Quick question: when's the last time you heard an accountant call themselves a "QuickBooks CPA"?
There was a stretch, if you're old enough to remember it, when knowing QuickBooks was a genuine differentiator. Accountants put it on business cards. It set them apart, and for a while it worked, because most of their competition was still on paper ledgers and desktop spreadsheets.
Then everybody learned QuickBooks. The tool didn't go away. The advantage did. Today "knows QuickBooks" is simply part of being a CPA, the way "has a phone" is. The accountants who built their whole identity on the software had to scramble back to the thing that actually mattered all along: doing your books right and keeping you out of trouble.
I call this the QuickBooks rule, and it's about to happen to an entire industry.
Every tool wave runs the same play
This isn't a one-time story. It's a cycle, and I've been in marketing and advertising long enough, 25 years, to have watched it run several times:
- The "web guys" of the late 90s. Building a website was a dark art, so knowing HTML was a business. Then came the site builders, and "web guy" stopped being a differentiator.
- The social media gurus of the early 2010s. Whole consultancies existed because Facebook pages confused people. Now managing a page is just a task somebody's employee does.
- The "data-driven" marketers of the 2010s. Once every platform shipped a dashboard, being data-driven stopped being special and became the baseline.
Each wave has the same arc. A new tool creates a temporary gap between people who know it and people who don't. Consultants make real money bridging that gap. Then the tool gets easier, the knowledge spreads, and the tool-based identity quietly evaporates.
Now look at how many people started calling themselves AI consultants in the last couple of years, and tell me this time is different.
The tool was never the job
Here's what survived every one of those waves: the people whose identity was the outcome, not the tool.
The accountant survived QuickBooks because the job was never the software. It was books done right. The marketers who outlasted the social media wave were the ones selling customers-through-the-door, not Facebook-page-management. When the tool changed, they just changed tools. Their customers barely noticed.
The tool-identity people had a harder decade. When your business card is the name of a software product, your business card has an expiration date you don't control.
The durable version of what I do isn't "AI." It's operations. It's finding where a business bleeds hours and money, and fixing it with whatever actually fits. Sometimes the fix is AI. Sometimes it's a plain automation, and sometimes it's a written procedure and nothing else. The diagnosis is the job. The tools rotate.
What this means when you're hiring help
This matters to you most at one specific moment: when you're deciding who to bring in.
When you're evaluating someone, sort what they say into two piles. Tool talk: the models they use, the platforms they know, the demos they show. And outcome talk: what they'd measure in your business, what they'd fix first, what they've actually shipped and what it saved. Tool talk isn't disqualifying. But if it's ALL tool talk, you're hiring a QuickBooks CPA in the year everyone learns QuickBooks.
A few questions that separate the piles fast:
- "Walk me through a project where the answer WASN'T the tool you're selling." The outcome person has a story ready. The tool person changes the subject.
- "What would you look at in my business before recommending anything?" You want to hear questions about your hours, your handoffs, your reports. Not a product name in the first breath.
- "What happens to your recommendation when this tool is obsolete in three years?" The right answer is some version of: the diagnosis doesn't expire, we swap the part.
Full disclosure, before this sounds like sour grapes
I use AI hard. Every single day. It's built into how I work and how I build for clients.
When people ask me about it in person, I tell them the same thing every time: AI is a force multiplier. It augments what you're already doing without requiring more time or effort from you. Same soldier, but now with a gun. The soldier still has to know where to aim, and that's exactly the point. The multiplier is only as good as the operator holding it, which is why the diagnosis matters more than the tool.
So the rule isn't "don't claim the tool." Claim it. Right now the gap between businesses using AI well and businesses fumbling with it is real money. The rule is don't make the tool the identity. AI is the current multiplier in a kit that has changed many times and will change again. What I sell is the thing that survives every wave: knowing where a business loses time and money, and fixing it with whatever actually fits.
The takeaway
The QuickBooks rule, in one line: hire the person who'd still be useful to you if the tool disappeared tomorrow.
The tool-of-the-decade will change. It always changes. The person who understood your operations, wrote things down, and fixed what actually hurt? That one's still useful the morning after. That's who you want in the building.
Workshop photo: Gary Scott (flickr.com/photos/130844332@N06)