Service Bureau Accelerator Convention Recap 2024

Baldeep: Welcome everyone to another episode of the Service Bureau Accelerator podcast. I’m here with Uncle Ross, Daddy Ross, Tia, the tax goddess. And today, we’re going to chat about our Service Bureau Accelerator Convention. We just did our second convention about a month back as of this recording. So we’ll go ahead and kick it off.

Ross, Tia, who wants to lead the charge?

Ross: I’ll let Tia lead the charge because she was so great.

The emcee. She was leading the charge all every day. It was amazing.

Tia: Fire. Let’s say this, this was the reschedule from the original, which people don’t know, our entire team was stuck in a hurricane down in Texas.

Ross: Hurricane Beryl.

Tia: Beryl, never had a hurricane in my life. So that was traumatic. So to have this rescheduled and still have an amazing turnout, I think was phenomenal.

And what I loved about it was that there was a level of intentionality and intimacy with the group that we did have, which made it for just a really [00:01:00] successful convention. So overall was very happy. Nobody was sleeping. Everybody was taking notes and X really great questions.

Ross: Yeah, for sure. It was good. The turnout, obviously. It wasn’t as good as we had hoped, but it was still pretty strong. It was great to have everyone there. We initially really the room should have been packed, but obviously with the rescheduling, and a little complications for certain individuals, but all in all, it was still great to have it. And I always love those things because we spend so much time like with Service Bureau Accelerator, it’s always on Zoom in our coaching calls, right on the Facebook group, and it’s all online. It’s all digital and you don’t actually get any real live face-to-face time with people so it’s always great to actually see our members and especially some of our members that we’ve been working with for six-plus years.

And then to finally actually meet them in person is really cool. So that’s always my favorite part about it is you’re really just to get to actually meet people face-to-face, and have conversations with them, and hear their results and success they’ve been able to achieve.

So that’s some of the coolest stuff that I always love about it.

Tia: And see the heights size, I’m like, Ross, how are you [00:02:00] doing?

Baldeep: Wait, what? Your heels didn’t catch up?

Tia: Yes. No, it was like the shoulder-to-head thing is, so this is what you really look like.

Ross: Yeah, you’ll only see a little frame of me here on Zoom and on podcasts.

Tia: Of course. And we had an SBA style. It was high energy, we brought the swag and the decor. It was a thousand percent.

Baldeep: The T-shirts that took the world by storm.

Tia: I can’t say them.

Ross: Tia, for several years, you’re not a fan of them but everyone else loves them. People were wearing them at the IRS forum in Dallas. People were walking around wearing our exclusive event t-shirts.

Tia: V-cut t-shirts.

Ross: Yeah.

Baldeep: For those of you guys listening, we had a shirt that said, Only Funded in the OnlyFans font style.

Ross: Style and font.

Baldeep: I don’t have one here in this room with me to show,

Ross: Cause if you don’t know as a Service Bureau, you only care about funded bank products. So Only Funded.

Tia: Only Funded. That’s it.

Ross: Awesome. Yeah. We’ve got a bit of [00:03:00] a little itinerary just to break down some of the cool parts of the convention.

Obviously, like we said, networking, meeting members, and hearing everyone’s success was amazing. It’s really cool as well when, so for example, Terrence was one of our members there that we worked with him for years. And this year, he’s just got his head down and he’s killing it. And he’s been quiet because that’s what he’s been doing is, just head down and killing it.

So then, finally get to talk to him face-to-face and hear all this stuff that he’s doing, everything that he’s been developing in his business and pushing forward, running ads, appointment setters, his sales team, and stuff, it’s just, oh shit. He’s gonna absolutely crush it this year. So it’s really cool to hear that stuff.

But going into some of the training content that we had, we’ve got a couple of notes on just some of the topics that were discussed. We’re starting to realize, so the year before was our first year doing a convention. And this year, we’re doing another one and it’s okay, what do we talk about now at the convention?

In our program, we don’t really hide anything. We teach everything that we do. And from every part of our business that we implement, we teach that exact same [00:04:00] stuff. We open up the doors and pull back the curtains and teach everything. So when it gets to the convention, it’s like, all right, they already know everything. They should.

So what can we teach now to really reinvent or maybe how do we just really come at it at a different angle? And that’s what we ended up doing, or we went through and broke down, how to create a sales and marketing system because with any business, having a system in place to actually acquire customers in a predictable and repeatable manner, that’s the most important thing.

That should be everyone’s number one goal. Especially as a Service Bureau is, how do I put some sort of a system in place to consistently generate new customers ongoing, on demand, where I’m talking to people every single day about my software, and I’m signing people up every week or every day on my software package.

So that was a big thing that we covered and not just how to get that system in place, but also a lot of them, here’s how to really manage that system and how to scale that system up where you have team members helping you. You’ve got systems pipelines, like all these campaigns in place [00:05:00] to really build a robust system that’s consistently pushing people forward and getting them onto their calendar.

So that was one of the really big parts. I think that was most of day one. We’re really focused in that. Hey, let’s get a system together so that you guys can just acquire customers on demand.

Baldeep: Yeah, I think, that was like a build-up or an add-on to what we covered last year. So what we obviously covering the training is just reiterating that. Because a lot of times and we see it in the industry all the time. This year, we’ve had a number of existing service bureaus join our program and move over their entire business to work with us because they’ve been stuck year over year at the same 2,000 products, 1,500 products, 4,000 products, and they’re just stuck, and they don’t know how to go past that. They’ve just been at that same point. When we have members that have been with us since the beginning that are growing year over year, 40, 50, a hundred plus percent, those systems are what’s really important for people to dial in. So we had to add a lot to it.

And we even pointed out where a lot of people are fucking up or [00:06:00] dropping the ball on generating, I think one of the key things like look, generating leads is easy. We’ve shown and done it and showed you guys. And I think that was actually an interesting one. But we showed them, look, this is what people did, and we showed their results, look at all the leaves they generate. But where do they drop the ball? And then we show them, this is where they messed up. And then we show them how we do it and they can see the night and day difference.

I don’t know how much into on

Ross: Yeah, the comparison was basically, it was the equivalent of like a hundred X more effort that we put in our prospecting systems, right? We do basically a hundred times the work that other members were doing. And If you’re putting in a hundred X, the work, what do you think you’re going to get out of the result?

Probably close to a hundred X, the result would, but showing that and really breaking that down and going behind this, that was another area where, Oh, this is maybe some of that we’ve covered in our program, but maybe it’s not clicking with enough people. So, now we can actually pull examples. There’s nothing like crazy, special, unique, but it’s just really putting these puzzle pieces together. And it’s okay, you’ve got this one done, but [00:07:00] now here’s the other piece of the puzzle that you need to put together. Now you’re actually seeing the big picture. And so just breaking that down, I think helped a lot of people as well.

Tia: And I think in that segment that you’re mentioning the comparison, the biggest mic drop for a lot of people, including myself was, when you said, okay, hey, this is the whole system that we tell you guys about. And I did this entire system with a fake company, with a fake this, with a fake ad, with a fake everything, and then you play the recording and everyone’s, Oh shit.

The same script, the same everything.

Ross: Yeah,

Tia: And it’s, you record that close. Everyone was like this. Okay, yeah. We need to get on that shit.

Ross: Basically, it was just for more context. I was showing that the system that we were working with some clients, some SBA members, helped them set it up last year. And it’s basically like an ad campaign. And so, I tested it myself. Cause I’m like, okay, let me just make a dummy account. And I was showing people at the convention where it’s like a $5 lead came in. So I spent $5 for this person’s name, email, phone number. Called them, got [00:08:00] them on the phone, and it basically equated into a $10,000 deal, for five bucks.

Tia: As an example,

Ross: Oh my God. There’s $10,000. Okay, cool. There’s an example. What more do you guys need to see? Now, not all deals are going to be like that. Obviously, that person was, but there’s a lot of people in the industry that are experienced a lot of what that prospect was experiencing. A lot of pain, a lot of challenges in the industry not getting the right deals, and not getting good service.

And it was like, that’s the majority of EROs if you talk to them. They’re getting shitty deals and it’s very easy to flip them onto your software. You just got to be able to get that information out of them and just paint the picture and just show them why you’re better. And that’s really it.

So after that, basically like day one was a lot of that. The second day was really about client success and retention. Okay, now you’ve got these customers, how do you keep them long-term? And so that was day two. Balls, maybe you want to dive into some of that stuff that we talked about?

Baldeep: We also on day two talked about team building, I think, too. But retention with customers, we did a segment of that last year, as well. But I think it didn’t click as [00:09:00] much as it did this year.

Ross: As people are growing and they’re getting more and more customers. And now they’re starting to experience some of that churn where people are leaving. Yeah.

Baldeep: Yeah, and a lot of it came down to what support are you giving them. What acts like streamlining their support? How do you streamline support like the way we streamline our support? How do you have those continuous conversations with your clients to, I don’t want to say upsell, but upsell them or provide them more value, at the end of the day?

But yeah, the biggest part of that was even giving your customers milestones, right? We talked about how you give them certain milestones to increase their business off the time ahead. What else do we even talk about there?

Ross: Yeah. Show them where there’s like more money.

Baldeep: Yeah. Cause one of the concepts also on the retention is, how do we show your clients how to grow, right?

Yeah, anyone can give them a good software deal for the most, especially anybody in our program. We show them how to structure these deals to make it appealing for the customer. But if you can show your client how to increase by a hundred bank products in a season, isn’t that more valuable? Do you think they’re going to stay with you longer? So how does those things work?

So that was a big [00:10:00] portion of it as well. Because a lot of times, people don’t want to leave where they’re at if they’re satisfied. But what we’ve noticed a lot over the years, and with people in our program with other service bureaus and like, why people join us a lot is the lack of proper support channels, right? Yes, there’s software tech support, but a lot of times, especially if you’re selling a program that’s not just software, say, you have some value adds in there, software tech support can’t help them with certain things. So, how are you managing your EROs in those scenarios? Are you available to them during the season? Are you too busy running a tax office to be available to them? Those things end up coming up a lot as you get bigger because you’re going to have a lot more items to deal with.

So that kind of leans into well, to retain them, you should be building your teams. So we led into that. How do you build your teams? How do you skill support? I don’t know if you want to add to that Tia, Ross.

Tia: And recall that was in response to this. I don’t want to say complaint, but this baby complained about, this person left my Service Bureau and went to another Service [00:11:00] Bureau that was in my same community and deep enrolls, you guys need to do something about it. What was your guys’s response to that?

I know, but.

Ross: I had a quick blunt response as a joke. I was like, shit off for more value than easy. But really though, if you’re not providing value and someone else is providing more value, the person’s going to go to the person who’s providing more value to them.

Let’s be real, let’s just straight up. If you’re not providing value, someone else is providing more, obviously, the person is going to leave and go to the spot where they’re providing more value. How do you fix it? Provide more fucking value. It’s not that complicated as a concept, but how you actually do it, sure, that’s where there becomes difficult.

How do I provide more value? What does that look like? It’s a learning curve, right? What are people’s challenges? One of the biggest things that I wanted to mention actually from Baldeep, what you were saying was, there needs to be that mindset shift away from, I just want to sell them software and never have to talk to them again. If you’ve been in any business, you have to talk to your customers. If you want to run something where you’re never talking to a [00:12:00] customer, go, I don’t know, maybe sell t-shirts as an e-com store or something like not having an actual service-based business. Have just like a product where you never have to talk to people because when you’re selling software, sure, you could call it a product. It’s still a service-based business. They’re doing it. They’re working with you ongoing. They’re using your software year in and year out. There’s that ongoing relationship. There’s that ongoing connection with the customer. You have to provide support to them. You have to be able to actually talk to them.

Now, it doesn’t have to be you all the time. You can scale it. You can train a team, but you have to be there. And if you don’t do that, like Baldeep said, people aren’t getting support. They’re going to go to somewhere where they can actually get support when they need it. So it’s just a mindset shift really of how do I support my customers? How do I provide more value?

When you start asking those better questions, instead of, Oh, I don’t want to talk to anyone. They just have to figure it out. I already told them that I don’t want to figure it out. If you change your approach to, okay, how do I make sure that everyone knows exactly how to do X, Y, Z, or how do I make sure that everyone knows how to reach out to me or [00:13:00] my team to get support?

Now, you’re creating solutions to problems versus just ignoring problems completely. So, that’s a big part of it is just do a mindset shift and just really focus on delivering value.

Tia: And classic SBA fashion, you guys told them what to do and how to collect the information to do it, which if you join the program, you can get access to that information. But I think that’s what I appreciate the most that people came there saying, Hey, have these questions and I want to make a mind shift or I want to build on my foundations and they were able to, pretty much like you said, do that, reset every year. The convention was like a reset for a lot of people, honestly.

Ross: Yeah. And we do that every year as well, right? I think, that’s actually what we opened with as well on day one, where we show it’s like, Hey, all of the fundamental stuff that we have in our program, all of the frameworks, even like the seven-day launch to the new program that we launched this year. The seven chapters of it, we basically go back through that internally, every year ourselves. We sit down for a week. And we plan our entire year [00:14:00] of business. We look at what did we do that worked. What didn’t work? What are we going to do this year? What improvements are we going to make? How do we scale up our support? How do we provide more value to our customers? All the stuff that we teach and like the framework, I think a lot of people misinterpret as, Oh, I just need to go through this once and then I’m good.

But, again, what’s the question? How do you keep offering more value?

You keep improving, you keep developing. So we go through that every single time. And I think that’s like you said to you, people had that shift where, okay, I got to reset. I’ve built this stuff so far. Now, let me continue to build on top of it. Let me keep scaling. Let me keep adding more stuff to it. So it’s good to see people have that kind of mindset shift, for sure.

Tia: Okay, let’s talk about this top producer panel. How are these individuals selected? I think me and Ross selected these people for the panel.

Ross: We knew.

Baldeep: we looked,

Ross: was involved as well.

Baldeep: I picked it, but then I think, you changed it or somebody changed it. I don’t know. It was fine. Because sometimes, people leave the room or they’re not easily visible. So it’s like, all right, let’s just grab who we can see that [00:15:00] we know qualify based on the awards.

Tia: Yeah. What’s considered like a top producer?

Baldeep: Various different things, right? Some of the volumes, I think one of the people on there got like an award for rookie of the year. I think, was that one

Tia: was like 2 or 3 people.

Ross: Yeah. Everyone on stage got to work.

Tia: Everyone got an award, but know that at the time.

Baldeep: True.

Ross: Yeah, that is true.

Baldeep: One of them was, they’re all awards based off, hey, these people got an award, but everyone was slightly different, right? Somebody, the way they did theirs was different than the person next to them. It was different than the person next to them. For example, like Shambrika did really well in the way she does it. She was completely different than how Terrence does his.

Ross: Exactly. That’s what I was going to say. Everyone was very different on their approach.

Baldeep: Yeah. So there was that like combination of volume and how many people have they sold. Like Ethan’s in their system, things like that.

Ross: Yeah.

Tia: And think, that was beautiful to see. I’m sorry, Ross.

Ross: Yeah, no, I was just going to say, again, all the people who get awards, we know what they’re doing on, for the most part, but we knew it’s okay, this is a group of people that we can have up there.

I’m sure there may be other people in the program that are doing a little bit more volume than them, but [00:16:00] we know where they’re at and what they’re doing, and the work that they’re putting in. And so it was good to really have like Baldeep said, they’re all doing it differently, as far as like the model that they’re approaching their Service Bureau with. But the coolest thing was the similarities and what they’re actually doing, providing value, and supporting their customers. They’re doing all these core things. Even though their models are very different between maybe doing academy or just selling software, how, and how they even do that with their marketing sales, all that stuff, it was very different, but the end result, and what they were delivering to their customers had so many similarities and so much overlap with what we teach.

And what I always love, is cause this happened last year at the convention as well, when we brought the top producer panel up. They’d be talking about things that literally, we were breaking down 30 minutes prior.

Now, other people are like repeating the same stuff that we say. And sometimes, that’s what’s needed. And so that’s another reason why we’d like to do those panels where it’s, look, Baldeep and I can stand on stage, and we can tell you guys this shit till we’re blue in the face. And for some reason, certain people, it just doesn’t really click, but [00:17:00] then, when a peer, when someone in the program says the exact same thing, but maybe just they articulate it differently, but maybe it’s coming from them and their story and how they implemented what we teach, then it clicks. They’re like, oh, okay, now I get it.

So it’s always great just to hear a lot of the similar content, but just from different people out of different mouths, cause then it’s just presented a little bit differently. And sometimes, that’s what’s needed for it to really click for other people and they see that.

So yeah, it’s always a fun thing, having the top producer panel.

Tia: And I think every person that was up there was from a different approach it from a different aspect of the core. I’m pretty certain, each person did a different core training model, which was dope. And I think I love Terrence because he was like, look, I know where my strength is and my weaknesses and Hey, this is what I’m doing. And this is the investment that I’m putting in there. And I love that everyone had confidence, and just such a reassurance of the direction it was going in. And what I also loved is that they not only talked about what they were doing, but they were very passionate about the change that they were making in their [00:18:00] own way.

And that was different for me. Like I’m making money, but I also feel like I’m making a difference.

Ross: Yeah, that was huge. I remember Shakara was talking about that, with how much she puts into her people. I didn’t really know that much about

Baldeep: She was meeting with clients in the lobby before the

Ross: oh, yeah, I didn’t know how much she really poured into her people and until she really shared that a lot more this year.

Cause I think, she was on the stage last year as well, wasn’t she?

Baldeep: No, I asked her to be, she wasn’t in the room when I called her out that.

Ross: But yeah, it was really cool to see that, just how much she pours into her people, right? Again, that’s the reason why she’s up on stage is because she pours into her people. She over-delivers at every opportunity. She had a story where she had someone come and just like a crash on her couch for a week. And she was training them up how to become a tax repair and stuff. She’ll go above and beyond what other people will do.

And that, when word gets around with what kind of a mentor she is and how much she’s ready, willing to pour into people, she’s just going to get people to come into her left, right, and center. Cause that’s the type of person that they want to [00:19:00] work with. So, really cool to hear that stuff as well.

Baldeep: Yeah.

Tia: I love that.

Baldeep: Then what else did we do at the event? We had the TPG networking party.

Tia: It was not long enough. It was not.

Ross: I had to bail cause I was still working on the slides.

Tia: Slides, yeah.

Ross: The second day at the end. Cause we had a presenter who, unfortunately, had to drop out from a scheduling conflict, so we had to come up with a training kind of last minute out of the back of our pocket.

Tia: Behind the scenes.

Ross: Yeah, behind the scenes. So it was like, all right, I’ll go have a couple of beers, say hello to people, take some photos, and like, all right, I’m out. I got to get back to work.

Tia: No, that was so much fun. And I did go up to Eli. I said, Eli, why is this only a few hours? You need to pay for another hour. He’s, oh, no, it wasn’t me. He’s, okay, who wants to drink? It was like, okay, we’ll take drinks in place in the hour. It was just so nice to see everyone there, connect dressed really nice. We’re like going above and beyond, which is something you don’t really see an experience in our industry. Most of the conventions are really dry.

Baldeep: Yeah. That comment, we get a lot on our presentations. Even last year’s convention [00:20:00] and this year’s was, Oh wait, I actually learned stuff. Like it’s not just a bunch of fluff.

Ross: Oh, and I actually made some sales too. Yeah.

Tia: And do the workshops in real-time. That is just,

Baldeep: the fast action strategies and like the stuff that we put out there, there’s some people that like we gave out a strategy. I’m not going to say it here cause that’s for our members. But literally, we’re like, Hey, put this out. Boom, boom. Say this, this, this. And then, there’s literally people like hundreds of comments. There’s people making a Teresa. She was sitting in the hallway during the workshop, just closing sales. She’s, okay, I’m getting it. So she’s on the phone. I see her on the phone or a computer just, oh yeah, I just made $3,000. So that was cool to see.

Ross: Yeah, that’s what we’re all about over here. It’s like, how do we get you guys, if you invest in this program with us with Service Bureau Accelerator, how do we help you get your money back, as fast as possible? And so, we put some stuff in there to really help people go out and do that, for people who are willing to take massive action and be comfortable being a little bit uncomfortable. If I don’t really know what I’m doing yet, it’s all good. We’ll walk you through it. We’ll help you out. It was awesome to see people take that action.

The [00:21:00] workshop was great too. I think there was a lot of things, like a lot of dots that are getting connected for people as we were going through. So, what we did differently this year at our convention was the third day, we had a half day for everyone. And we actually did a, it was like a four-hour workshop with a workbook that everyone got. So it was really getting clear on your goals. What exactly are you offering? What are you pricing it as? What are you going to set for fees? What are your marketing strategies?

We had a bunch of stuff for actionable items, even with a checklist for homework, because what we wanted out of this convention was to actually give people literally, here’s the step-by-step playbook that I’m going to run as soon as I go home.

A lot of times at conventions, there’s so much great information, everyone gets so excited and they get pumped up and motivated. But then when they go home, all that information is just scrambled in their mind and they go home. Maybe it’s right after, then there’s the weekend, then they’re back to life, they got to deal with their family, their kids, whatever it is.

And then by the time the next week starts and rolls around, that information is just slowly [00:22:00] disappeared. And they’re like, Oh crap, what did I do? Did I write notes? And they’re trying to go back through their notes and try to remember. So this, we were like, let’s do a workshop, where we can literally write all this stuff down, and then have actionable items and a checklist for people to go out and execute everything that they just worked on in the workshop.

So that was really cool. I think a lot of people enjoyed it. And we still spend a lot of time breaking down specific things, just to really help people overcome weird little kind of roadblocks just in their mindset or just getting clarity on certain things. So, I think that helped a lot, and excited to see people’s results after that, as well.

Tia: Yeah, it did. And I saw people in the lobby area, working on their workbooks. Maybe someone was grabbing something to have to work on afterward and had their workbook in hand. And I even personally love the workbook. It was a different touch, this year.

Baldeep: Well, if you were participating in the workshop, you didn’t have work that day.

Tia: Yes,

Ross: I will attend the workshop.

Baldeep: I will attend the workshop.

Tia: Yes, that was a bonus. It was really dope. Just the swag, [00:23:00] the gear. We didn’t even talk about that. The swag bags upgraded. Look, I’m using my workbook today.

Baldeep: Oh, that notebook. Yeah.

Ross: Yeah, I got mine right beside me as well. Yeah.

Tia: Hot,

Ross: Nice new pens as well.

Tia: The nice pens.

Ross: Ooh, hell yeah. Those pens were not cheap.

Tia: It’s the little touches that just make people feel like, we have a sense of belonging. And we’re the cool kids. So it just really the exclusive of the exclusive.

Ross: The elite of the elite.

Tia: The elite of the, yes.

Baldeep: And this year, we did for the first time an award ceremony. So that was interesting. People who are like, Oh my God, I’m getting, they didn’t even really know who was getting the awards. Yeah.

You develop like this, we had no clue. We were like, all right, we’re just doing the awards. Here’s the list. And then you had made it a whole thing. So we want to talk about how you didn’t make it a whole thing there, Tia.

Tia: Because you all were burnt out from the whole like, okay, we have to put a whole another last-minute thing together. And everyone was just at capacity. So I’m like, okay, let me see what I can put together here. Jamison’s like, [00:24:00] Okay, just go ahead. Yeah, it’s good. It was beautiful.

We had the red carpet, and the beautiful awards. I gave a speech that no one knew about, what else? Tears. So the way that the initial ceremony was structured, everyone was supposed to know who was getting awarded. However, people came so beautifully dressed. No one wore their badges.

Ross: That’s right, we’re like, oh shit, no one has their badges on, no one’s gonna know.

Tia: So no one knew. And when I tell you, it was like a scene of Jeopardy, come on down. It’s like me, I won. It was beautiful. It was so fantastic. And I think, who wore the khakis? Wasn’t you, Ross? Did you wear khakis?

Baldeep: I was wearing shorts

Tia: Oh, short.

Ross: No, it was just jeans. Jeans and a T-shirt.

Tia: So Ross said, okay, what you see me in.

Baldeep: Did I wear shorts? I think I wore shorts that night, yeah.

Tia: And then when you came back in the jeans and khakis, I said, here we go. The show will go on. Let’s continue. But wonderful.

Baldeep: Yeah, you see KFC and be like, you all got your suit and everything. I’m like, [00:25:00] fucking suit. It’s my party. I’m gonna wear what I want to.

Ross: We had a collared shirt on, with the SBA logo on it. That’s good. The award is not for us to look good. It’s for our members. That’s my theory on it.

Tia: Yeah, it was really beautiful. And I think that actually created an additional connection for people to see the work that they’ve done, and be presented on this platform because no one’s going around every day, saying, Hey, you did a good job on making those cells. Or, Hey, you’ve increased your brain products year over year. You just do the work.

And so to get that acknowledgment, I know it meant a lot to our members, for sure.

Ross: Yeah. The award ceremony is great and everything like that, but I was really surprised with like you said, the acknowledgment, but how much emotion came out of people as well going upright. Where some people were like, literally almost on the verge of tears, cause they were just so overwhelmed with joy and just that appreciation and they’re like, wow, I did it. That realization really kicks in then when you’re going up and getting a trophy and get an award. So it was really great. I think we had a couple of our members give a little bit of speech for some of the larger tiers. And it was just really [00:26:00] cool.

Shambriga, for example, got the Rookie of the Year. She said, when she joined, that was her goal. She put her mind to it. She’s like, I want to be the rookie of the year. I want to be the top producer this year. And she did it. So, really cool to hear those stories.

Tia: Even the surprising story with Shalamara, when I thought she was going to say her tax office was real successful, she’s, like, no, it flopped. My tax office failed miserably, but I can sell software.

Baldeep: yeah,

Tia: Just so unexpected. I think it was another journey. I loved her story. Just hearing, seeing everyone’s work, but then hearing their journeys, it’s just connected. And then you saw afterward, people were hanging around and talking to the people that did win awards, taking notes, Hey, can I change information? What are you doing? I had the same story. I didn’t even know that we were going to do an award ceremony. So that was an added touch, once I realized, it was on the agenda.

Baldeep: Oh, you didn’t realize that from the agenda that was out for months before head.

Ross: Maybe didn’t review it. Tia just shows up and she’s like, what’s the itinerary tomorrow? I’ll makeup, I’ll come up with these speeches. I’ll just pull [00:27:00] it out of nowhere and crush it.

Tia: Book a ticket.

Ross: Tia’s the go-to MC for a reason. I know what Tia will just absolutely deliver every time.

Baldeep: I’m gonna tell this quick little story and then we’ll probably wrap it up. So, Tia, I see her pulling up and whatever she lifts or Uber. And she’s, yeah, I just took a 30-minute train ride in

Tia: Two hours.

Baldeep: two-hour trip. Yeah. And I’m like, why’d you do that? When she’s Uber, she’s, this is only like $5. I’m like, you get reimbursed for your expenses. She’s like, what?

Tia: I took $1 bus in two hours.

Baldeep: It’s just Uber here and got here like 20, 30 minutes.

Tia: I said, I was on the Metro, right? He’s like, what’s that? I’m like, your local transportation. He’s like,

Ross: What’s that?

Tia: Okay.

Baldeep: Oh, you don’t get reimbursed for the Uber.

Tia: I was sweating. I had my bags. I’m like, Oh, okay. I’m here.

Ross: Houston and early August.

But one last thing, I also wanted to comment on, cause it was actually one of my favorite parts. Cause I had been like really dieting and everything beforehand, but the food at the

Baldeep: Oh,

Ross: the [00:28:00] dinner at the awards ceremony,

Tia: Thank you. I don’t came know who came up with the menu.

Ross: Oh, it was so good. It’s there like preset menus. We just get to choose from it. And that was amazing. The food, that I’ll tell you that place, and you mean the cheese with macaroni.

Tia: The cornbread with the butter.

Ross: Oh yeah. Oh, it was all way too good. I wish I could have just sat there and just ate the whole evening long.

Tia: And it was only for the convention. It wasn’t on the regular menu. So

Baldeep: oh yeah.

Tia: beautiful, beginning to end.

Baldeep: All right. We’ll go ahead and wrap it up here. Service Bureau Accelerator convention, 2024 recap. If you’re interested in joining Service Bureau Accelerator, there should be a link below this video, go to our website, ServiceBureauAccelerator.com, register for a webinar, book a call with our team, and we’ll answer all your questions.

And all right, catch you on the next one.

Tia: Peace out.

Ross: See yah.