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So something has been on my mind lately, and I just want to talk through it today. I am Morgan, by the way. This is the 24-7 profit plan. And if you have been listening for a while, you know we usually dig into pretty specific stuff. But today I want to zoom out a little because I think there is something bigger going on that explains a lot of what small business owners are dealing with right now. And most people have never heard it framed this way. So bear with me for a few minutes because I think this is going to connect some dots. Because if you have been running a professional service business over the last few years and you feel like your clients or patients or customers have gotten more demanding, more impatient, quicker to leave a bad review when something is not perfect, you are not imagining it. Something actually shifted. And once you understand what caused it, a lot of things start to make sense. So let me take you back about 10 or 15 years. When you called a business and got voicemail, that was just how it worked. You left a message, you waited a day or two, they called you back, and that was completely normal. Nobody thought twice about it. That was the expectation across the board, and businesses of all sizes operated that way. Then something happened that had nothing to do with your industry specifically. Amazon started delivering packages the same day you ordered them. Then in two hours, Uber showed up and suddenly you could get a car to your door in four minutes. DoorDash meant your dinner arrived in 30 minutes without you leaving your couch. None of those companies are dental practices or law firms or real estate agencies. But what they did was permanently rewire what people expect from every business they interact with, not just from Amazon, not just from Uber, from everyone. Because the human brain does not compartmentalize expectations by industry. Once you experience instant response in one area of your life, it becomes your baseline everywhere. So now when someone calls a dental office on a Tuesday evening and gets voicemail, they do not think, oh, well, that is just how dental offices work. They think, why is nobody answering? And they move on. That is not a complaint about entitled customers. That is just how expectations work. They rise to match the best experience you have ever had, and then they apply that standard universally. And here is where it gets really interesting for small businesses in 2026. The gap between what customers expect and what most small professional service businesses are actually delivering has never been wider. Not because small businesses got worse, but because the benchmark kept moving and the tools to keep up with it were not always accessible or affordable. A large hospital system or a national law firm can staff a 24-hour call center. They can have someone answering phones at 11 at night. Most solo practitioners and small firms cannot do that. And for a long time, that was just an accepted reality. What has changed is that the technology to close that gap is now accessible to any size business, not just the big ones. A solo real estate agent can now have the same availability as a large agency. A two-person dental practice can now respond to inquiries at 10 at night the same way a corporate dental chain can. That playing field has genuinely leveled in a way that it simply was not five years ago. And I think this is actually one of the most underappreciated shifts happening in small business right now because for a long time, the conversation around AI was very much about big companies and automation at scale, robots taking jobs in factories, algorithms at tech companies. It felt distant and not particularly relevant to the dentist with two chairs or the personal injury attorney working out of a small office. But that is not where the most interesting things are happening anymore. The most interesting things are happening at the small business level, because that is where the gap between customer expectation and business capability has been the largest. And therefore, where closing that gap makes the most dramatic difference. Think about what it means for a potential patient to call a dental practice at seven in the evening, which is exactly when a lot of people get around to making those kinds of calls after work and actually have someone pick up, answer their questions, book their appointment. In 2026, that is not just good service. That is a competitive advantage because most of that patient's other experiences calling businesses after hours have still ended in voicemail. The businesses that are paying attention to this shift right now, the ones that are closing the gap between what customers expect and what they deliver, are the ones that are going to look back in a few years and understand why they grew and their competitors did not. And the ones that are waiting, that are assuming the way they have always operated is fine because it worked before, are dealing with something more serious than they realize. Because the expectation does not go back down. Once customers experience instant availability, they do not reset their expectations to accommodate businesses that cannot match it. They just find ones that can. That is not pessimistic. That is actually a tremendous opportunity if you are willing to see it that way. Because the tools exist right now to deliver on those expectations at a price point that makes sense for a small business. That was not true five years ago. It is true today. All right, that is what I wanted to share today. I think understanding why customer expectations have shifted the way they have is genuinely useful context for any small business owner trying to figure out why things feel different than they used to and what to actually do about it. If you want to explore what closing that gap looks like for your specific business, the links to learn more and book a free conversation are in the description of this episode. I will see you on the next one.