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EP330: Stop Guessing: Use Your Numbers To Actually Grow Your Business · Profit With A Plan

• 0:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know, most business owners make decisions in the dark without even realizing it. They operate on gut instinct, outdated spreadsheets, or whatever their bookkeeper sends over that looks like tax time, right?
• 0:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But most companies… but companies that grow, scale, and actually keep their profit.
• 0:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They treat their numbers like a roadmap.
• 0:26
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This week, we're talking about the kind of accounting that goes by beyond tax prep. You'll hear how proactive financial systems give you cash flow confidence, smarter planning, and a business that can weather any season.
• 0:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Plus, we break down what small businesses can borrow from commercial real estate accounting to think bigger and make decisions with long-term value in mind. So if you want to stop reacting to your finances and start owning them, this episode of Profit with a Plan is the one you want to catch.
• 0:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey entrepreneurs, are you working too hard for too little profit? Well, welcome to Profit with a Plan podcast, where we help you scale smarter, increase profitability, and build a business that's worth more, whether you keep it or sell it.
• 1:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I'm Marcia Reiner, Business Growth Strategist and the profit booster behind Infinite Profit. I've helped countless entrepreneurs to turn their businesses into highly profitable and sale-ready assets, so they enjoy more income now and a bigger payday later.
• 1:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: So join me for practical strategies, expert insights, and proven steps to help your business be more profitable, more valuable, and built to last.
• 1:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: By the way, today's episode is sponsored by Infinite Profit, where we don't just talk profit, we deliver it.
• 1:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And so, I got a question for you. If you're tired of flat revenue or marketing that just doesn't pay off, the new Profit Booster Growth Map might be for you. In just a few minutes, you'll learn exactly how to bring in more qualified clients and plug those profit leaks that might be eating away at your cash.
• 2:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Go get your growth map at ProfitBooster.biz and start turning your missed revenue into real money.
• 2:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: All right, let's jump into today's episode. My guest, Sunny Grappone, is the co-founder of Precision Counting and Consulting, or also known as PAC by Their Friends.
• 2:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's a financial advisory and accounting firm known for helping small business owners gain control of their numbers and build healthier and more profitable companies.
• 2:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: With years of experience in operational accounting, commercial real estate finance, and small business advisory, Sunny brings a clear, practical approach to financial management that owners can actually use.
• 2:41
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: He specializes in turning messy books into clean, actionable financial systems, giving entrepreneurs the insights they need to plan ahead, manage cash flow, and make confident decisions. Sunny has guided hundreds of businesses through growth, crisis, and expansion by helping them understand the story behind their numbers.
• 3:01
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: His mission is simple. Give business owners the clarity they need to protect their company, increase their profit, and build long-term financial freedom. Sonny, welcome to Profit with a Plan Podcast!
• 3:13
  Sonny Grappone: Hi, Marcia, thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be on the show.
• 3:16
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah, so, I always like to start off and figure out
• 3:20
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: how you got into numbers and finance. Usually there's some sort of thing that triggered along the way. We don't wake up and go, I'm gonna be an accountant. Or do we?
• 3:30
  Sonny Grappone: No, no, no, no. It was a long and, I wouldn't say treacherous, but it was a long journey, to get there. I was a late bloomer, you know, I went back to school when I was about 25. I was always an entrepreneur.
• 3:44
  Sonny Grappone: From the young age of… my first job was 12 years old, bagging groceries at my, parents' supermarket, in New York, working at Wahlbaum's. I used to have my little tip jar, and…
• 3:56
  Sonny Grappone: You know, and I made great money, like, $75 in a day on a weekend, you know? And, back then, that was, you know, a lot of money for me, you know? So I always, liked the idea of having my own money and making my own hours, and so, you know, as I got older and I got my first real jobs, my first job was at Kmart and, like, doing stuff like that, I always had a side hustle. And, I always knew I wanted to be my own boss.
• 4:21
  Sonny Grappone: You know, and it flourished for me in my 20s when,
• 4:26
  Sonny Grappone: I had an act for detailing an auto body, just came up naturally. You know, I started working on my own car, and, you know, people started to see my work, and people started to get drawn to it, and people would come up to me and ask me, can you do my car, can you do my car? You know, so it turned into a business where eventually I had my own, body shop out in Long Island, and it grew, you know, and I was doing a lot of residential auto detailing.
• 4:51
  Sonny Grappone: in…
• 4:52
  Sonny Grappone: you know, wet sanding, compounding, that type of stuff. And, by the age of 25, 26, I would say, I was getting some wear and tear on my body, and I remember going to the doctor and him telling me, if you do this for, like, another 15, 20 years.
• 5:08
  Sonny Grappone: it's not going to be good for you, you know? So, because I had some injuries from basketball, I played college basketball when I was a kid, you know, so it was just, it wasn't working out right for me. So, you know, my mother's dream, was for me to go to school and finish, you know, she was very big on, you know, academics. You know, my mother comes from a third world country, Guyana and South America, you know, she came here with nothing.
• 5:32
  Sonny Grappone: And, you know, worked at a company, worked her way all the way up.
• 5:36
  Sonny Grappone: And, you know, kind of lived the American dream, you know? And she sacrificed everything for us, and she instilled the work ethic in me that I carry with me today. And, her dream was for me to get an education and, you know, move forward, and I finally did at 25, decided to go back to school.
• 5:50
  Sonny Grappone: And I said, let me see what I, you know, what I like, and I took a couple classes, and I had an act for accounting. Now, my mother's a bookkeeper for 40 years. All my aunts are accountants, and I kind of found my niche in there. I like…
• 6:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: A family business.
• 6:03
  Sonny Grappone: Family, yeah. You know what's great about accounting? It's, like, one of the only things that I can do that I feel like truly present, you know, in the moment, focused, like I'm laser-focused. And people think, when they think accounts, they think math. And it's not more so math, it's more so problem solving, you know, it's like a.
• 6:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Awesome.
• 6:20
  Sonny Grappone: You know, if something's happening on this side, it has to happen on this side. And if it doesn't, what's happening, right? Everything has to balance. You know, so I went to college at 25, and went back, you know, kind of started from scratch, and I worked my way up.
• 6:35
  Sonny Grappone: Working two jobs, going through school, and finally I graduated with a degree in accounting, and I worked corporate for a while. My first job was for a hospital, and
• 6:45
  Sonny Grappone: I didn't really like it too much. It was, not-for-profit, a lot of very, you know, monthly budget meetings, stuff like that, and
• 6:54
  Sonny Grappone: I ventured off into consulting, working in Manhattan, for a bunch of years, and I learned a lot. Just working in different industries, different fields.
• 7:03
  Sonny Grappone: And, finally, I was able to branch out. I got really tired of, working in Manhattan. It changes you as a person. It's hustle and bustle, and, you're always in a rush, and I spent 4 hours of my day commuting.
• 7:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yay.
• 7:19
  Sonny Grappone: Yeah, on the train, and at the time, my wife saw, like, I was just not happy, and I sacrificed my, sanity for less money.
• 7:29
  Sonny Grappone: And, I worked for an individual that was trying to poach me for a long time that I consulted for. I took less money coming back, and it turned out, it worked out, it was the best thing I ever did, because, I did so well here that he ended up becoming a partner with me in my own business, which is now Precision Accounting and Consulting.
• 7:47
  Sonny Grappone: Which we… we broke the door, like, I would say. I always had it on the side burner, but it officially became something in 2021, I would say, right before, like.
• 7:58
  Sonny Grappone: after the pandemic, and kind of when people needed, funding, PPP, that type of stuff, we kind of really, the pandemic was like a godsend for us, I have to say, because it…
• 8:08
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Mounting space, yeah.
• 8:09
  Sonny Grappone: Oh, yeah, because it expanded our scope, going from…
• 8:12
  Sonny Grappone: New York now to, you know, every state, you know, in the United States. You know, I have clients in Chicago, California, Vegas, Florida, you know, you name it. We're pretty out there, you know, so it just changed our landscape, and we were able to bring value into areas that we never thought we'd be able to, you know, because New York is not… not that it's limited, but, there's a lot of competition here, you know?
• 8:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: No, I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it. So it sounds like, it sounds like that your, your, your, original job at bagging groceries for tips was, was something that stayed inside of you and, and pushed you towards the business side rather than the corporate side of taxes, which I love.
• 8:54
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I think that so many business owners really, truly don't understand their numbers. They get… they get all squirmy, or they look at it quickly enough to go, okay, it looks fine, let's go, right?
• 9:07
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Or, the flip side, they rely so much on their accounting team, bookkeeper, external, whatever, tax person, that they still really don't know. And… and I find that that's just… I think that's the killer of business success and growth, is not really understanding.
• 9:25
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: How to turn those numbers into financial systems, like, like you said.
• 9:30
  Sonny Grappone: So… It's really unbelievable, like, when you see it, like, you know, and the problem is they just don't have the right team in place. Like, people take advice from a bookkeeper, and this is not putting bookkeepers down, but they're not accountants. You know, they can put.
• 9:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They're there to data entry.
• 9:48
  Sonny Grappone: Correct. You know, you just mentioned real estate. We had a real estate client that we just visited a couple weeks ago. He has over $100 million in assets, right? Never did estate planning or anything like that. But cash flow-wise, he has no idea where he is. You know, entity structure-wise, he has no idea where he is, you know? He just started doing cost segregations, you know, within, you know, a couple years, you know?
• 10:13
  Sonny Grappone: And he's taken all his advice from his bookkeeper.
• 10:16
  Sonny Grappone: You know, it's just… it's mind-boggling.
• 10:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's… it's scary, right? You know, and so… so what I want to do with… with this conversation is talk about the financial systems and… and things that we can do as small business owners who aren't
• 10:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: number-savvy, maybe they don't like looking at it, maybe they don't truly understand, and give them some tools or ideas to help really make it easier for them to make really great decisions, because
• 10:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: everything you do has to be based on the data, right? I mean, I'm just… I'm just a firm believer that, you know, if you're not… if you're not understanding what is coming in, and what is going, and how it's working, and how it could work better for you, then how can you decide to make an investment in an employee?
• 11:03
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Or equipment, or a new marketing position, or step into a new market, which are all the things that are growth-driven without
• 11:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Understanding those numbers.
• 11:15
  Sonny Grappone: Oh, 100%, and you're so right with that, you know, when people come to us, you know, they don't come to us when things are good, they come to us when things are bad, you know? And I always say that, and the funny thing is, so many bus… I would say probably over 50% of business owners operate with the mentality that if I can make payroll.
• 11:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I can pay myself.
• 11:35
  Sonny Grappone: I'm doing okay. And that is the furthest thing from the truth. They don't want to
• 11:40
  Sonny Grappone: see what's under the hood, and that's when they come to us, because then they can't make payroll, or they can't pay themselves the salary that they were paying, and they're like, why can't I do this anymore? Well, you know, like, you know, have you ever took a look at any of your financials? You know, that's one, right? Like, you know, we send out so many financials to people, you know, on a monthly.
• 11:58
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They don't know what they're looking at.
• 12:00
  Sonny Grappone: they have… they don't ask any questions, and, you know, and we dumb it down for them, you know? I send a whole, you know, financial breakdown for them, summary, everything, kind of making it, you know, paint by numbers for them, you know? And I find that's kind of… that kind of is helpful, but they get scared of what they're looking at, you know? But if you make the right decisions in the beginning, you know, and you… and you cut the bad habits, you know, from the get-go.
• 12:25
  Sonny Grappone: you're gonna save yourself a lot of pain. It's, we've had so many companies come to us. You know, we're in the construction… we deal a lot with construction also. Construction is one of our main niches, and we did a lot of hospitality in the past, which I still do, but…
• 12:42
  Sonny Grappone: I shift over to, construction, just because it's kind of where, we're needed more.
• 12:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yeah.
• 12:50
  Sonny Grappone: that we've been, really honing in right now on job costing for our construction guys. Because so many of them come to us, and they say, I have no idea what I'm making off each job.
• 13:01
  Sonny Grappone: And I find it mind-boggling, because they're… when they're going over their estimates, or when they're about to place a bid, they have… their estimates are estimates. They're not even close, you know, because then when they do their estimates, and then you take their actual financials, you compare their estimates to financials, what actually happened, their variance is so off, you know? So, like, how do we get to those numbers? How do we utilize, you know, certain… and they would try to do it manually.
• 13:25
  Sonny Grappone: We have… we are living in such a great time for technology, where you have to embrace the mentality of work smarter, not hard.
• 13:35
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love that. Well, let's talk about that a little bit, because I think that's a really important piece of understanding.
• 13:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: your information, right? When you're making a bid on a project, or a job, or a new client, right, or a new customer, if you're selling widgets, then you're really looking at cost per goods sold, and operating expenses, and those kind of things. But in reality, they're very similar, right?
• 14:02
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: when you're bidding a job, or you're making a proposal, or, you know, a request for a proposal, right? You know, where do you start to look in to say, well, I think this is what it cost me to do this job, to how variable it actually costs me? Where do we look for that?
• 14:21
  Sonny Grappone: Well, so, like, one of the things I would do is look at your past finances, right? Look at, like, kind of like a percentage of revenue, right? At certain materials, because you're kind of…
• 14:29
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Is that something reasonable to ask a business owner? We just talked about it. No offense, business owners, we love you, I'm a business owner, but you're dumb when it comes to accounting. So when you ask them to look at the last percentage of, you know.
• 14:42
  Sonny Grappone: Well, you should.
• 14:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They're not going to know how.
• 14:45
  Sonny Grappone: Right, and I say that as, like, do you know what your profit margins should actually be, right? In construction, you're lucky if you're making 10-20%, okay? If that, right? And that's gross. So…
• 14:58
  Sonny Grappone: when we do, like, something, for example, like, for… we just had a client at Glazier that we, we work with, that we were doing job costing beforehand. He increased his profit margins by 30%.
• 15:09
  Sonny Grappone: After we had the bottom line for him, and we were costing out every single thing, and it all comes to internal procedures, right, and making sure you're doing everything. But to have…
• 15:20
  Sonny Grappone: To make it as simple as possible to utilize those numbers in the most efficient way so you know how to estimate the right way, you have to have the right internal controls put in place, the right people that are giving you that data in order.
• 15:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to make the.
• 15:34
  Sonny Grappone: informed decisions. Like, we say it all the time, we set up all these softwares, automation, all this stuff, but if we're not getting the correct data, they're useless.
• 15:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Garbage in is garbage out.
• 15:44
  Sonny Grappone: Yes, and that is the biggest struggle I find with our clients, is that we can't get them to put in the same amount of effort, like, you know, to get where we need to get. You know, if they want us…
• 15:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: That's where the bookkeeper comes in, though, right? Whether, you know, we wouldn't expect the business owner to be doing data entry and putting it in there, but we also wouldn't expect the girl answering the phone as the receptionist to have the skill set to do it. So, is that really an important, hire that you want to have?
• 16:14
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Or, outsource that you want to have, that that bookkeeper knows exactly how to put in the data.
• 16:21
  Sonny Grappone: 100%, and knows what they're working with, right? Like, knows what data they're putting in, and…
• 16:28
  Sonny Grappone: First, we automate, and then we have the right person to implement that data to automate, right? We just found this new tool, it's great, I'm giving them a little plug here, but it's called Adaptive. They're a software company that we just met out in Vegas when we were at the QuickBooks show. They are the first of its kind that does strictly job costing. That's all they do. Usually, when you find a software that does job costing, it's really
• 16:53
  Sonny Grappone: more project management software. Hmm.
• 16:55
  Sonny Grappone: you know, Procore, BuildOps, Nullify, I'm just naming off a few people, software people might know. But that's… they're… they're just one facet of many. This company strictly just focuses on job costing, right? And they can… they… from what I've seen on their case studies and trying out their software, they gave us a sandbox.
• 17:17
  Sonny Grappone: They can reduce
• 17:18
  Sonny Grappone: work time, as far as data entry, by almost 2 to 3 days. And from what I've seen, I mean, because what these people are manually doing, it's so much manual work.
• 17:29
  Sonny Grappone: of inputting the invoice, inputting the job codes, you know, inputting the prices, you know, it's just so redundant that there's no thinking involved, it's just robotic, you know, and sometimes that's how mistakes get… We're trying to get somewhere where we're getting the right data for these business owners to make the informed decisions, right? Because if I'm a business owner, I need to look at everything as high level as possible.
• 17:54
  Sonny Grappone: You know, in order to make… And you need to trust that the data is being put in properly, and you have the codes on them, and you have the price for the widget that came to make the bigger widget that became to make, you know, the service possible, right? So it's that daisy chain of things.
• 18:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: One, you know, if you make a mistake on A, then the whole thing's exponentially out of whack, but if you make the right moves everywhere along the chain, then it shows up accurate.
• 18:23
  Sonny Grappone: 100%, and you know what? The part of the problem is, too, you have to have a staff that's open to change, and a lot of people aren't. The bad word, change.
• 18:32
  Sonny Grappone: Oh, my God, and that's why, like, I try to inform people when they come with us, we're gonna have either one of two options. It's either we work with your team, or you outsource the whole thing to us, because they're not willing to do what you need to do to get you where you need to be.
• 18:45
  Sonny Grappone: You know, like, if you want to set up your business for success, we deal with that a lot in the hospitality industry. We get these restaurants that come to us, right? And they have one location. Their dream is to expand to 2, 3, 4, 5 locations. Okay, great. You know, let's do it, you know, let's come up with…
• 19:00
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Snail the first one.
• 19:02
  Sonny Grappone: yeah, let's nail the first one, get the model right, let's not go to, let's get lending for, you know, 20 to 30%, you know, and it's just a cycle that reoccurs. And we help businesses successfully do that based on.
• 19:17
  Sonny Grappone: profits, right? Building the model, taking a certain percentage of profit, creating another fund, you know, for them to put that in. And over time, we had just helped this place, Gnocchi. They're called Gnocchi NYC, they make Italian gnocchis.
• 19:31
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Yum!
• 19:32
  Sonny Grappone: Yeah, very, great business model, not a lot of infrastructure, not a lot of upfront costs for it, and when we started with them, they had two locations, now they're at 7. You know, because we had such a structure in place that we knew their profit margins from the get-go, we had the correct data and the correct tools in place to get that data, right?
• 19:52
  Sonny Grappone: The people that are inputting that data, they're not… my point is they're never gonna do as good a job as the software's gonna do.
• 19:59
  Sonny Grappone: So, let the software do its job, and you just be a component of that software, putting it.
• 20:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Well, sure, then it becomes… then it becomes, here's the baseline, right? So, when you're setting it up, you're setting the baseline for it, and if something changes, you have one variable or two variables you can change in that, and then the software runs based on that variable, right?
• 20:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Or based on that baseline. And… and then it's… it's giving you the information, and then, like, now, I'm thinking, okay.
• 20:27
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: if I don't have to pay Susie Q, you know, two days to input data every month, and I only have to pay her a couple hours one day to input the data, then that's a cost savings on me to offset the expense of the… of the software without the errors.
• 20:42
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Especially in today's space of AI, I mean, so many people are leaning towards or leaning into the technology because less errors.
• 20:51
  Sonny Grappone: Rock your costs, right? I mean, like, at every penny. We just had a company recently that went belly up. They were a startup construction company. I see this a lot, all the time. What happens is their insurance, right? A lot of these guys, if you ask them, how are you paying for your insurance? And they, like, look at me, like, dumbfounded, and I'm like, are you paying it out of profit, or are you bidding it into your jobs?
• 21:11
  Sonny Grappone: They're like, I don't know, I just pay the renewal when it's up.
• 21:14
  Sonny Grappone: So you're not…
• 21:15
  Sonny Grappone: paying it through… you're not putting it into your bids, then? No. Why aren't you putting it into your bids?
• 21:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It's a major expense.
• 21:22
  Sonny Grappone: Major, general liability.
• 21:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It was a major expense.
• 21:25
  Sonny Grappone: And it's based off payroll, right? So you estimate your payroll will be $200,000, you go throughout the year, at the end of the year, it was $500,000. Well, guess what? Now you're gonna owe that difference at audit time, okay? You're gonna owe about, you know, whatever it is, the 300 grand difference that they're gonna raise that premium off of. They don't audit you at 1231, they audit you at April, so now you owe for the whole year, and then the 4 months you underestimated it.
• 21:48
  Sonny Grappone: That puts people out of business, because.
• 21:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: They can't come up.
• 21:50
  Sonny Grappone: the money.
• 21:51
  Sonny Grappone: Right? So now, like, with this company that we did it for, we were able to get them out of that muck. They had the money to pay, but they didn't want to get in the same situation. But now we put tools in place, you know, software in place to track their payroll, to make sure that they are on pace with what they estimated their policies to be, and if they're not, they need to place that into their bids going forward so they don't run into this situation, right?
• 22:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Okay, I'm hearing a common theme here, Sunny, that it's not about…
• 22:18
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: the revenue coming in and the expenses going out on that kind of level, it's looking at the small itty-bitty pieces, or in the general contractor's insurance claim, right? Those are big movements that the business owner is not thinking on how to best structure.
• 22:39
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And to have a team like you in there to say, hey.
• 22:43
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: This is the way… this is the best way we know how to do it, and if you're looking at it like this, this is how it's going to benefit you coming out. The business owner… the best thing a business owner can have
• 22:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: is consistency, and repeatability, and, you know, having something planned and known and aware of, rather than the surprise out of left field, or the, oops, I didn't plan for that, or, wow, I don't have it, right? And next thing you know, you're out of business.
• 23:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And in the small space, that number can really kick you to the curb, right?
• 23:18
  Sonny Grappone: Right, 100%, and you should know these things ahead of time, right?
• 23:21
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You should! You should! But they don't. And if they do know it, they don't know if it's in the right space, right? If it's in the right spot, if it's on the correct line, right? To make it…
• 23:36
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: before taxes, after taxes, before, you know, profit, after profit, is it in the right column, and how can I take advantage of the best thing? The tax code has this gigantic book, right, that you have to follow, and the smart people that follow it
• 23:53
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Are the ones that are able to profit more from it.
• 23:56
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And have a consistent, steady business, which is great now, and great later when you want to sell it, because now the buyer knows that it's like, okay, you've been doing your books properly, and the numbers make sense, so there's no way for me to wiggle on the price.
• 24:14
  Sonny Grappone: Well, I say that all the time, especially with customers that we, you know, say, like, you know, a lot of times we're an outdoor fit, right? But what happens is, say if they go elsewhere, well, they don't really go elsewhere, what happens is that they grow big and they want to go internal. That's usually what happens, you know, they're gonna hire, you know, and whatever. And we see, you know, and then they end up coming back to us, which happens a lot of the time, because their books go to stuff. But when they don't keep those proper books in place, like you said.
• 24:38
  Sonny Grappone: And then it comes valuation time to sell their business.
• 24:41
  Sonny Grappone: they're gonna be screwed, you know? And then the other thing is, you know, putting in place also prop, proper…
• 24:48
  Sonny Grappone: tax planning.
• 24:50
  Sonny Grappone: You know, which we do a lot of, you know, especially on a quarterly basis, to make sure we're staying ahead of the game, that you're paying your quarterly estimates, that you're taking advantage of all the tax advantages that, you know, are at your foot, you know. I just had a company we just did, we were looking for… they were basically in a budget crisis, and they needed to hire 3 internal people at their company. It's a manufacturer.
• 25:15
  Sonny Grappone: company that we consult with, and they couldn't find it. We were looking at the numbers, there was no wiggle room on, you know, through their P&L on their payroll.
• 25:23
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: To be able to pay for the employees, right?
• 25:25
  Sonny Grappone: Yeah, they need to hire 3 more guys, and we couldn't trim the fat enough to find it. And that happens. Your profit margins are so, you know, tight.
• 25:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: We all know, they're very tight, right? We're in a world of…
• 25:38
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: chasing to the bottom, right? We're competing with people, we're lowering our prices, the cost of everything is going up, so we know and we feel it. But I think we as business owners, we sit there and go, well, what else can I do? My customers can't…
• 25:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, handle a price increase. I can't handle the carrying the load, so where do I go? And that's the awareness playground of sort that you need a competent team with. They can come in and say, hey.
• 26:11
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Here's where we can make some tiny shifts, some tiny changes, to make it so that you can, and everybody's still, you know, happy.
• 26:21
  Sonny Grappone: I think it too, and knowing, you know, having the right team… like, even us, I have the right team around me, strategic alliances, that, like, if I can't make informed decisions, or I can't help my customer in the accounting realm, you know, I'll go to other people, like, you know, that do stuff well that I may not know about that give tax benefits. That example I just told you, we ended up finding that customer what we call a wellness program, okay?
• 26:45
  Sonny Grappone: Because they had a certain amount of employees, they had over 25 employees, and if you have on the… if you have over 25 employees, the government incentivizes you
• 26:54
  Sonny Grappone: to stay healthy. They want your employees to stay healthy, because in the long run, it lowers insurance costs and just helps everybody out. So they put a program out there that if you sign up for a wellness program, preventative health measures, where it pays for gym memberships, it gives you all these tax benefits, it lowers your FICA taxes significantly. You don't have to pay FICA tax on that. So, we found this wellness program that we implemented for this team, and we… I had
• 27:19
  Sonny Grappone: the right team to implement it for them, and we ended up saving them $600 per employee per pay period, okay?
• 27:27
  Sonny Grappone: Wow.
• 27:28
  Sonny Grappone: like, astronomical, you know? So we did the math, and at the end of the day, they're gonna end up… and we're gonna do the same thing for our physical therapists that we just made the same recommendation, but we just found this out months ago. So, like, now I'm like, alright, you know, like, we need to give this to more people, you know, that are dealing with those budget deficits that need money in order to, you know, hire and…
• 27:50
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: to shift and move things around a little bit so they can do it, and that's… and that's the benefit of…
• 27:55
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: being the business owner, right, is that you now get those government opportunities, or tax deductions in many instances, or grants, or movements in your financials that allow you to
• 28:12
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hire. They want you to hire. They want you to stay in business. They want you to pay taxes, but they're doing these things so that you're a better steward in your community. And when you do that, you get rewarded for it, which allows you to be and do more, right?
• 28:29
  Sonny Grappone: Yes, and that happened a lot with the recent grants that went out during the pandemic, we did a lot of them, the employee retention credit, right?
• 28:36
  Sonny Grappone: And we qualified a lot of people, but we also disqualified a lot of people because we have certain ethics and guidelines to guide by, and the purpose of that credit was to hire more people on payroll so you could sustain your staff. That's what it was for, to give you back those payroll taxes that you were paying, and so you could expand. And a lot of people didn't, and now they're struggling, or they're out of business. And we've seen quite a few go under because they didn't properly
• 29:01
  Sonny Grappone: plan with those funds, and it's sad to see. And the government…
• 29:06
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Why you need somebody who's aware of the opportunities and the knowledge and skill set to be able to go, look, you're busy selling your product, right? You're busy running your business every day. Your job as a business owner is not to know tax code and angles and directions and things you can do with your numbers.
• 29:28
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You have to be able to sit down with someone and take that data and use it properly.
• 29:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: But you also need that someone that has the skill set and mindset to come in and go, have you thought about this?
• 29:40
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: What if we did this? This would open the door to this and that. What do you think?
• 29:44
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: You know? And you just can't get that from a bookkeeper, or a tax professional, or a, you know, or all accountants. So, there are great people in all industry, but there's a lot of generalists that are single-minded and looking at a certain direction, so having that consulting company
• 30:04
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Like yours, they can see and navigate these things could be really beneficial.
• 30:10
  Sonny Grappone: Yeah, I tell people that… look, I get it if you're, you know, just starting your own business, right? Costs are limited, right? You're not making a profit within your first couple years. I totally get that.
• 30:20
  Sonny Grappone: But once you're established, like, you shouldn't be doing your own marketing, you shouldn't be doing your own accounting, like, you know, like, and when people look at me, like, at more of an expense.
• 30:31
  Sonny Grappone: whatever you're paying for, you should look at it as an investment. Like, I'm an investment. I'm, like, our guarantee is that we…
• 30:37
  Sonny Grappone: hopefully, within every customer, at the end of the day, we always try to guarantee them we're successful 93%. I've actually done the study on it. 93% of the time, we've been more successful at saving you more money than our annual fee.
• 30:49
  Sonny Grappone: And that's our goal at the end of the day. You know, we're gonna save you more money than what we cost you annually, and we do a pretty good job on that, and we show you the breakdown at the end of the year, what we saved you, whether it be through tax, or finding cuts in accounting, you know, through your team, on the financials, whatever it may be.
• 31:05
  Sonny Grappone: we've become very successful on that note. You know, so that's what I said… Oh, and then that becomes, exactly, that becomes the investment in what you're doing to make your company bigger, better, and stronger, so… Yeah, 100%.
• 31:17
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: I love that. I love that that's, you know, I mean, I try and do the same thing, too. I'm gonna grow your company and, you know, the revenue enough to cover my costs, right? So then I'm actually free. You know? And then everything else on top is gravy, right? You know, to look at those kind of opportunities, but…
• 31:34
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Hey, Sunny, I know we can talk for days on this… on this subject, and there's so many rabbit holes that… that business owners, A, get caught in, B, they can't see, or three, they're leaving on the table.
• 31:48
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And so, I want to encourage, today's listeners to really think about what can I do different in the upcoming year to make my business stronger and be able to take advantage of opportunities and growth. So, where can listeners find out more about you and PAC?
• 32:06
  Sonny Grappone: Oh, sure. So, you can go to our website, right? That's PrecisionAccountingConsulting.com. You could also reach out to us for a free consultation on our website. And we also have a podcast called Profit Principle Podcast, that's strictly on YouTube and Spotify, where we give great tax and accounting tips for business owners, and we introduce new products, and…
• 32:30
  Sonny Grappone: new lines that can help automate your business and make you more efficient on the back office, on the accounting side. And you can also reach out to me, Sonny Groupon is in Accounting and Consulting, LLC in Melville, New York. We just say that because there's others, Precision Accounting, but…
• 32:45
  Sonny Grappone: Just so you get the right one.
• 32:47
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Nice, nice. Well, that's great, thanks. I know that,
• 32:51
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: you know, podcasters are great, you know, and getting value, right? We don't… we may not be ready to buy right now, today, but there's always value we can find, and when we are ready to buy, then we're in the right spot, because we've been circling the wagons and getting ready for that, so I think it's great.
• 33:10
  Sonny Grappone: You're absolutely right. Thank you.
• 33:13
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Great. Alright, listeners, thanks for tuning in today. I hope you picked up some valuable insights and actionable ideas that will help you make your business more profitable.
• 33:22
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And I know, know, know, know, and 100% believe that looking at your financial data helps you make smart decisions, and whether those are hiring, growth.
• 33:33
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: increasing revenues, preparing to sell your company, you need to have the right people and the right data that's in there to help you make those decisions the best way possible for your company. So I'd encourage you to reach out to Sonny and get some of his goodies there.
• 33:49
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: Alright, before we go, if you're ready to bring in more of the right clients and keep more of the what you earn, then go grab my free Profit Booster Growth Map.
• 33:59
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: It'll pinpoint the top 3 moves to grow revenue and stop those profit leaks fast. You can get it anytime, it's easy, there's no sales pitch, there's nothing, it's just a great little tool I love to give. And my boyfriend, Chad, GPT, helped me create it, so it's got some great ideas. You can go get it at ProfitBooster.biz.
• 34:19
  Marcia Riner | Profit Booster®: And while you're at it, don't forget to subscribe! You don't want to miss future shows. You can always find Profit with a Plan on any of your favorite podcast platforms. We're looking forward to more great, profitable strategies with you on next week's show. So until then, make your plans and profit with them. Thanks so much, Sunny, appreciate you.
• 34:38
  Sonny Grappone: Thank you for having me. Thank you. I had a great time. Thank you so much, Marcia.