One Step at a Time

Today, our guest is Byron Patrick. Byron has a personal mission, which I love, which is to help CPAs and small businesses to leverage technology for their success. He once was a practicing CPA, and found a passion, which we want to talk about as well, but discovered a passion for technology. So we need him in our profession for sure, and we need him because he’s a lot fun to talk to. So, Byron, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks so much for having me, Randy. Appreciate the intro.

Yeah. Well, I just winged it. I don’t know if you noticed that.

Well, hey. You said you needed me multiple times. So how could I deny that?

That’s right. So, you and I met—see, we’re already one requirement down. We said we had to laugh on this show. Look at that.

Alright. Easy. 

You and I met, well, you could correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I remember, we met recently through, you were doing the—you were the brain behind Scott Scarano’s Accountant Bracket Challenge, and that’s how we met. And that is, we hadn’t met before that, right? Or am I off base?

No, no, that to the best of my knowledge was our first time. Despite your voice being in my ear for many hours, prior to that, you know, that was our first interaction.

You mean, you’ve actually listened to the podcast or my webinars, or—I didn’t know anybody that.

The podcast. It’s frequently on my morning walk with the dogs.

Wow! I am now honored. I appreciate that. So let’s talk about—you know what? Before we jump into things, because there’s so many things that we could talk about, just the fun we have in our profession, but how did the Accountant Bracket Challenge come about? I know you were the technology brains behind that, but give us a little idea, you and Scott Scarano, how you came up with that idea?

You know, it was kind of this weird, you know, the world works and just mysterious ways. And I was actually in a bit of a break, if you will, between roles. And I was playing with this app called Bubble, which is this no code platform for you know, kind of like wannabe developers like me, to build stuff. And I was playing with it kind of trying to figure out, like, could I do something with it. And simultaneous to that, you know, Scott and I were talking about Accounting High stuff, and he and I actually met central to both of us—he’s in North Carolina, I’m in Maryland, so we met in Richmond, Virginia at the Virginia Society of CPAs office. They were nice enough, they’re friends of mine, nice enough to give us some space. 

And we were just kind of brainstorming a bunch of stuff. You know, while we were there kicking it, all of a sudden, I just had this idea and he was like, oh my god, and he pulled out, like, a note where he had written down a very similar idea. And I said, I think I can build this. Like, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I think I could build this. And this would be like, you know, I have always been like a builder. I like building [things] and he’s like, let’s go. And the beauty about Scott is, like, he’s just like, reckless abandon at times, and he’ll let people who, you know, like, throw knives for a living, throw knives. So, yeah, so I started building it and, you know, we kept just kind of iterating on ideas of how to do it, and next thing you know, I mean, over 2,000 people logged into this silly little app that I built. It was pretty fun.

Oh, yeah. I had a good time. And I should have said this in case anybody didn’t know what we were talking about, but Byron and Scott put together this, you know, bracket challenge kind of mimicking the NCAA tournament, basketball tournament, but for items that are useful to individuals within the accounting profession. So there’s a bunch of different categories, and it was a good time. So I just want to thank you for doing that. I had a lot of fun with that.

Of course. I had a lot of fun too.

Alright. So I didn’t really explain what you’re doing these days, because you said when you were talking about the bracket challenge, you were kind of in between things. Currently, you are with B³ Method, the Amy Vetter company. Is that what you’re doing currently?

That’s it, yeah. Absolutely. During my break, Amy—it kind of coincided, the time when Amy was looking for, you know, some additional help to support her in growing the B³ Method Institute. And she and I have been friends for almost two decades, so I’ve always been really dialed in with everything she’s doing and what she’s working on. And, you know, so she didn’t have to spend time, like, kind of courting me on what she does. I already knew it. It just really aligned with, I mean, you kind of mentioned my purpose in helping firms, and, you know, it just kind of worked out. So yeah, I joined her in February, and, you know, I’m helping to support her and the team with our consulting engagements, our workshops, our educational content, and beginning to build some additional content, for what we’re offering to firms.

And you’ve been a presenter out there on topics. Is this something you’re still doing? I’ve seen, you know, CPA Academy, probably different associations. Are you still out there on the speaking circuit?

Yeah. It’s kind of ebbed and flowed. I’ve never considered myself like a professional speaker—I’ve always done it for educational purposes, business development purposes. And I think it’s going to start picking back up more now that I’m with Amy, and that’s you know, kind of part of our role in what we do. So, yeah.

Alright. Well, there’s the background. Now let’s go even deeper into the background to see where we are today because, you know, we mentioned at the beginning, you were practicing CPA, and then this technology bug hit you. So what was that transition, and how did this, you know, I mentioned it too—you found your passion. I love when somebody talks about finding their passion because that is such a huge… I was just on this podcast, and I don’t remember what I said, but it was really profound. I’m going to say so myself.

Good enough!

It was something like if you can find the intersection between your skills and your passions, then it’s like you don’t even work a day. It’s just become such a passion project, and it’s just so fun. And I feel like I’ve done that about my speaking. But so how did this come about? You’re out doing taxes and accounting or whatever you’re doing and all of a sudden the technology bug hit you?

Yeah. I mean, completely unexpected, to be quite honest. I mean, I grew up in, you know, the 80s and 90s—computers were, like, kind of a thing. AOL was kind of a thing. But, like, I was not, like, the geeky kids sitting down and just, like, cranking away on computers. Like, I just played with them. You know, even in college, like, you know, kind of messed with them. Like, everybody wanted to be in my group because I knew how to use PowerPoint, like, really well, you know?

Anyway, when I started my career, I just somehow ended up as that kind of go-to of, like, I have an IT issue, go to Byron, go to Byron, like asking me questions to the point where the firm I started my career with, I ultimately left there because my time spending, like, on IT issues was eclipsing my time doing taxes and accounting. And I was like, you know, I got this CPA, I got this degree, like, I kind of want to be an accountant, you know? And so I kind of, like, transitioned out of there because I was like, I’m going to go be an auditor. 

And at the next firm I went to, all of a sudden, very quickly, and I went from about a fifteen person firm to a 120 person firm, but then very quickly, again, I started becoming the kind of go-to for IT things and a very long story, but basically the IT director at the larger firm became very threatened by me. He actually tried to set me up as bringing a virus into the firm.

Oh, wow!

Yeah. It was pretty nuts, right? Like, anyway, his role was terminated, and the managing partner of that firm came to me, took me to lunch one year after I started there and was like, you know, you’re an okay accountant, but we think you’d be a really good IT guy. And, like, I sat back and I I can remember, you know, talking to my wife at the time just like, trying to figure out, like, I do seem to have this, like, magnetic force that is pulling me. But again, like, I decided in high school, I’m going to be an accountant. Like, what the? But I realized I was like, yo, I have an opportunity to blend this tech calling, and stay attached to this profession that I have fallen in love with. And, you know, maybe this is the, you know, that intersection, or, like, I’m a big Jim Collins Good to Great fan. My hedgehog, right? Like, I can find, you know, something I’m good at, something I love doing, and something that I believe I can be the best in the world at doing, and get paid to do it. And if you can blend these things, and find your hedgehog, like roll with it, you know? So I made the leap and you know, almost two decades later, I’m this techie, nerdy CPA.

That’s an awesome story, and I want to expand on that a little bit I think—but Jim Collins is quoted all the time on this show, I’ve never read Good to Great. I keep saying I have to do it. I know. And honestly, and I’ve said this on the show, I don’t read business I don’t know why. I always thought it was so boring. And then the first one I read, which we can’t have one podcast without me mentioning John Garrett, I’m contractually required. No, I’m not.

Hey. John’s a good dude.

Yeah. But I read his book, which is not necessarily a business book, but it is a business book.

Yeah.

And then, just recently, I read two Simon Sinek books, which man, I just fell in love with those books—The Infinite Game, and Start with Why. And so I keep saying I gotta read Good to Great. So yeah, I think you just solidified the fact that I need to do that.

Honestly, it was my first business book I’d ever read. And in fact, I didn’t even read it, I got cassette tapes—I had the cassette tapes in my car, and, like, it was 14 tapes or something, but it’s, in my opinion, it is the bible of business books.

Really? Alright. And that’s what I would do probably is listen to it when I’m working out. That’s how I did the other books. Although I read John’s book. But Simon’s I listened to was on the elliptical or whatever.

And so this transition then to the “techie, nerdy CPA” as you said, how long ago was that?

So that was 2000—oh my god—2004. So it was almost 20 years ago. Yeah.

Wow, you’re getting old, I guess, huh?

Yeah, it’s…

I got you, though. I got you in years, I think. I know I’ve got you in years.

Maybe by a couple. 

Alright, so let’s talk about the whole—I mean, I want to talk a little technology in our profession, but let’s leave that to the end right now. Because let’s stick down this road of you following your passion. Because another thing that you like to talk about is just, you know, being healthy in our profession as well. And in my mind, if you could follow your passion and get paid for it, like you were saying, man, that just helps your mental health and physical health. So where did this passion on health come in for you as well?

You know, and that’s another delayed one. I would say the first 40 years of my life, I just trashed my health. Like, just disrespected my health. Like, the mantra, “I’ll sleep when I die,” I definitely said that at least once a week, burning it at both ends, you know, eating whatever’s in front of me, like, really no regiment of any fitness. It was actually really funny, I’ve always been a vibrant lucid dreamer—like, I have very lucid, like, crazy dreams. Like, my fiancée is always laughing because almost every morning, I’m like, I had this crazy dream. And she’s like, what now?

Anyway, I heard this sleep specialist talking, and he wrote a book called Why We Sleep, and I was like, yo, maybe I can figure out what’s the deal with these dreams, so I’m going to listen to this book. And I listened to the book—it didn’t tell me anything about my dreams, but it opened up this world to me of, holy crap, I’ve been doing this wrong for 40 years of my life, and there is an insane opportunity to improve my overall performance at life itself, just by caring about my sleep. And, you know, it really kind of unlocked a journey for me that, man, I wish I’d found it, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

Yeah. And we’re talking about the sleep, we’re also talking about, I think we talked about mental health in the profession. I know that’s a big passion of mine. Is that something that you’ve also looked into?

Very much so. You know, there are family members of mine where, you know, anxiety and depression have been challenges for them. And through not only sleep, but also learning about proper breathing techniques, I have just unlocked, again, an amazing amount of information and knowledge that is accessible to all of us—not through medication, it has no negative side effects—just simply by proper breathing, which, like, who knew that there was proper breathing? 

Right.

You know, like, it’s supposed to be kind of like this autonomous, like, function. We just breathe. Who knew that there was a better way to breathe, and it’s legit pretty wild.

Wait. So tell me the better way to breathe. Is it something you can do succinctly? I mean, you can go an hour. I’m fine with that.

Yeah, I mean, it honestly, it’s as simple as saying, mouth breathing is terrible. It’s awful. We have never been taught that. Frankly, through just evolution, our nasal passages, everything else, have promoted mouth breathing. The reality is there is a reason why we have sinuses and nasal passages, and kind of the conditioning that happens when you breathe through your nose, and take that oxygen in, has serious implications to mental health, physical health, diabetes, your, muscle mass, fat, anxiety, allergies, asthma. It’s nuts.

Really!

It is! And I, like, the first 40 years of my life, again, I was like, this kind of stuff was witchcraft. I don’t listen to this holistic BS stuff. And so there’s a book called Breath by James Nestor, which is what got me looking into it and learning about it, because it was actually about free divers who will, like, hold their breath for, like, 7 to 10 minutes. 

Oh yeah. That’s crazy.

It’s crazy, and they actually do it. So he kind of discusses the science and educates you on why these things happen. You know, since then, it has just, like, really gotten me dialed into, like, understanding this. And of course, I’ve made changes—I do breathing exercises on a daily basis. I did mouth taping while I sleep for a while, which got rid of my snoring, and it’s also helped me to learn to breathe through my nose, you know, frequently. So there’s a lot to unpack, but just simply paying attention to the way you were breathing and inhaling through your nose—game changer.

Wow. See, that’s not one I’ve heard of. I mean, so with all the burnout and mental health presentations and webinars and podcasts and everything I’ve done, I’ve learned something new each time. This one, I’m going to have to look into now.

Yeah.

Because anything we can do to reduce the anxiety to, you know, make us healthier, to get more rest for our bodies and our brains and better intake of oxygen, apparently, that’s something that I’m going to have to look at then too. See, you are—I told you were needed. You’re a wealth of information. 

Yeah. Needed just like a scab.

Hey, it’s important! But I wouldn’t call you a scab.

I appreciate it.

So we can go into that a little more, but let’s talk about technology then. Because technology, in any way, you know, how are you getting involved, what are the important technologies? What are things should be people should be looking at? But one thing again, to stick to this theme that I apparently can’t get out of these days, is technology just helps us be more efficient and helps us be healthier in my mind, if we integrate technology correct. Are there other important technology issues right now that you think that everybody should be looking at in our profession?

Well, I mean, the first thing I would say, and this is right aligned with, you know, mental health, is there’s a lot happening with technology. I mean, the one thing—I hate repeating this statement, but—it will never be slower in the innovation of technology than it is today. It is accelerating every single day, and that that creates a very major sense of overwhelm for a lot of us. So, you know, I really would say to everybody out there who is thinking about technology: I want to stress to you, don’t get overwhelmed. You see things on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever, people doing some amazing science fiction-like things, but don’t, like, cause that to paralyze you, to feel like I’m so far behind that I’ll never catch up, because the the truth of the matter is none of us will ever catch up. So I think that’s number one.

Number two is, there is so much technology out there, to your point, that can help simplify our lives. And I always stress to people: Don’t explore technology for the sake of technology. I definitely have, like, automation in my house that nobody needs for any real purpose other than, like, it’s a good party trick. But there’s a lot of stuff that we can use that really will relieve challenges that we have every day. And I say start there. Like, find little, simple things to do, like, Zapier. I honestly, like, that’s one of my favorite places to start, because if you can find one silly little zap that you can build, it just, it begins to give you a taste for what is possible, and you just build and build and grow from there.

So with Zapier, can you have Zapier just take over my email? Because I am so bad at email. Is there a way that somebody, some technology, can just respond, or if it’s important, just send it to somebody else? I mean, that’s my biggest issue is email. I hate it.

You are definitely not alone there. I think email has just become such a bottleneck. And I, like, just to take a little bit of a, you know, side road to that statement—I don’t mind email alone, but what drives me nuts is the 47 other communication platforms in addition to email that I have to manage: LinkedIn messages, Twitter messages, email messages, other portal messages. Like, that is what makes me choke, but I do think there’s stuff coming. I mean, not to be cliché, but ChatGPT is definitely exposing some major opportunities with email, whether it is just kind of filtering and maybe auto-sorting your email, but also, you know, creating responses. We’ve seen Canopy, we’ve seen Karbon, Gmail’s rolling out with some stuff. Zap is a possibility that you can use with a GPT to begin to create some of this. I mean, I think I heard a podcast recently where people were joking that eventually it’s just going to be GPT communicating with itself, because everybody’s going to do it. But, you know, I do think that there’s some relief on the way.

Alright. I for years was, you know, and and so I’m one of these people that doesn’t freak by the red, whatever, the red circles that show you have all these unread things. And I know everybody else seems to. I don’t know if you’re one of those or not?

No. I’m not an inbox zero guy, trust me. 

Okay, yeah. So I mean, I think at one point, my email on Outlook probably showed, you know, 30,000 unread emails or something like that. But in my mind, I saw them on my phone, or I saw them on my iPad—I had seen them. But I got to the point where I was, you know, keeping up almost daily, keeping it to zero. And as of today, I’m at 1,000 unread emails. So I’ve got to, I’m creeping back, and I’ve got to reverse that trend. So we’ll we’ll we’ll we’ll figure out some technology or virtual assistant or something that can help me stay on top of that. 

Alright. What other technology? I mean, so in general, I agree with what you said, and I’m going to ramble here for a second: So technology is so important, and not just implement anything, and don’t get overwhelmed by it, and start simple, and just to find one task that you can help automate that makes it easier. And if it’s taxes, maybe it’s just getting the the electronic signatures or something. Boom, I’ve saved some time with that. And then, as you go, you’ll add more and you’ll get this whole tech stack and you’ll become more efficient and you’ll be able to work less, or you’ll be able to concentrate on the high dollar value projects rather than these tasks that can get automated. And so I just think it’s so important. Is there any little simple, you know, you had mentioned ways to start? Is there, like, this is one thing everybody should be looking at today to, you know, at least start dipping our toe into technology integration?

Yeah. There’s a bunch of stuff. I would say one of the things that I firmly believe is kind of a foundational tool in all organizations is a non-email communication platform, which I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth because I’m complaining about that in one respect, but in another respect, I do believe Slack and Teams are way more efficient modes of communication for teams and organizations.

And I have seen, I’ve set up and used many different types of, like, integrations and automations with Slack, for example. Like, for example, one of the challenges many small teams have is most of us are remote in some capacity these days. So we don’t know what everybody’s working on each day. And you can take Slack, and you can create a channel that’s your daily check-in, and it can prompt everybody in the morning: “Hey. What are you working on today? What do you need help with?” And everybody can throw a quick little note in there of, these are my top priorities today, I really need help with X. And it’s such an easy way to get kind of a team huddle without requiring everybody to go on another Zoom meeting or call into a channel or something like that, and it really helps to create an asynchronous working style within an organization. 

So I would say if you’re not using either a Slack or a Teams environment, I would strongly recommend it, and I would strongly recommend doing the training that both of those apps have, because to be quite honest, I see so many people who just use them so wrong. They don’t understand threads, they don’t know, you know, why to respect different channels. and these are things that can create such significant efficiencies when done properly. So do those trainings internally with the entire team, and then, again, you’ll find all kinds of opportunities to build on top of those platforms.

Yeah. And I actually have used both and I currently use both—Teams we use with Tri-Merit, and I think I need the training. We had a question this morning, hey, we’ve got two chats here labeled “Unique CPA Conference,” and people were like, which one’s the right one? And there’s different people on each. So we need to come up with better rules on that. But, yes, I think it’s much better. And then slack, I’m part owner of a bar in Chicago, and we use Slack for that. And it’s just nice to get all that information out easily, and readily available. 

The other thing that II started doing working with this year, which was more of a platform communication I think you mentioned, was Lisio. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Lisio. But it was nice because if anything that was specifically tax season related, I knew if it came in there. I didn’t have to look through a thousand—and I have 8 different email addresses too—I didn’t have to go look at all my different email addresses and see what was going on. I knew if it came in there, it was that. So that I was happy with.

Yeah. And I do love those systems that there’s, like, an intentional use for them. And I think that’s my rub with, like, text messaging, WhatsApp, LinkedIn. Like, it’s just a whole pile of noise that you have to sort through. But if you have the, like, that platform where you could say client communication is here, team communication is here, other third party communication is here, like, defined buckets so you’re not kind of searching all of them for the same thing, I fully support that. And I really do love those systems that allow you to kind of isolate the client and the work-related communication in a single place.

Yep. That’s what I was impressed [by] because, again, I didn’t have to look through all the noise like you said that was out. It made it much easier. Anything else on technology that’s important that we should be thinking of before we go to a couple final things?

I mean, I would say and again, at the risk of being one of a million, definitely dabble with GPT, ChatGPT, or whatever it is. Like, just play with it because like, for me, I’m still just playing with it, but I can tell you, I’ve used it to crush some crazy Excel and G Sheet macros

Really!

They have saved me, oh, just an insane amount of time. I mean, there was one, I had a bunch of data for the Accounting High Bracket Challenge that I needed to parse in a certain way, and I could have built it. There’s no doubt I could have built it. But I just typed into ChatGPT, like, the way the data was structured and what I was looking to do, and I think pumped out a macro that was…

Really?!

Yeah. It was awesome.

See, these are the things I don’t know how to do yet. Because I tried to do—I think there’s limits, or I’m doing it wrong. So ChatGPT I’ve, like, I’ve downloaded an entire transcript from a podcast or, you know, copied it, and I pasted it into ChatGPT, and I said, alright, can you summarize the main themes that were discussed in this podcast, and then it tells me the data is too long. Is that a thing or am I doing it wrong?

Yeah, that could be a scenario depending on the length of it, where you’re exceeding some of the format. But you can also break it up. You could, you know, just do it in smaller chunks of data, because an entire transcript, I mean, that can be, what, 25,000 words sometimes, probably more?

It’s a lot. Yeah.

Yeah. So you could try to break it up a little bit, and, actually, a tip for everybody: Ashley Francis, think she’s SeattleTax on Twitter, just rolled out a newsletter, where she’s showing you, like, the play-by-play of what she does with ChatGPT. And she’s like a linguist when it comes to that kind of stuff. Like, anybody who is like, curious, check it out, find her on Twitter. Her newsletter, it’s pretty slick. I’ve definitely picked up a bunch of stuff and and just from following her.

Yeah. It’s funny because I just reached out to somebody on Friday to ask about her because a a I knew she was doing that AI stuff and we’re going to—you and I talked about—we’re going to be doing an AI session at our conference, and I thought, well, I wonder if she’d be, be interested in that. Another thing now that you mentioned Twitter, I was looking at this morning, Nayo Carter-Gray had posed a question about Bard, another AI tool. Have you even heard of Bard?

I have. I’ve played with it. That’s Google’s you know, competitor, if you will, to GPT. It works very similar. I’ve in fact benchmarked Bard against GPT and Bing AI a few times, you know, just and and Bing is powered by GPT on the backend but there’s some nuance to the differences. But, I mean, it’s pretty decent. It does a fairly good job. In fact, if I recall right, when I was asking a question that I was benchmarking against, Bard actually produce the best answer. 

So, again, like, I would say for anybody out there who’s exploring, like, just explore what is, you know, easiest for you to access. They’re all very similar. And don’t worry about like, we’ll date ourselves here, a Beta versus VHS like competition where you’re going to choose the wrong horse in this race. I think all of them are good.

Yeah. I’m just getting in, just looking, and I’ve done basics with ChatGPT, but I’ve done simple things like helped do research for webinars I’m doing, which would take me two hours in the past, and now it took me five minutes just to say give me some statistics on, you know, mental health and the profession or burnout in the profession. And I couldn’t find it and boom, it does. Now it’s still the data’s two years old or something that’s the most recent or something. Is that right? 

Well, yeah. The difference in the models and and they’re I I believe probably by the time, actually, I think now that the 3.5 has been put to bed, so I think we do have some newer information in 4. But that is a good point: I mean, with all of this stuff, I mean, just like Google, you know, like, just because you googled it doesn’t mean it’s fact. And I’ve even done some of my own research, like, actually what’s really good, you can even say, like, if you wanted to reference, you know, Start With Why, you could ask, like, hey, did Simon Sinek discuss this topic? Can you summarize it? And ChatGPT will do that. But I’ve seen sometimes where what it pumps out is not accurate, so you have to have some understanding because you’d be like, that’s not correct, wasn’t it about this? And it’ll say, oh, I apologize. It was actually about this. So yeah, you definitely have to be aware of that stuff.

Yeah. For sure. Alright. This is what’s so cool about talking to people like you, because, you know, I go in thinking we’re going to discuss one thing, and we get into another, and I get educated, which is cool. You had mentioned AI, you know, like, Canopy and Karbon has started to integrate, and, I don’t know if it’s specifically Chat[GPT]. There’s some kind of AI into their software. Do you think are we going to see more things coming up? And you like you said, we are, like, just exponentially growing with technology. Is this tax season going to look different, you think, because of AI this coming year?

I mean, I would hope, to be honest, if I was running a tax practice, there’s no doubt. And I’ll add a third one to it: Client Hub has also rolled out an integration. And what’s rad about theirs is they’re like, if you have a workflow you want to build, you can actually prompt Client Hub, and you could do this right in ChatGPT as well, but right within the tool, you can say, hey, we need to build a workflow for electronic filing, and they’ll go, boop. Like, you know, and kind of…

Really.

Yeah. It’s pretty slick. So there’s a lot of cool stuff. And, I mean, you know, the Canopy and the Karbon stuff is helping with that communication aspect of things, which, you know, we’re always thinking about, like, how do we, like, pull the lever quicker, but we lose sight of, you know, how laborious the communication can be—oftentimes because we suck at communication generally. And so do our clients. So if you have a tool that can maybe translate what your client is actually asking for, and then respond to it in an intelligent way that, you know, gets to the heart of the answer, wow, you just saved five back and forths?

Yeah. See, that’s the thing. Being more efficient with technology integration. Dawn Brolin and I just did a webinar where we talked about technology integration, how she has designed her own success to be working 35 hours a week during tax season, so she could coach softball, and she wouldn’t be able to do this without the integration she’s done with technology.

No doubt. 

So it’s been a lot of fun. Alright. So I think we kind of wrapped technology. I think we left a lot out there. Before I do the final two questions, which I think everybody knows what they are at this point, well, we’ll see if you do or not. But, any final wrap up on what we talked about so far today?

I would say if anybody is interested in kind of the the sleeping and breathing stuff, just hit up Why We Sleep or Breath. You know, download these books, and just, you know, or check out Andrew Huberman’s podcast. He he has an episode specific to both of those topics that builds on the content.

Alright. We’ll do it. So now—I already mentioned John Garrett once. I was doing this, again, before I met John Garrett. But I’m not going to call it “What’s Your ‘And’?” because that’s John’s thing, I’m just going to ask you, what are your outside of work passions? What do you enjoy doing when you’re not talking tech or teaching tech or observing tech or whatever?

Yeah. There are couple things. I mean, I have two daughters. They’re now 21 and 23. My youngest daughter is on the Pitt women’s lacrosse team. So, you know, definitely spending time watching the team, watching her, being involved there. My oldest daughter is now a civil engineer, but she’s also big lacrosse player. So she does some young women’s league, so going to watch her.

Wow. That’s fun.

It is fun. It’s a lot of fun. Second thing, we we live here. We have a small farm. We’ve got horses. So I’m a farm hand. I shovel a lot of [stuff], and, you know, despite the sound of it, that is actually, like, some of my best thinking time, while I’m just out there early in the morning, like, you know, shoveling, and taking care of the horses. And then, of course, my dogs. I mean, I’ve got a border collie mix and a corgi puppy, and they just bring so much joy.

Nice. Border Collie, is that, you know—smart dogs! Is she or he, getting into trouble at all?

Oh, she is the most wonderful dog. I mean, this dog was, like, almost built in a lab for a farm. She actually Border Collie, Blue Heeler, Australian Shepherd, Husky.

Wow.

So, like, just hyper intelligent, hyper athletic. Like, she tries to herd the horses. The horses don’t give a [crap], she’s only 45 pounds, they’re a lot more. But, yeah, she’s awesome.

Yeah. We have a Australian Shepherd who is, you know, super intelligent. She’s not super athletic. We’ve had a couple others that have been super athletic, but she just gets into trouble because she is just way too smart. I mean, every door in our house, she can open, whether you push it in or pull it out, she can open it. That kind of stuff. So yeah. 

I believe it. That’s great.

And then and then one other comment based on what you were saying: So your kids’ sports, that is, like, the greatest time ever. And our kids are now, well, almost 30—by the time this is released, they’ll be 30 and 28, so, you know, out of high school and college, well out, but our youngest just told us yesterday, and he was a volleyball player, he just told us yesterday that he and his wife are are going to be playing in a six person, sand volleyball league this summer in Chicago, and we’re like, we’re there, we’re watching.

So much fun. That’s awesome.

Yeah! It’s been years since we’ve all done that, and that’s one of the things I miss. And I’m waiting for grandkids so I can get back into the start and, like, you know, I might even coach again. We’ll see, but at least watching.

You know what? That’s awesome. I mean, I coached mine when they were young, and, you know, it’s kind of funny because I do regret slightly the times when life was just so busy, and we were running kids all over the planet for all of these sports, and I admit there were times when I didn’t really take the time to enjoy it because I was so busy, like, running here and there. And now that I’m on that end of it, I’m like, damn, I would go back to those moments.

Yep. Anybody listening, take note of that, because it’s so important, and you miss it when it’s over for sure.

Yeah.

Good thing you still got it going, and I get to relive it now, it looks like at least, with rec league level. 

That’s fun. Good luck with that.

Now my son and daughter-in-law may not know we’re going to come, but we’re still going to go and watch them play.

So and you’ll still be embarrassing, I’m sure.

I’m sure I will. So alright Byron, the last thing then, if anybody wants to find out more about what you’re doing, where would they get ahold of you or see what you’re doing out there?

I mean, definitely LinkedIn, you know, just Byron Patrick. There’s not many of us. Just get the y before the r, and you’ll probably find me. I do ask that you send a note included, like, just, you know the drill. If it’s a blind one, I’m sorry, but just no. Twitter, Byron_CPA, I think. You’ll see my CPA picture there.  And then, byron@b3method.com, if you want to learn more about what we’re doing over there.

Yeah, a lot of good things over there. I ran into Amy this past week in San Diego. She and I were both speaking at the same event, and it was the week I got to talk to her for quite a while. So it was a lot of fun.

That’s awesome. Sweet. 

Alright, Byron. Well, I really appreciate you being here. I mean, we had to change the schedule a couple times, so I’m glad we got it worked out this time.

All good!

And I will see you in June.

Look forward to it. Good to see you, bud.