 When we started to truly implement accountability into our business, not only me holding our team accountable, but them holding me accountable, some things started to change, some incredible things started to happen. Because I found out that for me, for JD, accountability is my strength. Accountability allows me to accomplish anything I want. But this second core value that we have is what I want to talk about today, and that's accountability. Write this down for me. To accomplish anything, you must write down something. To accomplish anything, you must write down something. I don't know if you all know. I think I saw it correctly today. It's National Daughters' Day. Did anybody know this? Anybody familiar with this? It might have been yesterday, but I have three daughters, and so when I just saw this picture pop up here, I'm like, oh my gosh. Three daughters. That's Molly, is the youngest, Sally is in the middle, and Lainey is the oldest, and that's my wife, Lindsey. To accomplish anything, you must write down something. Accountability has three forms. The first form of accountability is writing it down. You want to accomplish something, write it down. You want to hold yourself accountable, write it down. Make a list. Prioritize it. Execute it. While you're working on that list, make another list. Call that your parking lot. Reprioritize it. Accountability allows you to do anything that you want to do. Accountability makes anything possible. The second form of accountability is sharing what you want to accomplish with other people. Sharing. Tell somebody about it. And the third form of accountability is to ask that person that you shared what you want to accomplish. Ask them to follow up with you. Ask them to hold you accountable. This has got to be a trusted advisor. This has got to be a trusted person. Somebody who loves you. Somebody who cares about you. Somebody who cares about what your goals, what your dreams are, what you want to accomplish. I was coming home from work on a Saturday, normal Saturday to me. It was during tax season. And as I pulled into our neighborhood, we're the second driveway on the right. So as you come around, I can't really see my house, but as you come around the curve, I could see that there are cars at my house. When I pulled in, I recognized some of the cars as my in-laws. They're normally there. They come over all the time. I've known them since I was 15 because I started dating their daughter September 26, 1999. So it's not odd to see them there. And I walked in. I'm on the phone talking with one of my assistants. And they're sitting there on the couch. And not only are they sitting on the couch, my pastors are on the couch. And my wife is there. And I'm on the phone and say, hey, I got to get back with you. Hang up the phone. What's this? What's going on? My wife's like, Jonathan, we need you to sit down. She starts reading me this letter that talks about everything I've been doing the last 15 years. She tells me about how she thinks that I'm drinking too much. She tells me that she doesn't agree with me doing drugs. She tells me that there's going to be a new way of life around here. There's going to be a new plan. I get up out of the chair. I'm like, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing this. I go back into my bedroom. I go in the bedroom. There's four suitcases packed up, four suitcases. I walk into my closet. We're always dropped my keys. I check where I always keep my stuff and it's still in there. I walk back in. I'm like, well, this just isn't going to work. This isn't going to work. This is not happening. She continues to read through the letter and we continue to have a conversation. We negotiate for five hours. There is no way in hell that I am leaving this house. It is not happening. I'm going to tell me when I'm going to see my kids. You're not going to put these rules on me after we talked for a long period of time. We finally got to the point where it was okay for me to stay home. But I had to do two things. I had to start going to AA and I had to start going to marriage counseling. I had to bring accountability back into my life. I had a decision to make. It was up to me because others had already made a decision for me. And until I made that decision myself, nothing was going to change because for two years I had been told by my wife, asked by my wife, pleaded, please go get help. How in the world can an accountant not believe an accountability? How is that possible? How can you sit there and think, this is nothing that I need help with. I'm in control. I've got this. I don't have a problem. I started going to marriage counseling every week. Every week. It sucked. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want to talk about everything that had happened. I did not want to be the enemy. I didn't want to be held accountable for my actions. Maybe the thing about accountability is when you truly decide that you want to be held accountable, when you truly decide that you need to make a change, when you truly get to that point, you got to start unwrapping a lot of layers. I had to unwrap so many layers. I started going to AA. I never even thought about even remotely getting close to that kind of a place. I did not want to listen to everybody else's problems. I did not want to sit there and admit the fact that I'm an alcoholic. But what is amazing is when you start to give up control of everything in your life, of those things that have control in your life, the thing that I learned when I started sharing with others about how I thought about things, what made sense to me, why alcohol had this kind of a control over me. I started to learn, holy crap, there's other people that think just like this. Unbelievable. And it started to help. It started to allow me to think clearer. It started to allow me to be there for my girls again. It allowed me to be there for my wife again. After I started going, I went to this conference called 10X. Anybody been to 10X? 10Xers? I went to this conference and I saw Tim's story speak. I saw Coach Michael Bird speak. I saw Hank Norman speak. And holy cow, I was like, this is the way to do business. When I was there, I woke up in the middle of the night. It's two o'clock in the morning. I'm in Vegas. I'm an alcoholic and an addict. How in the world am I going to go to Vegas? But luckily I'd started going to AA and I'd had that intervention. I woke up in the middle of the night and I thought about this new way of doing business. It just kind of hit me. It just kind of came across like it was like this Jerry McGuire moment where it's like this new idea of doing business, fixed price accounting packages, this new way of being able to grow and scale your business. I was going to get in front of so many people on so many stages. I was going to start being in videos. I was going to start shooting YouTube videos for goodness sakes. I was going to make accounting sexy, just like insurance, right? And so I went to this conference when I came back. I had a company at that point in time that was very successful, profitable. We started to change the way we did business. I had a partner at the time and he didn't go to 10X with me. Have you ever been around if you went to 10X? Have you ever been around people that don't think 10X? Have you ever been around people that say, what the hell are you doing? Why are you doing this? This is stupid. Don't do it. It's typically the closest people to you. What was amazing though is that Lindsay was completely supportive of this. And so when I came back and started being on videos, I was flying on jets, I was going to all kinds of different conferences, meeting so many awesome people, and it was going really well. Our business was growing like wildfire. It was awesome. As it continued to grow, my partner and I, we went to this 10X 360 event because we were starting to grow apart. We thought, man, we need to go to something together, get on the same page. So when we went to that event and we left, we thought we were on the same page. In two or three weeks, it started to kind of spread apart again. We weren't thinking the same way. We didn't believe in the same things. And so when I was on a trip to Disney World, I get an email, and it's not really an email that I really appreciated, to be honest with you. It was an email that said, this is your problem. You're going to handle this. I said, fine, we're done. I started getting messages from clients that weren't getting customer service. They weren't getting calls back. Emails weren't being answered. Tax returns were really done right. I started to understand that this transition that I had made, where I gave my partner all of the power, all of the control, all of the decision making, because I was making videos. I was flying on jets, meeting all these people, bringing in all this business. But I found out that everything that was happening on the back end wasn't what I thought it was. When we split, holy cow, I had two cultures growing inside of my business. Some people that wanted to work, and some people that didn't want to work. I had two different types of clients. Those that were traditional clients, and those that had kind of come on board during this time while there's on videos, and JD's going to help me do this, and he's going to help me do that, and he's going to help me do everything in my business, and all of a sudden I'm going to become a millionaire because I'm working with him. Somehow that was the message that got out. So the day that my partner left, one person quit. Another person quit. My whole management team quit. I started losing clients over and over and over again each week on a Sunday in particular. People just started to quit. Before I made this decision, because I become more awake in my mind, because I wasn't drinking anymore, I felt like that there was something missing in my life. There was something missing. And what I realized that was missing was my relationship with Jesus. So I decided that I needed to start reading the Bible. And when I was reading the Bible, I had never actually gone through it all in one year. I'd never done that before. So I decided to get an accountability partner. When I got this accountability partner, we sent each other a check message every single time that we read the Bible that day. I started to get fulfilled, but while that was happening, I had these people leaving at the same time. God, why in the world is this happening? Why is this still an issue? I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing. I'm going to AA. I've gone to marriage counseling. I'm reading the Bible now. I'm doing all of these things correct, I thought. But as I continue to read in it and as people continue to leave the business, as clients continue to leave the business, I started to have this realization, holy crap. I'm the only common denominator here. There's got to be something that's going to change. There's got to be some change here, and it's going to take me to do it. I've got to make the decision again. How am I going to rebuild this business? I had mountains of debt piling up. We went from 1,250 clients to 256. I was able to find an angel investor. They started working with me one-on-one. They started working with me in an accountable way. I laid out a budget. Imagine that. I laid out a budget. I started following that budget. That got the finances in order. But as people continue to leave employees, team members, relationships, vendors, as they continue to kind of see what was happening, I started to feel abandoned. And I started to get angry about that. But I knew that what I wanted to do in the beginning, what I wanted to do when I started following this new path in my business, what I wanted to accomplish, I did not want to give up on that. But I had to do it a different way. I wasn't going to do it just by myself. I couldn't just be everything to everybody. I realized that I needed to build some system, some way for all of my other employees to understand exactly how we do business. I went to that boot camp with Matt Monero and Judge Graham. I had my eyes open to the fact that if, man, if you establish these core values in your business, everything runs smoother. When you start to live by those core values, when we started to truly implement accountability into our business, not only me holding our team accountable, them holding me accountable, some things started to change. Some incredible things started to happen. We hired one person. We started this hiring strategy. We hired another person. We're hiring based off these core values. As people that are new to this industry when you're in the accounting world, it is hard to integrate into the way the things are in the real world. When you go to college and you're studying accounting, they teach you how to study to pass the CPA exam. I had to develop this system that could be replicated. I started meeting with our new team members on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. We started going through this book called Traction. If you haven't read it, read it and run your business off of that book. It's your playbook. We started to implement accountability into our everyday. We started to write down our goals. I started to write down my goals not only in the morning but in the evening. Why did I do that? I was following Grant Cardone. He said the number one thing that he has done that has allowed him to reach the levels that he has reached is by writing down his goals twice a day. I was like, you know what? I'm going to try this. I'm going to do it. I'm going to post on Instagram every single time I do it because I'm going to use Instagram as an accountability tool. I'm going to start sharing with other people that this is what I'm doing because I found out that for me, for JD, accountability is my strength. Accountability allows me to accomplish anything I want. Accountability allows me to help my team accomplish anything they want. As we started writing down our goals, we also started writing down what we are grateful for every day. We call it our daily ledger. The daily ledger defines what your goals are, what you're grateful for, what your three targets are each day, and what would make today great. This is an incredible tool that we have used that is a requirement in our business. It is a requirement of our team. This has changed our whole organization. We've gone from 256 clients now up to 1,064 clients as of this week. I really appreciate that. It is amazing the difference in the team and how we work together now, how we integrate together, and we're starting to magically find people that think, act, behave just like I do. Just like Matt and Judge were talking about, that you start to identify, you start to find the right people. It is amazing how it works. As you are building your teams, I encourage you to utilize these core values to start to implement those because it will have an impact on your business. As we started adding more and more people to the team, we went from 42 people down to 10, I think we're at 97 now. In the midst of all of this, I partnered with Paul Croft. When I started writing down my goals every day in November of 2019, some amazing things started to happen, and it wasn't only because of that. As I was reading the Bible each day, I started to recognize the fact, and after studying and AA, relying on my higher power, I started to understand that it wasn't just me that was going to make this happen. It wasn't just me that was going to be able to rebuild this business. It wasn't just me that it was relying on. I could rely on God. This whole spiritual aspect started to infuse back into my life, and you can see the picture of my family there. It allowed me to be able to reconnect with them in a way that I had never connected with them before, and it became so clear to me that this constant chase of the dollar, this constant chase of success, was something that I needed to check myself on. I want to be successful, but I want to pursue significance. I am not a perfect person. I have done a lot of terrible things, but I truly believe in progress over perfection. In our industry, we constantly talk about, and I use this quite a bit, that we are practitioners not perfectionists. What's interesting to me is that as I have studied accounting and as I have been involved in taxes and as I deal with clients from day to day and help them build their businesses and help them utilize the tax code, I have to remind myself too that I am a practitioner. I am not perfect, but I can believe in someone who is, and I can have my life follow someone who is. As I have continued to build this team and we have worked together, I realize that there has to be some consistency among all of the services that we add, all the services that we provide. I have to have some way to hold them accountable. We started to implement what we call scorecards, it's interaction, read it. These scorecards to allow us to have metrics. We are able to run our business consistently now and an inconsistent client base starts to become consistent when you bring consistency to your employees. It's amazing how this works. What has happened is we have created this system, these four pillars of wealth creation in which we believe will build wealth. This is not just from our point of view. This is from seeing every single client that we have over the last eight years, 15 years for me working at other accounting firms. This system is something that basically how we interact with our clients, how we interact together, how I teach our team now to serve you better is in each one of these different areas. We talk about these areas all the time, every day, every week, weekly training. Weekly training for our clients, we call it tax talks. We try to over communicate. What is really interesting is since we have simplified this in our business, that's allowed us to now have an opportunity to scale, have an opportunity to help more people. Basically from all these business owners that we've studied over all these years, we know that if you apply these four pillars, you will create wealth. Each one of these pillars requires you to be a part of it. See, I've come across a lot of clients that basically say, hey, why don't you fix this problem? You need to do this. You need to do that. I haven't heard from you. You're the business owner. We serve you. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? There is no way I would overcome alcoholism if I didn't put my butt in the chair and go to AA. It wasn't happening. So our first pillar is generating over $10,000 a month. Creating wealth requires you to earn over $10,000 a month. The second pillar is identifying tax savings. Tax planning is essential to your business. I showed one client here recently, man, they took a lot of great expenses. I was on the phone with them. They were doing our tax planning package. Man, they took everything. They had done conservation easements. They had done this. They had done that. They had a 401k plan. They were using every single play in the book, right? I was like, man, y'all have done really well. But I started out. I kept asking questions. I realized they had purchased a building. Ah, cost segregation study. Tax savings saved them $330,000, $330,000. Now they can use this next one, protect your income, life insurance. They can start to protect their income with their tax savings every single year. This is how you build wealth, everybody, practically. And finally, saving to invest. How much should you save before you invest? It depends. The best answer in the book for an accountant. It depends. It depends on what your goals are. Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? Let's lay out a plan. But it's going to involve these four. So I want to ask you, if you want to learn more about these, the way that you start working with us is joining our free private Facebook group. If you text 844 JD Frost, text 8Nation to that number, you'll get an invite. I would love for you to invite every Tuesday at about 7 to 8 p.m. It kind of varies. I'm going to be perfectly honest with you. I put a post in there every Tuesday about anything relative to taxes, business, growth, personal growth, struggles with alcoholism, struggles in business. It's hard. This is difficult. This is not meant for everybody. And it takes time. It takes real time. And what I like to refer to is patience and persistence. Patience and persistence required when you were trying to grow wealth. When you were trying to do something big. I thought that it was going to happen overnight. I left 10X and I thought, this is going to happen this year. Here we go. I cannot wait. And I have been on a journey. And for me, the only way that I am able to live out patience and persistence is my relationship with Jesus Christ. And so in closing, I would just like to pray for this room. God, thank you so much for 8% Nation. I really appreciate everything that you have provided for everybody in this room, Lord. I pray that you would be with each one of these business owners, each one of these individuals. Please be with them through the hard times. Please be with their families during these hard times. Please continue to bless us and bless each other with our relationships that we have together, Lord. And let us know that through accountability to you, through accountability with each other, through accountability to ourselves, that we can accomplish anything in your name. Amen. Hey, if you enjoyed this, I got another one you're going to love. It's right there. Click on it. See you in there. Thank Cody and Lauren for putting this on. Give those guys a big hand for doing this. Amazing. Amazing event. Okay? Amazing. Really, you guys are awesome, like when he called and said, hey, would you do this deal? The fact that they're willing to.