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Turning Business Revenue Into Your Family Fortune · From Stuck to Scaled: Growth Strategies for SMBs

• Julio Gonzalez: Welcome back to From Stuck to Scaled. Today we'll explore the important topic of turning business revenue into lasting family wealth. We'll be talking about actionable strategies and insights that can help entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of building and protecting their financial future. Our guest today is Phil Calandra, an accomplished entrepreneur, best-selling author, and wealth strategist with over 25 years experience in the financial industry. He has successfully built and sold two businesses in the financial services sector. and currently plays a key role as an equity partner in a 12 billion investment advisory firm. Phil has extensive experience working with Fortune 100 companies, small businesses, and individual investors, helping them navigate their wealth building journeys. He's also a seasoned athlete, having completed multiple Iron Man triathlons and marathons. And let's welcome Phil to the show. Phil, it's great to have you on from Slick to Scaled. Phil Calandra: Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Julio Gonzalez: Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your business. Phil Calandra: Yeah, so I I've spent over 25 years in the financial services industry, and I've seen a lot of businesses fail. And my mission now is I build a third company. We we built two. My wife and I exited two businesses in 2021. And now the third go round is to make an impact for small business owners. Far too many business owners are failing. They're not being successful. They're not making it. And I want to take my experience, my success and my failures and be able to help people make a difference in their own community, in their own families and in their own lives. And that's why True Wealth Advisors was was born. Thank you for having me. Julio Gonzalez: And what no, absolutely, yeah, what are some of those challenges that you're seeing that you're trying to address? Phil Calandra: Yeah, I think the biggest one for most founders and and business owners is there isn't really a rule book. There isn't a playbook that we've ever been handed. So when you think about it, all financial strategy, or I should say most, all is a very definitive word, most financial guidance and strategy grew out of the Industrial Revolution 70, 80 years ago. The financial advice that we are still clinging to isn't really meant for the entrepreneur. It's not meant for the business sector. It's meant for the W 2 employee that walked out of World War II or the Industrial Revolution. So I think a lot of Julio Gonzalez: Yeah, absolutely. Phil Calandra: businesses are failing because we have not that we have bad people giving bad advice. We've created what I call a specialist model. So if you think about your finances as a business owner, when you scale to any modest level, you have a bookkeeper that records transactions, they're looking in the rearview mirror. You have a CPA accountant that files with your favorite uncle with the IRS. They're looking in the rearview mirror, making sure that you're compliant with your taxes. You have a fractional CFO, perhaps. You have a financial advisor, you have a business coach or mentor. I always had coaches in my life in my businesses. And none of them are talking to one another. So you have what's grown into this specialist model. If you want to buy real estate, where do you go? To a realtor. And and if you want a portfolio, who do you go to? A financial advisor that was born out of Wall Street. And I'm not suggesting that you don't need those types of advice givers. What I'm seeing is this fragmentation, this lack of coordination is what's causing the founder, business owner, not get to where they want to go. And that can be fixed. That's a structural pattern, and that can be fixed. Julio Gonzalez: It it absolutely takes a team and and I'm not sure if you you know, follow any of the exit planning institute, you know, processes, but that's one of the big things that that they drive. You need a team in order to exit, right? But at the same time, you know, exit planning is strategic planning. and too many business owners don't do strategic planning to begin with, and they have no Phil Calandra: Hundred percent. Julio Gonzalez: vision of that long term plan and one way or another we're all exiting our businesses. Phil Calandra: Yes. And the unfortunate thing is what I see with a lot of the clients we work with, if they're depending on the exit to be their wealth strategy, you know for a fact a lot of businesses are not sellable. And we think they are, like, you know, no mother has an ugly baby, as the saying goes. Julio Gonzalez: Ha ha Phil Calandra: So we all think that our business is immensely valuable. There's gonna be somebody that wants to buy it for top dollar. And and and you and I both know all the statistics. Most of these people walking around, working, hustling, grinding, if that is the only possibility for wealth for their family, meaning the exit, I think a lot of people are sadly disappointed. And I know you see that day in and day out. And of the of I know one of the studies I saw recently. From the Exit Planning Institute, I think it was only 11% of the businesses that do have an exit get what the owner thought they were gonna receive from the transaction. So again, as a financial strategist, if your whole future generational wealth plan or your retirement is dependent upon the exit, wow, you better, you better rethink or at least have a different game plan, to your point. Julio Gonzalez: Yeah, you you you touched on a number of components in there without going into the actual components, but I see it as a time all the time as as a fractional COO, you know, key person risk, right? You know, so you are the one doing everything. if that is you, you don't have a business, you have a job, right? And those b yeah, Phil Calandra: That's right. With overhead. Julio Gonzalez: and and those business owners think that, you know, I'm gonna get a seven or eight, you know, X multiple. when their business is is basically zero value because you are the business. And and I'm working on a on a customer right now. It came to me, you know, more from a sale perspective, which I don't get into, you know, transactions themselves, but you know, from operationally, you know, they've been in business for 30 some odd years. The the husband, even though the wife is a partner, the husband kept her out of the business. He was everything. And now he's had a health issue. Phil Calandra: Hmm. Julio Gonzalez: and she is suddenly running the business and talking about selling and getting, you know, some value out of the business. And honestly, I don't know that they can get a lot of value just based on the current situation. So, you know, business owners really need to do a lot of, you know, long term planning. you know, to to consider what an exit is gonna look like. for for themselves, right? Because I think a lot of yo you know, younger entrepreneurs are coming into it. I'm gonna build something and sell it. You know, so they're they're coming in with a very different perspective. But those of us in in our generation, you know, I'm a little older, have a a different mindset. I'm gonna I'm gonna build this and run it and I'm gonna hand it off to my kids and the kids want nothing to do with with the business. Phil Calandra: Right, right. I think what I what I see most is people operationally, they don't build a sound business in the beginning. They they struggle, they they find a zone of genius, they find that thing that they can make money doing. And it's kind of like getting on a treadmill. If you get on a treadmill, you can start very slowly and walk. But you have this button that you can push and you can speed up the treadmill faster and faster and faster. So if you correlate that to business, you can start a side hustle and make 50,000, 200, 400, a million, two million. Julio Gonzalez: Yeah. Phil Calandra: Because if the Julio Gonzalez: Absolutely. Phil Calandra: treadmill stops, if the power goes out, you know, you and I are both in Florida, we, you know, a storm comes, you know what it's like to lose power. The treadmill stops. Your business is over. You're basically unemployed at that point. We call that a treadmill entrepreneur, and it's a trap. So what we try and teach and show our clients is how to build wealth that you can extract. Profit is the domino that knocks down every other domino. But you have to generate the profit, not revenue, profit. You have to learn to keep it off of other people's hands, in particular Uncle Sam, and then you have to multiply it. So those are the things that a lot of people are not being taught. They're not being shown. And the other thing I would say that I just heard from you, Oleo, is you know, if they build a structurally sound business from an operation and a financial perspective. I always looked at it like I want to build a business that I love that I could sell tomorrow. It was so tight, it was not owner dependent, it was frameworked, it was had processes and SOPs, but I never choose to sell it. Wouldn't that be a better way to design the business than what you said is you're going into business thinking of the 10x valuation, the multiple. And the easy button. It's easier for someone to start the side hustle and think and dream, well, I'm just gonna sell this for five million and ride off into the sunset. Maybe. But maybe they should be working to create a better operational and financial structure to build a business they love. It was so tight they could sell it tomorrow, but the family the family chooses never to sell. That to me is a better, more noble. Mission than just the exit. Julio Gonzalez: Absolutely. tell me about your book, The Wealth Creation Method. I'm assuming all of these concepts are in there. So you know, w walk us through the book. Phil Calandra: Yeah. I have a copy of it with me all the time. It it made Amazon bestseller back in May. And if you'd permit me just a short story. I tell people the book took 25 years of lessons learned, about 16 months to write. But in March of 2009, during the financial crisis. I sat at my desk at the end of a very long day and stared at my computer screen. And I had eight cents in my business checking account. And payroll was due the next day. Now, this wasn't because I was not a successful business owner entrepreneur. It's because I was on a treadmill. And the financial crisis happened to all of us. It's like COVID. It happened to all of us. September the eleventh. 2001 happened to all of us. The financial crisis put me into such a state as a founder, as a business owner in the financial services industry, mind you. I had every license, I had won the awards. I was the smartest person in the room when it came to the money. And I had eight cents in my business account. And it took me a long time. I was ashamed of that. I was embarrassed. I said, you know, how did this happen? And it happened like so many other people. It's a pattern. They didn't build a business, the structure, the pattern repeats itself. So when I wrote this book, I kind of in my mind thought, what would I want to know that I didn't know on March of 2009? And that became the wealth creation method. It's more of a field guide, it's more of a handbook that shows people exactly the things. that I wish I had known or somebody had shared with me as I was building a multi-seven figure business that ultimately had eight cents of cash flow. Julio Gonzalez: So walk us through some of that, some of those tips and and conversations that take place in the book. Phil Calandra: Yeah, so the first thing that I think doesn't get talked about properly for business owners. Everyone knows they should have an emergency fund, right? That's just good common sense. You have to have some liquidity, three to six months, personal expenses. You need to take that one step further. I call it liquidity layering. There are two liquidity layers that as an owner we should have. One is Definitely the personal emergency fund. But the other is the cash runway. What is the number your business needs to have in a high yield savings account? Not in your name, in the business name. So that if there is a disruptive disruption, you can make the payroll. What did I do when I stared at my account with eight cents? I didn't have a liquidity layer for the business. So I had to scramble. And I ultimately took a home equity line of credit personally to infuse capital into the business. Very common. But it's something that you need to think about ahead of time. Now I wish I'd never gotten to the point where I had eight cents, but liquidity layering is number one. Number two, extraction. Profit is the domino that knocks down every other domino financially speaking. And we have this. This culturation in the United States that revenue is a metric. Revenue is a very, very poor metric for most small businesses. Now, if you're Coca-Cola, if you're a rider truck down in Florida, you're, you know, Meta, Facebook, yeah, revenue, the top line number number everybody wants to know. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash flow is freedom. So we've got to start thinking as founders, as business owners, entrepreneurs, not about our revenue, not because we're going to go to the cocktail party and talk about the fact that we just crossed 10 million in revenue. Who cares? What matters is the EBITDA, the profit, the operating income that you can extract from the business and turn it into personal wealth. That's why you started the business. And people don't do that. the other big one that I talk about is fragmentation. I mentioned it in the open. As soon as you have a little bit of success in your business, you're gonna need people. You cannot do this yourself. You know, what's the old attorney joke? the person that represents themselves as a fool for a client. So all of a sudden you're making money in your business. You have a bookkeeper, you have a CPA, you have a financial advisor. You have a business mentor, you have a COO, you have all of these advice givers, and they're well-intended. Not all of them are charlatans, but the problem is none of them talk to one another, especially in the finance space. So when your financial kind of ecosystem is not knitted together, you have what we call fragmentation. Think of it like filling a bucket with holes in it. You're pouring revenue in the top, you have leaks and holes in the bucket. No matter how much revenue you think you're successful, it's falling out the bottom. And you're gonna turn around two, five, seven, ten, twenty years from now, and you didn't build any wealth from your for yourself. You just you know you had an expensive job with overhead. So those are kind of big ones that we see. I I think one of the biggest travesties. Going on in America right now, especially for business owners, is taxation. Everywhere you look, we're getting taxed at the federal level, at most state levels, the local municipalities, the gas tax, the everything. And a lot of quality CPAs do a very poor job of guiding the business owner in reduction strategies. I actually had an email come across my desk yesterday from someone that called themselves a tax coach. So I downloaded the guide. I'm like, yeah, I'm interested. I'm not a CPA. I'm just a businessman. I've done this a long time. I was like, yeah, I want to see the tax guide. Can I learn something? And I was reading through it and I was like, this is wrong. I said, I I I thought this person was a CPA. I took the document, I put it in Claude, right? I used my friend AI and I said, give me an interpretation of this tax guide and point out any areas that are not congruent with the tax code. There were six things in this tax guide that were flat out wrong. So I think that it's a problem. You've got to know who you're listening to. If you're getting your tax advice off of TikTok or Instagram, which is kind of where this was going, heaven help us. That's the situation that we find ourselves in in 2026. Julio Gonzalez: So how do you help your customers address the fragmentation issue? Right. Because Phil Calandra: Yeah. Julio Gonzalez: a a a lot of business owners don't know, you know, let's bring everybody together and have a conversation. So how do you how do you explain that to them? Phil Calandra: Great question. And we call that a chief wealth officer. Just like there are fractional COOs, fractional CFOs, fractional CIOs, we work side by side with the owner, CEO, founder, and help them coordinate all of those financial components. almost like a a holistic Unified wealth strategy. The same way a COO would come in and be able to bring vision and actionable items. You're plugging holes in an operational bucket. We're plugging holes in a financial bucket. And you could do that very, very successfully. We call it a chief wealth officer. It's just somebody that sits alongside the CEO or the founder and doesn't necessarily Eliminate the specialist, you still need the bookkeeper. Now, in our model, we we kind of function as a family office style. If you don't like your bookkeeper or if your CPA sucks, we'll give you one of ours. And we build that as a comprehensive, what we call a unified wealth plan. And it works very, very well. Statistically, we've seen this pattern repeat itself between 60 and 110,000 a year. Can be found by plugging the holes in this fragmentation, taking advantage of strategy, in particular tax strategy that no one showed you. The financial advisor community, they want to sell you more funds. Well, maybe you don't want more SP 500. Maybe you want Airbnb. Maybe you should be reinvesting back in your business. You know, the the the most common thing you hear from the gurus is. Invest all back in your business. It's the greatest asset you have. You're gonna have the exit. Maybe. But we talked about the exit dilemma before. So maybe you should be reinvesting. Maybe you should reinvest in other businesses, private equity. the wealth architecture is one component of the big picture. So that's how we do it, and it works. Julio Gonzalez: I love that you have that that more holistic view because so many business owners don't think beyond their business because like we talked about the exit, it's all gonna come at the end. you know, I know a business owner, you know, who's got a you know, pretty good business, good profitability, and is taking a minimal salary. And, you know, I challenged him on it and he's like, because the business blah, blah, blah. And it's like, you need to talk to some more, you know. financial strategy type of folks, because you can be doing so much more with your money. You could be, you know, investing in real estate and and other, you know, and it's like i if I have to make that recommendation as a non financial, non investor, you know, focused person, yeah, that that's a scary thought. you know, but business owners Phil Calandra: Yeah, very much so. Julio Gonzalez: don't don't see it. Phil Calandra: No, they don't see it. And I think part of it is not their fault. We're just not taught this. Again, I think a lot of the financial advice that we're receiving, number one, it's not entrepreneur-centric. It's not for the business owner. It's for the person that spent, you know, 30 years, 40 years in a job, or more in per more specific in a factory job. You know, we worked in fields a hundred years ago. Then we moved indoors to a factory as manufacturers, as laborers. And now, you know, the greatest employment segment of growth is the entrepreneur. It's the small business. It's mom and dad taking the risk and kind of going out and trying to make a name for themselves. That's the entrepreneur revolution. Unfortunately, we're stuck to the old ways, and it's not going to work. That's why a lot of businesses fail. And I know you see it. Same way I see it, it's just a finance lens versus a operational structural lens. Julio Gonzalez: I'm gonna break here for a second, Phil, because the lights went out. It's motion sensor. yeah. Phil Calandra: Yeah, I didn't you you weren't moving enough. Julio Gonzalez: and and I started making a note, but I lost part of it. You said revenue is vanity, something is sanity, because I really like that quote. Phil Calandra: Profit is sanity. Julio Gonzalez: Profit. I wasn't sure if it was Phil Calandra: Cash flow is freedom. Julio Gonzalez: I I want to use that at the end. All right. So let me go back and I will I'll reintroduce the show and continue from there because the timing is perfect. So you Phil Calandra: Are we hitting the things that are important to you? Julio Gonzalez: yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So you're listening to From Stuck to Scaled, and we're speaking with Phil Calandra about finance wealth management, wealth management. wealth retention even for small to mid sized business owners for founders. So Phil, talk to us a little bit more about some of the financial planning that business owners are not doing that they need to do today. Now I have a you know multi seven million seven figure business and I'm not thinking about anything but exit. So what should they be looking at today? Phil Calandra: That's a really great question. And I think I would start to frame it this way. There are three pillars. There are three specific elements that every business needs to focus on, but they have to be viewed in totality. They have to be viewed as one unified plan. And what was it that Benjamin Benjamin Franklin said? People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan. So Julio Gonzalez: fail to plan. Phil Calandra: Stick that in our minds, right? So the three core areas are the business itself. What is it that you do that generates profit? Remember, we talked about revenue as a vanity metric. What is it that your business does that generates profit? And how can you accelerate your profitability? That's almost what the fractional CFO lane does. So we need that. Number one, if we make more money, if we generate more profit, that's a flywheel that you can spin faster and faster. But what's the flywheel that's gonna crash into generating more profit? It's called your favorite uncle. It's the IRS. So if you generate more and we show our clients how to generate more profit, if you generate more profit, the counterclockwise flywheel. Is you have to learn how to keep it. You have to learn tax strategy. I am not talking about filing a tax return. This is, you know, as we're recording, we're getting ready to enter in the fourth quarter. You must, not a nice to have, not a maybe I should have, you must have a conversation with your tax strategist now. If you don't start prepping for strategy and reduction in the fourth quarter, you're gonna get past the holidays, you're gonna forget New Year's Eve, and you're gonna wake up in March or April and you're gonna ask your CPA, what can we do? I don't want to write a $200,000 check to Uncle Sam. Too late. If you generate more profit, you have to take control of keeping it. That's strategy. And then after you've generated it and kept it, the wealth architecture has to be viewed across that bridge. What is it that that money is meant to do? Most people stop there as business owners. And then the Wall Street set of folks are failing you because they're thinking in terms of 401k and Work to 67, and you'll get your Social Security. And you'll be on Medicare at 65. Come on, we gotta do better than that. For a seven-figure founder, that's not gonna fly. So generate it, keep it, multiply it. And from a wealth architecture standpoint, it could be real estate, it could be the equity markets, it could be reinvestment back in your business. It could be investment in other private equity. It could be any number of different tools. And because we've built this specialist model, what I just described to you has their own set of people that are selling you crap in each of those pillars. And I'm not suggesting you don't need those tools. You have to buy some tools to work in the garden. But let's step above that and say, What is the bigger picture that I'm trying to solve for? I want to become independently wealthy. What does that even mean? We call that the wealth freedom number. What is the amount of money that we have to have for our family where work becomes optional? That's another thing that I talk about in the book. I introduced the idea of work optional lifestyle. We if I say the word retirement, everybody's heard that so many times. I I mean I I mentioned in the beginning my wife and I exited two business. One was an insurance agency, one was a registered investment advisory firm. You know the multiples. blessed beyond measure. We were work optional. I was 51 years old and I was bored. I was like, I hate fishing, I suck at golf, I I'm good at work, I'm good at helping people think. About complex financial you know things. So I want to work. So why is it that we've gotten in our country this notion that everybody has to march and step to age 65, collect your Medicare, and then your Social Security? Like, I certainly can't live on that. A lot of people do. But we're thinking about things in the wrong way. So A unified bridge across all three of those things would be measurably better than what most people are doing as they scale a business from, you know, two million, ten million, twenty million, thirty million. That's my answer. Julio Gonzalez: I wanna touch on the work optional and and go way, way back to basics to touch on something else that you said. But 70% of every business sold, the foun the the business owner, the seller, regrets it within a year because they have no identity beyond their business. Right. So now I'm gonna take you way, way back to basics. You know, we and we we touched on this earlier, the business owner that's doing everything. Right. When you were talking about, you know, speaking with your tax strategists, and you know, all I'm hearing, you know, from the business owner side is I'm too busy for that. Right. And business owners need to realize, you know, their job is to grow the business, not do the work. Right. And growing the business, you know, part of it is having those very strategic conversations with that team. Phil Calandra: Yes. Julio Gonzalez: Right? What do I need to do to grow? What do I need to do to save, you know, my my income? Right? We reduce taxes. And they're stuck on I have invoices to to process because they they don't trust or you know, the you know, the accounts payable or accounts receivable person doesn't, you know, do it well enough. You know, how do you help those business owners break free from that so that they can in fact You know, have those better structural conversations. Phil Calandra: Yeah, I think that's exactly the problem that the chief wealth officer, my vision of having this fractional wealth coordinator, because the business owner, CEO, entrepreneur, they become the bottleneck, don't they? Because what you said is right. They think they they need to handle it all themselves, or they don't have time to handle it themselves. So then they defer it or offload it to the specialist model. They think, well, my bookkeeper will handle that. Will they? Or they think that my CPA has got the tax strategy. really? So the fractional chief wealth officer is the person that stands in the gap, just like a COO does with the managerial roles. with the operations staff. If you don't have somebody that can coordinate, it would be like, you know, us going to Symphony Hall down in Miami, right? And we go to Symphony Hall and we see the string section. There's the the percussion drums. Then you have the brass, trumpets, French horns, and they're all looking at different music. There's no conductor standing at the front with the little baton. How is that symphonic rendition going to sound? And Julio Gonzalez: Shall we? Phil Calandra: that's what we're doing as business owners. We're fragmenting what should be the most important piece. I know when I started up my first business insurance agency back in 2025, excuse me, 2003, 2004, all I wanted was enough to cover the mortgage. And the business just bloomed and growed and got bigger and bigger. And what I, you know, what they always say, if if you knew what you knew now back then, how much more success would you have? And I'm like, my God. I thought I was saving money by doing it all myself. I was like, no, I should have just paid somebody to coach me, to direct me. one of the things that made us wildly successful in our business is my wife. you would love, she's an operational genius. She sees frame, she dreams of SOPs and frameworks. She's built infrastructure. And that's what made us successful. As soon as I allowed her back in 2012, 13, she rewrote the whole business. She ran it. She operationally designed what success was. That's the problem, is people want to do it. They're the chief cook and bottle washer, the booker, butcher, baker, candlestick maker. They think they need to do it all. And they think they're saving money. I'm working with somebody right now that can't get their head around the difference between a profit center and a cost center. And I'm not going to over-guarantee or over-promise. It's either going to fit or it's not, right? You can't. Force a round peg into a square hole. But the struggle is she's not able to see that the fragmentation, the amount of time, the lift, the geometric growth that would come from the structure, the unification of what I call the three flywheels. When somebody realizes that, and even if it's for the first time, when they realize that, they're like, holy crap. I can I can get fifty, sixty, a hundred thousand dollars a year back into my pocket. Start compounding that outside of the business in your personal wealth architecture. Who cares if you have the exit? If you have the exit, it's the cherry on the top. And that's what we experienced. Julio Gonzalez: So Phil, you know, in in the show notes that I have here that I put together, you know, you talk about two games that we must play as founders or entrepreneurs. What are those? Phil Calandra: So the two games are the income game and the wealth game. The income game will make you rich. Because what we can learn as entrepreneurs, getting back to my treadmill analogy, you can speed it up. You can generate more income. Income is linear. It can make you rich. It can't make you wealthy. Wealth is geometric. And if we were drawing this on a blackboard, Julio, it would look like A linear line going up and to the right, that's your income or revenue game. The wealth game starts flat and maybe the wealth game even dips down a little. But then as it starts to turn up, it becomes geometric. It's like a hockey stick. And that's what we want to teach our clients is income is perfectly normal. It's you have to have it in a business. That's what the operation function is designed to do. generate the income, but then turn it into a geometric wealth game. Wealth is what gives you the freedom. The reason we started businesses in the first place was to create freedom as you define it. I I would never be on the golf course five days a week, but I have buddies that, you know, they're going around the world playing playing golf. I go around the world last year I went to Italy and drove a Ferrari for a week. So You know, whatever you want to do, but that comes from geometric wealth, not income. So if you think about it, it it's kind of I'll use a golf analogy. If we went, you know, I'm from Atlanta, if we went east of Atlanta to Augusta National, use a golf analogy here. I could give you one of two things, Julio. I could give you Tiger Woods, Jordan Spief. Jack Nicholas, Arnold Palmer, name any of the greats. I'll give you either their bag of clubs or their golf swing. Which one would you want? You'd want the swing. Cause they could use any golf club and still be better than me or you. What they Julio Gonzalez: True. True. Phil Calandra: have that we don't have, and I'm a bad golfer, they have spent hours, they've hit thousands and thousands of golf balls. That's the wealth strategy. That's what takes them from being an average golfer at the club to being one of the world's greatest golfers. It's not the golf club. It's the swing, it's the strategy, and that's the difference between learning how to make a linear object income produce for you versus wealth, which is the game that's geometric. It's strategic more than it is tactical. Julio Gonzalez: You can tell I'm not a golf person. Phil Calandra: I'm n I told you up front I'm not very Julio Gonzalez: Yeah. Phil Calandra: good at golf. Julio Gonzalez: And Phil, what are some of the the you know very common mistakes and that you see in the business that cause leaks versus in tax personal wealth, you know, that that maybe our listeners can start, you know, looking at today to see if maybe they have something obvious that stands out. Phil Calandra: Yeah, I'll give you a few of them. That's a great question. kind of a loaded question, because every business is different. But if you think about how to generate more profit in your business, a lot of businesses and businesses who have been around a long time, they have a faulty pricing structure. They maybe have never raised their prices. They've never really examined the revenue mix. What are the lines of the business that are generating the best margin? And we go through our business, we create offers. Every business is creating an offer that they sell, and then what they've sold has to be fulfilled. And they haven't really dug underneath the surface and said, from a financial perspective, how does what I offer, how does what I sell, how does the revenue mix generate gross and net profit? Examine that. A simple 5% price increase when the business has never increased their prices over the last decade, yet inflation has been raging. Examine your margins, price increase. And then the second thing is in the PL itself, we all have expenses that creep up on us. In our personal life, we call it lifestyle creep. In the business, I call it expense management creep. Very simply. So go line by line with your financial professional. The bookkeeper probably won't know how to do this. The CPA is not gonna do this. This is why we do this. Go line by line and look in the PL and say, did this expense bring me a client or keep me a client? That's my lens. Now I'm not saying we cut everything that's not bringing you or keeping you clients, but start with that frame. And you're gonna find in your PL three, four, five percent price or cost reductions. Raise prices five percent, lower expenses five percent. And in most seven figure businesses, you've added fifty to a hundred percent net profit. Profit centers, that's not a cost. So that would be in the generate, in that, in that, that generate flywheel. From the tax perspective, small business owners, the tax code is written for you and me. The tax code is so generous for business owners. We're the backbone of the country. W-2 earners don't have much tax strategy. As a business owner, you need to be looking at if you're at S-Corp. The accountable plan done correctly. Augusta rule, kids on the payroll, cash balance plans. It's not enough just to do an IRA. If you're trying to defer tax for your retirement, maybe a cash balance plan is better than a 401k for you. So again, just moving through the pillars, then on the personal wealth architecture, it's not just r what rate of return you need to earn. It's what's the goalpost you're trying to nail. We call that the wealth freedom number. The wealth freedom number is the capital sum that you're striving for. It's not going to be enough to just say, I want to build a seven-figure business or multi-seven-figure business or eight-figure business. That does not mean anything if you can't create for yourself the wealth freedom number. The wealth freedom number is that s capital sum of money that makes you work optional. I get to choose when I work, I get to choose from where, with who. that's a lot better you know, kind of design of your goals. and then the last thing I'll say are, you know, goals are things we can see. goals are things that we can see, then you know, milestones are things that we can shoot for. They're like like goals are things we can see, targets are things we can hit, milestones are things that we can check. So I would encourage you, especially on the personal wealth architecture side, what is the goal? Why do you want $20 million net worth? Because somebody else has $20 million? you know, we just lost one of the greatest entertainers and philanthropists in the world this week, depending on when you're listening to us record, you know, Dolly Parton. And I saw an interesting statistic. Dolly Parton, her net worth was approximately 400 or 500 million dollars. She gave away over five hundred million over her lifetime. You understand that made her a billionaire. Her goal was never to be a billionaire, and she could have been. And with compounding, she probably could have had multi-billions. That wasn't her goal. That wasn't what she saw. So goals are things you see, targets are things you hit. Identify that, and the journey along the way is going to be much more enjoyable. So that's how I would turn a good question into a long answer. Julio Gonzalez: And and you you brought up an excellent point there with Dolly, because you know, it it isn't just all about accumulating money. You know, it's what you do with it. And you look at the impact that she had on so many people's lives, you know, that to me is wealth, right? Phil Calandra: Course. If you only think of wealth as money, you're going to be a very dull boy. You're going to be shallow. You're going to be empty. I have met with multi, multi nine figure families. They sacrificed all of their health to build their wealth, Julio Gonzalez: Yeah. Phil Calandra: only to find themselves in the last days of their life regretting. Missing the ball game, missing the work optionality. life's too short. If you're only focusing on money, money is just a tool. We should say that c plainly. Money is only a tool. If you're an asshole, if you're a bad person, money's just gonna make you a bigger bad person. If you're a good person and you have meaning and you have purpose and you have relationships and you have a family that loves you, you've got great wealth. Money's just a tool. And money can accelerate, it doesn't eliminate problems, but it can sell accelerate the solution. Julio Gonzalez: Absolutely. And Phil, where can our listeners find you? Phil Calandra: Yeah, I would love to connect with the with the listeners. we'll put all this in the show notes. if you'd like to get a copy of the book, Wealth Creation Method Book.com, you can go to a free tool we use with all of our clients. It's called the Wealth Creation Scorecard. We talked about the holes in the bucket. If you want to identify where your gaps are in those three pillars, those three flywheels, generate, keep, and multiply. Go to wealthcreationscorecard.com. We'll put that in the show notes. It's 15 questions, takes three minutes. It will show you exactly where your gaps in your financial ecosystem exist. You can take that document right back to your bookkeeper, your CFO, your CPA, and say, hey, I took this free scorecard. How can we fix these things? The other thing I would submit is after the scorecard, figure what it's costing you. If you want to identify what your gaps or fragmentation are costing you, set up a call with us. We have a complete diagnostic that will show you not just where the gaps are, but what those gaps are costing you. And then we could put my email address in there. I we have a great team. I'm always making myself available. I've got four keynotes presentations between now and and Thanksgiving. I love to pour into communities and and audiences because I think that we can help a lot of people, you and me. The things that we do and the things that people need to hear, they're not hearing. And you gotta hear them Julio Gonzalez: Absolutely. Phil Calandra: and you gotta take the guidance from people you know and people you can trust. TikTok's not gonna do it, Instagram's not gonna do it. I'm I I'm afraid to say a lot of people. have advice givers in this specialist siloed model, it's not gonna get it done. And and I wish everybody the best in having the exit, but let's extract wealth and let's build a plan around it rather than hoping we we close the chapter with a big fat exit, right? Julio Gonzalez: Phil, you've given us a number of incredible nuggets. I had to write down revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash flow is freedom, because that really, really stuck with me. so for our listeners, you know, if you want to be work optional, you need to get to work. have a conversation with Phil or, you know, another wealth advisor that can really, you know, look at that larger picture for you. And as you consider your own strategies, remember the importance of developing a comprehensive financial ecosystem, not individual fragmented team. and avoid Phil Calandra: Yes. Julio Gonzalez: some of these common pitfalls in both business and personal wealth. we appreciate you tuning in and hope you found value in today's conversation. Don't sub don't forget to subscribe for more conversations aimed at helping you grow your business. Until next time, keep pushing forward. And Phil, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Phil Calandra: Thank you for having me.