Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Carlotta Thompson on Implementing Monthly Tax Strategies and Acquiring Businesses for Tax Benefits | Tax Series

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Carlotta Thompson on Implementing Monthly Tax Strategies and Acquiring Businesses for Tax Benefits | Tax Series · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of Inspired Stories, where leaders
• 0:07
  share their experiences so we can learn from their successes,
• 0:10
  how they've overcome adversity, and explore current challenges
• 0:13
  they're facing. Welcome to another edition of
• 0:17
  the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their
• 0:21
  experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired
• 0:24
  by how they've overcome adversity.
• 0:27
  My name is Anthony Cotispoti and today's guest is Carlotta
• 0:30
  Thompson, founder and CEO of Tax Strategist of America, where she
• 0:34
  gives business owners the insider secrets to save
• 0:37
  thousands on taxes. And here's the important part,
• 0:40
  doing it legally. She is well positioned to give
• 0:43
  this advice because she began studying tax law when she was 14
• 0:47
  and she is an ex IRS agent. She's going to tell us some of
• 0:51
  the most common tax deductions that people miss out on.
• 0:54
  Carlotta is also the founder of the Call to Love nonprofit
• 0:58
  organization that teaches children about education,
• 1:01
  entrepreneurship, and evangelism.
• 1:04
  But before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is
• 1:06
  brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where
• 1:10
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• 1:13
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• 1:16
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• 1:18
  add over $900 per employee per year to their bottom line by
• 1:22
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  qualifies, contact us today at Add Back benefitsagency.com.
• 1:34
  Now back to our guest today, the CEO of Tax Strategist of
• 1:37
  America. Carlotta, I appreciate you
• 1:39
  making the time to tell your story today.
• 1:42
  Thank you. Thank you for letting me be
• 1:43
  here, Anthony. So, Carlotta, just tell us
• 1:45
  simply, in your own words, what does Tax Strategist of America
• 1:50
  do and how did you first get started with it?
• 1:52
  Yeah. So, all right, Tax Strategist of
• 1:55
  America is the only firm in the US that implements tax strategy
• 1:58
  on a monthly basis. So where you might hear of like,
• 2:02
  oh, that's, you know, we do tax strategy from several different
• 2:06
  accountants, right. Well, they give you a plan, they
• 2:10
  might help you start implementing it at the
• 2:12
  beginning, but they don't continue on, right.
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  And so we implement tax strategy every month for the entire year
• 2:21
  and consistently. And when new strategies come
• 2:25
  out, we put those there as well. But how did I get started?
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  Well, that goes all the way back to when I was 14 years old.
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  I was sitting at the table going through mail with, you know,
• 2:36
  with my parents, and I came across a booklet.
• 2:39
  And I was like, what is this? And they were like, oh, that is
• 2:44
  something you should read. I was like, OK, I'm gonna read
• 2:46
  it. And so that booklet happened to
• 2:49
  be the instructions for the 1040 tax return.
• 2:52
  I know that's kind of weird. And you're probably like, why in
• 2:55
  the world would you be reading a booklet about tax credit or.
• 2:59
  At 14 aren't kids reading like right like mystery novels And is
• 3:04
  that ROM coms? Not me, obviously, but that
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  booklet, you know, I thought of it as a treasure hunt for
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  business owners. Like I, I couldn't understand my
• 3:17
  family were entrepreneurs, my aunt, my dad, I couldn't
• 3:20
  understand why they were always so scared of the IRS and, you
• 3:25
  know, tax returns. I'm like, because that was
• 3:27
  always something in our house, right?
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  They always were were concerned about taxes or my dad was a
• 3:33
  truck driver. He had a trucking company.
• 3:35
  So fuel taxes is always about taxes.
• 3:38
  And when I read this, I was like, but dad, there's all these
• 3:41
  things you can do. And of course he was like, yeah,
• 3:43
  you're, you don't know what you're talking about.
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  But anyway, big. Quiet.
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  Little kid, right? But that's when I knew I wanted
• 3:51
  to be an accountant. And so when I was 18 years old,
• 3:55
  I went over to college and and decided I was going to study
• 4:00
  accounting and finance. So I have two degrees, but when
• 4:04
  I was when I was at college, I had worked at a big box
• 4:10
  accounting place and I was like, these people are doing a
• 4:13
  disservice to business owners. They're not helping them save
• 4:16
  money. And anyways, Fast forward, I was
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  like, I'm going to work at the IRS because I know the IRS wants
• 4:23
  to help business owners. I'm 22 at the time, very naive.
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  I because remember the only interaction I ever had with the
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  IRS was this whole booklet giving you all this knowledge.
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  And like, you know, like I thought that that's exactly what
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  the IRS was all about. Was the education, Boy, was I
• 4:44
  wrong. Anyways, I applied, never got a
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  call. Went to work at the largest firm
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  in Arkansas and two years in to working there, I got a call and
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  it was the IRS went to interview me and I had not applied for the
• 4:58
  for the IRS since before I graduated college.
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  So I couldn't even believe they kept your information that long
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  because, you know, they're notorious for losing things so
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  how could they even find my information?
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  Anyways, so I got the position and I was so excited.
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  Like I thought you would be rolling me out of the IRS in a
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  body bag because I would die there at my desk 'cause I loved
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  it and. I What did you love about it?
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  I loved learning all of the different strategies and all
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  because when you think about it, you think about all the tax
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  laws, right? Well, I thought I saw every law
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  as a strategy because 99% of those laws are for business
• 5:42
  owners and they can use those. And obviously I was a small
• 5:45
  business auditor, so I was like, why aren't you using these
• 5:49
  things? And you know.
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  Wait, as the auditor, you were talking to the small businesses
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  like, hey, you guys should be taking advantage of this
• 5:55
  production over here? Right.
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  Because I thought if I, because I knew like, OK, I'm going to
• 6:02
  give them a large tax bill because they don't aren't, they
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  don't have everything, right? That was the story over time and
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  time and time again. But I thought if they thought
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  this was more of a consulting and I could give them strategy
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  for the future, they would look at this bill they were getting
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  from the IRS as more of a consulting fee than a bill.
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  I I, I love your mindset. This is awesome.
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  I I love the way your brain works.
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  It's it's so counter intuitive to the rest of us.
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  Please continue. So anyways, I obviously was, I
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  was sitting across from a taxpayer one day and he said,
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  Carlotta, if the IRS had made me take a course, I would not be in
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  this position. He said when I became a business
• 6:49
  owner, you know, they, they tell us to go hire an accountant and
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  I hired the best accountant in town and I hired the best lawyer
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  in town. If they had just told me what
• 6:57
  they expected, I wouldn't be here.
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  I mean, we can all relate to that, right?
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  The IRS gets our EI, we go to the IRS, get it, get an EIN.
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  Like they know when we start a business, they could just send
• 7:08
  out a course and tell us like, here's what we expect from you,
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  but they don't, right? They don't send out anything.
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  And so that conversation kind of jolted me and I started a
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  ministry at night helping business owners pay less tax,
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  kind of like Dave Ramsey does with, you know, financial
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  education. I did that with business taxes.
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  I know that's kind of crazy anyways.
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  And my thought was, hey, if I think these business owners
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  money, they're going to give more to the church because
• 7:40
  that's what they, you know, believe in.
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  So that's what I where this all started a few years in after
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  that, I'd already been at the IRS three or four years, but a
• 7:50
  few years after that I came across this blue collar worker
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  and I called him to be audited. Well, he was so excited and this
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  was so rare for me because I didn't understand how you could
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  be excited about taxes, right? Well, he said this is going to
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  be the best testimonial, Carolina, this is going to be
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  amazing. And I'm like what he said, yes,
• 8:15
  I sell tax advice. I'm like, OK, OK, OK, that's
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  great. You know, like I'm excited this
• 8:23
  will be my first no change. And so I went out to audit him
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  and I realized that he was in a multi level marketing company
• 8:29
  that sold tax advice that was pretty much fraud.
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  And by the time we were done with that audit, he had filed
• 8:36
  separately from his wife. And by the time we were done
• 8:39
  with that audit, him and his wife, because obviously I was
• 8:41
  auditing both of them because once I audited him, I opened
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  her. We're going to get over $100,000
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  in tax bills for two blue collar workers that were making less
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  than 6570 thousand as a family. OK, So I left the IRS before I
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  could finish the audit, and that little ministry I started at
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  night became my business. And obviously now it's not, you
• 9:06
  know, you're going to give more to the church, but you're going
• 9:08
  to give more to what you believe in.
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  Because I believe that all of us entrepreneurs, we want to do
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  good in the world, whether it be through, you know, doing
• 9:19
  building church homes or building community centers or
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  building whatever. You know, like we all have a
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  purpose here. And mine just happens to be a
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  ministry. But yours is probably something
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  totally different. And that's OK.
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  But I know if you give less than the IRS, you can give more to
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  what you believe. In I love that and so many
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  things to unpack there. Let me I made a list here.
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  So, so you're the only firm, the only tax strategy firm in
• 9:48
  America that helps their clients implement tax strategies on a
• 9:51
  monthly basis. So each month you're kind of
• 9:55
  you, you've got a, a, a stable of clients.
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  Each month you're going to them with a a new tax strategy.
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  We're going no, because the strategies that we do have to be
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  done every month. So whereas a lot of business
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  owner, a lot of business strategist, tax strategist,
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  they'll get you started on the path.
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  We all know that entrepreneurs are not going to do it unless
• 10:19
  someone does it for them, right? So they'll pay for a plan.
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  I, I used to charge $25,000 for my tax strategy plans.
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  My clients never did anything with them.
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  And I was like, why did you pay me to do this plan if you're not
• 10:31
  going to do anything with it? You know, and, and so I realized
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  that unless you make them do it and you ask for this information
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  every month, they're not going to do it because they, you know,
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  they, they realize they're paying too much in taxes, they
• 10:47
  pay you to solve the problem and they get ahead of dopamine, But
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  then they realize like that's ongoing, right?
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  They have to continuously do something to pay less tax.
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  It's not like a, oh, I can pay for this plan and I'm going to
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  pay less tax. No, that's just a plan of how to
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  get there. And so that's why we do it
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  monthly. That's why we do it ongoing
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  because entrepreneurs are not going to take your plan and
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  implement your strategies that you gave them otherwise.
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  So you charge some kind of an upfront fee to come up with the
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  plan, and then there's an ongoing monthly fee to help them
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  stay on top of everything and make sure they're taking
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  advantage of the plan that you put in place for them.
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  Make sure that they're with your help or maybe with your complete
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  doing that this plan's getting executed.
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  Right, kind of. We charge an annual fee.
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  So we'll charge a A1 time fee for the year and that includes
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  the plan and implementation because we don't want to just
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  sell you a plan. I mean, that's a, that's a waste
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  of our paper, right? For in a waste of your money,
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  right? Like the plan is, is so minute
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  to what we do. And so we don't even sell the
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  plan by itself. Like you have to buy the, the
• 11:56
  whole thing. Our first year is when we set
• 12:00
  everything up and it is the more expensive year and then ongoing
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  is about half the price. And it's an ongoing, you know,
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  ongoing year after year. Tax strategies change constantly
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  and the strategies that we implement actually you can do
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  every year, you know, and we add and do those as new laws come
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  up. What was the big box accounting
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  firm doing that You mentioned they were doing a disservice to
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  their clients. You left.
• 12:28
  You went on to do other things. What what was it that they were
• 12:32
  doing or not doing that? You're like, oh, this just
• 12:34
  doesn't sit right with me. I got to get out of here.
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  Well, so I think you know as accountants we should be when we
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  do a tax return, we have to be asking a lot of questions.
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  We can't just take what the client gives us and throw it on
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  a return. And that is what this place was
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  doing. Now there are, we work with
• 12:55
  accountants all throughout the country because we are obviously
• 12:59
  we don't have any competition for our program, but we also
• 13:03
  don't do the taxes. So our clients will use their
• 13:06
  own accountant or they'll use one of our partnering
• 13:09
  accountant. That doesn't mean that they, you
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  know, all accountants are not created equal.
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  But this firm that I was at, they just, they brought you in,
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  they took what you had on the piece of paper and they stuck it
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  in a, in their software. There was not any like
• 13:24
  brainstorming. There wasn't any, Hey, this is
• 13:27
  not a deduction or hey, you should be doing this or do you
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  have this documentation? It was just, we got your return
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  done in about 30 minutes and or an hour and you were on your
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  way. And those people sitting behind
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  that desk only had three days of training.
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  So you know, even, but even if you have, you know, ACPA with,
• 13:52
  with five years, I think we have five years of college and then,
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  you know, they take a test, right?
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  And so even the CPA S or EAS, they're still trying to get a
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  return done as fast as possible. And sometimes they can't get
• 14:09
  into all the questions that they that they need to get into.
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  And I've learned that like I can't throw accountants under
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  the bus because I am an accountant, right?
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  I know because I used to have an accounting firm, I know how hard
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  that is. So the strategy is kind of what
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  brings that all together and gets it on the return, because
• 14:28
  you pay an accountant to do a return and you usually are only
• 14:32
  going to pay them for three or four hours of their time right?
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  Now, this big box place, they did it in an hour, you weren't
• 14:38
  getting much, right. But even your, your accountants
• 14:41
  that you know, are doing this and, and they're qualified,
• 14:46
  right? They're, they're only spending
• 14:48
  three or four hours per tax return because that's all you're
• 14:52
  paying them as a tax preparer. We spend about 80 to 100 hours
• 14:57
  per client to do everything that we're doing.
• 15:00
  So obviously we can go deeper, we can ask more questions, we
• 15:04
  can educate. And so that's kind of the
• 15:06
  difference is the tax preparer is there for compliance, The tax
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  strategist is there to pull the things out of you to do the
• 15:15
  strategies that are there laying on the table in front of you
• 15:18
  that you just haven't heard about.
• 15:20
  Gotcha. I hear what you're saying.
• 15:22
  The the CPA firms, they're they're not the enemy.
• 15:25
  They're not bad people, they're just they're staying in their
• 15:28
  lane. Their lane is very specific to
• 15:30
  filling out the tax returns, making sure that they're done
• 15:33
  clearly correctly and in a compliant manner.
• 15:36
  And they're not in the same lane as you.
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  You're in a completely different lane where you're like, hey,
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  there are a whole world of tax strategies over here that are
• 15:44
  available to you that that that's just not your
• 15:47
  accountant's field of expertise. So let us show those to you and
• 15:51
  let us help you implement them and then we can help you package
• 15:55
  up that information to get to the CPA to then put it into the
• 15:59
  return to to submit to the IRS. Is that accurate?
• 16:01
  Correct. That's accurate.
• 16:03
  Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
• 16:05
  And that's also why, you know, you're, when you were in
• 16:09
  business, one of the closest relationships you have is with
• 16:12
  your accountant and you listen to them no matter what.
• 16:15
  And this is just kind of a another thing to think about.
• 16:18
  Remember, accountants usually are not business owners, right?
• 16:23
  They have a business, right? They hung a sign out outside and
• 16:26
  they're self-employed. But if you remember, you know,
• 16:29
  our four quadrants and Robert Kiyosaki's teachings, he teaches
• 16:34
  us that self-employed. That's what most accountants
• 16:37
  are, are much different than business owners, right?
• 16:40
  And so I think that we, we try to get all this advice from our
• 16:46
  accountant that's not really a business owner.
• 16:48
  So that's also why half the year we focus on teaching you about
• 16:54
  business, teaching you business acquisitions, teaching you real
• 16:56
  estate acquisitions, teaching you all the things because you
• 17:00
  we either we have two problems as business owners.
• 17:02
  We either have a tax problem or an income problem.
• 17:06
  And so we usually will take half the year to teach about tax and
• 17:09
  half the year to teach about income.
• 17:11
  And so that's also what kind of separates us is we're not just
• 17:15
  trying, we're not sitting over here just trying to hatch your
• 17:18
  tax bill. We're also trying to grow your
• 17:20
  wealth and so you can have the best of both worlds, right?
• 17:24
  And that's that's ever changing and it's a cycle, so.
• 17:28
  Do accountants ever feel threatened by you or do they see
• 17:31
  you as a as a good partner? We never have accountants that
• 17:35
  feel threatened by us because we actually bring them on as a
• 17:39
  partner and we train them like we're like here, we'll train
• 17:43
  you. We'll we have a whole company.
• 17:46
  It's called Stable. We do all their billing for
• 17:48
  them, we do themselves, we do training for them, we do peer
• 17:51
  review for them. We do everything.
• 17:54
  So all they have to do is focus on what they're best at and
• 17:57
  that's preparing tax returns and doing the bookkeeping.
• 18:00
  We also do CFO services over there, some operations stuff.
• 18:04
  So there's lots of things that we have going on, but I would
• 18:07
  say if they're just trying to be an accountant or a tax preparer,
• 18:11
  there's no threat. Now, tax strategists sometimes
• 18:14
  will be like, well, you know, that they kind of feel like,
• 18:19
  they probably feel like we're a little bit of a competitor.
• 18:22
  But what we normally have is they'll say, well, I'll do the
• 18:24
  plan and you do the implementation.
• 18:26
  So we can do that, right? They do the plan and then
• 18:29
  they'll send them to us for implementation.
• 18:31
  So we can work with anybody. But at first they might think,
• 18:34
  oh, well, this girl's just another tax strategist.
• 18:37
  No, no, we're implementing everything that you gave them in
• 18:39
  that plan that you don't want to do.
• 18:41
  And so we actually work with tax strategist as well.
• 18:44
  But sometimes we have to, you know, say, hey, this is what
• 18:48
  we're, this is what we're doing. This is what you're doing.
• 18:50
  I want to talk about the blue collar guy that you mentioned
• 18:54
  while you were at the IRS and the he was so excited this was
• 18:57
  going to be a testimonial because he was giving tax advice
• 19:00
  to people. And then you got in there and
• 19:02
  started looking at what he was doing and it was all fraud.
• 19:06
  What, what can you tell us some of the things that he was doing?
• 19:10
  Yeah, like he was writing off his entire house because he
• 19:12
  would have meetings at his house.
• 19:14
  He was writing off entire meal, all of his meals because he
• 19:18
  would be talking about his opportunity with the person at
• 19:23
  the checkout. You know, it was just egregious,
• 19:26
  right? Like you as a business owner,
• 19:28
  you understand, like you can't write off your entire house
• 19:31
  because you have a meeting there.
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  You can't, you can't write off your entire, all your meals
• 19:35
  because you spoke about your business, advertising your
• 19:38
  business to somebody at a checkout line.
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  Like it was egregious, right? And that's usually, that's why I
• 19:45
  said it was more like he knew, right?
• 19:48
  He knew he was, he was, and he wasn't committing fraud.
• 19:52
  But the, the people that were teaching this, this information
• 19:57
  were fraudulent, right? They, but then we couldn't, we
• 20:00
  couldn't prove it because they would just talk around it.
• 20:04
  Like they would imply this is what you're supposed to do, but
• 20:07
  they wouldn't come out and say it.
• 20:09
  So like we had all these recordings of of what they would
• 20:12
  say. But then he's like, well, they
• 20:16
  did say that, but they didn't do it on recording.
• 20:19
  And so it was hard. And man, this guy was like
• 20:23
  devastated, right? But it was, it was just
• 20:26
  egregious, like deduct his whole life.
• 20:29
  He deducted every mile because he was always working, you know,
• 20:33
  no matter where he went. He had he had no idea he had
• 20:36
  been given bad information. No, and that's what broke my
• 20:39
  heart was that, you know, most business owners know that, but
• 20:43
  this guy wasn't a real business owner.
• 20:46
  And that nothing against multi level marketing, user network
• 20:48
  marketing. We have a lot of clients in that
• 20:50
  field that are legit, but this company was not legit.
• 20:56
  And they've given him bad advice.
• 20:58
  And like I said, the IRS didn't send him anything like he
• 21:02
  started a business, he had an EIN.
• 21:04
  The IRS could have very well sent information and said, hey,
• 21:09
  you know, this is what we expect from you.
• 21:10
  But they did it. And so he was doing his returns
• 21:14
  itself. He didn't get any outside help.
• 21:17
  And it was just, it was really sad.
• 21:19
  Yeah, and I think that's an important distinction here is
• 21:21
  that, you know, people understand that you Carlotta,
• 21:25
  you're playing by the rules, right?
• 21:27
  Yes, you're, you're a licensed ETA.
• 21:29
  You know, you're an ex IRS agent like you, you understand what
• 21:33
  the guardrails are. You're helping people with
• 21:35
  legitimate tax strategies. Right.
• 21:38
  And I'm not ACPA, I'm an EA and the reason why I don't the
• 21:42
  reason why I'm not ACPAI do have everything to to have ACPA, but
• 21:46
  CPA S cannot invest with their clients.
• 21:49
  And I do a lot of acquisitions and a lot of of helping my
• 21:54
  clients acquire businesses, acquire real estate.
• 21:57
  And you're not you have to keep a very fine line when you are
• 22:00
  ACPA. So I chose not to go that route
• 22:05
  because this is also about growing well.
• 22:07
  And so we do a lot of like like half the year, like I told you
• 22:12
  before, we do investment strategy of like, hey, these are
• 22:17
  the kinds of investments you need to offset this income on
• 22:21
  your return. You can't do that as ACPA.
• 22:25
  These are the kinds of investments you need.
• 22:27
  And here's somebody who can, where you can buy those
• 22:30
  investments because as business owners, we need like off market
• 22:34
  type of investments. We don't want need to just go to
• 22:37
  the stock market, right? We need things that are going to
• 22:40
  have a tax impact. And so that is what we focus on.
• 22:43
  So we do a lot of investment strategy, a tax incentivize
• 22:48
  investment strategy, not telling you, hey, this like go invest in
• 22:52
  this thing, but giving you the type of investment you need,
• 22:56
  right? Like, OK, well, you have passive
• 22:59
  income, you need this kind of of investment to offset this kind
• 23:03
  of income. And so that's a little bit
• 23:07
  clear. Now we have lots of Cpas that
• 23:09
  work here, but I have to really toe the line because I am the
• 23:14
  one saying, OK, let's move this over.
• 23:17
  Here's some, here's some people we'll see in our kind of circle.
• 23:22
  We have lots of different products, right?
• 23:25
  Like you guys, you all have, you know, I heard you talking about
• 23:28
  you'll have employee benefits, right?
• 23:29
  We have lots of different products and we move people
• 23:31
  around this product to help them with their strategy.
• 23:35
  And some of those things might be investments, some of those
• 23:37
  things might be, you know, different strategies that are
• 23:41
  kind of out-of-the-box. And so that's that's what we do.
• 23:45
  And so we I had. I had.
• 23:47
  To correct you. I appreciate that.
• 23:49
  I don't want anyone like, yeah, 'cause I don't want any.
• 23:53
  I don't want any. So a state CPA is a state
• 23:56
  license. EA is a federal license, but we
• 24:00
  just have a little bit more leniency on what we can tell a
• 24:03
  client, obviously. So anyway.
• 24:06
  Yeah. Thanks for clearing that up.
• 24:08
  And you've mentioned business acquisitions several times in
• 24:11
  the conversation. Let's let's explore that more.
• 24:13
  What, what, what's the strategy here that that you you're
• 24:16
  teaching your clients? So two years ago, if you told me
• 24:20
  business acquisitions was what I was going to be teaching, I
• 24:22
  would have told you you were nuts because I was not even
• 24:25
  thinking about a business acquisition.
• 24:26
  I always thought of business acquisitions as like, you know,
• 24:30
  the big guys on Wall Street, mergers and acquisitions, right?
• 24:35
  But I got into it and I realized that a lot of businesses fell,
• 24:40
  right? They just fell when they when
• 24:42
  they start up. And I was looking at business
• 24:46
  acquisitions and the first business acquisition I looked at
• 24:50
  it was a 40 year old accounting firm.
• 24:53
  They had 20 employees. They had more revenue than I
• 24:58
  had, and I could buy them for $0.00 down.
• 25:04
  I'm like, I'm stupid. Why did I not just take this to
• 25:08
  work? Because I've been doing this
• 25:10
  for, you know, five years at this point.
• 25:12
  I've worked all this blood, sweat and tears to get to this
• 25:16
  and I could have just bought one.
• 25:18
  You know, if I had not been an accountant, it would have been
• 25:21
  5% down, right? 5% down South 50,000 or $100,000
• 25:27
  down, which I had in my 4O1K from when I was at the IRSI
• 25:32
  could have bought this in. When you buy a business that's
• 25:35
  already running the failure rate of a business that's already
• 25:40
  there and, and stabilized, it's like 2% failure rate or
• 25:45
  something, right? And whereas when you're starting
• 25:48
  a business, the failure rate's like 95 or 96% in the first
• 25:53
  couple of years. I don't know, it's like
• 25:55
  astronomical. And so I was like, this is
• 25:58
  crazy. So I got into business
• 26:00
  acquisition. Well then I realized when you're
• 26:04
  looking at business acquisitions, there are lots of
• 26:07
  companies with a lot of furniture, fixture and
• 26:09
  equipment. And so if you buy a company, say
• 26:14
  you have $1,000,000 in your business that you $1,000,000 in
• 26:17
  income, net income and you're going to be paying tax on that
• 26:20
  $1,000,000. Well you need $1,000,000 in
• 26:23
  write offs. So I'll set that right.
• 26:27
  Well, you can buy a business with $1,000,000 in furniture,
• 26:31
  fixture and equipment and those will write each other they'll
• 26:36
  together that's zero OK and. Does that still work if the
• 26:41
  business that you're buying from has already depreciated those?
• 26:46
  Items, Yes, yes, yes. And that 'cause we're doing
• 26:50
  asset purchases, right? And so those, those businesses
• 26:53
  have all depreciated all that stuff out and you're buying
• 26:57
  their furniture, fixture and equipment.
• 26:58
  And a lot of times you're only paying about another 100,200
• 27:02
  thousand over that million for their cash flow.
• 27:06
  So like right now, you know, I could go pull a business that
• 27:11
  has 1.2 million in FF and E they're making $400,000 after
• 27:16
  expenses a year and you can buy that for 1.4 and you can get it
• 27:22
  for 5% down. OK.
• 27:24
  And so it makes absolutely no sense now to go start a business
• 27:28
  because you can buy one that's already making $400,000 in
• 27:31
  profit. It comes with 1.2 million in tax
• 27:35
  deductions the first year, right, first year tax deduction.
• 27:39
  So you don't have to wait and you didn't put but you know
• 27:42
  sixty $70,000 down on that business.
• 27:45
  And so that is what we teach our business owners that are past
• 27:49
  that two $3,000,000 mark that they're kind of bored with their
• 27:53
  current business and they're like, how do I grow?
• 27:55
  How do I grow? And you can grow their business
• 27:59
  acquisitions. We also teach that to business
• 28:01
  owners who are brand new, who are like, I want to be a
• 28:04
  business owner and they're at that zero to 40,000 mark, right?
• 28:08
  OK, go buy a business, don't grow a business because chances
• 28:12
  are you're NFL at growing a business.
• 28:14
  And if you go buy a business, then you're going to cut all
• 28:17
  that failure rate out. We want to buy businesses that
• 28:19
  are over 10 years old that have over 10 employees, that are over
• 28:23
  $1,000,000 in income. How challenging is it to find
• 28:28
  businesses that check all of these boxes?
• 28:31
  Very, very easy. There are thousands of baby
• 28:36
  boomers retiring a day. And I think I heard the other
• 28:40
  day, like 15% of them are, are business owners and a lot of
• 28:43
  them are just shutting their doors.
• 28:45
  They're not even putting their business up for sale.
• 28:48
  But there are thousands and thousands and thousands of
• 28:50
  businesses for sale that are put up every day.
• 28:53
  All right, these are these are a baby boomers are checking out
• 29:00
  and their work, their their parent or sorry, their kids
• 29:04
  don't want to take these businesses over and they're just
• 29:06
  ready to retire and they're shutting the doors on profitable
• 29:09
  businesses, boring businesses that aren't, you know, YouTube
• 29:14
  worthy, right? They're pest control businesses,
• 29:17
  They're garage door businesses. They're the plumbing businesses.
• 29:21
  They're boring and their kids just don't want to take them
• 29:24
  over. And these are businesses that
• 29:27
  perhaps sometimes they're, they still have an operator in place.
• 29:30
  So say I'm here in Columbus, OH and there's a business
• 29:34
  opportunity in Milwaukee, WI, like I don't want to relocate.
• 29:38
  Is that that's still an option. For me, so there's there's two
• 29:42
  kinds of businesses you're going to buy.
• 29:43
  You're either going to be an investor as a as an investor or
• 29:48
  as as a business owner. You yourself you're either going
• 29:50
  to be an investor or an operator, right?
• 29:52
  You either have a lot of money and you need the tax write offs
• 29:56
  or you don't. You have an income problem and
• 30:00
  you want to be the operator, right?
• 30:01
  So everybody has an income problem or a tax problem.
• 30:03
  The people that have tax problems usually don't want to
• 30:05
  operate. They want to buy a business with
• 30:06
  an operator in it. The people that have an income
• 30:09
  problem, they want to operate because they want all the
• 30:10
  income. So there are lots of these
• 30:13
  businesses. Like I said, we want something
• 30:16
  that already has 10 employees. And so there's already a second
• 30:19
  line for these businesses. They just don't want to, they
• 30:22
  don't want to take the risk of buying it right.
• 30:23
  Their W2 employees their, their thoughts are not at
• 30:27
  entrepreneurial. So those employees usually will
• 30:32
  give them a 5 or 10% of equity and keep them on, keep them
• 30:37
  invested. So yes, there's there's plenty
• 30:40
  of those opportunities. There's also opportunities if
• 30:42
  you want to be the operator, you know, if you are trying to buy a
• 30:46
  business and you have an income problem and you want to keep all
• 30:48
  that $400,000 for yourself, then you would be an operator and you
• 30:52
  would move to that location and pick and you know, run the
• 30:56
  business. So we have both sides, we have
• 30:58
  both types of people coming in. And so are you acting as a
• 31:01
  broker between the the buyer and the seller here or are you just
• 31:05
  kind of helping? No, we're just educating, right.
• 31:07
  We're just educating the clients on we're, we teach them how to
• 31:12
  buy, fine, buy a tax, incentivize business.
• 31:17
  And then we have a program where we teach the operations and
• 31:20
  stuff like that. But that, you know, I'm very
• 31:24
  passionate about it because, like I said, two years ago, I
• 31:27
  thought it was dumb. And now I'm like, Oh my gosh,
• 31:30
  why are you not doing this? Because it's a great tax
• 31:33
  strategy. Not only that, it's a great
• 31:36
  income strategy. And so I think as accountants,
• 31:40
  we have to always be willing to think outside the box.
• 31:42
  And that's where I see myself different from most accountants
• 31:46
  is they're not entrepreneurs. They're in the business by
• 31:49
  default. They might be self-employed, but
• 31:52
  they're really not trying to grow their wealth.
• 31:55
  And so I am just taking clients on the path that I'm going
• 32:00
  myself. And I, I got to the point where
• 32:03
  I was doing all the strategies, you know, all the, all the
• 32:06
  personal strategies, all the business strategies, all the
• 32:09
  real estate strategies. And I was still paying a hefty
• 32:11
  tax bill. And so I had to find something
• 32:14
  that was going to take that pain away of that tax bill and that's
• 32:19
  where I went to business acquisitions.
• 32:21
  And so that is why I do it. That's that's I think it's a
• 32:25
  great tax strategy, pretty. Clever.
• 32:28
  Also found that it's a great income strategy for those people
• 32:31
  that follow me who are like, I have AW2 and I just, I'm so sick
• 32:36
  of paying all these taxes and business acquisitions can offset
• 32:40
  your W2 income. And so they might want to stay
• 32:43
  at their W2 job. I actually have a client right
• 32:45
  now that's staying at their W2 job.
• 32:46
  If they're buying a business with the operator in it to give
• 32:49
  themselves the tax strategy, that's going to offset their W2
• 32:53
  job and then they'll start taking over, you know, that
• 32:58
  business after they retire from their W2 job.
• 33:01
  And let's say that I don't have enough in income to fully take
• 33:06
  advantage of the tax write off from the strategy that you just
• 33:08
  described. It rolls over for how many
• 33:11
  years? Or just into?
• 33:12
  However many. I mean, I think it's like, I
• 33:15
  think it's like 20 years or something.
• 33:18
  It's a long. Time you can stretch it out and
• 33:20
  then are you directing most of your clients to take advantage
• 33:22
  of SBA loans to acquire these businesses or are there other we
• 33:26
  do? We have, so I do this with my
• 33:30
  mentor and so he has actually a fund where he will do the down
• 33:35
  payment. If you need down payment
• 33:36
  assistance, SBA is only 5% down. So I, I like SBA for that fact.
• 33:43
  If you don't like SBA, you know, we have there's so many ways to
• 33:47
  get these things for zero down. I mean, I think we have like 100
• 33:50
  and something strategies for financing and a lot of these go
• 33:57
  owner finance because really these people just want out of
• 34:00
  the business. They're not, you know, they
• 34:04
  don't need the money right now. So there's so many ways to get
• 34:07
  the money. The money is like the I know
• 34:10
  that's like the biggest fear of people.
• 34:11
  Of course. Our well, it's like, oh, that's
• 34:14
  the easy part. The money's the easy part
• 34:17
  because you can, there's so many opportunities when you get in
• 34:20
  our circle. You know, like I said, if you
• 34:23
  are an investor, like the money's the easy part, right?
• 34:26
  Well, you think you because your biggest question was the
• 34:30
  operator. Well, the operator's problem is
• 34:32
  always the money. So we pair a lot of those up.
• 34:36
  We'll pair an operator up with an investor and they'll pair up
• 34:39
  and buy the business. So it's, it's amazing what we do
• 34:42
  in our community because people just want to, they both want the
• 34:47
  same thing. But one will have money, one
• 34:49
  will have be like, oh, I can go out there, I'll move today.
• 34:53
  We also start teaching kids at 7 years old about our pathway to
• 34:59
  wealth. This is through your nonprofit.
• 35:01
  Yes. And so we have a secular, it's,
• 35:05
  it's through my nonprofit, but we have a secular event that the
• 35:08
  nonprofit will they produce in the summer.
• 35:14
  It's they produce it alongside our our tax position for adults.
• 35:20
  So the nonprofit will pay for the kids to go through the
• 35:24
  program and it's called kid position and teen position.
• 35:27
  But we will start teaching kids at 7 years old.
• 35:30
  So by the right now we have some, we have a 17 year old that
• 35:34
  just closed on a Med spa 98 days after coming to our event last
• 35:38
  summer. She was 16 at the time.
• 35:40
  Her dad had to cosign for her. We have a lot of kids, so
• 35:44
  they're now 18 that want to be operators.
• 35:47
  And so we're, we're and we have a lot of homeschooled kids
• 35:50
  because their parents are like, yes, let's invest in them.
• 35:54
  You know, let's they invest in themselves and then they they
• 35:58
  have a lot of kids and so their kids will come through our task,
• 36:01
  our Kidquisition and teenquisition program.
• 36:03
  And so those kids are like, hey, send me anywhere and they're you
• 36:07
  know, they're ready to go and be operators.
• 36:11
  And so we have a lot of those kids that are coming out of the
• 36:14
  program and like, hey, I'm ready.
• 36:17
  So it's really cool to see these nineteen we we actually go up to
• 36:23
  23 and so the 23, 19 to 23 year olds coming out of the program
• 36:29
  and saying send me wherever I'm ready to go.
• 36:32
  And they have our support and and the knowledge.
• 36:35
  And so if you're an investor, you can find, you know, one of
• 36:39
  them even and, and have them help you be operate that
• 36:42
  business. Your program sounds really
• 36:43
  interesting. As an entrepreneur myself, I in
• 36:46
  in masterminds and, you know, socialize with a lot of other
• 36:49
  entrepreneurs. And one thing I hear, you know,
• 36:52
  is a common topic of conversation is, you know, when
• 36:54
  kids get to be college age, like, is that the best move?
• 36:58
  You know, if our kids are showing the same kind of
• 37:01
  entrepreneurial interest and spirit as us, does college make
• 37:04
  the most sense? And some of them are of the mind
• 37:07
  that, you know, rather than invest the money in a college
• 37:09
  education that they might like to invest in a business for them
• 37:13
  and have that sort of be their education.
• 37:16
  What what's the, the tell us how to find these programs?
• 37:20
  The The Kidpreneur Teenpreneur. How do people find these?
• 37:24
  So you can go to our website pretty much if you get on our
• 37:27
  list, you'll see it at the bottom of of our emails, right?
• 37:30
  It's called Teenquisition and Kidquisition.
• 37:35
  You could, you know our list, you have the link for our list.
• 37:38
  You can go to www.taxregisofamerica.com, but
• 37:44
  once you get on our list, you'll be on the inside and you'll find
• 37:47
  out about these programs. We do not advertise them hard
• 37:50
  because they fill up so fast. So we if you're a client, we try
• 37:57
  to get your kids plugged in. I think we have over 70 kids
• 38:01
  already coming to our event in August.
• 38:05
  We will probably have 150 kids come through that.
• 38:09
  And yes, I agree, two of my boys probably won't won't go to
• 38:13
  college. They are like, no thank you.
• 38:17
  My daughter is going to college because she actually helped me
• 38:21
  start Texturizers of America when she was 14 and she was the
• 38:25
  youngest ever recorded I guess to get her QuickBooks Online Pro
• 38:31
  certification. She did that at 13 and she.
• 38:37
  Sounds like a chip off the old block there.
• 38:40
  She has to have a degree if she wants to, to take over the
• 38:43
  business, right? Like she can't do it as just a,
• 38:47
  a, a person with no, no college degree because we're a, a tax
• 38:52
  strategy firm. She's got to have that
• 38:54
  background. So she knows like she's already
• 38:58
  she's 17 and she's going into her third year of college.
• 39:01
  So she's going to college because she has to and she
• 39:05
  already has found like I need to do this if I want to run this
• 39:10
  business or be a part of this business.
• 39:13
  My boys on the other hand, they have no desire to be a part of
• 39:16
  this business. And that's the thing, like if I
• 39:19
  didn't have her, where would the business be?
• 39:21
  Now our goal is to go public. So obviously we would go public,
• 39:24
  but just taking you back to you thinking that people wouldn't
• 39:28
  want to sell their business. Kids don't want to take over
• 39:31
  their parents businesses. All the honestly, there's a lot
• 39:35
  of trauma usually in the lives of our kids because they've seen
• 39:39
  how hard we've worked for these things and they don't want to
• 39:42
  work that hard. I'm just being honest.
• 39:45
  Like there's a lot of kids today who are who are like, my parents
• 39:51
  worked hard. I just want to live a normal
• 39:54
  life and make 50 sixty $70,000 a year and that's OK.
• 39:59
  I mean, whatever they want to do, but I'm just saying like
• 40:03
  entrepreneurship is not for everyone.
• 40:05
  I have a lot of students that go through my program and they
• 40:08
  realize that they're like, I don't, I don't want to do this.
• 40:11
  I want to go be an employee and or you know, they'll partner
• 40:15
  with someone up and they'll be an operator.
• 40:17
  They're like, I'm good with 5%. If I can operate this thing, I
• 40:20
  don't need to own the whole thing.
• 40:23
  I just want to work in it. And so that's, that's our
• 40:26
  operators that are coming out who are like, I don't want all
• 40:28
  the responsibility to own it. I just want to, you know,
• 40:32
  operate it, be an employee, have you know that cushion there?
• 40:37
  So it was fascinating to kind of do a deep dive there on the tack
• 40:41
  the business acquisition strategy as using it as a tax
• 40:45
  strategy. And I'm sure you don't want to
• 40:47
  give away all of your secret sauce, but is there other maybe
• 40:51
  low? Is there some other low hanging
• 40:54
  fruit or some other creative ideas that that you want to drop
• 40:57
  on the audience here? Yeah.
• 40:58
  So, OK, if you are a business owner, you're going to there's
• 41:03
  there's three sets of strategies you're going to implement.
• 41:06
  You're going to implement your personal strategies, your
• 41:08
  business strategies and your real estate strategies.
• 41:11
  And then that's when you would go into acquisitions after
• 41:15
  you've done all this. OK, so let's talk about personal
• 41:19
  strategies. These are things like hiring
• 41:21
  your kids. The Augusta rule, Augusta rule
• 41:24
  is came out of Augusta, GA. That's where you can rent your
• 41:27
  home to yourself, rent your home out for 14 days a year tax free.
• 41:31
  You can, your business can rent your home from you.
• 41:33
  It's tax deduction to the business, tax free income to you
• 41:38
  hiring your kids. If your kids not working in your
• 41:40
  business, I think it's a disservice because you want to
• 41:42
  teach them work ethic. You can put your kids in your
• 41:47
  advertising, you can pay them, you can put the money if they're
• 41:49
  Roth IRA, that's what we're doing for our kids.
• 41:52
  So when they do graduate, they can go and buy a business.
• 41:55
  Because if I put it in a 529 account, which is the education
• 41:58
  account, I'm going to have a big penalty because they're not
• 42:01
  going to school. So I put it into a Roth IRA.
• 42:03
  They can take out those earnings that they put in there tax free.
• 42:08
  And so that's what. Our they can take out a Roth IRA
• 42:11
  tax free to use for education. They can take out the money they
• 42:15
  put into the Roth IRA for any reason.
• 42:19
  They just can't take out the interest that it's earned,
• 42:22
  right? And so they can take out all
• 42:24
  those earn their earnings from their job when they turn 18 and
• 42:30
  they can use it for anything. So they could use it for
• 42:32
  business or whatever. So you can always take out the
• 42:37
  money that you put in because it was paid at it was after tax
• 42:40
  dollars, right? You just can't take out the
• 42:43
  earnings. So, but those are kind of
• 42:46
  personal strategies, right? There's a list of personal
• 42:49
  strategies. Now business strategies are the
• 42:51
  strategies that usually have a specialized firm doing them,
• 42:55
  right? So this would be like employee
• 42:57
  retention, credit research and development cost segregation.
• 43:01
  These are things that you're going to implement per business.
• 43:04
  So personal strategies you're implemented per person.
• 43:06
  So if you've got two partners in the business, each partner would
• 43:10
  implement personal strategies, unless you're a couple, then you
• 43:12
  would implement personal strategies as a couple.
• 43:15
  Business strategies are implemented per business.
• 43:18
  And like I said, those are going to be things like ERC R&D cost,
• 43:23
  like there's 110 of those strategies.
• 43:25
  Next you're going to implement real estate strategies.
• 43:27
  Real estate strategies are implemented per property.
• 43:30
  So if you've got an apartment complex, that's a property.
• 43:32
  If you have fifty single family doors, that's fifty properties.
• 43:35
  You're going to implement those strategies per property and then
• 43:39
  you would go into looking at business acquisitions.
• 43:42
  Once you're done with those 3 buckets of strategies.
• 43:47
  If you've never been on one of our webinars, we give away
• 43:50
  exactly how to do the personal strategies down to the forms you
• 43:53
  need to fill out to do them. So you can DIY them.
• 43:57
  You can do it yourself, obviously.
• 43:59
  I mean, we're wanting the entrepreneurs who don't have
• 44:02
  time to do everything. So we'll give you everything and
• 44:05
  you can do it yourself. But we know that entrepreneurs
• 44:09
  don't have the time to do it. That's how our business was
• 44:11
  born. If they had the time, they would
• 44:13
  do it, right? They don't they, they need to
• 44:16
  focus on making their money. But business owners, I think,
• 44:21
  you know, their whole focus is gross receipts, like how much
• 44:24
  income can I make? And they rarely think about how
• 44:27
  much income can I keep. And so I want to leave you with
• 44:30
  a kind of a nugget, one doll for every $1.00 in tax savings that
• 44:35
  you save, that's equal to $7.00 in gross receipts.
• 44:38
  Think about it. We do business acquisitions
• 44:40
  throughout the country. Your profit margins are usually
• 44:43
  about 30%. So $7.00.
• 44:45
  You're going to get to keep about 30% of that.
• 44:47
  That's about $2.00. You're going to be paying about
• 44:50
  a dollar in taxes between, you know, your employment taxes for
• 44:55
  you and your business taxes for state and federal, you're going
• 44:59
  to have about a dollar left. So for every dollar we save you,
• 45:04
  you multiply that times 7 and that's what you would have to
• 45:07
  make in gross receipts. So whenever you come to our
• 45:10
  webinars, which I think you're going to give them your link to,
• 45:14
  to our trainings, it's a 2 hour training and our goal is to save
• 45:16
  you $10,000 on that training and show you how to implement it
• 45:20
  yourself. And then if you multiply that
• 45:23
  time 7, that's $70,000 in gross receipts you would have to make
• 45:27
  to make up for that $10,000. So I think it's very well worth
• 45:30
  2 two hours of your time to do that and you can leave being
• 45:35
  able to go and implement those things or higher us to do that
• 45:39
  for. You it's amazing the difference
• 45:41
  there, $7.00 to to every $1.00 in in revenue.
• 45:46
  Yeah. Carlotta, what, what are some of
• 45:48
  the most common mistakes that you see business owners make?
• 45:52
  You get a lot of clients who come in the door.
• 45:54
  You know what? What are some of the the most
• 45:56
  common things that you see? I would say the biggest mistake
• 46:00
  is not keeping up with your records, right, Not having
• 46:03
  records. The biggest thing in an audit is
• 46:06
  not that you didn't purchase. The thing is that you don't have
• 46:09
  any record keeping. So you got to remember that your
• 46:13
  credit card statements only go so far for mills, travel.
• 46:18
  For mills and travel and mileage, you have to have actual
• 46:23
  for mileage, you have to have a log.
• 46:24
  And for mills and travel, you have to have receipts, OK.
• 46:27
  And they have to put on the mills, you have to put the
• 46:30
  purpose of of the mill and who you are with.
• 46:35
  And so that's that's low hanging fruit the IRS is always going to
• 46:39
  go after. And you need the receipt even if
• 46:41
  you've got a credit card statement that shows the line
• 46:44
  item on. Right, on Mills travel you have
• 46:48
  to have a actual receipt on mileage you have to have an
• 46:52
  actual log. Even if you're taking actual
• 46:55
  expenses on your return, you still have to have a mileage
• 46:57
  log. So those are things that those
• 47:00
  are the three things IRS is always going to get you on
• 47:02
  because y'all don't have those receipts, right.
• 47:05
  So keep those receipts. Now also, the IRS knows that
• 47:12
  accountants are terrified of them.
• 47:14
  So a lot of times in an audit, and This is why we provide audit
• 47:17
  defense because this makes my stomach just turn over.
• 47:22
  Most accountants are scared. And so when they go into an
• 47:25
  audit, they will just tell the IRS to disallow things.
• 47:29
  So they'll say, Oh, well, we need proof of these expenses and
• 47:32
  the, and if the client doesn't have it, they'll just tell the
• 47:37
  IRS to disallow it. Well, you can recreate records
• 47:40
  for the IRS. So you can, you know, recreate a
• 47:44
  mileage log if you don't have one.
• 47:48
  Also, if you don't have the receipts, a lot of those
• 47:51
  receipts, you can go back to the place and get them right.
• 47:55
  You can go back, you can show your your your credit card
• 48:01
  statement. They can pull the receipt at the
• 48:03
  place you were at. Also, when you're, when you're
• 48:09
  under audit, the Cohen role is a role that allows you to use
• 48:15
  other supporting documentation for everything except mileage
• 48:19
  and travel and meals. OK.
• 48:21
  And so if the IRS asks you for like a receipt for Walmart and
• 48:26
  you can say, oh, this is what I purchased, then they have to
• 48:31
  take your oral testimony or that's where they you can rely
• 48:36
  on those credit card receipts as long as you know what you
• 48:39
  purchased. All right.
• 48:40
  And so I would say documentation is the biggest mistake.
• 48:44
  Now, what are some things that are always constantly called red
• 48:47
  flags? One of the things I didn't
• 48:49
  mention is that I was also a classifier at the IRS, which
• 48:53
  means I've classified tax returns that came out for audit.
• 48:57
  So a classifier is. So let me explain what the IRS
• 49:02
  does. The IRS gives every return a
• 49:05
  score, OK? The biggest mistake on a return
• 49:08
  is that the next code is wrong. That's the NAICS code.
• 49:13
  And that tells you what kind of company your company is.
• 49:16
  Well, accountants are really lazy, and so they'll just throw
• 49:19
  any code on there that can get you audited faster than
• 49:23
  anything. Think about it, if you're a
• 49:25
  hairdresser and they have you coded as a construction worker,
• 49:31
  your expenses are compared to other construction workers, not
• 49:35
  hairdressers, right? And so that's going to be way
• 49:38
  different. And so that code is how your
• 49:42
  return gets scored. A lot of times accountants will
• 49:45
  put 999999. That's so stupid.
• 49:48
  All right, don't do that. That's a red flag.
• 49:51
  That's not even a red flag. It's going to get you audited
• 49:54
  because you're getting compared to people in a different group
• 49:59
  than you're in. All right.
• 50:01
  So #1 make sure your next codes right.
• 50:04
  And that's going to be on, on your return, whether whatever
• 50:07
  you're filing, there's going to be a code on there and it's
• 50:09
  going to tell what kind of entity you're you are.
• 50:13
  So if you're in real estate or you're in, you know, if you're a
• 50:19
  beauty shop or whatever you are. All right.
• 50:21
  So that's number one. Number two is that the things
• 50:27
  that accountants tell you that are red flags are not red flags.
• 50:30
  Usually accountants cop out for things they don't know is that's
• 50:35
  a red flag. It's also their cop out when
• 50:38
  they think it's a red flag like Home Office.
• 50:41
  I don't know how many accountants will say Home Office
• 50:43
  is a red flag. That is not a red flag.
• 50:46
  That is so silly, but that's what you hear, right?
• 50:50
  And so as a classifier, what we're, we're looking for is
• 50:55
  first of all your other expenses, what, what other
• 50:58
  expenses do you have? Are they things that on your
• 51:02
  other expenses don't put other put like what it was for, right
• 51:07
  putting on there? If those things can go on a line
• 51:10
  item like on the main return, that's better, right?
• 51:13
  Because those other expenses are always being looked at.
• 51:17
  What, you know, what kinds of expenses are there for what kind
• 51:22
  of entity type you are? So those are the things that IRS
• 51:25
  is really working at. Now, I'll say for biggest miss
• 51:28
  deductions, things I always see miss number one's mileage
• 51:32
  because people just don't take the time to do a mileage like so
• 51:35
  they just don't put it on there at all.
• 51:36
  You either have people that put too much mileage or people that
• 51:38
  don't put any mileage. And I'm like, OK, you're an
• 51:41
  Internet marketer, but you obviously probably go to the
• 51:44
  bank, you go to the post office, you go to, you know, meetings,
• 51:47
  whatever. Don't forget your mileage.
• 51:50
  The second thing I would say that almost every business owner
• 51:55
  misses, including me, is when you turn something from personal
• 52:00
  use to business use. So like when I started my
• 52:04
  business, right, I used a lot of stuff that I had laying around
• 52:08
  that's turning personal use items to business use.
• 52:11
  Most people don't ever deduct those things because they're
• 52:13
  just like, well, I didn't buy them when I started my business.
• 52:16
  It doesn't matter when you bought them if it's the lower of
• 52:20
  Fair market value or the cost in the current year when you put
• 52:23
  them in ServiceNow. Even now to this day, I mean,
• 52:27
  I'm a multi $1,000,000. I have 3 multi $1,000,000
• 52:30
  businesses. I still make this mistake
• 52:33
  because my husband will, you know, take something we bought
• 52:37
  personally. Maybe it was a tractor or
• 52:39
  trailer or something, right? And we have bought it
• 52:43
  personally. We never deducted it.
• 52:45
  And he'll put it into business use and he won't tell me.
• 52:47
  And I'll be like, oh, I never put that on the return because
• 52:51
  you didn't tell me, right? You just started using it.
• 52:53
  And I don't know how many personal lawn mowers that we've
• 52:55
  turned to business use and I haven't put on there.
• 52:58
  So think about that every year when you're doing your return.
• 53:01
  Is there anything that I bought personally that I'm now using in
• 53:05
  business? There's a lot of great gold
• 53:07
  Nuggets there, Clauda, thank you for sharing that.
• 53:10
  I, I want to make sure that we also give voice to all your
• 53:13
  services. There's the annual service that
• 53:16
  we talked about at the the top of the show where you do the
• 53:19
  strategy and you help implement for the full 12 months.
• 53:23
  It's you don't push the kid and the teen coaching because it
• 53:29
  fills up so quickly, but that's also available.
• 53:32
  Are there other services that we should talk about here?
• 53:36
  So we have the accounting and tax services from stable where
• 53:40
  that's where we partner with our accountants.
• 53:41
  But obviously to the clients that is where you can buy
• 53:45
  accounting and tax. Like if you need a tax return
• 53:47
  done or you need bookkeeping done, you need CFO services,
• 53:50
  that is through a stable and we sell you the service.
• 53:55
  We match you with three accountants and you choose which
• 53:57
  one that you like the best. The cool thing about that is the
• 54:01
  accountants are all competing on customer service.
• 54:04
  They're not competing on price cause all prices are already,
• 54:07
  they're all the same, right? So it's really cool to have to
• 54:10
  have an accountant compete on customer service.
• 54:13
  You'll be surprised how much better an accountant is when
• 54:15
  they have to compete with a fellow accountant based on how
• 54:19
  great their customer service is. Also, which another thing that's
• 54:22
  really cool is we own the client.
• 54:24
  So if you don't like your accountant, it's really easy to
• 54:26
  switch. You just say, hey, I don't like
• 54:28
  them, I want to switch. You all know how hard it is to
• 54:31
  switch. Accounts like it's so many.
• 54:33
  People are like, I've been with my accountant to 10 years and I
• 54:36
  hate them, but I don't want to go through the problem of
• 54:38
  switching, so we actually made that problem go away.
• 54:43
  It's genius. Yeah, We also do audit defense
• 54:45
  on all of that. We do peer review on those
• 54:50
  accountants. So one thing you may not know is
• 54:52
  that accountants can do whatever they want to do.
• 54:55
  They don't have to have any peer review done on their work unless
• 54:58
  they're audited by the IRS. That's the only time that their
• 55:01
  work is, is looked at, right? And a lot of times they're the
• 55:05
  IRS is only going to audit one return and they're going to, you
• 55:08
  know, you're never going to hear about it.
• 55:10
  So what I like about our program is we actually peer review these
• 55:14
  people to make sure that they are up to our standard of doing
• 55:17
  tax returns and bookkeeping, which is usually peer reviews
• 55:21
  usually only done by the top 10 firms in the USI like this
• 55:25
  because they actually get peer reviewed.
• 55:29
  So that's that's our stable services.
• 55:33
  We also have the business acquisition, real estate
• 55:35
  acquisition coaching and that's from the standpoint of tax
• 55:38
  incentive incentivizations, which is to my knowledge, we are
• 55:44
  the only firm teaching that from a tax standpoint.
• 55:48
  I've not seen anyone else. There's lots of people teaching
• 55:51
  business acquisitions, real estate acquisitions.
• 55:54
  I've seen real estate talk from a tax standpoint, not seeing
• 55:58
  business acquisitions talk from a tax standpoint and really
• 56:01
  honing in on the ones you need for your tax situation.
• 56:05
  We also have let's see that covers tax position.
• 56:11
  Then we have our done for you service.
• 56:12
  We have inquisition to acquisition stable and then we
• 56:19
  have our network of strategies where, you know, if you come to
• 56:24
  us and you're like, oh, I need operations help, we can send you
• 56:29
  to someone for for that. We're we try to be a holistic
• 56:32
  place of, Hey, I need this help because clients always come to
• 56:38
  their accountant for everything. I mean, to the point where I'm
• 56:42
  thinking we need like a marriage counselor in our circle on
• 56:45
  networks because they come for everything, right?
• 56:49
  Like they, there is no, no stone unturned.
• 56:53
  They're going to come to us for it.
• 56:54
  And we actually are going to put health in there because, you
• 56:58
  know, our clients are like, oh, my health's bad.
• 57:01
  Like I need life insurance. I can't get, you know, so it's
• 57:04
  they come to us with everything. And so we're trying to make sure
• 57:07
  that we have someone to support them in every place they need
• 57:10
  supportive. That's great.
• 57:12
  And that is a really holistic approach.
• 57:14
  Let's shift gears for a moment, Carlotta.
• 57:15
  And I'm curious to hear about a particular challenge either
• 57:19
  personally or professionally that you experienced along the
• 57:22
  way and and the lessons that you learned coming through the other
• 57:24
  side. Man, I've had so many of these.
• 57:30
  We should have started with this, this that would have got
• 57:32
  people like really and excited about what was to come, man.
• 57:38
  All right, so I will I, I call it God's sifting me.
• 57:46
  He's sifting me right. Like, you know, in the Bible it,
• 57:49
  it talks about how we're sifted like wheat and they beat the
• 57:52
  wheat and then they shake it around.
• 57:54
  I feel like that is has been most of my entrepreneurial
• 57:58
  journey. I'm always getting beaten and
• 58:01
  sifted anyways, So I don't look at it as a negative.
• 58:04
  I look at it as God's just just preparing me for what he has
• 58:08
  next. But biggest, the biggest thing
• 58:13
  that comes through as a business owner was at one time was taking
• 58:18
  on a partner. And this is I'm going to tell
• 58:22
  you when you're taking on a partner, that's a marriage.
• 58:26
  And you better be sure that you would want to be married to that
• 58:31
  person if you're going to take them on as a partner because it
• 58:35
  can blow up in your face really quick.
• 58:38
  And so this partner was only coming on as a minority partner,
• 58:42
  which is fine. Like I'll take under 15%
• 58:45
  partners all day long because they really don't have any say.
• 58:49
  They're just, you know, they're, you're giving them kind of a
• 58:51
  piece of equity. And so this guy was going to
• 58:55
  come on as a 1% partner, right? But as he got into the company,
• 59:01
  he exploded ourselves, which I guess use the term make it rain.
• 59:10
  He made it rain, right? He really exploded our company,
• 59:15
  but he did it by raising our prices.
• 59:18
  And so we were selling to clients at $25,000.
• 59:22
  Now we knew our service wouldn't hold at $25,000 because it's
• 59:29
  just a plumbing and tax strategy can be worth $25,000 I'm sure,
• 59:34
  but not to the kind of clients that we were bringing on.
• 59:37
  Most of our clients were in that you know three $300,000 range
• 59:42
  and so don't pay in 25,000 a year for tax and accounting was
• 59:46
  just too much for them. So what happened is we couldn't
• 59:50
  keep those clients happy. He wanted 50% of the business,
• 59:57
  50% of everything that I grew. So he was gonna be, he was gonna
• 1:00:02
  leave the business if I didn't give him 50%.
• 1:00:05
  So obviously I offered him 43%. That was not enough.
• 1:00:10
  Thank you. Jesus.
• 1:00:11
  He didn't take it and he left and he started a business
• 1:00:17
  exactly like mine. He tried to duplicate me.
• 1:00:22
  But the thing was, is he wasn't an accountant.
• 1:00:24
  He was a sales guy. And so he took a lot of our
• 1:00:30
  clients. I would say he took a lot of
• 1:00:34
  clients that he brought in, not a lot, probably like 5-4 or
• 1:00:38
  five, right, big 25,000 or your client, which was fine because
• 1:00:42
  as soon as we, you know what, so that hurt, right?
• 1:00:46
  Like I, I mean, this guy was pretty much in our business,
• 1:00:50
  ingrained in the business. Had to feel betrayed.
• 1:00:52
  He takes clients he's going next door to start the exact same
• 1:00:56
  thing. Or try to anyways.
• 1:00:58
  Right, And he didn't have anything to do with tax before
• 1:01:00
  he came in. Like he was a sales guy, right?
• 1:01:02
  Like he didn't know tax or anything, but he could talk like
• 1:01:05
  me because he listened to everything I said.
• 1:01:07
  And so betrayal, lots of heartache because this guy was
• 1:01:12
  my friend. Very sad.
• 1:01:16
  I mean, I'd gotten in with his family like so I had this family
• 1:01:19
  dynamic with him. I'm just going to say like when
• 1:01:22
  you're an entrepreneur, don't, don't get in bed with other
• 1:01:27
  people. Give them, you can get them,
• 1:01:30
  give them a 15% minority share all day long.
• 1:01:34
  It would be better to do a joint venture or something like that.
• 1:01:38
  I am against partnerships at this at this time.
• 1:01:41
  The only partnerships I have are less than 15% except with my
• 1:01:46
  husband. And we're in a state where he
• 1:01:48
  would get half anyway. So obviously, and I wouldn't be
• 1:01:52
  here without what he's done. So he, he deserves 50%, but I
• 1:02:00
  learned a lot of hard lessons in that.
• 1:02:02
  But I came out on the other side and it became a blessing because
• 1:02:08
  those clients that we brought on at $25,000 did not stay
• 1:02:12
  obviously because they couldn't afford $25,000, right?
• 1:02:16
  Like they just, it was not even smart for them to afford it.
• 1:02:22
  So now we make sure our services are in line with the client that
• 1:02:26
  we bring on. We don't have any services that
• 1:02:29
  are $25,000 anymore like that. You know, those clients are
• 1:02:33
  $1,000,000 and above 25,000's fine.
• 1:02:37
  But for those clients that normally you're seeking us out,
• 1:02:40
  you know they're at that 300,000 to to two or three million mark
• 1:02:45
  in gross receipts. That's not their, that's not
• 1:02:48
  their profit. We do have some 30 million,
• 1:02:51
  forty $50 million clients, obviously, but it just wasn't
• 1:02:58
  the right fit, right? Also, as soon as that happened,
• 1:03:04
  we had another sales guy that was trained by this guy.
• 1:03:06
  He was an accountant. He was a terrible accountant.
• 1:03:09
  And so I don't fire anybody. So this is my second lesson.
• 1:03:14
  I am terrible at I. It's a hard thing to do if
• 1:03:18
  nobody's ever been through it, I mean.
• 1:03:20
  Yeah, it's. It's worse than breaking up with
• 1:03:23
  somebody, right? Because you, I mean, it is
• 1:03:25
  breaking up with someone, but you know, now you just took away
• 1:03:28
  their paycheck too, you know, Yes.
• 1:03:30
  And you're destroying their family and you're, you know, so
• 1:03:33
  as a business owner, I'm going to tell you our childhood trauma
• 1:03:37
  is what we have to work through every day as a business owner.
• 1:03:40
  And so my mom passed away when I'm 7 via suicide.
• 1:03:44
  So that's traumatic for me. I feel like that she abandoned
• 1:03:49
  me, right? And so now every time I'm, you
• 1:03:53
  know, have, I have a huge team and like when I get close to
• 1:03:57
  them, I'm so scared like to they're going to abandon me, but
• 1:04:01
  I, but at first like I'm going to have to abandon them when
• 1:04:05
  they first come on because if they don't aren't a good fit,
• 1:04:08
  like that's, you know, me abandoning them.
• 1:04:10
  So anyways, a lot of trauma going on there, obviously, but
• 1:04:15
  we all need, we all need a therapist.
• 1:04:19
  Put that plug in there. But I had this accountant that I
• 1:04:24
  moved from accounting to sales because he was a horrible
• 1:04:27
  accountant and I give everybody the chance.
• 1:04:30
  And so the guy that was my partner had had trained this
• 1:04:35
  guy. The partner left about he he
• 1:04:38
  wasn't ever a partner. He was going to be a partner,
• 1:04:41
  but he left three months prior to that.
• 1:04:43
  This guy was selling his services on my sales calls.
• 1:04:48
  Wow. So he was taking the sales calls
• 1:04:52
  and he would say, Carlotta, it's too expensive for you.
• 1:04:56
  Let me sell you what I do. Yes, that happened.
• 1:05:04
  OK, so how? Did you find out one of these
• 1:05:06
  prospects? A client, a client finally
• 1:05:10
  contacted me and was like this guy said that he has these
• 1:05:14
  services and and I don't know what's going on.
• 1:05:17
  And so, I mean, he probably took 30 clients.
• 1:05:21
  Though Oh my gosh, yeah. It was like nauseating.
• 1:05:25
  OK, so then he was obviously, I don't know, he had some mental
• 1:05:31
  issues because whenever it came to light, he was like, I can't
• 1:05:35
  believe you would ever say that. Like he attacked my Christianity
• 1:05:38
  and I'm like, bro, there's like 30 people that have come to me
• 1:05:42
  now. Like obviously it's not just me
• 1:05:46
  me judging you. That's not how this works,
• 1:05:49
  right? Like he was like that's not
• 1:05:51
  true. Anyways, he stole our laptop so
• 1:05:54
  that become a whole nother, you know, policy like everything you
• 1:05:59
  learn, you implement something to make it where it doesn't
• 1:06:06
  happen next time. I have had so every day is
• 1:06:12
  something I'm learning, right? Like every day I am one, you
• 1:06:20
  know, fire away. I feel like from blowing things
• 1:06:24
  up. Not really, but that's how it
• 1:06:27
  feels as the CEO of seven companies.
• 1:06:30
  I, I have seven companies now, so it may be, you know, a
• 1:06:35
  software issue today or a, a real estate issue tomorrow.
• 1:06:41
  Like who knows, you know, but I'll say that failure is not
• 1:06:48
  real. And that is one of the biggest
• 1:06:51
  problems I had as a new entrepreneur was I was so scared
• 1:06:54
  of failure because again, childhood trauma, right?
• 1:06:57
  Failure's not. Real.
• 1:06:58
  What do you mean by that? You just pivot so every time
• 1:07:03
  like I felt have in most people's eyes, I probably have
• 1:07:07
  felt several times, but I've never really failed because I
• 1:07:11
  just change what I'm. Doing.
• 1:07:12
  You learn from it, you adapt, you treat it, you treat it as a
• 1:07:15
  as a learning experience. I tried this, this was an
• 1:07:18
  experiment. It didn't work.
• 1:07:19
  I'm going to try something different.
• 1:07:20
  Now I have lots of things that have not worked and currently
• 1:07:23
  I'll just be very transparent Currently last year was sales
• 1:07:30
  were so easy, OK, like I mean you could mention something and
• 1:07:36
  it would be it, it would sell out like that.
• 1:07:39
  This year the economy has changed.
• 1:07:42
  I, I, I know it's not just us because it's happening with a
• 1:07:44
  lot of our clients. The sales atmosphere has
• 1:07:46
  changed. And so this year we're we're
• 1:07:50
  stopping our done for you services on June 6th.
• 1:07:53
  So they'll be stopped by the time this comes out.
• 1:07:55
  We'll still be doing our strategy plans, but our done for
• 1:07:58
  You will be sold out for the year.
• 1:08:00
  But we didn't sell out, right like last year, we sold out in
• 1:08:04
  April. This year we're ending ourselves
• 1:08:07
  because really our clients don't, there's this fine line of
• 1:08:14
  when entrepreneurs, they, they get overwhelmed and that's going
• 1:08:19
  to become about probably May or June.
• 1:08:25
  What what I mean by that is they have to, when they come on to
• 1:08:28
  our services, they have to fill out surveys all the way back to
• 1:08:31
  January. And so if they come on in June,
• 1:08:33
  they're going to have to fill out January, February, March,
• 1:08:35
  April, May, which only take about 10 minutes each.
• 1:08:38
  OK. But entrepreneurs don't have
• 1:08:42
  that much attention. So they're like, Oh my gosh,
• 1:08:46
  this is so much stuff. You know, like, I mean, it's,
• 1:08:51
  it's crazy. So we do not sell past June
• 1:08:55
  because we know our customer service rates drop out.
• 1:09:00
  So people that come on past June are not as happy as if they came
• 1:09:05
  on before June. And so right now our our last
• 1:09:10
  year we quit selling in April and we have 80 over 82% renewal
• 1:09:16
  on last year services, which is huge for this not being an
• 1:09:19
  accounting service like accounting services are where
• 1:09:22
  you actually get your tax and bookkeeping done.
• 1:09:25
  Those are pretty sticky. This is not that, right.
• 1:09:28
  So it's like a an annual service and.
• 1:09:31
  Somebody must. They must be really seeing the
• 1:09:33
  value of it if they decide. Exactly 82%'s.
• 1:09:36
  Not like a tax return where you have to get it done every year.
• 1:09:39
  They get opt out of your services, but they're going back
• 1:09:41
  and they're looking and they say, oh, I spent this and here's
• 1:09:44
  how much I saved. Yeah, I'm doing that again.
• 1:09:47
  Exactly. So 82%'s huge.
• 1:09:50
  The ones that aren't renewing are the ones who are didn't fill
• 1:09:56
  out the stuff and they didn't save anything, right?
• 1:09:58
  They're not, they didn't participate, right?
• 1:10:00
  Most of them anyway. So, and, and we still have seven
• 1:10:05
  months of, of time for them to renew.
• 1:10:08
  So they don't have to renew by a certain date.
• 1:10:11
  Like they can renew throughout the year as their old payments
• 1:10:17
  fall off. So a lot of them are still
• 1:10:19
  paying for 2023 because we allowed some longer, you know,
• 1:10:22
  extensions of, of plans last year.
• 1:10:24
  So anyways, but that kind of a test to, you know, how our, our
• 1:10:33
  goal is delivery over anything else.
• 1:10:36
  It's all about delivery. How, how great can we deliver a
• 1:10:40
  product and we don't want to just sell to sell.
• 1:10:43
  So sales has been a problem for us this year, which has never
• 1:10:47
  happened in the past and we've had to pivot.
• 1:10:51
  You know, our ad cost went up. We're paying like three or $4000
• 1:10:56
  per client. That's huge.
• 1:10:59
  You know, our ad, our ad spin for somebody to come to a
• 1:11:04
  webinar went from $7.00 to $23. I mean, there's just a lot of of
• 1:11:10
  factors. And so, you know, if I would not
• 1:11:13
  have pivoted, pivoted, pivoted constantly.
• 1:11:16
  Like, you know, last year we didn't sell anything past April.
• 1:11:21
  We actually shut down sales for the rest of the year.
• 1:11:24
  This year we're pivoting to our acquisitions.
• 1:11:27
  We're actually selling that the rest of the year this year,
• 1:11:31
  whereas last year past April, you couldn't buy anything from
• 1:11:34
  us. So that that's just some lessons
• 1:11:37
  like you've got to constantly pivot based on where you're at.
• 1:11:41
  Those are really powerful. Yeah.
• 1:11:42
  Thanks for sharing those, Carlotta.
• 1:11:44
  Are there any specific mentors or maybe books, events, or
• 1:11:49
  experiences that have helped shaped you or your professional
• 1:11:52
  career? Yes, Russell Brunson is how I
• 1:11:57
  became an entrepreneur. Well, I was born an
• 1:12:00
  entrepreneur. I've been selling stuff on the
• 1:12:02
  playground since I was in kindergarten, right?
• 1:12:04
  Russell Brunson is the founder of Click Final.
• 1:12:07
  Brunson How I understood you could sell online.
• 1:12:11
  So one of the first things I did was I had a financial course
• 1:12:16
  before I was doing the tax stuff.
• 1:12:18
  And as church outreach, I did a financial outreach.
• 1:12:21
  But instead of people hating their budget, I wanted them to
• 1:12:24
  love their budget. And so it was called love your
• 1:12:27
  budget. And I sold that.
• 1:12:31
  And I sold that because Russell was like, you can sell online.
• 1:12:34
  I was like, no, you can't. No, that's not a thing.
• 1:12:37
  And so I sold, I, I sold out and like, I don't know, 24 hours, I
• 1:12:42
  guess probably the first time I ever pitched Love your budget.
• 1:12:47
  I don't even teach that anymore. But but back then I did.
• 1:12:51
  And you know, so I would say anything he puts out marketing
• 1:12:56
  secrets. It's probably the book, the one
• 1:13:00
  book that I read that that changed my trajectory.
• 1:13:03
  It's so cool because his dad is coming to speak at our event and
• 1:13:09
  in August. It's like a, a, a full circle
• 1:13:12
  like moment, right? I'm like, I love his dad and
• 1:13:16
  Russell probably doesn't know me from from Adam, but his dad is
• 1:13:22
  amazing. His dad's an accountant.
• 1:13:24
  It's really cool. Anyways, he we're we're
• 1:13:27
  partnering with him and he's coming to teach the summer.
• 1:13:31
  And so I would say him for sure. Alex sharpens where I learned
• 1:13:35
  everything about operations. He is amazing.
• 1:13:42
  I you could bench his podcast and learn everything you need to
• 1:13:47
  know about operations. He doesn't sell a a program
• 1:13:51
  anymore but you can learn everything you need to know just
• 1:13:54
  from his podcast. Recently I started following
• 1:13:58
  Tommy Mello. He spoke on stage the other day
• 1:14:01
  when I was at an event that I was speaking at and he is in the
• 1:14:05
  garage door space, which I know is weird, but the dude is like
• 1:14:09
  so smart. He owns A1 Garage doors, that's
• 1:14:13
  a national company. He's taking on rounds of of
• 1:14:18
  public trading or taking on rounds of private equity.
• 1:14:23
  He has a book called Elevate. So that's who I'm currently
• 1:14:27
  listening to him listening to his podcasts.
• 1:14:29
  Great stuff there. So that's who I would say has
• 1:14:31
  had the most impact on. Me these are great examples.
• 1:14:33
  Thanks for sharing those, Carlotta.
• 1:14:35
  I just have one more question for you.
• 1:14:37
  But before I ask it, I want to do 2 things.
• 1:14:39
  First, if you like today's content, please hit the
• 1:14:41
  subscribe, like or share button on your favorite podcast app.
• 1:14:45
  I want to tell people how to get in touch with you and find all
• 1:14:48
  your great services. Tax strategistofamerica.com is
• 1:14:52
  the best place. Yes, and I'm also on Tiktok,
• 1:14:56
  Facebook and Instagram. Most of the time it's Carlotta
• 1:15:00
  Thompson Finance, but there's not very many Carlotta
• 1:15:03
  Thompson's. You'll find me very quick.
• 1:15:05
  We put out videos every day, just a little nugget of tax
• 1:15:09
  information. So those are those, that's where
• 1:15:12
  you can find me. And then yes, like we have a
• 1:15:15
  weekly webinar that you can come to.
• 1:15:17
  It's a 2 hour training. It is live every week and that's
• 1:15:22
  where we can answer your questions, get you hooked in.
• 1:15:25
  I know a lot of you probably are like I don't have two hours, but
• 1:15:27
  I promise it's worth it. I mean, like I said, if we can
• 1:15:30
  save you $10,000, that's worth $70,000 in gross receipts.
• 1:15:34
  But we also send out a replay. We can always just hit the
• 1:15:40
  replay button and put it in 2X. So yeah.
• 1:15:44
  Be be a good investment of time and they can find that webinar
• 1:15:47
  and sign up for it on your website
• 1:15:49
  techstrategistamerica.com. Yes, Sir.
• 1:15:52
  Last question for you, Carlotta. I'm curious how you see your
• 1:15:55
  business evolving in the next five years.
• 1:15:57
  What are the big changes that are coming?
• 1:15:59
  Well, AI is going to be huge for accounting.
• 1:16:02
  And like I said, we're going to embrace, we embrace whatever
• 1:16:06
  comes our way. There is no competition.
• 1:16:08
  If a firm comes out and they can do what we do for less money,
• 1:16:12
  hey, we're going to sell their services for them because for us
• 1:16:16
  it's all about bringing the community together and providing
• 1:16:19
  everything on place. So AI is going to have a big
• 1:16:23
  effect. We are trying to go public.
• 1:16:27
  That is our goal. Our 10 year goal is to go public
• 1:16:31
  and you know us own the client and get them all the services
• 1:16:35
  they need. So like a one stop shop for
• 1:16:38
  small businesses, there's nothing like that in in the US
• 1:16:43
  that's widely known. We come at that from a tax
• 1:16:46
  strategy perspective. So hopefully we can do that.
• 1:16:49
  And I, you know, I'm not even going to say hopefully I know we
• 1:16:52
  will do that because all we have to do is pivot along the way.
• 1:16:56
  I would say in your business, don't ever let anything that you
• 1:17:01
  see coming be be competition to you.
• 1:17:03
  Figure out how you can make it. Go in with your brand, find your
• 1:17:07
  blue ocean, find what you're doing differently and make it
• 1:17:12
  cohesive with what you're doing. I'm always trying to navigate
• 1:17:16
  the road of being the only one that does something.
• 1:17:19
  I'm the only one that teaches acquisitions from a tax strategy
• 1:17:23
  standpoint. Now, do I believe other people
• 1:17:25
  will come along and do that? Absolutely they will.
• 1:17:28
  If they become a big name out there, I'll just bring them into
• 1:17:31
  the company and have them be a cohesive part of our company,
• 1:17:36
  right? I'm I'm always looking to
• 1:17:40
  collaborate and not not compete because that's where you're
• 1:17:43
  going to get to the to the best place.
• 1:17:46
  How do you see AI having an impact in the accounting space?
• 1:17:50
  So AI is going to one day be able to do tax returns, right?
• 1:17:55
  It's going to be able to do everything.
• 1:17:57
  It's going to be able to lift things off.
• 1:17:58
  It's going to be able to tell you the strategies you're
• 1:18:00
  missing. But there's always going to be a
• 1:18:02
  human component to it because AI can't know the answers to every
• 1:18:07
  question. So there will always be a part
• 1:18:10
  of it. It's kind of like QuickBooks.
• 1:18:11
  They use a lot of AI already to like put your things in a
• 1:18:14
  certain spot on your books, but then they get it wrong and they
• 1:18:17
  put every deposit to income whether and it could be a loan,
• 1:18:20
  you know, like they just it, it assumes a lot.
• 1:18:25
  So AI is going to it's going to be there to help us.
• 1:18:28
  I think it's going to be able to help us do a lot more strategy.
• 1:18:31
  I think it's going to be able to help us review a lot more
• 1:18:34
  returns. So and I think it's going to be
• 1:18:37
  able to do returns. So I think that it's, you know,
• 1:18:40
  just in just like the law field, it's going to have a huge
• 1:18:43
  impact. But to think it's going to take
• 1:18:47
  the place of an actual person. Yeah, it's not because it's not,
• 1:18:52
  it still has to to ask you questions and you have to be
• 1:18:56
  able to answer them correctly. And well, garbage in is garbage
• 1:18:59
  out. And so that is the biggest
• 1:19:02
  problem with accountant or with with clients period, is they
• 1:19:06
  don't know how to answer the question.
• 1:19:08
  They answer it wrong. You know, the return's wrong,
• 1:19:11
  whatever. So you know, you do get a lot of
• 1:19:14
  a lot of garbage out and that can't be fixed by a computer,
• 1:19:17
  right. It's just.
• 1:19:19
  That that's great stuff, Carlotta.
• 1:19:21
  I wanna be the first to thank you for sharing your story with
• 1:19:23
  us today. I really appreciate it.
• 1:19:25
  Thank you for letting me be on. That's a wrap on another episode
• 1:19:28
  of the Inspired Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us
• 1:19:31
  today.