Tax Strategies for Business Owners

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Dean Vance – Vance and Associates CPA

 

 

Podcast Overview:

00:00 “From Bakery Job to Business Owner”
05:40 Atypical, Big-Picture CPA
12:48 Decoding Business Patterns Mystically
16:47 “Fridays: Cakes, Beer, and Nostalgia”
23:55 Law School Decision and Karma
30:43 “Tax Return Amendment Review Process”
33:21 Bookkeeping for LLCs and Corporations
38:16 “Bimonthly Financial Meetings Routine”
46:38 “Inside vs. Outside the Box”
50:56 Leveraged Medical Supply Deduction Strategy
56:37 The Rosetta Stone’s Impact
01:02:57 Choosing a Trained Tax Strategist
01:04:03 Captive Insurance Company Basics
01:12:20 S Corp vs. C Corp for E-commerce
01:15:47 Client Assessment and Discovery Process
01:19:54 “Entertainer Computes Cost of Labor”
01:27:50 “Creedal Country: Merit Over Origin”
01:33:57 Basement Drywall Experience
01:35:56 “Opportunity and Ambition Dynamics”
01:44:42 “German Cultural Traits & Influence”

Podcast Transcription:

Dean Vance [00:00:00]:
Third would be tax planning, I guess, generally. You want a professional who knows what they’re doing to In go through your books and say, hey. Just like I mentioned with my with the the the prospect that that turns into a client was, you know, just have somebody who does this all the time. Right? Take a look at your books and take a look at your tax returns. Okay? Is there is there a fidelity between the closing of your books and your tax return? So you check all these different things, one. And then two, you can look at how they’re situated legally, how how their entity is set up legally. Right?

James [00:00:35]:
You have found Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. Downloadable audio episodes can be found in the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. We are locally and written by the Bank of Sun Prairie, Calls on call extraordinary answering service, as well as the bold business book. And today, we’re welcoming slash preparing to learn from Dean Vance of Vance and Associates CPA, and we are talking taxes. So, Dean, how is it going today?

Dean Vance [00:01:06]:
I am well, James. How are you? Thanks for having me.

James [00:01:08]:
Very well. I’m excited. We’re we’re towards the April here. I guess, really April, which is always the the month of Calls. Love it or hate it.

Dean Vance [00:01:17]:
That’s right.

James [00:01:19]:
And I am excited to have you on the show because I can tell you before I got what I would consider to be, business aware accountant, I have paid what I feel like is way more than I should Dane in Calls, and no one’s ever proud of that.

Dean Vance [00:01:36]:
So I’m

James [00:01:36]:
happy to talk to you. So let’s just start with the baseline. What is Vance CPA?

Dean Vance [00:01:42]:
Vance is such a CPA. We’re a CPA firm. We’re located in Blue Call, Pennsylvania, which is right outside of, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. And, where it’s four of us, and, we do small business accounting and tax work. So, we have three basic offerings, transactional controller and CFO, services, and we have got a couple niches. One is the home care, home health niche. The other In and engineering niche. I guess you’d say the third would be a, ecommerce niche.

Dean Vance [00:02:12]:
Alright. So yeah.

James [00:02:14]:
Well, that’s pretty you know, you’re clever right there to pick your verticals.

Dean Vance [00:02:18]:
Yeah.

James [00:02:19]:
The target instead of saying we’re the accountant for everyone that has money

Dean Vance [00:02:22]:
That’s right.

James [00:02:23]:
Or pays taxes because

Dean Vance [00:02:25]:
That’s right.

James [00:02:26]:
I interviewed a guy this was years ago, and he said niches bring the riches. Yep. And it was interesting that conversation with him. So I’m like, what Dane you talking about? Why would you cut down on your potential customer base? But the more I Call to him, the more I realize this guy’s a genius. And I guess that’s why we do this, right, to learn stuff from from people.

Dean Vance [00:02:45]:
Yeah. And you do it long enough, James. You you you you’re you’re In a you know, if you’re in a location long In, like, Eskimos have what? Ten, fifteen different adjectives for snow? You know, we’ve got two. Right? Yellow and plain. Right?

James [00:02:56]:
Yeah. Right.

Dean Vance [00:02:59]:
So so the longer you’re in some place if you ever you remember the book, Wealth of Nations. Right? Adam Smith?

James [00:03:04]:
Yeah. Yep.

Dean Vance [00:03:05]:
He had the, the needle factory example of economics In you remember that. You know? And you and the thing is, I mean, you you spend more time in one place, your learning curve just kind of goes like that. You know? If you don’t, your learning curve is and of flat. Mhmm. And so to to to your point, yeah, you you riches are In niches. Absolutely.

James [00:03:25]:
I love it. I love it. So how long have you been in the CPA game?

Dean Vance [00:03:29]:
Kinda got my CPA In ’96. Okay. So, you know, it’s been four almost thirty years.

James [00:03:35]:
Alright.

Dean Vance [00:03:36]:
Yep.

James [00:03:36]:
And tell me about being a CPA. Is it common? Like, I see a lot of CPAs that are just one person shows.

Dean Vance [00:03:44]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James [00:03:45]:
Is that common to go down that road like a chiropractor, or are most of them working for companies and just a handful of them are owners?

Dean Vance [00:03:53]:
I think most in terms of numbers, I think most are probably in the government

James [00:03:59]:
and in, you

Dean Vance [00:04:00]:
know, Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies. They’re they’re they’re working for companies. And then some entrepreneurial types, you know, are have their own business. Like, you know, I worked I worked at, I worked at a CPA firm when I had gone to I was Dane Joe’s undergrad, went to directional grad school, and, actually, I was gonna get a master’s in taxation. I was bored out of my mind. But, anyway, I went to a c local CPA firm, worked there for for a season, and then worked worked with, Tasty Baking Company, the makers of Tasty Dane, if you ever heard of that. Yeah. They’re actually Pennsylvania based.

Dean Vance [00:04:36]:
In like little w’s in a sense. Got all kinds of little, you know, cakes and so forth. So I worked there for about four years, and then I got tired of being there. And, even my my manager said, you’re you’re kind of she said she said, you’re kind of a, what did she say? She said, you’re kind of a partner type. You know? You you have that kind of vibe that you’re, you know, of a lot of the partners that, you know. And so I left there, and I formed my own business, you know, after four years. And, you know, first, I just started doing tax returns. You know, people needed tax returns.

Dean Vance [00:05:05]:
And then from there, it just kinda grew. You know? But but but yeah. But to your point, yeah, I think I think most CPAs are one person shops. They might hire tax preparers On tax season, but most CPAs are who are on their own are are one person shops.

James [00:05:20]:
So tell me a story just about the mindset of a CPA. Because from my point of view, this seems like crazy boring. But most of the people that I know that are in the CPA industry, they’re like, how do you not understand numbers? How do you not

Dean Vance [00:05:35]:
That’s right.

James [00:05:36]:
So I just wanna try to wrap my head around understanding the mindset of a CPA.

Dean Vance [00:05:40]:
Yeah. Well, it depends. Right? So it’s like I I would say I’m a I’m a atypical CPA because I am a a big picture CPA. A lot of CPAs, the the traditional kind of, what’s the word, stereotypical CPA is very In quiet, you know, very neat, you know, not one here out of place and all that In of stuff, and very predictable kind of personality. And, but ultimately, CPA, some of them, I guess, the more extreme types you would say would be kind of on this spectrum. Right? Where they block they have the ability to block out things and zone In the the matter at hand. And the matter at hand On the CPA field is to really intuit what what the numbers are saying. Right? You take a look at a Business, so you’re tracking the Business movements.

Dean Vance [00:06:31]:
Right? And those trackings, those fingerprints are in the the the the flows of cash. Right? So Call comes in, goes out, and then promises come in and go out. Right? So if your cash basis is it’s generally cash. Right? Cash comes when it goes out. And you take you’re taking a look at the business. Okay? You’re taking a look at, you know, what what cause and effect you have In the business. Okay? So you have an effect in the financials. And the financials, for the most part, the financials are, lag what they call lag measures.

Dean Vance [00:07:03]:
Right? So it’s the effect of something that happened before it. Right? So after a while, a CPA gets good at, okay, here’s what you have as a result. How did we get here? Right? And then if if you can find out the seeds that went into the ground at a particular time that had this tree bud and had certain number of apples pop out, then you’re like, okay. This is so if we want these number of apples to pop out, we need to plant these seeds over here. Right? So good CPA gets In your relationship between the cause and effect of the business, what the business is really doing. And and again, that shows up in the numbers. If you’re tracking numbers, that shows up. Now the lead measures, you got lag measures and lead measures.

Dean Vance [00:07:47]:
Oftentimes, the lead measures are are what they call On. Right? But their inputs, how much labor, what and of labor you’re putting in, what kind of supplies, that kind of thing you’re putting into it to get to a lag measure here. So so a good CPA knows that. A good CPA, I would say, is familiar with a particular industry. They’re familiar with what’s called a KPI, and KPI are key performance indicators. So they know for certain industries that, you know, there’s certain KPIs that are more important than other, KPIs. And service industries like I’m in, you know, CPA firm, the important thing is getting good labor. Right? Getting good person to work for you.

Dean Vance [00:08:25]:
Right? And and, so anyway, just to answer your question, yeah. So that’s what a good CPA would do. A typical CPA tends to be, again, very steady and, conscientious, very hardworking, very detail oriented. Yeah.

James [00:08:41]:
Alright. That makes sense. Tell me so I guess it didn’t even dawn on me because from my point of view, CPI is just a person that does taxes.

Dean Vance [00:08:47]:
Right. Right. Right. True.

James [00:08:48]:
I guess I didn’t realize when you’re talking about these larger companies, they’re crunching numbers in all different directions for all kinds of reasons Yep. That probably I imagine the great majority don’t have anything to do with taxes directly. Is that safe to say?

Dean Vance [00:09:03]:
That is safe to say. There are a lot of accountants, you call them management accountants. Right? I mentioned KPIs and and different metrics like that. You’ve got, liquid ratio, quick ratio, that kind of thing. Those are management accountants, and they’re looking at the the cause and effect dance in the numbers. Right? And they’re looking at so they’ll they’ll they’ll be in a Fortune 100 company. They’ll track how they’re doing versus maybe their competitors, other other Fortune 100 companies that are in the same space that they’re in. They’ll track, are they the same? Are they below? Are they above? That and of thing.

Dean Vance [00:09:37]:
Right? That’s what so and there are a lot of CPA that don’t don’t wanna do taxes, frankly. You know?

James [00:09:42]:
Oh, okay.

Dean Vance [00:09:43]:
Yeah. I mean, in the last in the last, let’s say, ten, fifteen years, I remember being at a seminar years ago, this, group called Tax Coach. Right? They so they they train, CPAs to do tax plans. Right? And I remember the guy, Ed, Dane, who’s the head of, Tax Coach, he had this, this, PowerPoint presentation, and he showed a a, he showed a, a slide of a dinosaur looking over its shoulder, right, like this, and seeing a meteor coming down. Right? It’s like, you know, he was like, hey, man. This is this is the tax world. You know? If you, you know, you gotta get out of the way or you’ll be extinct. You know? Uh-huh.

Dean Vance [00:10:26]:
So, a lot of us moved away from just doing taxes. I mean, I moved away a long time ago. I would say within the last twenty years, moved away from that to getting into accounting, monthly accounting, and and tax planning, and tax management, tax mitigation, that In of work, which is what makes you. Yeah.

James [00:10:44]:
So it’s interesting because I can tell you as a small business owner, I’ve owned a few businesses, and it wasn’t until recently that I realized the value of having somebody look at your books. More than just once a year when you give them the pile of paper, here’s my p and l. Here’s my whatever software file. Go just tell me what the damage is kinda thing. And having somebody look and, like you said, saying, well, we got you know, why was this month higher? Why was this month lower? And let’s figure out how to avoid the low months and how to build upon the the tall months, make them even taller, and rinse and repeat and learning from them. Yeah. And it’s so weird to me that I was so ignorant to not think that somebody can look at those numbers and actually tell a story so that you can figure out what do you do in the future Right. Instead of just like, hope it’s good.

Dean Vance [00:11:40]:
That’s right. That’s right. But, yeah, you’re you’re talking, like so you’re that that bias, James, is a lot of people have that bias. It’s it’s compliance. Right? Because you you have to comply. Right? You have to comply. So there’s a compliance, utility to doing all the accounting and all that. But there’s also a management accounting utility, which I referenced earlier, which is it’s almost like In you could imagine, you know, your numbers going into the therapist’s couch and talking to the therapist.

Dean Vance [00:12:10]:
How you doing?

James [00:12:11]:
Low technology.

Dean Vance [00:12:12]:
Yeah. How you doing? How you feeling? You’ll seem a little tired. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So many orders, and we can’t you know? There’s so many orders, but the but we’re In ninety day cash, so we’re dying here. I’m all tapped out. I’ve asked the bank for a bridge loan, and it’s just killing me. That’s why I’m so tired now.

Dean Vance [00:12:29]:
You know? That kind of thing.

James [00:12:31]:
Tell me more.

Dean Vance [00:12:33]:
So so you yeah. So you have that. But yeah. So the good part is the the management part. That’s the part where you can create. Right? That’s the part where you can talk about the future. You do forecasting. Right? Cash flow forecasting.

Dean Vance [00:12:48]:
And looking at, like I said, before about the the, you know, the the the the cause and effect. Right? That and of dance and actually In really going into your history and understanding, On, is your underlying business model, right, what you’re selling, and then how how it’s sold and and looking at the cadence throughout the year. Is it a seasonal business? Can you flatten it out? There’s times where it goes down. Can you bring another product in to level it out? Things like that. That’s the exciting part of it. Because Call me because you’re dealing in the unknown. It’s almost like the realm of it’s almost like mystical in a sense because you’re dealing with something, but you you have enough There’s enough elements in present time to tell you and and history to tell you what it’s gonna be, you know, next quarter, next year, by the end of the year, that kind of thing. Right? So you have enough information from your books because it tells you a story.

Dean Vance [00:13:39]:
And, if if you dig in enough, it’ll tell you a great story, and you can, manage yourself better that way.

James [00:13:46]:
I love that. I love also saying, like, hey. We’re down. What are some options to bring it up seasonally? Like, every December, you’re down. What can we do to to bump it up so you’re just not hurting every December? Whatever that’s

Dean Vance [00:14:00]:
Yeah. And there’s a I’m sure they’re they’re a chock full of his stories In history of different companies that had those issues. You know? They have to find something, and then they they bumped into something. It’s like, oh my god. You know? This is this is crazy. You know? So it’s a

James [00:14:12]:
great deal.

Dean Vance [00:14:12]:
I love it.

James [00:14:12]:
I love it. We have a client that we answer phones for that does fireplace repair, In, and all that kind of stuff, and they just added on roofing, which is a genius move. Because we’re in Wisconsin where fireplaces are are burning bright. Let’s call it five months a year. Mhmm. But the summer, beautiful months when it’s 80 degrees outside, nobody cares about their fireplace.

Dean Vance [00:14:36]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [00:14:38]:
But you’re getting hailstorms and stuff. They probably care about their roofs, so I thought that was a very clever move. You got your guys. Now you got work for them. It’s not just sporadic.

Dean Vance [00:14:48]:
That’s right. And and, James, that reminds me of Call here. We got a couple, snow mountain ski ski resorts. Right?

James [00:14:55]:
Mhmm.

Dean Vance [00:14:55]:
And in in the summertime, they just turn them into, you know, like, water parks. You know?

James [00:14:59]:
They Oh, really?

Dean Vance [00:15:00]:
Yeah. They pull out the yeah. Of course, some of the some of the equipment’s gonna be there all year, but they cover it up, and they put water park stuff in there. Yeah. It’s pretty cool.

James [00:15:08]:
That is clever. Yeah. Instead of just being a barren hill for

Dean Vance [00:15:12]:
Exactly.

James [00:15:12]:
Whatever six, eight months out of the year.

Dean Vance [00:15:14]:
That’s right. Gotta

James [00:15:15]:
get some use out of it. That’s smart.

Dean Vance [00:15:17]:
That’s right.

James [00:15:17]:
I love that. It reminds me of a I used to be a concrete truck driver. I mean, we’re talking crazy years ago and not for very long because that’s that’s a tough job that you don’t get paid anything for. But I remember we would get paid or you, you never know when you’re done. Like, you’re done when the order stopped coming in.

Dean Vance [00:15:36]:
Right.

James [00:15:36]:
You drive in to refill with your concrete and stuff like that. And if your number didn’t come up or I guess when the number stopped coming up, then you know to park your truck and thing.

Dean Vance [00:15:46]:
Mhmm. That’s right.

James [00:15:47]:
Sometimes it was five at night, sometimes it’s nine at night. You just never know.

Dean Vance [00:15:53]:
And I

James [00:15:53]:
would ask the guy, like, what’s the deal here? How come we can’t schedule anything? Because that makes it very tough as an employee. And he’s like, when that, whatever, $250,000 truck is parked there, it’s not making us any money.

Dean Vance [00:16:05]:
That’s right.

James [00:16:06]:
We want that thing to be going as often as possible, so we’re gonna squeeze everything we can out of it. And what he forgot to mention just is that it’s at the expense of the employees and their social life. But

Dean Vance [00:16:18]:
That’s right.

James [00:16:19]:
But I was like, you know, that’s fair. When that thing’s parked, it’s no better than a rock.

Dean Vance [00:16:24]:
That’s right.

James [00:16:25]:
So I get it.

Dean Vance [00:16:25]:
That’s right.

James [00:16:26]:
I get it. So you’ve been doing the CPA thing for a long time. Yep. Tell me I wanna ask you about the when you’re working at Tasty because it’s curiosity thing. And you mentioned that you weren’t really a big fan of that. Was that over the course of time, you’re just stuck in this cubicle kind of thing and you’re like, take more to life?

Dean Vance [00:16:44]:
It it was actually tasting cake was great, actually. You know, it’s funny. I had a

James [00:16:47]:
you know, I

Dean Vance [00:16:47]:
was in my, god, my my younger years, and, I remember, I had a I had a roommate. My roommate and I, on Fridays, I would get, you know, I would get, Tastykake cakes. We’d come home. You know, we we’d have cakes and and beer on Friday. Right? So Nice. A lot of lot of gas over the weekend. Just just I’ll leave it at that. But, Tastykake was interesting, but it it it it when I was there, I realized that, yeah, you have a lot of that cubicle stuff.

Dean Vance [00:17:19]:
Right? Cubicle going through the numbers, that and of thing. And temperamentally, I wasn’t quite there. You know, I could In downshift. I I call it downshifting to to being able to do that. But I found that, I remember there were there was a the head of PR at Tastykake. She had she always had all these different nonprofit, like In and award dinners and stuff like that. And nobody ever went to them, and she started giving them to me. I started going to them all the time.

Dean Vance [00:17:47]:
I loved it. It’s like, this is cool. I love

James [00:17:48]:
you know, this is Nice.

Dean Vance [00:17:50]:
And and but it but it spoke to my my temperament that I I like that, In that mixing up and stuff like that, going to different places, shaking people’s hands. Not not quite like a politician, but almost. Right?

James [00:18:03]:
No. He’s schmoozing. I get it.

Dean Vance [00:18:04]:
Yeah. And schmoozing. That’s right. Kinda schmoozing. And and I realized that, you know, I remember being there. I remember people in the accounts payable department. They were like, I gotta get out of here. You know, one day I’ll get out of here.

Dean Vance [00:18:18]:
You know? And I just said, you know what? Let me let me actually get out of here. So, I left there, just started my own Business, and, I remember coming back a year later. Those people are still there. I gotta get out of here, Dean. I gotta get out of here. You know? And It’s

James [00:18:33]:
on the twenty year plan. Right?

Dean Vance [00:18:35]:
Yeah. Right. You know? And it’s I remember my uncle who had his own Business. He had In company in And. And, he he told me he said, you know, when you get your own business, you you learn things that you couldn’t learn unless you had your own business. And he said, you’re gonna go through tough times, but you wanna go through that you wanna go through the bad stuff quickly. I remember him telling me. Right? So you wanna go through it quickly as possible.

Dean Vance [00:18:59]:
Keep your overhead low, save your money, and, you know, and and get out there and and just really meet people. You know? So, anyway, yeah, I hope that answered your question.

James [00:19:07]:
Yeah. Absolutely. Tell me more about the temperament because you mentioned that a little bit. Yeah. And I guess in my head temperaments, I can remember working for a boss that was what I’ll call a yeller. There might have been a couple chairs thrown and him. And I remember just watching him go what I’ll call psycho thinking there In nothing nothing that we do that is that important.

Dean Vance [00:19:32]:
Right. Right. Right.

James [00:19:33]:
The like, we’re fixing printers.

Dean Vance [00:19:36]:
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

James [00:19:37]:
It wasn’t like we’re not an ambulance company or something like that, and somebody turned wrong, so somebody died or anything. Like, somebody’s documents didn’t get printed. Like, it’s a big deal, but it’s not that big of a deal.

Dean Vance [00:19:49]:
Not that big. Yeah. Yeah. People like that are drivers, I guess. Right? I I’m not you know, I don’t know. But people like that, they’re probably, you know, a holes or had I won’t use the word.

James [00:20:01]:
No doubt. No doubt. He was capital a, Vance

Dean Vance [00:20:04]:
hole. And I don’t know if he was the owner or just the manager?

James [00:20:07]:
No. He’s just a manager.

Dean Vance [00:20:08]:
Yeah. But the owner appreciated that this guy got results. Right? And Yeah. Problem. I guess

James [00:20:15]:
In that specific case, I don’t know that he got results. We had a lot of turnover there. Okay. A lot On turnover.

Dean Vance [00:20:22]:
So Well, he might have been a

James [00:20:23]:
misfit. Yeah. But they were drinking buddies, so that that helped.

Dean Vance [00:20:27]:
Well, he might have been a misfit for that. But, yeah, I In mentioned, yeah, temperament earlier. It it took me a while to really see that because I I I came into the accounting space. My my uncle told me to to go into accounting because I had for some reason, I was at Dane Joe’s University, and I wanted I was predental for, like, one semester. It’s like

James [00:20:47]:
Oh, really?

Dean Vance [00:20:48]:
It’s like, what

James [00:20:49]:
a shift.

Dean Vance [00:20:50]:
Yeah. It’s like, like, what what the heck was I thinking about? Right? I mean, I I just remember going past the Science Building, which had all, you know, biology and chemistry. My blood pressure Call go right up every time I walk by there. Right? So I remember going to see my adviser. My adviser said, you should try accounting. Accounting is is, what did you say? It’s quantitative Call like pre dental is, but, you know, it’s and I tried accounting, and I got a a in accounting. I liked it. It was it was, debits and credits.

Dean Vance [00:21:16]:
You know, they they balance out. They have to equal debits have to equal credits. Right? K, thanks to Paco Call Lucco or something, the guy who founded, Double Entry Bookkeeping. But, it was very logical. You know? It wasn’t subject to it wasn’t like psychology, you know, or or sociology or politics. It wasn’t it was it was what it was. It was very fact based. Mhmm.

Dean Vance [00:21:40]:
Here’s a trans it’s very mathematical fact based since, you know, Dane so so there was a certain comfort in me for that. So I I went into that. Plus, my uncle said, look. Because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Dane says, look. Look at the one ads. Right? Like, this is this is back in the, you know, post Reagan era, I guess. And look look look at the one ads.

Dean Vance [00:22:00]:
It’s like, you know, it’s like two pages full of, you know, Authentic, accounting, accounting, accounting. And so I was like, okay. Cool. I’ll try that out. But I must say that coming into it, I went to a small CPA firm in Philadelphia. I really didn’t like it because it was very because because the temperament was for, what I would call CS. Now let me just In back up for a second here. When I mentioned temperaments, kinda like Myers Briggs, and of, and of these these behavior profiles or or

James [00:22:31]:
Oh, sure.

Dean Vance [00:22:32]:
Personality profiles.

James [00:22:33]:
In things like that?

Dean Vance [00:22:34]:
Yeah. So so the one that I like is, the DISC or DISC profile.

James [00:22:40]:
Yeah. Big fan

Dean Vance [00:22:41]:
of that. You’re familiar with that. Right?

James [00:22:42]:
Oh, yeah. Very.

Dean Vance [00:22:44]:
So so I my profile was a high DI. Right? So I’m a dominant influential. Right?

James [00:22:51]:
Me too. It’s all good.

Dean Vance [00:22:52]:
Are you really?

James [00:22:53]:
Dane plays. Totally. Absolutely.

Dean Vance [00:22:55]:
And you’re mechanical. My god. Okay. That’s interesting. Okay. Cool. Well, there’s no there’s well, you know what I’m talking about then. So the dominant In, I’m I’m partly task facing Mhmm.

Dean Vance [00:23:06]:
And I’m partly people facing. Right? So when I found out about my DISC profile, and I had somebody explain it to me and all that, a lot of questions were answered for me. Right? Because because the the space that I’m in as an accountant was very, like a CS bias.

James [00:23:22]:
Right? Totally. That’s why I was it’s interesting you say DI because I would assume c, but then you’re on a podcast, so it can’t be a % c. There’s gotta be something else in In, your IRS.

Dean Vance [00:23:34]:
That’s right. Yeah. So so so, yeah. So I’m a high high DI. I remember the guy who did he he he did my chart, I guess, you Call it. Right? He did my son’s chart. My son’s a high DC. So my son came on around beginning of COVID.

Dean Vance [00:23:55]:
Right? And he came on because he had his he had worked he he was poli sci and at Dane Joe’s, and his mother and him to go to law school. He didn’t wanna go to law Call. You know? And I Dane to tell him, he says, look. You know, my karma is my karma. You know, don’t you know, everybody has their own karma. If you don’t wanna go to law school, don’t go to law school. You know? You can work for me because he was looking from some some place to work at. He he had been in real estate management for two years.

Dean Vance [00:24:24]:
He hated it. It just wasn’t you know, you know, lockouts, you know, you’re on call for lockouts, the pipe freezes, the whole nine. Right? You gotta run to people’s places. So you you worked for me for about a year. And and I anyway, to answer your question, so he’s a DC. So he’s a dominant conscientious. So he’s got two task facing. So he’s very task facing.

Dean Vance [00:24:50]:
And so after a year, he On to he was interested in in coming on. I was like, hey. I’m I’m gonna train you. We’re, you know, we’re gonna spend some money, make sure you get trained, so forth and so on. And it took about two years for it to really In kick in all the training and all that. But I told him, I said, look, you’re naturally more attuned to this than I am. Right? You can you can actually do the work. I’m probably better with more big picture stuff, which which you can do it in the CPA firm.

Dean Vance [00:25:15]:
You don’t have to do all the crunching yourself. You know? But that I would but but that you’re you have a higher gear for this work than I have. The actual work the actual production work, you have a higher gear than I have. Right? I can take it so far, but, you know, anyway, you got my point. Totally.

James [00:25:33]:
Totally. Absolutely.

Dean Vance [00:25:34]:
So so I guess I guess after about two, two and a half years, it started to kick in. So all the training, all the investment into him started to kick in, and he started to get to that higher gear. Right? Nice. Very appropriate with clients where because I’m a high DI, I would take things personally in a way that he didn’t take personally. Right? Just to, you know,

James [00:25:55]:
like Pure logic. Yeah. No emotion. Right? Yeah.

Dean Vance [00:25:59]:
Very very logical, very very, you know, very appropriate, you know, that kind of thing. But, again, I had a lot of experience. I helped him with some things and and all that. And and we got two people under Carrie. So he’s got a CPA and a bookkeeper under him. Now I specifically because for for for me as a DI and him as a DC, we needed CSs to balance out. Right? High SC or high CS would balance out the team. And we we actually I actually tested for that, and I hired for that, and it it’s played out perfectly Nice.

Dean Vance [00:26:36]:
Beautifully. The way my son’s name is Kerry, the way he he says, dad, you just you get the business, just stack it up. And that’s the way it’s In. And he’s he he’s like that. You I could just give him more and more cases to do, and it’s, like, not even an issue. You know? It’s not even In issue.

James [00:26:52]:
It’s right there.

Dean Vance [00:26:53]:
It’s right there.

James [00:26:54]:
So That’s cool.

Dean Vance [00:26:55]:
Yeah. That’s that’s why I really believed in the temperament thing. You really can’t you really can’t go to school for temperament.

James [00:27:01]:
You know? No. No. My goodness. Dane it.

Dean Vance [00:27:04]:
Yeah. Well, you know. Yeah.

James [00:27:05]:
Yeah. I was told by there’s a guy that bought one of my businesses, and we’re talking about employees and all that jazz. And he said, what was his rule? No projects. He’s he’s like, you can never fix an employee’s personality.

Dean Vance [00:27:22]:
Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

James [00:27:23]:
You train them, and you can teach them skills, but personality is something that you will never change. So and even if you could, you wouldn’t wanna go down that road. There’s other employees that are available. So just

Dean Vance [00:27:35]:
Right. Right.

James [00:27:36]:
No projects. And I can remember hiring people where I’m like, you are sharp, but you’re kinda I don’t know. You’re not very you can’t talk or you you have some other personality issue. And I’m like, Call we gotta do is tweak that. And that’s a terrible position to be In. Just like, all you have to do is change your personality, and you’ll be a perfect employee. You know, you’re loyal. You show up.

James [00:28:02]:
You’re on time. You do the work well. People hate you, but you’re so good in all these other areas.

Dean Vance [00:28:08]:
Right. That’s right.

James [00:28:09]:
And I learned the very expensive hard way multiple times that you just hire for personality first. The rest you can fix. Or Yeah. Teach, I guess, as far as that

Dean Vance [00:28:20]:
goes. I agree. That’s a very good point. I guess being a high DI, that wasn’t a problem for you. Right? To to to get to get that as a

James [00:28:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. I learned I learned I guess In didn’t take too many bad hires where you’re like, you know what? This isn’t working. But then you hire for personality first, and it it worked out really well. Yeah. And it and I guess it also helps culture of the business

Dean Vance [00:28:45]:
Yeah.

James [00:28:45]:
Is way better when you have nice people rolling around. The challenge then is sometimes you have to deal with people. Like you said, you can’t be good at everything. She’s a really nice person, super awesome at her job. She just has a really hard time showing up all the time. So sometimes you have to deal with that, where you have to change people out and all that jazz. But Mhmm. But overall, hiring for personality first has been In, I would say, a game changer for my businesses.

Dean Vance [00:29:15]:
And I would say I would say the same for yeah.

James [00:29:17]:
I don’t know. I don’t does anybody say that? I don’t know if I’ve I’ve read a lot of business books, and I don’t remember any that said hire for personality first. But, maybe they’re out there. I don’t know.

Dean Vance [00:29:29]:
Maybe. I I would I remember well, I think of Dan Sullivan. I don’t know if you know Dan Sullivan. He’s coach business coach.

James [00:29:37]:
I know the name. I can’t did he write a book? I can’t Yeah.

Dean Vance [00:29:40]:
He wrote a couple books. He’s read a bunch of books. He wrote one called who not how, which is pretty

James [00:29:45]:
I’ve heard of that book. Yeah.

Dean Vance [00:29:46]:
Yeah. Who Not How. It doesn’t really tie in exactly to what you said, but it’s it’s kinda similar to that in terms of temperament. But I I I agree spot on, James, what you said about you I’m the same way. I I came it came painfully to that realization that I hire I hire for personality or temperament, first. They can always learn the other stuff. Because the other stuff, if you hire the right temperament, you’re not you’re not teaching them Greek. You’re teaching them their own language, but maybe more words in their own language, which they’ll naturally pick up.

Dean Vance [00:30:17]:
You know?

James [00:30:18]:
Fair. So I love it. Let’s shift gears and talk about taxes and some of the, we’ll call it the problems, issues, lack of awareness that some of your clients are just small business owners that you’ve come across where you’re just like, oh, boy. What are let’s just talk about, let’s say, top three challenges that you’ve seen or mistakes that you see small business owners make in the tax world.

Dean Vance [00:30:43]:
Okay. So let me look back on a okay. So, there was a new client that came in a couple years ago, I remember. And and one of the things that we typically do is, like, we’ll just look at their, you know, last Call three years tax returns. Right? And as you know, James, you can go back three years generally go back three years and amend somebody’s tax return. Right? So we just you know, it’s it’s a it’s a it’s a service that we do. We don’t charge for it unless we actually amend the return. And I tell either clients or prospects, I say, look.

Dean Vance [00:31:10]:
You know, you’ll you’ll have a professional firm look over your books and give you a thumbs up if everything is fine. And if it’s not fine, that’s great because we can find and fix it. Right? So I remember, a couple years ago, we had Draw on a home care business that, when I reviewed their tax returns, I’m looking at their numbers. I’m like, okay. I said, could you give me the, QuickBooks your QuickBooks file, your accounting file to this particular year? Took took a look at that. And they had, a bunch of deposits. Like, whoever did the books, the neighbors, cousins, nephew, whatever, whoever did the books, had included PPP loan money and in top line sales and, Dane and other loans. They just took whatever was deposited in the bank and Call it at sales.

Dean Vance [00:31:58]:
You know? So, you know, I remember, got about two I’d say about two months ago, my client calls me On. She said, hey. I got a check-in the mail. It’s $98,000. Thank you so much. And, so you have that. You have you have so that’s that’s one error, I would say. Right? Just, just assuming that if it’s a deposit, it’s it’s revenue, and it’s not.

Dean Vance [00:32:20]:
It could be your own money. You could add a loan from your On or something and put that money in. That’s one. I’d say and thing is just really not not treating and we talked about this earlier, but not treating your Authentic, like, for for management accounting purposes. Right? Not not treating it like a cause and effect. And then I would say third would be tax planning, I guess, generally. You want a professional who knows what they’re doing to In go through your books and say, hey. Just like I mentioned with my with the the the prospect that that turns into a client was, you know, just have somebody who does this all the time.

Dean Vance [00:32:59]:
Right? Take a look at your books and take a look at your tax returns. Okay? Is there is there fidelity between the closing of your books and your tax return? So you check all these different things, one. And then two, you can look at how they’re situated legally, how how their entity is set up legally. Right?

James [00:33:18]:
Okay. You’re talking LLC, s corporation, stuff like that?

Dean Vance [00:33:21]:
LLCs, partnerships, corporations, that kind of thing. And with an LLC, you can you can elect that to be an s corp. It is a process by which you can do that. But you you want to, you On take a you you you wanna take a look at the client’s books just to get clean, get them get them cleaned up, and we typically do that. We we we just finished a, a, On about a week or so ago with a new client engineering firm that came in. And you’re just you’re finding how they’re doing things. You know? And it’s kinda like, you know, In of haphazard often, and it doesn’t have to be haphazard. So cleaning your books, getting clean books, looking at your books, I would say, In a monthly basis, whether you’re a transactional client, controller, or CFO, client, You look at your books and you have somebody who goes goes through the books, and have, you know, On about your books.

Dean Vance [00:34:14]:
Have a conversation about, okay. You’re you’re you’re exposed to this much tax. You’re making this much this first quarter. We got a payment due on well, there’s a payment due on 04/15, but then there’s certainly and payment due on June 15. Right? Let’s see where your profile is. Okay. How much you need to put away and, we’re here in Pennsylvania, so here will be how much do you put away to the IRS? How much do you put away to the, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania? So so looking at the numbers, making sure the numbers are correct, making sure that you have a strategic plan, because because you’re whoever you are, you’re you’re in a particular business model. Right? Looking at the numbers, especially, I’m saying cash Business, especially if if you’re using accrual basis.

Dean Vance [00:34:59]:
Accrual basis is more lined in with what you’re actually doing. Right? So cash, you know, you you finish a job or whatever, you’ll get paid that day or sixty days down the road. Right? So that’s not a great gauge of your top line revenue. What is a great gauge of your top line revenue is your billing. Right? And that’s accrual. You get into accrual basis that way. Alright? So keeping an eye on your money. The more you look at your money, the more you develop a relationship of cause and effect.

Dean Vance [00:35:31]:
Right? If you like, my mother told me years ago. Yeah. She said to me she said to me she said because I always complain around August. You know, my money went down. Nobody nobody was paying their bills. Everybody’s on vacation. So I’m sitting there stewing because I know they’re on a beach somewhere. You’re spending Call, they owe

James [00:35:49]:
you money.

Dean Vance [00:35:49]:
That’s right. They owe me money. Right? And and she said to me, she goes, well, if you know that’s the case, every year, Dean, just make sure you’re sure enough money away so you’re not worried about that. It’s very commonsensical. Right? But, yeah, getting it getting In to an intimate relationship with your cash flow, what you’re doing, and finding a very competent, consultant, accountant, CPA to look through your numbers with you and bounce things off of you. Because there are things that you you know, you’re you know, we have a we have a prefrontal we have a limbic. Right?

James [00:36:19]:
Mhmm.

Dean Vance [00:36:20]:
Your prefrontal and limbic, you’re thinking they’re both in your head, so you you should know what you’re thinking. But no. You no. Oftentimes, you don’t. Unless you get a journal and write down, you go, oh my god. Is this what I’m thinking about right now? Yeah. This is what you’re thinking about

James [00:36:34]:
right now. Yeah. This is what you’re thinking about right now. Yeah.

Dean Vance [00:36:35]:
And and so, you know, meeting with your accountant on a monthly basis is something similar. Right? And the way we do In, it’s like, we we’ve probably spent about, I don’t know, ten, fifteen minutes going through the financials In we have a financials meeting. And then the rest of the time, I mean, even on my transactional clients, it’s supposed to be just financials. But even, you know, if we’ve got extra time on a monthly basis, we’ll kinda go into the underlying business model, new opportunities, what’s happening in the market, that and of thing.

James [00:37:06]:
Nice. So your the business owners that you run into or that you work with, the majority of them, are they meeting with you on a routine basis throughout the year?

Dean Vance [00:37:17]:
Yeah. So the yeah. So we have some bit yeah. We have some businesses that we and they’re smaller. We we do them at the end of the year kinda thing. But, if they’re transactional, like so so the the introductory service is a transactional. Right? So transactional service, typically, we meet once a month. So, you know, typically, we go through four weeks of onboarding just to kinda catch up their numbers, just kinda, you know, see make sure everything is proper and so forth.

Dean Vance [00:37:46]:
And then we they they choose a particular cadence. So I said, look. We’re meeting once a month. What’s your preference? Right? So we we do, you know, what what’s your was it Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? What’s your preference? What time is it better? You know, in the morning, afternoon, what’s better for you? And, which week? You know, you typically, it’s it’s the first or second week. Right? And In could be the third. Depends. If it’s transactional, and Dane it really could be any week. Right? Typically, the first, second, or third week.

Dean Vance [00:38:16]:
If it’s a controller client, we meet twice a month. So the controller client, the the first meeting is a pipeline meeting, and then two weeks later, there’s a financial statement meeting. But, typically, we’ll we’ll meet on a Zoom Call, and some people may wanna do a Teams Call, although for the most part, it’s just a Zoom call. Sure. We look at their numbers, and, we just you know, we we kinda dig in because during the during the the the the, I guess, the discovery Call, when they’re prospecting, they call In. During the discovery call and then maybe the the second of what I call the strategic call, we’ve In find out where they’re at, where their pain points are, like, what their issues are. Right? And, you know, after we catch them up on the books, we have a template to use when we come and meet with them. You know? And, it could be anything.

Dean Vance [00:39:04]:
Everybody’s different. Right? Some people are very much on top of things. Some people Dane not. Right? So

James [00:39:09]:
Right. Oh, yeah. You know?

Dean Vance [00:39:10]:
So I got Carrie going, hey, dad. You know, I’ve I’ve been trying to email them to get this information. It’s not coming over. Same here is different, but but, typically, we we meet on Zoom, and we record the meeting. And then we have a transcript of the meeting. So typically, most of the times, clients, you know, every now and then, they’ll say, hey. Can I get a copy of that? Like, no problem. Here.

Dean Vance [00:39:33]:
Here you go. Right? Mhmm. But for us, it’s great because we get to find out exactly, what’s going on, you know, what we talked about. We got a transcript right there. And then it’s it’s a great it’s a great place to go just to kind of, you know, memorialize all their needs, wants, that kind of thing.

James [00:39:49]:
No. I get it. I love hearing that Carrie said something about, wondering why how come this client’s not responding to anything.

Dean Vance [00:39:56]:
Yeah.

James [00:39:57]:
Because even though you’re working with them, you’re working for them, and you know that or they should know that their response is actually helping you help them. We run into that with our clients with our call answering service, and you’ll ask them a question like, hey. We just need clarity on this little thing. And you know, like, at least in my head, this is gonna take you thirty seconds to give us a response that’s gonna help us serve you way better. And they just they flake. You gotta ask them 20 times before they’re finally like, oh, yeah. Just this, whatever.

Dean Vance [00:40:30]:
That’s right.

James [00:40:31]:
I’m like, I understand that you’re busy, but In if you just give us a call while you’re on the road and just answer that question, I’m certain that you could find some time to help us out. Because in the meantime, we’re just like, what do we do now?

Dean Vance [00:40:48]:
That’s right. That’s right. And and that’s yeah. Go ahead. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

James [00:40:51]:
No. No. No. It’s just interesting or it’s actually helpful for me to hear that it’s not exclusive to us.

Dean Vance [00:40:57]:
Oh, no. No. Not

James [00:40:58]:
at all. Other businesses.

Dean Vance [00:40:59]:
Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I was talking to Carrie the other day, and I said, do you ever call, like, your phone company or your cell phone company, whatever, and you’re pissed off about something, and you get that very sweet person. You know? Like

James [00:41:14]:
I can’t be mad at you.

Dean Vance [00:41:15]:
You know, halfway through the call, I know I’m wrong. I know I’m the one who’s who’s that guy. Right? But they’re so, oh, mister Vance, we’re so sorry to hear that. And I’m like, I could I I could never I could probably fake that for a while, but after a while, like, I can’t fake it anymore. You know? But getting the right person to do that, and that’s that’s something we’re looking at for for this coming year, getting the right admin help because Kerry shouldn’t have to do that. He does that. He’s a high d like me, and I know and what’s interesting in our office, because he’s a high d Dane I’m a high d, I strategically made sure that that he worked out of the office for a couple days.

James [00:41:53]:
Right? No. He’s butt heads.

Dean Vance [00:41:55]:
Butt heads, man. And I had I had I had worked with a, was a CFO training company. They were a CPA firm, pretty large CPA firm, a couple years ago. And one of the partners there were two guys, one of the partners, Adam, said to me, he said, he said he was a high DI. Right? And that the other guy was a high In, and so they butt heads. Right? But he told me he said to me so it’s like he gave you permission to be myself. He said, you know, he goes he goes, I’m a high DI. I I don’t need to be anywhere near production.

Dean Vance [00:42:29]:
Right? Freaking In never forgot that. And so, Gabe, because I think I think high DI is we’re very ideographic. Right? We got big ideas and big it’s hard to to to take that energy and just kinda, you know, downshift down to calling missus Johnson because she hasn’t uploaded her w two. It’s a hard Yeah. In. Oh, yeah. You know? And you can fake it for a little bit, but but then it slips out. Then your hide d slips out.

Dean Vance [00:42:59]:
And then, you know, it’s not and and I can’t afford to do that. So I No.

James [00:43:02]:
No. No. No. You get in trouble.

Dean Vance [00:43:03]:
You get in trouble. Exactly.

James [00:43:05]:
In because you say something that’s a little too honest. Correct?

Dean Vance [00:43:08]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [00:43:09]:
Too On, and people don’t always wanna hear that because I don’t need to put 10 cups of sugar on this thing. We’re like, you know you gotta do this. Just do this. And they’re like, woah.

Dean Vance [00:43:19]:
Oh. Oh.

James [00:43:20]:
Where’s your empathy?

Dean Vance [00:43:21]:
That’s right.

James [00:43:22]:
And costs money. We don’t have that anymore.

Dean Vance [00:43:24]:
That’s why I say get that get that high CS or SC person they’ll call, and and they can just personally, just like this. And they’re, I’m so sorry that you feel that way. You know? It’s like, mhmm.

James [00:43:39]:
You know? It’s it’s very interesting that you mentioned that the disc thing. So I had my crew take the disc test, and I was under the impression that the majority of them would be s c, maybe I c. Almost every single one had high d, and either s or c is a secondary thing.

Dean Vance [00:44:01]:
Okay. Cool.

James [00:44:03]:
It surprised the hell out of me because I’m like, d On all these nice, kind, very detailed Draw.

Dean Vance [00:44:12]:
Yeah.

James [00:44:13]:
I don’t I don’t know where the d portion is coming In. It’s completely surprised me. Mhmm. S and the c totally understand all day long. But the d, I’m like, Interesting. How can we use this?

Dean Vance [00:44:26]:
How can we exactly. Yeah. It’s funny because we had, Bianca who we hired six months ago. I looked on her chart. She was she was a CS, but she had a little high I think a little bit over about a little bit more than average d. Right? Which I remember talking to my son about it. He’s like he’s like, because I we don’t need and more d. We’ve got enough d energy in In the place.

Dean Vance [00:44:51]:
Right? And so, but it was it was it wasn’t high enough where it would butt heads with us, but it was high enough where she would be she would take, take initiative. You know? Alright. And she and it’s worked out that way with her. Very detailed, very good, not shy about speaking up about different things. And we told her, said, hey. We’re, you know, we’re not If you can do it better than we’re doing it, by all means, let it you know, just do it. Yeah. So yeah.

Dean Vance [00:45:20]:
That is that

James [00:45:20]:
is the interesting thing when you are in a the culture of the business, you you have to constantly do this, I’ve and. We remind the employees that if they feel like we’re doing something wrong or not very efficient or something like that, by all means, speak up because there is no point in time where I know everything about everything. No way. No way. And you’re on the front lines. So instead of you hanging out, getting drinks with your friends saying like, oh my gosh. James is such a moron because we do this. Tell me, and we’ll change it.

Dean Vance [00:45:55]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [00:45:56]:
It’s costing us money if we don’t. So

Dean Vance [00:45:58]:
Amen.

James [00:45:59]:
I’d rather be much more efficient than just be like, oh my gosh. That James guy.

Dean Vance [00:46:04]:
You believe it.

James [00:46:06]:
Tell me about the the tax strategy and tax strategist because I just learned that this was a thing in my head. Every CPA was a that does taxes was a tax strategist, and I have learned very expensively that that is not the Call.

Dean Vance [00:46:22]:
That’s right.

James [00:46:23]:
That there are CPAs that just fill in the blank with the paper that you gave them, and there are others that make suggestions, ask questions, really look at the numbers and see where do these come from, where can how can we make them better in the future. Right. You just tell me the difference between those.

Dean Vance [00:46:38]:
Yeah. So you’ve got the check the box and of CPA, and they check the box and they’re within the box. Right? And, so, you know, On Call, I shouldn’t say unfortunately, but they’re they’re in the box and, you know, the internal revenue service has their particular codes and all that. And and a lot of CPAs, On, I don’t wanna raise any flags. Like, you know, I mean, you know, if if there’s a difference between you and this you and the IRS, you can go to tax court, you can go to district court, and and sometimes you’ll you’ll win. You know? It’s like it’s not you know? I mean, if you’ve got a good case for it and you’re within the bounds of the law, you may be aggressive to a certain extent, but but, and you may know some things that a lot of CPAs don’t know, which is some of the fineries of the Draw, then you should take that position. You know? So the I would say so you have those people who tend to be within the box, and they tend to probably be temperamentally in the box. Right? And then you’ve got some people who are kind of outside the box.

Dean Vance [00:47:41]:
And and, in the CPA space these days, the growth is happening from people who are outside the CPA box, outside that temperament. Right? Which which I think happens just generally in in the world. Right? You’re you’re, you know, you you you you’re you’re outside of that particular box. You’re outside the orthodoxy.

James [00:48:03]:
Mhmm.

Dean Vance [00:48:03]:
Right? Because they’ve been doing this forever. This has to be the way it has to be done. Not not really.

James [00:48:09]:
Otherwise, you’re commoditized. Yeah. And I imagine In the case of tax code, so much of it is what I would consider to be Draw.

Dean Vance [00:48:18]:
Yeah.

James [00:48:19]:
Or or I guess I’m thinking of, Call estate. I just learned about, segmented depreciation.

Dean Vance [00:48:27]:
Yeah. Call Calls segregation.

James [00:48:28]:
Call segregation. Thank you. Like, I just learned about that maybe last year or something like that. And In was one of those, wait, what? How does what is going on here? And that was never mentioned, by other CPAs that I’ve had. And it was never it wasn’t conversation like dinner conversation or going off for drinks conversation. There’s all these little nuances in the tax code that you’re like, wait. What? And I joked with my CPA. I was like, I feel like I’m playing Monopoly, and the book of rules Mhmm.

James [00:49:02]:
Is this thick, and no one has read it Call, everybody’s got their own Dane, and they’re like, this is this is where we fit. There’s a cliff notes version that’s being passed around, like Call the dice when it’s your turn. But outside of that, nobody knows all the rules.

Dean Vance [00:49:17]:
Yeah.

James [00:49:17]:
It gets those CPA that are outside of that box that are like, woah. Woah. Woah. Yeah. Page 57 here, you can pay your kid to work or things of that nature where you’re like, what? I didn’t know that was a thing.

Dean Vance [00:49:30]:
Yeah. What what’s what’s interesting that’s a good you bring up a very good point, James, that when when you’re in the orthodoxy, you don’t really think. You’re just in the orthodoxy. It could be, it could be an architect. It could be a CPA, could be an attorney, a doctor, a physician, surgeon. You’re just stuck in this orthodoxy. It’s just the way it is. And oftentimes, there are people who are not in the orthodoxy who are so dumb and disconnected that they’ll ask the most stupid asinine question.

Dean Vance [00:50:04]:
Like, why does In say voluntary compliance on the tax return? Right? Like and then the orthodoxy goes, oh, never talk about that. Who you know, that’s that’s a silly question. You don’t talk about that. Right? So but it’s it’s the people who are not part of the orthodoxy who are outside the box that ask those, quote, unquote, silly questions that actually dig In, well, you know, 99% of this space have been has been following a fallacy about things. Right? And and to your point about the, the cost segregation for real estate, yeah, it’s huge. Right? That’s a huge I mean, you so if you got commercial real estate, it’s thirty nine year depreciation. You get an engineer to come in there and say, hey. Half your building is really, you you know, five year property, and you can do a section one seventy nine on that half that building.

Dean Vance [00:50:56]:
You can write that off that year. It’s like you know? I mean, In terms of I mean, there’s a bunch of tax strategies. By the way, the the In revenue code’s got, you know, it’s got red lights, and got green lights. Right? So some things stop you, and some things say, you can come On, keep coming on, you know, that kind of thing. And one of the things, the the there’s a there’s a strategy called a leveraged, medical supply deduction. Right? Where this is In like one of those exotic kind of things where you Call buy into a limited partnership, and you’ve got these promoters that that sell these because it’s it’s in the code. Right? I’m not really sure the code name right or the code number right now, but it’s meant for social purposes and getting On, this kind of thing. But you can buy, say, 20%, not a 20%.

Dean Vance [00:51:42]:
Well, you can whatever the percentage stake is in particular, limited partnership for let’s say for 20,000, and you get a hundred thousand dollar deduction for that. Right?

James [00:51:54]:
Oh, wow.

Dean Vance [00:51:54]:
Yeah. Yeah. And if you’re in a 37% tax bracket, you’re talking some real cashier.

James [00:51:59]:
Yeah. You trade that all day long.

Dean Vance [00:52:01]:
That’s for absolutely. You know, you’re in a 37% tax bracket in Pennsylvania. You got that. You got 3% state. That’s 40 and whatever the medic let’s say 40% on that, and and, you’re saving, god, 40 so you make out about 20,000. It’s not that. And then less whatever the fee the promoter needs. You know? But you’ve In some some real cash after a while.

Dean Vance [00:52:23]:
There’s that. There’s there’s just really a lot. And and, you have to be trained in the, tax strategy space. I would say the godfather of it was tax coach for me. Okay. Tax coach came along, I would say, in 02/2005 with, Ed Lyon and, Keith, Vance. They came up and they did their thing. Ed Lyon’s not a CPA.

Dean Vance [00:52:51]:
Keith was a CPA. Ed was the guy who was outside the box. You know, he had he had a background in in, insurance insurance work. But but, he asked the kind of, quote, unquote, stupid questions that people don’t ask. And he asked those questions, and he just built this thing tax coach, and then there’s a spin off. Certified tax coach came around with, Dominique Molina a couple years after them. And, now you’ve got a now you’ve got a, you know, a crapload of different tax strategy Business. Because as you know, James, in economics, you know, there’s no such thing as a long term monopoly.

Dean Vance [00:53:28]:
No. Right. People hear people hear how lucrative it is, and they start coming into the space.

James [00:53:33]:
That was the joke in the in the printer world that I had was I could tell that I was making money because there’s competition. And when I started to see that the competition was going away, like, no one was entering the space, and I’m like, oh.

Dean Vance [00:53:48]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [00:53:49]:
Now now we gotta look and see why why aren’t they entering the space? Why don’t In have competition here?

Dean Vance [00:53:54]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [00:53:55]:
That’s interesting. I love it. Tell me about, you mentioned, I guess, in the write up that I see here, the absence of Customers. And I’m a big systems guy. My rule is to systematize everything.

Dean Vance [00:54:07]:
Yeah. Good.

James [00:54:08]:
Especially in the call answering world.

Dean Vance [00:54:09]:
Yep.

James [00:54:10]:
I did that in the printer repair world Dane other businesses that I’ve had. And I even I read, Checklist Manifesto way back when, and I’ve tried to implement things like that.

Dean Vance [00:54:22]:
It’s called checklist manifesto, the book?

James [00:54:23]:
Checklist manifesto was written I’m gonna butcher the guy’s name. So to him, I apologize. It’s Arul On or something like that. I believe he’s a doctor.

Dean Vance [00:54:34]:
Okay.

James [00:54:35]:
And what he had realized was that a lot of doctors are messing up because it was all up here.

Dean Vance [00:54:41]:
Yeah.

James [00:54:41]:
And they would just be like, ah, I’ve done the surgery a million times, and then they accidentally sew the person up with the scalpel inside their body.

Dean Vance [00:54:48]:
Oh, god.

James [00:54:49]:
Or they cut off the wrong foot or just mistakes are being made. Malpractice suits are being filed. And they were they were, quote, unquote, stupid mistakes. Things like the doctor knows better. Right.

Dean Vance [00:55:01]:
If

James [00:55:01]:
this were to come up on a test, they wouldn’t answer it wrong. Right? But the chart says cut off the right foot. They cut off the right foot. But whatever so he, took education, I think, or inspiration from pilots. Pilots have all their checklists.

Dean Vance [00:55:16]:
Yep. Yep.

James [00:55:17]:
And if they have, you know, the right engines out, you open up your book or you look on your screen that says these are the things that you have to do, cut off fuel, blah blah blah blah. And so his argument in the book was essentially systematize everything using checklists because they’re simple, they’re easy to follow. And even if you think you know everything, you probably forget often. Yeah. So it’s one of those things that I try to implement a lot of that in my business. Sometimes you get pushback from employees, but as and, I just push harder. Right?

Dean Vance [00:55:49]:
Yeah. It’s probably fear from them too. They probably have a certain level of fear that they’re

James [00:55:53]:
Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. I think all it takes really is one or two mistakes and you to be like, why’d you make the why did you transpose a phone number?

Dean Vance [00:56:04]:
Right.

James [00:56:04]:
Right? Or why did you do this thing that is super obvious that now, hindsight, that you made this mistake. You shouldn’t have made this mistake. Mhmm. You wouldn’t have if you actually followed the process. Where other businesses that I guess we’ve helped a lot of businesses create systems, but there’s many businesses, just owners that I come across, peer seat of the Vance. The the word system isn’t even in their vocabulary. Yeah. So I guess I wanna go back to you and tell me what have you seen as far as the absence of systems with some of the business owners that you’ve met or worked with.

Dean Vance [00:56:37]:
Call get to that In Dane second, James. But, you know, as soon as you mentioned that In terms of memorializing things, I think of the Rosetta Stone. Right? Yeah. Where the heck would Western or the whole world actually be without that that Rosetta Stone actually being transcribed or or or translated to understand what the hieroglyphics said, to understand all these different cultures? Where where would we be if we didn’t have that? So, yeah, where we are thank thank god my my son came in when he did. He he came in and, you know, I had everything up here. It was just it was just me. I hired some people during tax season, but it was Customers I was just kind of, you know, kinda I made enough money to put away a little bit of money, get away a couple times a year with my family, that and of thing. But when he came in, it it it I had issues with trust.

Dean Vance [00:57:25]:
Right? So I’m like, you know, I I In was very kind of, you know, felt a little funny about trusting a lot of people around all this information, all this data, you know, this kind of thing, personal information. So when he came in, one of the first things he he did was to use Teams. Right? So we already have Microsoft, the the suite of Microsoft, and he just used Teams. I’m like, okay. I’ve seen Teams. I’m like, what do you you know, what do you what what is it for? My god. We use that thing all it’s the most beautiful thing to have as Teams. It’s like a it’s like an enterprise wide, texting service and.

Dean Vance [00:57:56]:
We you probably use it yourself, but that’s a great thing to have. He came and did that, and I remember a couple years ago, he said to me, he said, dad, the key is is just like you said, the key is gonna be systems. So we brought in we we instituted this portal. We had a portal before, but this one was particularly, for what we wanted to do in terms of growth. Instituted that, and in it, there’s a there’s a little section called Wiki. Right? So in the Wiki section, all these different things that I habitually do because I’m moving out of production. Right? So as I’m moving out of production, I’m memorializing all the work that I’m doing for, let’s say, a particular client. I’m doing it on Loom.

Dean Vance [00:58:39]:
Right? And Loom is you know Loom. Right? It’s a screen capture software.

James [00:58:43]:
Mhmm.

Dean Vance [00:58:43]:
But I use Loom and I use I think it’s called Scribd. I On say Scribd. It just takes a screenshot like a like a click, click, click, and says where you went, you went to Google. You typed in this at at Citizens Bank. You went to the user login. You typed in this. So having both of those and I will put them into Wiki. And and, you know, this is how to process ABC company on a monthly basis.

Dean Vance [00:59:07]:
So Carrie then, he sees it himself. He can share it with his team, and it makes things much more systematized. And he he took over billing. He took over and by the way, he he’s, there was another framework that I’d use, that I’d use years ago. It was called Wealth Dynamics by Roger Hamilton. Not really sure if you ever heard of him.

James [00:59:29]:
I have not.

Dean Vance [00:59:30]:
Yeah. All these all these personality metrics are based on the I Ching. Right? The the Chinese I Ching, which is the the the book of Dane. Right? Which got, you know, metal, stone, cold, hot, wet Oh,

James [00:59:46]:
shit. Okay.

Dean Vance [00:59:47]:
All that stuff. And it was it was translated by Carl Jung back in, I think, the twenties. And then from his translation came all the, you know, Myers Briggs, all these different personality things. And, kinda lost my thought here for a and, but but, going back to systems, Jess Jess really, putting together a a template for how to get these things done. Right? And, so we use like, my my tech stack would be, for the portals In TaxDome. We use TaxDome. And in TaxDome, you have all these automations. Right? So, you know, missus Smith, we haven’t received your information for tax returns, and you put On a on a three day, one week, every other week and reminder.

James [01:00:33]:
So email’s a reminder.

Dean Vance [01:00:34]:
Yeah. It automatically goes out. Exactly. Right? And so, you know, whenever missus Smith uploads it, I get an email. Missus Smith just uploaded something. I look In. Okay. She uploaded her w two.

Dean Vance [01:00:45]:
You know? So that’s yeah. So so, I’m kind of jumping around here, but I I meant to talk about Carrie for a second. He’s a he’s a one of the metrics personality metrics that we use was called Wealth Dynamics, and it and it had him it had him located in a particular part of the Square as a deal maker. Right?

James [01:01:08]:
Oh, nice.

Dean Vance [01:01:09]:
So so he was much better. So I saw him as a better fit than I would be to Bill. He’s just a better dealmaker than I would be. And so I just gave that to him. And so I believe in who not how. I don’t have to like, I used to try to understand everything. Right? And I was, you know, I was burned out. And then instead of just giving and somebody who who knows how to do that thing, right, or is better at it than you, to temperamentally, they’re better at it than you.

Dean Vance [01:01:37]:
Almost like they have a divining rod. Like, you know, the the old divining rods for you to find Yeah.

James [01:01:41]:
Find the water.

Dean Vance [01:01:42]:
Right. People like, I have a particular divining rod with people. Right? So I’m I’m I’m pretty good at In, right, with with certain parts of that. And, and Carrie is just good at a deal. I mean, he’s looked at me a couple of times and said, dad, are you kidding me? We’re doing all this for them. You wanna charge nothing for them? And I’m like, well, they’ve been they’re they’re a legacy client. They’ve been around for a while. I’m not trying to you know? Dad, they’re making a million dollars a year.

Dean Vance [01:02:06]:
What are you talking to? In think they can afford it.

James [01:02:10]:
Charge. Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:02:11]:
Right. I think they can afford it. So, anyway, so that’s yeah. So I hope I answered some some part of that question.

James [01:02:18]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. What else do we have here? The lack of knowledge we talked about, absence of systems, no tax strategy plan. So as far as let’s just say that I’m a business owner, and I’ve had a CPA where I give them the shoe box or give them the QuickBooks file or something like that. Here’s my p and l and balance sheet. Tell me what I owe.

James [01:02:38]:
If I wanna find a tax strategist, how what are some things that I should look for to figure out In the person that I’m talking to that has CPA and all these alphabet soup after the name, How do I know that I’m talking to someone that’s actually a tax strategist versus someone that’s just gonna enter the numbers and move on with their life?

Dean Vance [01:02:57]:
Well, you can you can look I mean, you can ask them very specifically, are you a tax strategist? And if you are, where did you get your training? Right? So they’re they’re they’re they’re pretty there’s a newer vendor named KorVia that came into the space a couple years ago. Right? And and KorVia, I’ve never used it. It was supposed to be a very good tax software. It’s expensive, but it’s a very good tax software. But you you wanna get somebody who’s got some real training. I don’t I don’t know if Call has training or or it’s just a platform, really. But, you know, I would say somebody who is a certified tax coach or somebody who’s got who’s got training. I was a certified tax coach years ago, and I got trained.

Dean Vance [01:03:37]:
I just didn’t I just you know, I didn’t I wasn’t gonna pay all the monthly stuff after about a year or so being in being in there because I had the knowledge. I don’t have to be certified in it. But you can ask them specifically, like, what kind of, you know tell me more about s corporations. Tell me about captive insurance companies. What do you know about captive insurance? Any any tax strategist that’s worth his or her salt would know about captive insurance companies. Right? I don’t

James [01:04:02]:
even know what that is. What is a captive insurance company?

Dean Vance [01:04:03]:
A captive insurance company is a business that has their own insurance company. Right? And there’s a particular code section. I I wanna I wanna say 851 or something. I can’t remember exact code section. But the upshot, James, is that if if you’re let’s say, you know, you’re you’re a, you’re you’re a corporation and, you’re, you know, you got obviously risks in the corporation, you can get a you can get a, what’s called a captive insurance company, which is an insurance company specifically just for your operating corporation. You don’t have to it doesn’t have to be open for the whole neighborhood. You can have that corporation you have ABC Call, You can have ABC Captive Insurance Company. Right? And the way it works is that, you know, you usually well, the way it works is that the operating company pays an insurance premium to a policy in the Captive Insurance Company.

Dean Vance [01:04:55]:
Right? So the captive insurance company issues a policy for the operating company. And let’s just say, you know, you’re I mean, you go through a whole vetting process, right, where the underwriters, you know, they vet you to see what your insurable risks are and so forth. Go through that whole underwriting process to come up with all these different risks that you have. And then let’s say your let’s say your, your your policy premium, say, $300,000, you’re if you’re at the top bracket, you’re you’re saving almost half of that. Right? Because, you’re you’re and and and taxes. So taxes would be let’s say it’s called a hundred and $50,000 in taxes. But now because you have this captive insurance company, you’ve paid yourself 300,000 into the captive insurance company. You’re not gonna at least you’re not gonna pay the $1.50.

Dean Vance [01:05:41]:
That that so so the money goes into the captive insurance company. And guess what? The income that the captive insurance company has now is not taxable. Oh. I mean, there’s some I’m I’m being and simplistic with it, but that’s a general idea. Right? It’s it’s not taxable. And, you say you you can build up that money in the captive insurance company and really have the captive attached to maybe, some sophisticated financial planning with, you know, maybe, universal life insurance and that kind of thing, have that at retirement at a very low, tax Dane, maybe a capital gains Dane, 20% capital gains rate, which is better than 45%, or even 50% capital gains rates or or, income tax rates. So it it allows you to scroll away money. It allows you to migrate some of your other risks that you were paying directly to, you know, I don’t know, whatever.

Dean Vance [01:06:39]:
You know?

James [01:06:39]:
Car insurance company.

Dean Vance [01:06:40]:
Yeah. Health In, all these different all these other different insurance companies, you can bring them In the captive. Now there’s some captives, you do the captive and the, the health insurance is good enough. You’ll leave that alone and so forth. But the the idea is that you have a bonafide insurance company, that you can pay. Right? It’s it’s actually it’s PassMuster. One of the vendors that we use, is called CIC Insurance. They’re out of, I wanna say, Tennessee, I think, Kentucky, Tennessee, whatever.

Dean Vance [01:07:10]:
They are, they had a they had, taken their court case because the IRS had disclaimed their ability to have a captive insurance company as they took their case to the Supreme Court, and they won.

James [01:07:22]:
Nice.

Dean Vance [01:07:23]:
Yeah. They very nice. They won against the IRS at the Supreme Court level.

James [01:07:28]:
Wow.

Dean Vance [01:07:29]:
So that’s so they’re they’re really they’re my vendor of choice when it comes to captive insurance companies for clients. But that so you have that. So you have that. It’s a very In, sophisticated, tax strategy. Now as you go along, James, you can stack these things up. So by themselves, okay. They’re good, you know, depending In how much money you have. Right? They’re they’re good.

Dean Vance [01:07:51]:
But when you stack them up, that’s where you see the really the count the compounding of all these strategies coming together and really saving you a lot of cash.

James [01:07:59]:
Then you’re bringing down your total taxable income down

Dean Vance [01:08:02]:
Correct.

James [01:08:02]:
Typically end up in a lower bracket.

Dean Vance [01:08:04]:
Yep. Yep. Oh, yeah. You Call. You will be In a lower bracket. I mean, you’ve got, you know, 10 was it ten, twenty, 20 five, 30, 30 two, 30 four, five, 30 seven. Yeah. 37 is the top.

Dean Vance [01:08:16]:
And the idea is you wanna scroll away as much. And, usually, we we’ve sold captives. It usually happens around the, third quarter. Right? So it’s around July, August. We’re getting ready for doing a calculation conversation about the, the $9.15 payment. Right? So $9.15 payment’s coming up. And so we have a preliminary conversation with them about it, and this is when they got sticker shock, especially new clients. Right? New clients that we haven’t had a a usually with ongoing clients, we’ve had, you know, orderly cadence.

Dean Vance [01:08:45]:
We we know how much is going in 04/15, ‘6 ’15, ‘9 ’15, and 01/15, of the succeeding year. But but, the new clients are, like, new to this. Right? They’re you know, they think this stuff is mysticism. And and you get you grab their because, like, you like, when they first come on, you you do a tax plan, and you’re you’re putting out some of these things. Captive is one of them. It’s like, okay. Here’s the thing. And they’re like, that’s, you know, too rich for my blood right now.

Dean Vance [01:09:11]:
But then you come to the, you know, to to to the quarterly tax conversation. Now all of a sudden, they have ears to hear. Right? Because they

James [01:09:18]:
have say, woah. Tell me about that again.

Dean Vance [01:09:20]:
Exactly. You’re you’re calculating their their third quarter payment, and then you’re extrapolating because they’re gonna ask you. They’re they’re you’re extrapolating what their tax liability is gonna be four fifteen of the succeeding year, and they get sticker shock. So you have them in the right place. Right? And you say, hey. How about the the captive I mentioned before? You wanna talk about that? You know? Then you have a conversation about that and conversation about more aggressive, legally legal, but more more, I guess, exotic. When I say aggressive, most people you mentioned captives are like, what? Captive. What’s you know?

James [01:09:54]:
I’ve never heard of that before.

Dean Vance [01:09:55]:
Yeah. Captive Insurance Company. Yeah. As a matter of fact, if I, get a chat well, after this, I’ll send it to you. I’ll send it to, I’ll email it to you.

James [01:10:03]:
Awesome. I appreciate that. When you meet a typical business owner, and let’s just say Business owner doing, let’s just say a million in revenue to keep it easy number. And I’m gonna broadly say any business. Let’s just let’s I guess we can take it a couple different directions. Let’s say a service business, whether it’s drummer or, accountant, whatever. Are there some tax strategies that you commonly see they are not taking advantage of?

Dean Vance [01:10:32]:
That’s a very good question. Yeah. A lot of these tax strategies, most because the CPA because a lot of CPAs don’t do them to your earlier point or or question, or or observation, James, yeah, a lot of CPAs are are check off the box CPAs. Right? Mhmm. And and and Call, a lot of the CPAs are baby boomer. They’re like, I would say, in the first or second quartile of the baby boomer generation. So they’re all, you know, they’re all retiring and all that. And a lot of young people are not coming into the space.

Dean Vance [01:11:03]:
It’s a great space to be in actually if you’re if you’re somebody who’s trying to figure out what to do with their life. But but to answer to answer your question, and, it’s kind of, I’m sorry. My my my mind went somewhere. No.

James [01:11:20]:
You’re good. You’re good. Just an example that I learned recently this past year was that I could pay my kid.

Dean Vance [01:11:27]:
Yep. Yep.

James [01:11:27]:
So I have a space. I have him cleaning it.

Dean Vance [01:11:30]:
Yeah. Yeah.

James [01:11:31]:
He helps me do stuff. And I asked my accountant. I’m like because I learned about this on YouTube.

Dean Vance [01:11:36]:
Sure. Sure. That’s right.

James [01:11:37]:
And I went to my accountant. I’m like, I can pay my and? And he’s like, yeah. You can pay your kid.

Dean Vance [01:11:41]:
And never told me?

James [01:11:43]:
And I’m like, I didn’t just get a kid. Like, I’ve had this guy for a while. Like, he’s been helping, but I was just like, whatever he’s helping because he’s my kid.

Dean Vance [01:11:51]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [01:11:52]:
Like, I gotta give him some work ethic and thing.

Dean Vance [01:11:55]:
Yeah.

James [01:11:55]:
Like, and that’s okay. This like, oh, you own a business and a kid. Therefore, this is something you should look into.

Dean Vance [01:12:01]:
Oh, okay.

James [01:12:02]:
Please mention it.

Dean Vance [01:12:03]:
Thanks for reminding me. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. So so those yeah. Typically, very few that I bumped In. I would say all the ones that I’ve I’ve bumped into a bunch of them In the last couple years, and it’s like you know, you mentioned tax plans to them. You’re like, what? You know? I mean, everybody knows about s s corp.

Dean Vance [01:12:20]:
Right? So everybody goes, oh, you know, you elect an s corp. Okay. And that’s that’s generally a good one. Although, if you’re in the top tax bracket of 37% federal, and you know that the federal c corp rate is 21%, right, and you’re scrolling away a lot of money, I would say maybe take a look at the the the c corp as a possible. You know? So So maybe you have the s corp and then have a side c corp management company or something. Right? But typically, no. It’s like I I would say, so I’ve got so so ecommerce space, and a lot of these are are newly blowing up. Right? So the ecommerce space is a is a space that’s really popping.

Dean Vance [01:13:04]:
You people got Shopify, On. They got TikTok, and they’re just, you know, blowing up. Mhmm. Until they see the pain or feel the pain of taxes, oftentimes, they’re not gonna ask. Right? So I’ve got a client who we’re gonna get more and more sophisticated on. It’s a home care agency that she, she always makes she always nets over a million dollars. And so, you know, it takes a lot of different strategies to bring it down. So we, you know, try to bring it down as much as we can, but we have to get more more sophisticated.

Dean Vance [01:13:38]:
I think the first year, we did some basic things. I kinda redid her s corp because whoever did it before kinda screwed it up. So we redid that, and we did a couple other things. But but, typically, most people are not there. They’re they’re especially in the in the home care like, in a home care space, you’re talking about a cohort of business owner that maybe, say, six years ago before COVID were you know, they were nurses making $80,000 a year. Now six years later, they’re making $800,000 a year net. Right? Mhmm. Right? And but a lot of them still have the mentality of when they were making 80,000.

James [01:14:16]:
Yeah. This is just a very complicated w two that I’m giving.

Dean Vance [01:14:20]:
Right. You know? And so, you know, it’s like not Call, obviously, not Call, but, yeah, but a lot of them have this still have the same mentality. I’ll just take this H and R block and get it Dane. But that’s after the fact. Why would you wanna wait after the fact to to do that? You know, get this thing before the horse runs out of the barn. You know, make make sure that this thing is because it’s not this is not mysticism. It really isn’t. I mean, maybe CPA sell it like it’s mysticism, but it’s not mysticism.

Dean Vance [01:14:50]:
Right?

James [01:14:50]:
Right. I suppose, like, the financial planners Yeah. Wanna sell the retirement stuff. It’s like, don’t look at it. We got you.

Dean Vance [01:14:57]:
We got you. Yeah. And then then you then sometimes you realize they did get you. Right?

James [01:15:00]:
Yeah. Yeah. We’ll take two and a half percent every year, win or lose. But That’s right. Yeah. Trust us.

Dean Vance [01:15:05]:
That’s right. But but you can to your point, I mean, we’ve got, god, we’ve got Google. And look. Just so you know, you know, I don’t think I’m breaking any kind of code here, but, you know, CPA is also Google things. Right?

James [01:15:19]:
Call, In Vance. No doubt. Yeah. You can’t possibly know it all.

Dean Vance [01:15:22]:
Yeah. And it’s

James [01:15:22]:
a quick physically possible.

Dean Vance [01:15:24]:
Right. It’s a quick thing. It’s a quick, gofer, information gofer to use. Certainly, chat GPT is as well. And, it saves time and why not, right, to use. But, yeah, I would I would say for any business, they should like, we offer somebody comes In to us. Like, they’ll come in through a referral. They’ll come in through Google or whatever, and we’ll have a quick fifteen minute call.

Dean Vance [01:15:47]:
Usually, on the on the phone, I’ll just talk to them on the phone, see if they’re a fit. And if they’re a fit, we go to a discovery call. Right? And so they’ll they’ll, upload, their last few years of tax returns. I’ll gauge it. I’ll take their tax return information, put it on the Google spreadsheet for, like, you know, ’24, ’20 ‘3, ’20 ‘2, run the numbers down, see if they make sense. And then if I see anything that that just kinda calls out to me, like like a ratio difference, like their like their gross profit ratio In at a particular number. Right? Like, their cost of goods or cost of sales is at a particular number, especially if I’m I’m familiar with the industry like a home care agency, for example. Right? And then I’ll ask them and say, hey.

Dean Vance [01:16:27]:
Look. This looks a little interesting here with this with the ratio here. Could you send me your accounting for that year? And then, you know, they’ll send it to me or they’ll send you bank statements or whatever. We’ll do kind of quick and dirty number thing. And and if we see anything, we say, let’s let’s dive into this. And In, we’ll find something, and we just, you know, we’ll amend the return. So it doesn’t doesn’t you know, usually, it’s like law firms. I’m not not to bring in lawyers with this, but or even In.

Dean Vance [01:16:52]:
You know? Because you’re you’re you’re looking at and, usually, these assessments are free. You know? You you look in and, see what’s there. You know? And and the I mean, the worst that it can be is that you got somebody who’s professional to look over for you, give you a thumbs up, or give you a couple and, and it’s all good. Right? And then, but then sometimes you you hit you hit, like, you know, like, people putting PPP loans and top line revenue and and other loans and Draw forth In top line Adventures. Like, that’s a mistake. Mhmm. You know?

James [01:17:23]:
And you

Dean Vance [01:17:24]:
can help people out doing that. But, yeah, it it’s it’s an under kind of a underserved kind of thing. It’s it’s becoming more popular now, and there are more CPAs that and coming into the space as much as they’re coming into the, the the, tax strategy space. Because yeah. Yeah.

James [01:17:42]:
It’s interesting you mentioned that a lot of CPAs are getting older. I lost CPA two of them because of retirement. So it’s one of those, like, go find a like, I’m retiring. You know, I’m gonna be either selling the book of business to whoever or whatever. Yeah. Yep. And both times, I would consider the blessing someone in disguise because you learn, like, oh, if I go with this other CPA, they’re actually a strategist, and I didn’t know what time they can actually save me some money. And then part of you is looking back like, oh my god.

James [01:18:13]:
What have I spent the past fifteen years? Because I didn’t know these things

Dean Vance [01:18:17]:
Right.

James [01:18:17]:
Or my accountant didn’t bring them up.

Dean Vance [01:18:22]:
We’re we’re in a space, James, as you as you already know. We’re in a space and, look, whether whether whatever side of the political spectrum you or I or whatever on, you look you hear about those. You know? You hear about this whether you like him I got a friend who can’t stand Elon. Right? I mean, I don’t I don’t dislike Elon Musk. I mean, you know, who he he thinks he’s a Nazi and all this On. I don’t know. I don’t think he is, but, you know, but whatever that team is doing, finding all this stuff that they found In like, my god. It’s almost like pulling back a panel in your house and seeing all these termites.

Dean Vance [01:18:53]:
Right? And you’re like,

James [01:18:55]:
you know, how

Dean Vance [01:18:55]:
long these termites been here? Right? How long has this stuff been here?

James [01:18:59]:
Don’t like, I’ll be the first to say no one has ever accused the government of being efficient.

Dean Vance [01:19:04]:
That’s true. That’s true. And I

James [01:19:05]:
can tell you a really quick story, firsthand where I got the c behind the curtain, and it made me think a little bit. This is state. I had my printer repair company. I go to a state building and get a fix this plotter. And so I got my tools, and I’m taking this thing apart. And there’s a guy whose desk is pretty close because this thing is just stuffed in some office. And I’m working on the thing, and I’m just chatting this guy up because whatever that’s what you do. And within ten, fifteen minutes, I got a crowd of eight people around me just watching me at the state office.

James [01:19:42]:
And at first, I was like, oh, these guys are curious. You know? They wanna know what’s going In. But then they got some side conversations going on that have nothing to do with their job. And I’m there for forty five minutes, and these guys are still around me.

Dean Vance [01:19:54]:
Wow.

James [01:19:54]:
And so I’m the entertainer. Right? And all I could think In, I know what I’m gonna make on this job. Right? Over the course of time, there’s gonna be couple and bucks, probably something like that with parts and labor. And I’m guessing that the average wage in that state office is probably 60 to $80,000 a year. And so I was doing the math thinking, okay. If we got eight people making, let’s say, $70 a year sitting around for an hour watching this guy actually do the work, how much did that cost the taxpayers? Wow. And it made you cut it made me kinda mad because I’m like, on top of that, you have better insurance than I have. Pension, And you got all this other like, you’re essentially a protected class or you were a protected class as far as labor goes, making sure that you have a job.

James [01:20:44]:
And this is probably in the neighborhood of 02/2012 when when the economy was recovering from a rough time. And made me just think, like, doesn’t anybody miss you? Like, you’re not at your desk or wherever it is that you should be. Should I mean, do you have something to do? Because this isn’t your lunch break. This is just you hanging out, and nobody’s saying, hey, guys. Get back to work. Right. So not to say that, what is what is happening with those and all that kind of stuff is the right way or the wrong way.

Dean Vance [01:21:17]:
Mhmm.

James [01:21:17]:
I joked with people, and this In back then, that all you need to do is have the service guy, whether it’s the fire extinguisher guy, the printer guy, somebody just walk in there. And once you start getting a crowd, you can be like, okay. It’s obvious we don’t need you guys.

Dean Vance [01:21:33]:
That’s right.

James [01:21:34]:
Like, yeah, In you’re like, five minutes, whatever, you’re cool. Right? I gotta get back to work. So that was I swear to god, it was an hour that these guys are hovering around me until I fix the thing and move on with my life.

Dean Vance [01:21:46]:
God. Yeah. It’s like, at that point, James, the jig is up. It’s like, you guys are really not necessary. You know?

James [01:21:52]:
Right. Yeah. Going through and mopping up and saying entire departments are no good, I think that’s a little bit more aggressive than helpful.

Dean Vance [01:22:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. I I agree. Yeah. That is

James [01:22:02]:
But if you had but I feel like if you did it, something and sniper ish like that where you’re just like, hey, man. If you can hang out for an hour outside of lunch break, outside of your cigarette break or whatever, and nobody miss you. My wife’s a teacher, and she always joked where if you can go away and you don’t need a substitute like, we don’t need 12 people in HR.

Dean Vance [01:22:26]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [01:22:27]:
We Vance probably get away with one in a software program.

Dean Vance [01:22:30]:
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.

James [01:22:32]:
So yeah. Yeah. Anyways Anyway. Interesting the wasted money everywhere, I guess.

Dean Vance [01:22:38]:
I know.

James [01:22:38]:
I got to pay for a little bit of that. I still do. Yeah. We all do. Right?

Dean Vance [01:22:43]:
We all do. We wanna minimize how much we have to be. The more you see of that and of waste, the more you really don’t wanna pay taxes. You really just don’t.

James [01:22:51]:
The curiosity, I guess, not to get too political here, but the curiosity for me is saving all this money, does that mean that I’m gonna get this huge tax break in the next year or two? Or, like, what is the return on that? Who gets that return, I guess?

Dean Vance [01:23:06]:
Of saving all the money from tax planning?

James [01:23:08]:
Mhmm. The, let’s just government cuts. Let’s just say they

Dean Vance [01:23:12]:
Oh, I got you. Yeah.

James [01:23:13]:
Yeah. Yeah. Are they all all of a sudden gonna be like corporate tax rate is now 10%, highest tax Dane is now 20% or something like that, or, hey. No more sales tax or something like that.

Dean Vance [01:23:24]:
Well, in other way, they’re they’ve been kicking around tax changes. I mean, we I remember the national sales tax Dane been kicked around for decades now. And, the, you know, Trump’s got this external, you know, revenue service thing he wants to put together. He’s he’s kind of at war with the the, Federal Reserve. Right? So he’s at war with the Federal Reserve. New York.

James [01:23:45]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:23:46]:
You know, he’s he’s had, in both administrations, he’s had a statue of Andrew Jackson behind his desk. He was Andrew Jackson was infamous for one thing, the trail of tears, and he was famous for another, getting rid of the, central bank back in the eighteen hundreds. And so Trump was, signaling that he was gonna do the same thing in term not the trail of tears, but you know?

James [01:24:09]:
Hope not that. Not that.

Dean Vance [01:24:11]:
For for some people, you know, that’s

James [01:24:12]:
why he’s leading that way a little bit.

Dean Vance [01:24:14]:
Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. For some people, definitely. But but certainly for the other, getting rid of the central bank, federal reserve. And he’s been kicking around this whole idea of of taxes. You’ve, you know, you, of, you know, no tax on Associates Security, which which I think is honorable, right, for Fair. A million people.

Dean Vance [01:24:31]:
And, no taxes on tips and that kind of thing. And and, he he keeps referencing back when McKinley was around and how much money this country made in the, late eighteen hundreds with with tariffs.

James [01:24:45]:
And a lot of people a lot

Dean Vance [01:24:46]:
of the tariffs that he’s doing, he’s just matching tariffs that have been hitting this country for decades.

James [01:24:52]:
Yeah. I got I got different thoughts on the tariffs thing. That’s

Dean Vance [01:24:55]:
the Yeah. I’m not an economist per se, but, you know, it’s I mean, a lot of lot of businesses are relying on, you know, foreign trade, that kind of thing. So we’ll we’ll see what happens.

James [01:25:04]:
The the whole world. I mean, there’s entire I look at In as an example, the camera that I have, the mounts for the camera, the monitors, the computer, the microphone, the mounts for that. If all of a sudden that were to double in price or just not even be available

Dean Vance [01:25:23]:
Yeah.

James [01:25:23]:
Or not be available next day or the two days that we’re used to.

Dean Vance [01:25:27]:
Yeah.

James [01:25:27]:
Like, you’re talking about going backwards from my point of view.

Dean Vance [01:25:33]:
I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. It’s

James [01:25:35]:
And I guess I’ve had conversations. I just went camping with some buddies, and I was chatting with them. And I’m like, I feel that we as a country, like, we’re we have sweet ass life. Yes. We’re doing so well. So, I mean, just seriously, we don’t

Dean Vance [01:25:49]:
Can I quote can I quote you On that?

James [01:25:50]:
Yeah. Seriously. Absolutely. Because I I’ve been to I’d like to travel a lot, and I’ve been to some places that were, broadly speaking, on par or below. I have not been to any place that I can say this country is doing better than us. Yeah. Call, you look at infrastructure Yep. Utilities, stuff like that.

James [01:26:14]:
You can say, like, yeah, they’re even it’s about on par. This is a a lateral move, but I can’t I don’t I can’t think of many. And that’s not to say that I’ve covered the entire world.

Dean Vance [01:26:23]:
Sure. Sure.

James [01:26:24]:
I can’t think of any that I’ve been to where I’m just like, oh my gosh. They got it made in the shade here. Maybe they have a better view. But as far as In infrastructure, roads being decent. Yeah. I’m not gonna say that our roads are great, especially in Wisconsin. Probably in Pennsylvania, same thing. Like, they exist.

Dean Vance [01:26:41]:
Yeah.

James [01:26:41]:
Right? They’re not just gravel or something like that. So when I I say all that to say the country, we are doing pretty well. And I feel like it’s up to us then to help the rest of the world get up to par as well. Otherwise, what are we doing? We’re just having a sweet ass life at the expense of everyone else. In sounds like a Yeah. Terrible person.

Dean Vance [01:27:05]:
Yeah. No. I hear you. No. I agree with you. I mean, you know, to to, like, the Peace Corps, I guess, in the sixties and and some of those things that, you know, were were done then. And I think some of the sentiment behind it, I would say, is the best of American culture.

James [01:27:22]:
Totally agree. Totally agree.

Dean Vance [01:27:24]:
The best of American culture, not not to be under the thumb of tyranny. Those things are the best of American culture. Mhmm. You know, let letting the little guy, you know, get his feet and give him opportunity to grow and, you know, I mean, you know, the the guy’s mother or father or whatever could could have been a, you know, cleaning up, you know, after an elephant poop I mean, elephant poop cleaner.

James [01:27:49]:
Yeah. And then, you know, they

Dean Vance [01:27:50]:
come to this country and he goes to Yale Medical School, becomes a top surgeon or something. You know? It’s very particular and typical about this country because we’re a creedal country. You know? If if you it’s almost like, it’s on I wanna I I kinda wanna Call, so so it’s like we’re a creole country. Are are you on with the same value system? Okay. We don’t care what your father was or what your mother was. You know? If If you’re on board with that and you can show that you can you can do that, then, hey. You’re you’re one of us. Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:28:19]:
That makes us very atypical from a lot of countries. I I was raised in Switzerland when I was younger. Right? So I was there for about six years. And in Switzerland, it’s like, at least for men, it’s like the father trains his son to do what he does. You know? If he was

James [01:28:34]:
Ah, okay.

Dean Vance [01:28:35]:
If he if he’s an arborist, you know, the son becomes that’s just that’s just the culture. Right? And here, it’s like whatever your mother or father do, In doesn’t matter. You can you know?

James [01:28:44]:
Right.

Dean Vance [01:28:45]:
The son or daughter, they can come up and do whatever the, you know, whatever they this is very strongly American sense.

James [01:28:52]:
Yeah. This and of opportunity or it’s land of opportunity. That’s the rumor.

Dean Vance [01:28:56]:
Yeah. Well, let me just say this too, though. We we yeah. You’ve you’re right. We’ve had it sweet since, World War two. Right? So we had

James [01:29:02]:
Oh my god. Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:29:03]:
After World War two, we had the Bretton Woods system. Right? Pegged the, peg, what, $35 to an ounce of gold. Right? We went off of that in nineteen seventy, seventy one, I think. Kissinger went off of that. Mhmm. But you always need suasion for something. Right? So his his suasion was to go to the Saudis, and and In kind of, like I don’t know what he told the Saudis, and, just have the Saudis denominate all their trade in oil in US dollars. So you had a certain level of suasion then.

Dean Vance [01:29:36]:
The the Saudis did not renew that, I think, about a year or two years ago. I think it was a renewal point year or two years ago.

James [01:29:42]:
Oh, interesting.

Dean Vance [01:29:43]:
So they haven’t renewed that. So you’ve got that. You’ve got the BRICS. You know, you got, you know, Russia In the BRICS and China and the BRICS system. They the Russians were kicked off the SWIFT system five, ten years ago, I guess, or six, seven years ago as a, as a as a, because they had gone to Ukraine, I think it was. They got kicked off of that, but they were able to, you know, and of pick it up with the the Chinese and In the bricks. So, yeah, it’s it’s very interesting times. Very interesting times.

Dean Vance [01:30:16]:
I think the saving grace personally, I think the saving grace of this country is the declaration of independence.

James [01:30:23]:
Absolutely.

Dean Vance [01:30:23]:
And the constitution really is just the administrative form of the declaration.

James [01:30:31]:
Mhmm. That’s

Dean Vance [01:30:31]:
just the administration of the declaration. But I think the declaration of independence, really putting out there, the freedom of a human, to pursue what he or she wants to pursue. I think it’s huge as a country. That you had a bunch of guys sitting and. They did the Federalist Papers. You had the Cato Club, whatever it was called. And and looking, you know, five and, thousand years, two thousand years, and how

James [01:30:56]:
do we screw up?

Dean Vance [01:30:57]:
How do we do this? How do we do this so we don’t screw up like he’d screwed up or like she screwed up over there? How do we

James [01:31:03]:
you know? Like, no Checks and balances. Right?

Dean Vance [01:31:05]:
Right. That I know of. No other Customers done that. So we really do have and, yeah, we’ve we’ve had some issues in this country, but, I mean, I I think the best I think the best of American culture is is better than anybody else’s On very close to close to beating everybody else’s culture. I also agree. I don’t wanna say, you know, I don’t wanna come off like that. But

James [01:31:24]:
No. I’m not coming off like an ass or anything.

Dean Vance [01:31:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James [01:31:27]:
I guess I look at, immigration, and I’m like, the concern that we should have is when people don’t wanna come into the country.

Dean Vance [01:31:35]:
That’s right.

James [01:31:36]:
Like, when they’re there there’s no one traveling by foot 2,000 miles to get here.

Dean Vance [01:31:40]:
That’s right.

James [01:31:41]:
Like, now we have people that are trying to get here because and of opportunity. But when they stop and they’re starting to get into a different country, we should be like, woah. Yeah. But we’re not that bad.

Dean Vance [01:31:52]:
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.

James [01:31:54]:
It’s yeah. I always feel like the not to get too crass, but I’m reminded of Clinton with the whole Monica Lewinsky thing.

Dean Vance [01:32:01]:
Oh my god. Yeah.

James [01:32:01]:
I heard a stand up comic, and he’s like, we gotta be concerned when something like that can’t happen because, like, oh, he’s only the president. Nobody cares. So it’s no sway.

Dean Vance [01:32:12]:
That’s right.

James [01:32:13]:
That’s right. Able to do some things because it’s actually a position of power.

Dean Vance [01:32:18]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [01:32:20]:
So I’m like and I even I joked with, I got this group that I hang out with once a month. Quite a few of them lean pretty extreme. Right? And I was joking with them. This In twenty twenty one, twenty two. During pandemic ish times, but not right at ’20.

Dean Vance [01:32:39]:
Sure. Sure.

James [01:32:39]:
We’re having such a hard time hiring people. You’d have these interviews scheduled, then they’d have no shows. And I’m like, we need to open that border up because I feel like if somebody walked 2,000 miles, they’d also show up to an interview.

Dean Vance [01:32:52]:
You got that right.

James [01:32:53]:
And we got these people sitting on the couch getting all their money. They don’t show up to In, and they have a sweet ass lady watching Netflix.

Dean Vance [01:33:00]:
I know. I know.

James [01:33:01]:
So I’m like, they need competition because we all these employers are just like, we can’t find people.

Dean Vance [01:33:09]:
Yeah. Yeah. This is this is very interesting conversation. You’re right. You’re right. And, yeah, and of opportunity. I mean, I know where we are in Pennsylvania. A lot of the construction guys are Mexican.

Dean Vance [01:33:20]:
You know?

James [01:33:20]:
Oh, totally.

Dean Vance [01:33:21]:
You know? And so Totally. You’ve got you’ve got these guys. When I lived in Switzerland, I remember the Italians were the construction guys in Switzerland

James [01:33:28]:
Oh, interesting.

Dean Vance [01:33:29]:
Where we were, yeah, back in the sixties. Alright. But, yeah, here yeah. And and they get the, you know, they get the knowledge. Like, anything else, you do this you do it for a while. You just get good at it. You know? Yeah. You get all the distinctions at it and all that.

Dean Vance [01:33:43]:
So so so there’s certainly I mean, I’ve seen Mexican that were hard workers, you know, very hard workers.

James [01:33:48]:
Hard workers.

Dean Vance [01:33:48]:
Yeah. Probably hard workers. And, you know, so hey. I but I’m with you in terms of this is the and of opportunity. Absolutely.

James [01:33:57]:
Yeah. I had my my, basement drywalled a few years ago, and it was from a guy that I knew just I knew his business, whatever, and I’m like, hey, man. I got this small project, whatever, is during pandemic. And he’s like, yeah. No problem. He sends his manager. His manager brings one I I think it was a Mexican guy because he’s he spoke Spanish to him. The guy that was in my basement that actually did the work, he’s moving 12 foot wide sheets of sheetrock all on his own.

James [01:34:25]:
He got that whole room sheetrocked. I think it was four hours.

Dean Vance [01:34:29]:
Mhmm. And

James [01:34:30]:
there were cuts and stuff like that. It wasn’t just an easy rectangle. Wow. And I came downstairs just to offer him, like I don’t know if I had cookies or brownies or something like that. Just give him a break. He was already

Dean Vance [01:34:41]:
gone. Wow.

James [01:34:42]:
And I’m like, I look around the basement, and I was like, okay. If I would do this myself, I’d be here for the next two weeks. And I promise you, people would go in that basement. They’d be like, oh, did you do this yourself? Because and this guy, I’m like, oh my god. Yeah. That is incredible. Yep. And I got it I got it for a song.

James [01:35:02]:
Right? It was dirt cheap. From from my point of view, I guess, from a cost it was still, there’s a comma in the number. Yeah. It wasn’t it wasn’t like I paid $50,000. Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:35:13]:
But relatively, it was cheap.

James [01:35:15]:
Relate and I’m like, there’s no way. There’s no way that someone making the money you or I are making Mhmm. Could do that for anything near what I would consider to be affordable.

Dean Vance [01:35:26]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I’m like, I

James [01:35:29]:
don’t know, man. You get rid of people doing the roofs and the drywall and the electrician stuff and stuff like that. We’re gonna

Dean Vance [01:35:36]:
we’re

James [01:35:36]:
In a rough time. A house is gonna Call of a sudden cost $10,000,000 to put up for some little shack.

Dean Vance [01:35:42]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Really. God.

James [01:35:44]:
So that I guess that’s the one of the concerns that I have.

Dean Vance [01:35:47]:
Yeah. I hear you. I hear you.

James [01:35:49]:
And you’re also telling people, hey. This was the land of opportunity. Funny story. Get out.

Dean Vance [01:35:54]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [01:35:55]:
So Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:35:56]:
Yeah. I think Call, yeah. I mean, there’s there’s so many different I mean, the the the the cushy guy on the couch, you know, I mean, he’s gonna he’s gonna be and she maybe, but I would say more for young men. They gotta get their act together because if they don’t I mean, all these guys coming over here, they see the opportunity, and they’re hungry. Yeah. They will bypass the guy in a second. You know? And I remember

James [01:36:21]:
I used to deliver beer, and you’d meet these guys in the back of On. So we’d deliver beer early in the morning. And so it was all typically, it was Mexicans that were doing all their prep. They’re playing their Mexican music and all this kind of stuff and say, hey, Dane. Blah blah blah blah blah. And just conversations with them, they talk about sending money back home. Yeah. And I’m like, you’re making $8 an hour.

James [01:36:43]:
How much are you sending back home, and you’re still able to hear?

Dean Vance [01:36:47]:
That’s right. That’s right.

James [01:36:48]:
Because, like, I’m making I don’t know what I was making. Probably $11 an hour at the time there, and I’m like, that was hand to mouth paying rent in my one bedroom apartment.

Dean Vance [01:36:55]:
Right. Right. Yeah.

James [01:36:57]:
How are you guy so I guess that’s why I learned, like, they’re living 50 in a house and thing because

Dean Vance [01:37:02]:
they they have to because

James [01:37:02]:
they wanna send money back home.

Dean Vance [01:37:04]:
Yeah. Yep.

James [01:37:05]:
But it’s not like they’re making a million dollars a a year and then sending money back home.

Dean Vance [01:37:10]:
Right. Right.

James [01:37:11]:
Making peanuts and sending it back home.

Dean Vance [01:37:13]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James [01:37:14]:
But I’m sorry. I interrupted you. I’m sorry about that. No. No. No. No. No.

James [01:37:16]:
No. No.

Dean Vance [01:37:17]:
It’s all it’s all good. No. It’s it’s interesting. We we’re getting into tax and we’re getting into my my micro and macroeconomics. This is it’s it’s pretty cool.

James [01:37:25]:
Yeah. I’m really enjoying it. Yeah. There’s certainly things that I don’t understand. You you mentioned the central bank and stuff like that. Is it Jerome Powell?

Dean Vance [01:37:33]:
Jerome Powell. Yeah.

James [01:37:34]:
I can admit if I was him, oh my god. Like, there’s absolutely no decision you can make that you won’t piss off somebody.

Dean Vance [01:37:41]:
So yeah. That’s true. That’s true.

James [01:37:42]:
I mean, raise rates, lower rates, don’t do anything. So kudos to him for just being alive.

Dean Vance [01:37:49]:
Being alive. That’s true. That’s true. He’s getting it from all sides.

James [01:37:53]:
Yeah. And I I mean, it’s unprecedented as far as the the height of the tariffs, the the volume of them. Mhmm. And then just how it’s changing every Dane, and you’re meeting quarterly. To be it’s just like, I don’t know what we should do. Right? I have no idea what and of whiteboard they have where they’re trying to figure out what numbers they’re putting on there to figure out what’s going on.

Dean Vance [01:38:14]:
Yeah. I mean, I get the sense that that Trump’s kinda shaking the tree to see what happens. A lot of it. You know?

James [01:38:19]:
No doubt. No doubt. And and

Dean Vance [01:38:20]:
I In know and I haven’t I haven’t seen the numbers, but I know a lot of lot of, countries are trying to repatriate some industry back here. But, I don’t know. I mean, you know? No.

James [01:38:32]:
But what do you the curious thing for me because I’m I guess, I don’t understand exactly what it takes to put up a manufacturing plant, but I know that it’s not a light switch.

Dean Vance [01:38:44]:
Oh, no.

James [01:38:44]:
Like, you’re not just like, we need On a automotive thing, whatever In Pennsylvania. Yeah. And they Business some 50,000 square foot I don’t know. Maybe a hundred I don’t know how big a automotive plant is, but it’s huge.

Dean Vance [01:38:55]:
Yeah.

James [01:38:55]:
Yeah. Let’s say 200,000 square foot plant or 200,000 square foot chip manufacturer or something

Dean Vance [01:39:01]:
like that.

James [01:39:01]:
Yep. Like, that’s huge infrastructure, huge In, capital In and Vance, and the localities gotta figure out tax breaks so you come here and all that kind of stuff. So many moving parts.

Dean Vance [01:39:15]:
Yeah.

James [01:39:16]:
How and that’s gonna be years in the making.

Dean Vance [01:39:20]:
Yeah. I haven’t I haven’t seen I I know Trump was talking about giving special credits and incentives tax wise for domestic manufacturers. You know? I know he was trying to do that. But to your point, yeah, I mean, it you know, it’s it’s a whole globalism, retrenchment. Right? Or not retrenchment, but but a receding of the globalism impetus. Right? Yeah. So, but yeah. But you got a lot of cheap goods.

Dean Vance [01:39:48]:
Right? A lot of cheap goods from, it it was cheaper to make them over there, put them on one of these huge ships, bring them over here. Still much cheaper than it was over here. So, you know, we’ll see. I mean, In you know?

James [01:40:00]:
Yeah. The other thing that we have, that many other countries don’t is the whole union thing.

Dean Vance [01:40:06]:
Yeah.

James [01:40:06]:
So I think of when, UAW got all excited, was that last year or two years ago?

Dean Vance [01:40:12]:
Yeah.

James [01:40:13]:
Who was the head of Draw, and he’s just like, oh, everybody strike.

Dean Vance [01:40:18]:
Okay.

James [01:40:18]:
Huge shutdowns for Ford and huge shut I think Dodge was or Chrysler or whatever.

Dean Vance [01:40:23]:
Chrysler. Yeah. Yeah.

James [01:40:24]:
Where he was leveraging tens of thousands of employees to just not go to work. I’m like, do they have that in China? I

Dean Vance [01:40:33]:
don’t know. Yeah. They kinda

James [01:40:35]:
We moved our plant here, but no employees are working because they don’t like the, I don’t know, the Twinkies in the break room or something like that.

Dean Vance [01:40:42]:
Yeah. They don’t have unions. I don’t think in China.

James [01:40:44]:
Alright. So it’s just stuff like that where it’s not I guess, there’s labor cost, it’s regulation, and it’s all this other stuff that they’re not going to these other countries because they’re like, we really like The US, but you know what? We’re obligated. It’s like, oh, it’s way cheaper to go over here.

Dean Vance [01:41:01]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Huge. Huge. Yeah. We we I guess, as Americans, American culture, we need to go back. I I would say, just go back to our best. You know? You know, like In the, I guess, in the forties, fifties, thirties, whatever, with, just the algorithm of, like, real progress.

Dean Vance [01:41:25]:
You know? Like, real progress and having the correct algorithm. Countries mimicked us. And it’s I think, yeah,

James [01:41:32]:
I think fifties after World War two, we’re more unified.

Dean Vance [01:41:36]:
Yep.

James [01:41:37]:
And you’re like, okay. We lived.

Dean Vance [01:41:39]:
That’s right. Yeah.

James [01:41:41]:
We Dane now, and we had a lot of people that were employed because he had soldiers over there, and he had money flowing.

Dean Vance [01:41:48]:
Yeah.

James [01:41:49]:
And it was kind of a new world order

Dean Vance [01:41:51]:
Yep.

James [01:41:51]:
And of thing. So we’re like, okay. We’re cool. What now? And then, like, travel becomes a thing, and computers become a thing, and all that, like, way fast ramp up. People could get their own house.

Dean Vance [01:42:06]:
That’s right. Yeah.

James [01:42:06]:
Yeah. Stereos, radios, shows, whatever. Yeah. That was a and I I feel like we’re unified then In more like we survived.

Dean Vance [01:42:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. We we we followed two front war. You know, it was incredible. Right?

James [01:42:22]:
Yeah. Yes, sir. I can’t imagine living in, ’39 being, I don’t know, being a 20 year old guy in ’39.

Dean Vance [01:42:31]:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James [01:42:32]:
And this is just coming back in ’45 and thinking like, okay. What now? Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:42:40]:
The greatest generation. Right? Or yeah. The greatest generation. Yeah. And, that we you know? Yeah. Yeah. It’s incredible. I mean, the two front war, that’s that’s and just just that capacity that was able to be organized because of what was at stake

James [01:43:00]:
Mhmm.

Dean Vance [01:43:00]:
And having and people say, well, FDR might have known about the poor harbor. Who knows? But but certainly having all that going on and people just having to really, you know, work together and, in the meantime, realizing what a juggernaut of, of capacity we had as a country. It’s like.

James [01:43:18]:
Oh, surreal. Yeah. It still blows my mind Yeah. That a country the size of Germany, so essentially the size of probably Pennsylvania. Like, if Pennsylvania is like, we’re taking over the world. The rest of The US would be like, sit down. Right? But Germany is like, no. We’re doing In, and they actually came pretty close.

James [01:43:38]:
That blows my mind.

Dean Vance [01:43:40]:
Yeah. A lot a lot of it talking about temperament is German culture. You know, German German culture is In fascinating. I think I would say I would say I was gonna say them in And. But they, you know, they were able to stop Caesar for a while. I don’t know if I think he penetrated the riot, but the the type of people that Germany was the two the two Tonys and a couple other big tribes in Germany just had a certain certain kind of temperament. They’re like, hey, man. You know? Not today.

Dean Vance [01:44:13]:
What’s that?

James [01:44:14]:
Not that like, Germany is just telling Rome, essentially.

Dean Vance [01:44:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. Germany is I think I think Germany was hit. I mean, it was interesting with Germany because Call World War one, Germany actually won the war. Right? And then, England forestalled it to bring the Americans In. And, you know, Germany actually ended up, you know, losing In. But it it’s the German Call it’s the German people. It’s their it’s their actual and we don’t really talk about it.

Dean Vance [01:44:42]:
You know, some people say, oh, you shouldn’t say that. You know, whatever. But but the the Germans in their culture have a particular algorithm of being. You know? They have an algorithm of being that wherever they are on the planet, you can recognize them because they have a particular algorithm of being. They’re they’re particular tendencies that make them very good entrepreneurs Mhmm. Very good business owners. And I think that’s just universal that they’re that good as a culture. And they were always a, they were always a, a a thorn in the side of the British.

Dean Vance [01:45:19]:
You know?

James [01:45:20]:
Mhmm.

Dean Vance [01:45:20]:
And they, god, they, they’re, you know, they’re they’re always the juggernaut of of and they still are to this day. I think the juggernaut of of the economic, European economics. I mean, they’re just, you know, they were hard workers and the, you know, the whole night. So

James [01:45:36]:
Yeah. Wasn’t that 02/2008 when the rest of Europe was having a really bad day and Germany’s like, didn’t you save?

Dean Vance [01:45:44]:
Didn’t exactly. Did you save? Come on.

James [01:45:47]:
Greece is like, hey, guys. Little help here.

Dean Vance [01:45:51]:
Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So yeah.

James [01:45:53]:
Interesting. I got a little I got a little ending that I have to say here for the podcast. Yeah.

Dean Vance [01:45:59]:
But we

James [01:46:00]:
got off a sidetracked.

Dean Vance [01:46:01]:
I know we did. It was interesting. It was interesting.

James [01:46:04]:
Oh, I love it. I love it. Dean, I really appreciate you being on the show, though. This has been great.

Dean Vance [01:46:10]:
You, James. Thank you. Great. Had a great time.

James [01:46:12]:
I gotta say I’ve interviewed, I’m gonna call it a lot of accountants. And, normally, I would think accountants are pretty boring, but the accountants you included, the ones that I’ve interviewed, they’re fantastic.

Dean Vance [01:46:25]:
Yeah. Thank you.

James [01:46:26]:
So thank you for that.

Dean Vance [01:46:28]:
Thank you.

James [01:46:29]:
I don’t I don’t know. I guess, I don’t know. Maybe you guys are closet partiers or something like that, and the rest of the world just didn’t even know about it.

Dean Vance [01:46:38]:
Who knew?

James [01:46:39]:
I’m I’m

Dean Vance [01:46:39]:
a I’m an inductive accountant. Most accounts are deductive, so they work in the box. I’m kinda outside the box, which I had I had an identity crisis when I was younger about it. And so I started meeting started meeting these very successful owners. I remember I talked to this one guy, Craig. He’s a CPA in New York. And, you know, he says he says, you hire those people, Dean. You don’t have to do that crunching yourself.

Dean Vance [01:47:05]:
Right? That’s what you hire for. You know? Smart man. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And It

James [01:47:11]:
was just that I imagine it was that one little chunk of advice or mention. Right? And all of a sudden, they just Dane the direction like, woah.

Dean Vance [01:47:19]:
Yeah. I mean, because it’s yeah. It was it was it was that, and In that was, like, the whole eighty twenty rule. Right? That, you know, I I just kinda gave up the 80%. Just just focus on the 20. And and, you know, hire people. I mean, it’s like, I had to I had to just have my own process of you’re hiring an adult who’s got a mind, who can think. They probably have children, so they you know, they’re responsible.

Dean Vance [01:47:46]:
It’s like, you know, you don’t have to hold their hand. They’re they’re an adult. They can think. And, you know, just just tell them what you want, and they’ll get it done. And if they don’t, tell them thank you. But, you know, get find somebody else.

James [01:47:59]:
Yeah. We’re not a good fit. Take a walk.

Dean Vance [01:48:01]:
Yeah. And it’s not you know, if they’re not a good fit, it’s not bad. It’s like if I’m wearing, you know, size seven shoes, I’m not I can’t wear size seven shoes. Now my feet are not bad. Size seven shoes are not bad. It’s just not a fit. It’s not a crime. It’s just, you know, things aren’t fit.

Dean Vance [01:48:17]:
Okay. That’s that’s fine.

James [01:48:19]:
I love that analogy. That’s great. I’m gonna have to use that. That’s great. Cool. Well, Dean, thank you so much for being on the show.

Dean Vance [01:48:27]:
Thank you, James. Had a great time. Had a wonderful time.

James [01:48:30]:
Yeah. This has been Authentic Business Adventures, the business program that brings you the struggle stories and triumphant successes of business owners across the land. My name is James Kademan, and Authentic Business Adventures is brought to you by Calls On Call, offering call answering and receptionist services for service businesses across the country on the web at https://callsoncall.com. And, of course, the Bold Business Book, a book for the entrepreneur and all of us, available wherever fine books are sold. If you’re listening or watching this on the web, if you could do us a huge favor, give us a big old thumbs up, subscribe, and, of course, share it with your entrepreneurial friends, especially those that learn that they have to pay taxes and maybe they don’t wanna pay as much. Dean, I never asked you where can people find you.

Dean Vance [01:49:12]:
Oh, god. You can find me well, the, Dane Vance c p a dot com. You can go there. LinkedIn, Dean Vance, CPA. Instagram, Dean Vance, CPA. I don’t know if I have got TikTok yet or still have In, but, yeah, you can find me Dean Vance CPA, Vance and Associates CPA. Yeah.

James [01:49:28]:
Awesome. I love it. Great. We’d like to thank you, everyone and listeners as well as our guest, Dean Vance of Vance and Associates CPA. Past episodes can be found morning, noon, and night at the podcast link found at drawincustomers.com. Thank you for joining us. We will see you next week. I want you to stay awesome.

James [01:49:44]:
And if you do nothing else, enjoy your business.