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Scaling Smarter: The Future of Accounting with Joe Dunaway · Built by Margin with Laurie Chen

• 0:04
  Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen, fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle. Joe Dunaway is a Marine Corps veteran with over a decade of experience in accounting. After transitioning into finance, he saw the need for accounting services that prioritize people and community. With the discipline and commitment learned in the military, Joe built VICI Financial to support local businesses with integrity, transparency, and care. He is located in Syracuse, New York. Joe, Yeah, tell us more about what inspires you to start VICI Financial. When Yeah. So we just wrapped up, wrapped up our first year. So lots of, lots of milestones as, as you remember your first year, you know, making it through your first busy season, making it through your first extension, you make it through the summer and you know, it's always, it's always, there's always a cash element of that, you know, runway and stuff. And so we made it through our very first year, uh, which was October 16th. So very excited in, you know, It wasn't a specific problem. It was just, what's the future of our accounting look like, right? And I just feel like as I look around locally, it doesn't seem like there are a lot of regional firms, as we call them, that are positioned for that. They don't seem as agile. There are some smaller firms like myself that are just starting that have their eyes on the future. And, um, I wanted to build a firm that, uh, could, could be sustainable in, uh, the future with technology and AI going on. Um, but without losing that personal touch and care that a lot of people If they have the right accountant, that's what they're getting, right? It's always relationship-based. So I wanted to build something that I could continue to help people, which is the core of what we do. We're constantly helping people, helping solve their problems as it relates to business and personal finances without losing that personal touch. What I've seen so far, and it wasn't a guarantee, but what I've seen so far is the time that we've been able to save with our tech stack and just forward thinking of utilizing technology. we've been able to give that time back and spend more time with our clients, more in depth, more times in touching each client and getting to understand them a little bit better and be more forward thinking than reactionary. So that's really, you know, and I, we say it wherever we go, what we do is we help clients build the necessary infrastructure to scale either their business, or their personal situation through accounting, through whether it's bookkeeping or whatnot. That's what we do. We come along the side our clients to help them scale, put in the infrastructure needed to help them scale and I wouldn't say we specialize in small business, right?
• 3:51
  We Could go after bigger clients, you know, we call it whale hunting, right, where there's nice big fees and stuff. I like to work with smaller businesses because I like to help them set up good habits.
• 4:05
  I like to help them from cradle to grave, you know, start their business, get their bank accounts up and running. You know, I encourage them to get credit cards because it gives them an extra 60 days of cash flow. I like to connect them with their bail team, their bankers, their accounts, their insurance, their legal team. I like to be there at the very beginning with them, helping them through the greater mysteries of business and help them avoid the trap doors in business so that their position to have a greater chance of success, because as you know, the first one to three years makes or breaks any new business. So we want to come alongside. And I think just from a demographic standpoint, right, we want to work with clients that we're going to work with for the next 20, 30, 40 years.
• 4:56
  So working with early stage companies, I would say is more uh, our goal than a specific industry, but you name it, you know, construction, you know, blue collar stuff. We do a lot of blue collar stuff.
• 5:09
  Um, we do manufacturing. Um, we're really working with a lot of realtors, uh, cause as you know, you know, owning, owning land and real estate is, uh, really important, uh, for, you know, legacy, wealth management and stuff like that. So yeah, I wouldn't say there's a specific industry, but I would say larger, larger clients is really not our cup of tea at the moment. But as we get larger and we hire on more talent, we'll be able to take on and have more bandwidth for those larger clients.
• 5:44
  And I'm sure you've experienced this where some clients come from like a bad accountant.
• 5:48
  They have a bad experience with accountant and they think that an accountant is a sunk cost. It's just a necessary evil. But I like, I don't think that's the case. If you have a good account, I like to give our early stage clients a good experience with what a real accountant is, where it's an investment, right?
• 6:06
  You know, we're a part of your team. You know, your bookkeeping is not a sunk cost. You know, there's strategies you can take.
• 6:13
  So I see that as an investment. So I just wanted to make sure that we got that part in because if you don't have a positive relationship with your account, you're probably not doing it right. You don't have the right team. Maybe it's not the right fit. I don't know. But we definitely like to make sure our clients know that this is an investment in your business, not Yeah, absolutely. Especially if you're doing forecasting work, right?
• 6:43
  As a fractional CFO, that's a service that you provide. You're not just doing CPA, you're not just doing bookkeeping or even tax work, because that's all compliance, check the box work. But as a fractional CFO, you're offering forward looking services, you're helping them financially plan and forecast what creating those financial controls, right? And a lot, a lot of clients, especially early stage guys don't even know what that means, right? Financial quality. Well, I mean, that's an asset you, you go and sell your company someday, you know, a good set of books with some good, strong financial controls with projections, forecast budgets. Like those are all things that create value for your business. So that, that's why we, we call, we like to talk about it being an Yeah, so what is your tech stack look like? You mentioned that you have, you're looking to add more AI. What other software programs do So we operate off of carbon. Carbon's like the heart of everything we do. A carbon is a, it's a CRM and a workflow management tool combined. So everything we do, even my, even our emails are all integrated in through carbon. So we respond to emails in a triage box and all those emails either get cleared or they get or they go to, there's an action required there. And then each client has an organization and a work item, whether it's a bookkeeping work item or a personal tax work item or a business tax work item, there's work to be done. And so those emails get attached as the correspondence goes back and forth, those emails get attached to those specific work items. And for example, like our client, let's just take a personal or business tax return. There's a section where clients can upload documents. It's a secure portal to upload documents. And we can keep track of what's been uploaded. We can ask our client questions. We can do follow-up questions. We can track Um, has the engagement letter been signed? Uh, has it been prepped?
• 9:02
  Has it been reviewed? Is it ready to e-file? So, um, that's, that's one of the things that I found to be frustrating with traditional accounting firms where there just weren't a lot of systems in place. And it just seemed very chaotic where, you know, the new age way of doing things is, you know, these this tech stack just makes it so much easier. And then, you know, we actually have our software that we actually prepare returns and we use Drake. We're really happy with Drake. We feel like that the customer service is you know, world-class. I can't tell you that I've really had to wait very long ever, other than maybe on actual deadline dates. So they're very responsive, a lot of really cool intuitive tools, a lot of things we don't need to use because Carbon already offers, but it's a very robust software. And other than that, we pretty much operate communication-wise off of Um, Microsoft 365. So those are like our three primary. And we obviously, I don't know what you guys use for engagement letter, um, management, but we use ignition. So that's, that's the fourth, uh, software that we use. So everything's very tech That's great. Yeah. So in terms of A.I., the main A.I. software that we use is for tax planning. We use the software called instead. And I've been involved with this organization for many years now. They're originally called Corvi and they were really some of the pioneers in tax planning, automated tax planning. Then as their capabilities got better, they rebranded to instead. So now it's basically tax AI software for tax planning strategies and also just tax returns. They're currently working to add the ability to do tax returns with AI. They got approved by the IRS sometime last year, to e-file and that's like something that hasn't been done in like over 30 years.
• 11:08
  Like they're actually one of the few that have gotten actually approved by the IRS to e-file tax returns.
• 11:15
  So that's pretty amazing. The other thing is AP automation. Rillion is a firm that I actually just on a podcast forum, we talked a lot about AI. I haven't yet used it yet, but I'm looking into doing AP automation for my clients because, you know, AP is a chore. And if we can automate it using AI as much as possible, it could give so much Controller clients, got it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. We're looking into just doing more automation with prep, tax prep. So client uploads documents, W-2s, 1099s to the Carbon portal. We have it so that the Carbon portal is linked to OneDrive. So when an email comes through, The document automatically shows up on the work item. That work item, that document, that attachment also shows up in the OneDrive folder that's dedicated for that client. So that's pretty cool. So the AI would essentially go in and grab those documents. implement them into Drake. And then our preparer would be actually the first reviewer, essentially. And then our senior accountant would come in and do the second review. So it should save us a significant amount of time. I'm nervous because it's just tech isn't even though I'm very tech friendly. It's just not the language I speak, to be honest with you. My younger staff, they speak the language a lot better. And, you know, so we're excited to explore and see what that looks like. You know, again, the more efficiencies we can build in, the more time we can spend with our clients and having a meaningful conversation and, you Yeah, absolutely. What are your go-to tax strategies? What have you seen in the past year that has really helped transform a It all comes down to real estate, really. I mean, we've been doing more cost segregations, trying to get our clients that have the cash, the high net worth clients who've got more money that can get into rental income- situations where they can- buy properties and then we do the cost aggregations and then. You know we can take parts of that house that we can- depreciate over five or seven years versus twenty seven and a half years. And now we're able to throw a nice loss- on those- rental properties in the first few years to offset their W.
• 14:12
  two income so. That's, it's, it's, it's, it's exciting because it's something that I haven't done a lot of, had a lot of experience with, with other firms. Um, so, uh, I have, I've had a lot of clients, you know, this it's, it goes viral, all these tax, uh, strategies. And I've got clients always reaching out to me like, Oh, I seen this on tech doc.
• 14:33
  And I'm like, well, that's your first mistake. You saw it on TikTok, but I stand corrected. I can say here with the humility and say, you know what? I think there are some better strategies that I haven't been aware of in the past that I'm starting to get into. I've got clients who are interested in having better tax strategies who are interested in becoming now landlords and buying rental properties because the strategy works, it makes sense. So Yeah, that's a great one.
• 15:10
  Cost segregation though, do you have to work with a specialist to have that study done?
• 15:14
  We do, we outsource our cost segregation studies to, I mean, you know, it's a lot involved. You've got, You've got engineers. There's a lot of stuff that I'm not even qualified to do. So yeah, we outsource that to a specialist and we just want to make sure that it's done right. And at the end of the day, you know, someone buys a $300,000 property and they can take$80,000 depreciation in that first year. That's huge.
• 15:46
  That's a huge loss. And because they're active, participants in real estate, they don't need their license because they're spending 750 hours a year managing the property and buying more properties. They're able to take that loss, not as passive, but of active income. So it offsets their W-2 and business income. So Yeah, it really reminds me a lot of R&D tax credit in terms of complexity, because, you know, both you and I do do tax accounting for our clients, but we also, you know, outsource a specialist when it comes to R&D and cost segregation. R&D has been a huge topic in the past couple of years because of Section 174 capitalization.
• 16:32
  R&D credit has been in existence for a long time, but what happened with 174 in 2022 is that it It required the firms to capitalize their R&D expenses. So this created a ton of taxes for technologically savvy firms and companies that were profitable. And only just recently, in July, when the big, beautiful bill passed, that got reversed and created potential very large refunds. In fact, one of my clients got a refund of almost $100,000. That's currently being processed. But it wasn't, you know, they had to get R&D, you know, every single year. But the R&D only offset a certain part of the taxes. And so they still had a huge tax bill. But point is that R&D, tax credit, cost segregation, these are all strategies that companies that are making money should look at to see if you qualify and potentially get thousands, maybe hundreds of thousand Exactly. Yeah. And that reminds me of like the ERC credits and all that. We'll never see that again, but wow, that was the wild, wild west for people. And I still, I don't think we'll ever know like what was actually real and what was not, but you know, there's a lot going on and hope we never have to see those days again. But you know, these are the, these are the things that aren't going in a way, you know, the cost segregation, the, the, the R and D credits, these things are here to stay, you know, for the future. And if, If your tax account isn't talking to you about this stuff, maybe he shouldn't be, maybe not. But if these are things that are of interest to you, you should be asking your accountant about.
• 18:25
  Yeah, absolutely. What are some metrics that you track for your clients? What have you found that KPIs or things like cash runaway, what KPIs I mean, I like the tried and true ones. I love talking about gross profit percentage, top line gross profit percentage. I like the I like looking at all the vendors. I like to see who they're paying the most. I like to see, you know, obviously net income. And I like to, you know, where I like the most is I like really doing the aspect of the budgeting and the forecasting. And where were we last year? you know, and what variables play into where we should be going into the next year. So, you know, a lot, I don't really think I have a favorite one, but they're, you know, each client's a little bit different, right? You know, each industry has different KPIs that are helpful for that industry, but, you know, gross profit and net income are obviously a really good one. But, you know, obviously, you know, days cash, days AR, you know, how, how can we, how can we collect better? How are we utilizing our cache? Those are always really good ones that I No, I think QuickBooks does a decent job on some of those, but some of those are things that we track manually. They're not too hard. But Yeah, I have several clients that use Causal and love it. Prior to that, I used Jirav, J-I-R-A-V, which is a decent software, but I felt like the Causal was a little bit more well integrated. It was a little bit more easier to pull in different data sources, Excel, QuickBooks, Smartsheet. Um, yeah, I've had a great experience with causal and you can do all of your, um, calculations within, within And it's also, it's good for startups and companies that are doing like between let's say five and 20 million.
• 20:53
  I think if you're over 20 million, you might want to think about more of an enterprise product, um, like Anna plan. or something like that. But I think causal is good, good Yeah, absolutely. So what other services do you provide to your clients? Do you do controller work? What Yeah, I look at our bookkeeping as a sliding scale, right? We do basic bookkeeping all the way up to controller, all the way up to fractional CFO stuff. Uh, we do, we do offer payroll services. Um, we, some of our services are more like warm handoffs, like with our HR stuff, our it stuff. It's almost kind of like we, we white label some of the stuff we off. We say, we say we can help our client with it and we can, um, but you know, it's more of a, this is a, this is a partnership that we have, whether it's official or unofficial. And we, you know, we just want to be able to give our clients the best. And if we're working with, a third party to help us with things that we do, we like to share that resource with them. So, IT, project management, trying to think, you know, tax strategy, stuff What's an example of a client where the books were really messy and you had to clean it up? Like, do you have any examples of that where you kind of just kind of had to go in and pick it up and make it Yeah, I've got a few. I've got one recently. We just we just met with this client and things are good now, but it's always tough because, you know, it's usually because they were working with either an accountant that you know, neglected them or was passive, right? It's either accountant that just, you know, takes their money and just does the bare minimum and doesn't really, you know, almost kind of undersells themselves. Like if you just charge more, you can provide more and just tell them that, or you get an accountant that's just passive and they just, you know, they do the bare minimum and they don't really mean know that much. So, That tends to get some of these clients in a situation where it's adversarial. It's not a good relationship and they come to you and you start looking at stuff and you're like, wow, this is not the way it's supposed to be done. You know, they're leaning on you to save the day, but they don't realize how much work's required. So it's a real finesse.
• 23:38
  It's it really comes down to soft skills. It comes down to being being patient. And sometimes the client gets. emotional, gets get skittle it fired up and you got to kind of be able to manage that and try to reel them back a little bit. And it really, I find that the best way to deal with those clients is just come at it from an educational standpoint, like really truly care about what they're going through and what they're experiencing. And then come alongside them and say, well, listen, like I know that I'm giving you a lot of bad news and that we've got a lot of work to do, but I will teach you. I can't teach you the 15 years of accounting experience that I have in this phone call, but I can promise you that I can help you with the building blocks of understanding why this, you know, payment on this, you know, loan isn't an expense, right? I can explain to you why, you know, your, depreciating home office stuff when you really, it just puts you in a tough situation. You're better off just taking the home office simplified deduction, right? So it's just having patience. And I think with this specific client, they weren't paying for the level of service that they're paying for now. And that reflected in the quality of the tax work and the bookkeeping work that they were getting. Um, so, but fast forward now, there, there are some tough conversations and there were conversations where, you know, they were just completely wrong and you have to let them realize, let them find out, you know, it's, it's easy to be like, no, well, you're wrong because of this, but you just keep giving them evidence so that they can say, ah, you're right.
• 25:31
  And hopefully, and in this case, this was the case with this client, they have the ability to say, you know what? I was wrong, and I apologize. I understand now. I appreciate you bringing this up to our attention, and I'm glad that we have you. You build trust that way, and I feel like that was missing with this client. It's not the type of clients we look for. But sometimes, you know, you just get these referrals and you know, sometimes I take referrals as a favor for the person who's referring more than the client itself. And sometimes that's sometimes a tough situation. But If it's a real tough client, we've got to let them go. But if they respond well, and it seems like they're really interested, and they're willing to learn and relearn how to set new habits, then we keep them as a client. So yeah, it's not always easy. But with the younger clients, with the startups, with the early stage clients, they don't know any different. So when they come to you and it's a warm referral, it's like, hey, so-and-so told me about you that you did all these things. I don't know what that means, but I want that. Can you please do it for me? And it's like, yeah, let's go. Let's go down the checklist of things that you Yeah, absolutely. I love that you brought up that you get what you pay for, right? With your accountant, you know, you can either pay for a passive reactive accountant, check the box, you know, or you can pay for someone that is a little bit more forward thinking, more of a fractional CFO, maybe wants to build more of a relationship. Because I think especially the older generation, you know, they were brought up a certain way to say like, okay, we've got to check the box. It's about compliance. But now I think our generation of accountants are more focused on strategic planning, especially as we talk about tax planning, that there's a lot more there to unpack.
• 27:34
  And the more that we have like AI tools these days, It helps us to automate all of the strategies from the tax standpoint. But then also like the fractional CFO stuff, there's a lot that you can automate and do AI, run AI with. I don't recommend chat GPT. Necessarily, I think you still need someone that is very financially savvy and has the experience to maybe use strategy to learn how to run some ideas or prompts through. But that can't be like your sole source of your AI, right? Like I said, like ChatGPT, it's either $21 or it's $200 a month. Whatever the price point is that you're paying, that's what you get. You get what you pay for. So when it comes to accounting, whether it be accounting or AI, you get what you pay for. And if you pay more of a premium price, then you're gonna get a more premium service, a better relationship with your accountant or your CFO, and everything is Yeah, it goes back to what we said about our it's an investment, right? Like some of these other clients that come from, you know, an experience where, you know, the account didn't really come alongside as a team member.
• 28:52
  I feel like I have more invested in my clients than some of these other accounts. you know, I take it personal, like I really want to see them when we're like some of their biggest, you know, cheering crowd, because ultimately, like we're, we're a stakeholder in that company, they go, they go south, they're no longer a client, you know, we've got to replace them. I know that's, you know, a transactional way to look at it. But that's the reality.
• 29:17
  But I actually enjoy coming along and being a part of their team. So their increased fees are actually an investment that they're getting a return on because they're a lot more hardy of a company going forward and they understand their business a lot more. So it really is a pay what you get for Yeah. On average, how often do you meet with your typical Uh, well, it's usually, you know, with those types of clients, it's usually either it depends, it's sliding scale again, it's, you know, our, our fractional CFO clients, it's weekly. might be several times a week, depends on what projects we're working on, depends on quarterly stuff, annual stuff, uh, working on, you know, budgets in the summer for the following year. We'd really try to get ahead of that. We, we weren't really hitting those timelines this year, but you know, it's our first year. It is what it is.
• 30:16
  Um, but ideally we want to work on those budgets for the following year in the summer proceeding.
• 30:21
  Um, and then, you know, even our, even our regular book, our bookkeeping clients at the, at the lowest level, we still offer to meet with them, um, each month, just to explain the financials. It's, it's a quick five, 10, 15 minute meeting. Um, but I feel like it's important for us to, we get this FaceTime. They usually don't come in and it's usually more convenient for them. I'm surprised how many of our clients have really taken to doing these Teams meetings, these one-on-ones virtually, but it's really helped out with us being able to squeeze more clients in. We're both on time, we're going over the stuff, boom, boom, boom. Then after a few months of a new client, it goes a lot quicker. It depends. That's how our pricing is. I try to look at, well, how much time am I going to spend with this client? And that's how I dictate my fees. If I'm spending four hours a week with a client, I might as well be their controller at that point, a fractional controller. So it slides all over the place. So depending on the service level, we meet with them more often. But you generally once a Yeah, I think that's pretty similar with my clients. At CFO level, they're usually getting some kind of weekly support, might be on their Slack even, which is actually very helpful for me because then I have real-time view into direct messages or their Slack channel, right? I like it. As long as they're at the CFO level, I'm happy to be on the client's Slack, right?
• 31:59
  Do you recommend Slack to some of your clients, or has it just been Yeah, I think that the majority of my clients do use Slack. And I do recommend it because it's a great tool. It's fairly inexpensive.
• 32:16
  And it's great if you've got like between, let's say 10 and 30 employees. Because I just like the way that you're able to do like do team huddles, do Slack channels with hashtags, you know, like create different channels. I find it, I've used it for, ever since I started my firm. And so I would recommend I've got a lot of experience with Slack with some of my previous companies that I started. We use Slack with some of the previous firms I've worked with. I've encouraged them to use Slack and it's been very helpful.
• 32:51
  Some of the old timers don't really can't really get on board with it. They're hard to get them to use it, but we haven't needed it. We do most of our stuff internally through Teams, but I can see, and we've got Carbon, so we can communicate with the client that way, but I can see where Slack would make a lot of sense with some of those bigger clients Now, let's go back and talk a little bit about your origin story and why you started VICI Financial. So I want to talk a little bit more about kind of the risks that you took on.
• 33:32
  Like when you started your company, did you have any clients already in hand or did you just start and then get a client? Like were there any risks involved in when you started your firm about a Tons of risk. I had a decent book coming with me. But I took a 50% pay reduction. That was my biggest risk, honestly. Just trying to maintain our lifestyle on the personal side of things, while also trying to compensate my team what I felt like they were worth. Making sure that my team's members are paid a premium because they're good and we do good work and we have good clients. Now, as far as our client list, It was not ideal how it all happened. I tried to buy them. I genuinely tried to buy them because most of them came from my referral source, my personal network.
• 34:25
  And then there were clients that just didn't want to work with anybody other than me. And I tried having that conversation. And the previous guy I worked with just was difficult to get him to do stuff. um, that made sense. So long story short, um, we, we had a handful of clients. We let them know what was going on that we were leaving. Um, and, and that's it.
• 34:52
  Um, and then, uh, we had a, you know, a decent year, um, in bringing those clients over. Uh, but a lot of our prices went up, our prices went up significantly compared to where we were because That's part of the reason why it was difficult staying where we were because things just didn't make sense.
• 35:10
  It just didn't add up. There was a lot of stuff that was kind of hush hush that I know about it just didn't make sense. So but we increased our prices and there was a risk there because we had to charge market. We had to charge what we were worth and we had to charge for the fact that we cared a lot more and we were going to, you know, put our necks out a lot more. So there is a we lost some some retention on some clients there. But overall, I think we did really well. And we had a we have a pretty good referral system going, not a system, but, you know, the referrals have been good. We've made some strategic connections with financial advisors, attorneys, bankers, stuff like that. So we got all of that infrastructure in place. So still not getting paid where I want to be, but it's an Yeah, it takes time to build. Absolutely. You know, it's just like any other business, like the clients that you work with, you know, you have to make a huge investment and it takes time to get that return on investment. And so I totally understand where you're at, you know, because I started my firm six years ago. Well, yeah, nearly six years ago now. And so there's a bit of a risk because in a regular day job, you're probably gonna get paid a nice stable salary. Especially in our profession, in the accounting profession, there's not a lot of layoffs. It's not an industry that you can lay off. It's not a function you can lay off. Every business needs an accountant or a financial person someone to count the numbers and tell you if you need to get laid off and not the actual accountant or numbers person, right? Exactly. So yeah, we're in a great field. And it's just, it takes a lot, but to build your own business and go out there and take the risks that you do. So that's huge. All right. What is one favorite workout or Lately, I really love box jumps. I think just because I feel like everyone else hates them and they just seem like something that doesn't crush my soul. So I just feel like there's an advantage there somewhere. So I really like box jumps because I feel like it's one of my strong workouts. So I would say that Oh, what one was it? I think it was the key to money and happiness. A buddy of mine actually locally wrote the book. So I don't think most of our listeners would, well, maybe some of my audience would know the guy, but Andy Schafel wrote Money and Happiness. But I will say I'm like probably three quarters of the way through the goal.
• 38:13
  Yeah, it's like it talks about throughput and basically factory manufacturing cost accounting. Have you I have. Yeah, that was part of my MBA curriculum. It I love it. I feel like such a geek and nerd. Like I usually have like a 10 page minimum each day to read ever since 75 hard. And then obviously the five daily non-negotiables, it's still relevant. Um, I can't put the book down. I'm almost done with it. I'm very excited, but I think the next book I'm going to revisit because of this, where we're at right now in our business and trying to, uh, build more efficiencies is I think I might read buy back your time again. I'm ready to reread that one right now because I feel like it's relevant and it makes sense. So Yeah, that's what I did. I read it once three years ago.
• 39:10
  I read it again this year because it's a constant reminder of productivity and efficiency. Yeah.
• 39:19
  So you're in New York. What is your favorite sports team in Uh, you know, it's a good question. Uh, let's go professional sports team. Um, it's the New York giants, um, uh, college sports teams gotta be Syracuse university go orange. Um, so, but you know, I'm, I'm New York fan through and through Rangers Knicks as we've talked about. Um, but the baseball one is the weird one. Um, I didn't grow up watching baseball, so I'm actually a Sox fan, believe it or not. And that's very odd being from New York because everyone's either a Mets fan or a Yankee fan. But I just feel like during high school, you know, the Yankees started winning a bunch of world series. And I noticed that there was a whole bunch of people that weren't baseball fans or Yankee fans that were coming out of the woodwork being pro Yankee fan. And I felt like that was kind of a bandwagon move. So I went the opposite direction and that was before the Red Sox won their world series. What was it?
• 40:32
  2004 when they broke the, the streak, the curse. So I've always been a Red Sox fan for that reason. But by default, I root for the Mets, And lastly, how can people find you and learn Yeah, absolutely. So VICI, what is it? It's vichyfinance.com. It's even though our brand is VICI Financial, Couldn't get that for the URL domain, but it's vicifinance.com, V-I-C-I finance.com. And then if you want to catch some of our podcasts, which Laurie was on recently, and that should be coming out hopefully within the next week or two, that's thevicicode.com, thevicicode.com. And then I'm pretty active on my own personal Instagram page, just because I feel like early stage, it's a big part of the brand is my own persona. So you can find me at the joe dunaway at the joe dunaway on Instagram and then the VG pages at VG financial. So there's Awesome. Well, we're definitely going to link everything into the show notes on BuiltByMargin.com so people can connect with you. Joe, thank you so much for being here and sharing your expertise. You've given us some really solid insight into scaling smarter and harder. Thank you everyone for tuning in to another episode of Built By Margin. Don't forget to subscribe and share. Until next time, keep building your business with intention and margin. Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm