's happening.
especially from an operations perspective. So, you know, we're talking about time tracking, for example. I think a pretty common one in the space is Harvest. If you are not going to go the route of doing kind of a more all-in-one project management solution, Harvest does a pretty great job for time tracking. A lot of my clients who were on other time tracking tools have...
since migrated to Harvest, I also personally like Harvest because I have access to that API and I can pull a lot of the data and it makes my life a lot easier, but I do really like Harvest. besides that, I know some of these more all-in-one solutions for larger agencies. One of my clients just hopped on Forecast, Forecast app, which is not Harvest Forecast, it's something else. Yes, that's right.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:31.153)
Yep, it's a separate one, but Harvest does have a forecast app plug-in as well.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (22:35.63)
That's right. Yeah, and a tool like that, they've got time tracking in it or time cards in it as well. I know Parallax, think also, I think they have time tracking as well, but I'm not familiar. Those would be for much larger agencies, I think.
Steve / Agency Outsight (22:50.641)
Yeah, okay. Yeah, good stuff. think too many agencies are kind of running by the seat of their pants and being very reactive and need to get a better hold on their numbers, build out whether it's their own dashboard or leverage a company, an organization, and systems like you guys have in place. But certainly, get, listen, get above a quarter million, half a million, closer to a million, get it off the owner's plate, get somebody who's financially sound-minded to operate in
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (22:52.12)
Yeah, good stuff. think too many.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (23:09.72)
yet.
get it off the owners plate.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:19.897)
as a CFO or whatever you want call it, and track these numbers and keep them on a dashboard so they're front of mind.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (23:26.988)
Yeah. And I would say to that to that end, my experience has been some of the best, best outcomes for my clients have not necessarily come from the people who are gorgeous, like not involved at all in numbers. Typically, these are people who are very well self taught people who could probably make something work and come up with their own dashboards. But just merely taking that off their plate, they can now have such a much more fresh perspective. And then
They might have already had an inkling in one direction, but to have that second voice to come in with their own data, to either affirm that or potentially come against that point of view, that can be really, really valuable to have that kind of gut check.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:11.951)
Yeah, I love that. So this is the inaugural episode where I built the GPT to deliver my random rapid fire questions to close the episode out with. So first question for you is if your business had a mascot, what would it be?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (24:21.102)
Love it.
you had a dog, would be? would probably have to be some type of dog. have been, my wife is 100 % she's like, oh, we need a dog. I'm just like, we have four children under four. What's a piff? You'll never know.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:32.623)
Are you a dog family?
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:42.811)
What's a fifth? You'll never notice. What's a childhood hobby that you wish you never gave up?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (24:49.335)
probably playing piano, to be honest. It's it's therapeutic. It's such it just engages your brain in a such a different way. I love I love it piano.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:58.939)
Yeah. Yeah, I wish I was musical. I'm the most unmusical person in the world. What is one thing that agencies waste way too much time on?
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (25:09.844)
I would say trying to play business. Man, it sounds so bad, but like so much of the work just needs to be like, just get out there and sell. Just get out there, have conversations and focus on the selling and less on the how am I going to scale this thing? Like I think, yeah, I could go on. It could be a whole other episode about that, but I would just say not, yeah, don't play business too much.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:13.169)
Hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:38.597)
Love it. We'll do a part two on don't play business too much. Tony, thank you. Appreciate you joining me. Thank you for sharing your time and your experience and wisdom with us all. I appreciate you.
Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA (25:50.43)
I appreciate you. Thanks for having me on.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:52.421)
Yeah.