Welcome to Elevate with Elsner. Join us for inspiring conversations with individuals who have transformed their lives and are making a difference through the work that they do. And now, Welcome back to another episode of Elevate with Elsner. I'm your host, Blake Elsner. And today we have a fantastic guest who's flipping the financial game on its head. Byron Wolfe is a co-founder and CEO of CFOAF. a no-fluff, no-fear, bold-as-hell financial advisory firm to help businesses' owners stop overpaying the IRS, to scale like pros, and build real wealth. This episode isn't about QuickBooks or taxes that make your eyes bleed. This is the episode that will save you thousands, hand you back your freedom, and light a fire under your strategy. So without further Hey man, appreciate the intro. That was fantastic. Uh, literally couldn't ask for a better intro than that, man. That was great. But yeah, Doing great. Uh, you know, as obviously here we are at the time where we're recording this. A lot of people should always be preparing, you know, for taxes and whatnot. And I know you're big into CPA and wealth building and, you know, figuring out proper tax strategies. So what kind of, obviously it's all surrounded by numbers. What got you into the whole, the world of numbers, I guess you would call it, I mean, I've always been fascinated by it. I'm a numbers guy, mainly because I love money so much. You need to be a numbers guy for that. All the way growing up, school was fairly easy and it always came back to the numbers for me. In college, I took kind of an easy route because I was trying to play football collegiate level, too small, not fast enough. So I had to change gears and, you know, and find something that was going to make some money. My mom was also a CPA. And so she was in that lane. So I went into the business, really loved that aspect. Accounting just made sense to finish up there. Got out. I started in the accounting field and it was extremely boring just doing taxes. I was like, this ain't for me. I left, started my own business. I've had small businesses leading up to this. Started my own business, started a dealership. Did really well with that, grew that thing up. Then I felt a little burned out on that. We started a leasing company that started doing extremely well, and it was way less work for roughly the same profit. It's what I was doing with the dealership. So even though I love the dealership, that concept of working less to make more of the same money was brilliant. I was like, why am I going to work 60 hours over here when I can work 10 and make the same money? So, the dealership kind of burned out. We did sell it. So, that was my first exit. I learned a good lesson from that exit. I didn't exit in the best possible way. I sold when I was burnt out. I didn't sell at the top of the market. I didn't take the time to really assess what the best selling price was and what I was actually selling. I'm over here just like, hey, anybody want to buy a dealership? That's out the way. I know that now, but we did well. We sold for about a million dollars in the bank. That was great. I wasn't even 40 yet. I was still in my 30s. Felt like I was successful and then realized that a million dollars doesn't really go anywhere. It burns real fast. You know, still a leasing company that was doing good. That got me into consulting. So I would, you know, I was looking at other business owners that I knew looking at their systems, what they had going on. And I learned that like, I was really good at the finance. I'm really good at knowing what the numbers were, where things needed to go, like what the offset was, you know, I could tell you if I spent a dollar here, where I was going to get that money back and how much, but I wasn't good at marketing. I was okay at operations. You kind of have to be, you know, regardless, but I wasn't great at it. You know, I was a decent, you know, CEO, like high level stuff, but the day to day things, I just wasn't great. So, you know, not being the, I was okay at sales, but not the best sales person. I was really good at the numbers. So going in and talking to other people that maybe were just experts in that arena, you know, if I could come in and put my expert CFO level, you know, stuff, your controller, bookkeeper, you know, Chief Financial Officer, if I'd come in and be the expert in that space for them, that allowed their business to do infinitely better. And so I went away from trying to do everything and I focused on the area I was really good at. That's how CFOAF got started. We knew that we were very good at tax strategy. I've been pretty consistent. I've used the tax halls to my advantage to not really pay really any or much in taxes for a number of years. I was very good at setting forecasts, setting targets, knowing where the numbers were. I really knew the story of the business. CFOAF allowed us to go right to it, fractional CFO, and then tax savings through tax strategy. That's it. That's the core pieces. That's where we sit. I as long as there's people out there that are good at marketing, good sales, good operations, whatever, like I can come in and put our systems in that financial space behind it and allow them to just grow Yeah, I like how you put that. In other words, you know, you write the lyrics, they Yeah, exactly. You can put it down on paper for him, Yeah. You know, I hear you say, you know, following you, it's it's kind of say this thing is like business owners. They they're broke and extremely busy all the time. Like it seems like something that you always kind of like. bring Yeah. I mean, we tend as business owners, we want to be involved in everything. We're trying to do this, do that. have an employee, they're doing something, and it's slower than what we would do, we want to step in and like, bring them up to our level. And that's just really not going to happen. Like, you can't do everything. And if you try to do everything, it's not going to go well. Because when you're trying to do everything, you're just going to do a bunch of stuff not great. So if we can get to a point where we focus on the things that are the most important, and allow others to do maybe 70, 80% of where we would do if we get comfortable in that space, then we can start to grow infinitely faster. It's spending the right time on the right functions, not just a lot of time on a bunch of functions. But as business owners, that's what we do. We try to do everything. And you can I've said this a number of times recently on stage and on some podcasts, and it's true, but it sounds crazy. You could just about stumble into a million dollar business. And I know that anybody that hasn't had one, or maybe they're just kind of starting their journey, or maybe they've even had a business they started and they didn't get to a million, with inflation and everything that's going on, a million dollars doesn't want a million dollars anymore. But the reality is you can stumble into a million dollar business. You can literally do everything possible, not take on other people, and you can probably get to a million. But you're going to get stuck there so hard because you haven't built the systems, the processes. You have no way to get other people to do parts of the job. You are it. You have a million dollar job. That's what you have. When you try to do it all by yourself, you've created whatever level you get to it. Maybe you don't get to a million, maybe you get to 500,000, or maybe you get to 2 million, but you've created a job because there's nobody else involved. There's nobody else that can do anything. There's nobody else that really understands any of it, and there's no systems and processes to follow. Most people don't even know where they're at, how they got there. I can't tell you how many people have come in, looked at their stuff, you know, and they're in the multi millions of dollars, because maybe they can do operations. And maybe they figured out that, like, hey, I got to bring people in and they're not going to be 100%. Right. They're going to be able to do some things. And so they've done that. And now they're at that kind of multimillion. But they don't know where the money is. They don't really understand the difference between profit and cash flow. They don't look at targets. They're not saying, well, I want to do this. And if I want to be at $10 million a year, then I've got to, I've got to hit, you know, two and a two and a half million every quarter to get there. And so if I'm going to do that, then each month I got to be setting that target for a little bit under a million. And so every week I got to be hitting 200,000, like you got to kind of look where you're going to go and break it down into the individual steps. And so many entrepreneurs, they think long-term or they think like in the next five minutes, But they're not looking at like, what do I got to do by end of today, even? Or like, what are you going to get done this week? What do I get done this month? And it's that in between of like, I want to be 100, you know, millionaire guy, right? And okay, what's my next thing that I have to get done? There's a big gap Yeah, I noticed that in certain industries, I'll just come up with one like lawn and landscaping, like a lot of these guys or gals, whoever own these businesses, it seems like leads are never an issue. It's not, it's not that it's, it's always like the operational side I mean, Oh yeah. 100%, that's a great example. So I've dealt with a few of these, and those are the ones that get stuck so fast, because it is so seasonal. And so what happens, and I've seen this a number of times, and I'm not picking on the people that are in this space, but summer comes around, money is just racking up. They're making so much money, they're so busy, you know, they'll hire anybody that's got a pulse that hopefully can run a weed eater or run a, you know, run a mower, whatever, right? They're just, I need people. And I've got more clients than I can handle. Like that's, that's a general rule, you know, so that summer, and it starts to die down, and they've gotten used to this spin. So they've started spending, they usually have a brand new truck, If they have kids, they probably bought a few Mustangs or sit in the driveway for those kids or Teslas or whatever they're into, right? You started to buy these things because you're used to that money coming in and it doesn't feel like it's ever going to run out, right? But things slow down. And so you've got this staff that you got to pay, but the revenue is not the same anymore. The clients are still your clients, but they don't need you to cut every week or every other week, right? you know, especially here, like in Arizona, like, we don't get a whole lot of grass. So, you know, those landscapers, like, they're like, well, you need rock, like, can I trim your cactus? You know, these aren't normal weekly things, right? These are random. So the business isn't the same, but they haven't planned for it. So there's no cash that's kind of set set aside to account for this. So they just run into the same problems. You know, they lose staff, you know, maybe they go down to a couple of people, maybe they had a staff of 20. and now they need two or three, right? So you lose all this staff, and then all of a sudden, it comes back around, it's season again, right? And you start picking up and now you're slammed and everybody wants to give you money and you got more clients, but you don't have that 20 employees anymore, right? Like they're gone. You know, so finding kind of that gap, finding the things that allow you to do that. And so for landscapers, you know, like our yard guys, like probably one of the first things I always ask whenever I talk to one is like, what are you doing Right. And if they're like, well, I don't do, I don't do nothing. We take vacations or, you know, while we just maintain or whatever, I'm like, okay, you got two options. You got to go subscription model. Right. And like, have your clients paying you throughout the year, but you know, you're going to work harder for it in the summer. Yeah. So you've got consistent income, but you got to find something to do in the winter, right. You know, do Christmas lights, right. Do, uh, do snow removal, you know, do like, do some of the higher end kind of landscaping changes, right. Some retaining walls and things like that. but you've got to find something to do in the off season. Even if you're breaking even with the 20 employees in the off season, it's going to come back tenfold because as soon as season comes back around, you've got the staff to continue to grow. So you've got the guys handling it and now you can collect all those extra clients that you're probably turning down because you don't have the staff to do it because you laid everybody off or everybody left or they quit or you fired or whatever. Now you can pick that up. So 20 guys becomes 40 guys, right? The same cycle, you got to find something for those 40 guys to do in the winter, right? Or you got to be subscription model. So that's, I'm not saying that's the only choices, but I would say those are the top two. And I would say that that's probably how 90% of them can kind of get through. But you got to know what's happening. You got to know where the cashflow is coming from. You got to know like what's happening. within the business so that you can predict what your costs are, right? And you don't have to make money every month. But you need to make money every year, you know. And so scaling that Yeah. That's a, that's a really, really good point on how, like, because in St. Louis, obviously we get snow sometimes. Right. But some of these winters, we don't have any snow. So, you know, you see a lot of these guys, they, you know, they throw a plow on the front of their landscaping truck. And, but if we don't have snow, then it's like, Oh, now it's like, now what? Like, so I, Yeah. A hundred percent. That's where, you know, like your Christmas lights or chain walls, You know, we have a client, they have a pretty large landscaping company, they're into, they've got a dealership now too, so they actually sell equipment, which is great. And so they found a lending solution. And this is the wild thing, when we got into it, I told them right up front, they were, you know, shiny penny, right? Oh, we're gonna sell so much equipment, it's gonna be amazing, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, what's gonna happen is you've just multiplied your off season impact. So you've got to find a financing source. Because every one of the people that's where you were a couple of years back, 10 years back, whatever, they're going to see the same thing you have. And that bright, brand new, shiny equipment they just bought from you guys in season. Now they can't pay payroll. They can't pay bills. They can't pay rent or something. Right. And October, November, December, and they're going to be bringing that stuff back, trying to either sell it back to you or, or, you know, try to fix their, their problem. So now you have funding. And so we were able to, they, they, I'm not going to say they didn't believe me. I just don't think they took it as seriously as they needed to. Uh, but then right in the middle of it, they're like, we have so many amazing deals on equipment. People are trying to sell us back stuff at half of what they paid for. I'm like, yeah, I told you, I told you it was coming. Right. So you got to have a funding solution. So they were able to find a financial partner that allowed them to pick up a lot of this inventory. that had massive profit margins, but it wasn't going to be immediate. Like you have to buy it and then you have to sit, wait for the season to come back around. And a lot of times they were selling something back to the same person that sold it to them, you know, and getting 20, 30% margins on stuff because they don't need it in November. Like you said, when there's, there's no grass to cut, maybe there's no snow on the ground to plow, but they get to take care of, take advantage of that. And the other thing is, is like, don't just get so focused on the immediate problem. Like, okay, snow removal, people think snow, right? You got to plow it. We got to move the snow. What happens if it doesn't snow? Well, you don't know if it is or isn't right. So even when it doesn't snow, I guarantee that there's money in salting, right? Going in, salting the sidewalk, salting the parking lot in anticipation of it, maybe snowing, right? There's also, there's, there's money and making sure that like you've got good drainage, uh, all that stuff is taken care of because it doesn't have to snow for somebody to have a slip and fall in the front of your building and cost you a lot of money. Yeah. So if you're doing a maintenance, right. With that stuff, you know, you're good. Right. And that's where those contract comes in because, Hey, when somebody says, well, I only need you when that, you know, when I need the yard cut, not necessarily. You need me when you have that. You need me for your weeds and everything else. Maybe the grass isn't growing, but weeds still are. So we got to do that maintenance. And I got to make sure your sidewalks, your parking lots are safe. So you do subscription model and it doesn't matter if we got to work twice as hard in a month, you pay the same price, you know, and maybe there will be months where I'm not as involved, but you're still covered and you still have somebody to reach out to. you know, try to get ahold of a guy to do snow removal the morning of a snowing, that's really hard, right? Like, you know, but if you've already got the person, you're already on radar, right? They probably already salted it. They probably know you're on schedule for them to come out and clear it, put the new salt down, you're good to go, you're covered. So being able to pitch the like full coverage, Yeah, that's, that's really great advice. And obviously you can even convert that into pretty much any sales job where you're going, you know, up and down and sales and nothing's ever, um, you know, smooth. Right. But so flipping over to like common mistakes to that obviously costs businesses. And one that I, I heard you talk about was like no entity structure. Like, is that a big thing to always have, you know, running as some type of a sole proprietor LLC, is that a major tax Oh yeah, big time. Entity optimization is huge. What we see is people don't even have an LLC, they start a business, sole prop, one, you got massive liability on that because it comes back to you. But then without the LLC, at best you're filing a sole prop Schedule C on your 1040, you're gonna miss out on some deductions that are available to anybody that just has an LLC in general, right? First level. Second level is you start actually making money. Well, all of those dollars that your business is profiting, you're gonna pay your income tax on that, but you're also paying self-employment tax. So literally without having the right entity, every dollar that that business makes, you're paying an extra 15.3% on it for 15 cents on every dollar you made in addition to the income tax and your state and local taxes and payroll taxes on what you're paying out, but you're gonna pay another 15 cents on every dollar out just in self-employment tax because you don't have the right LLC format. You don't have the right entity optimization. So when you do that and you hit a certain level of profitability, being able to go to like an escort you know, the S corp allows you to become a business entity, you're still functioning, not as like a C corp. So still an LLC, but it's taxed, taxed like an S corp or S corporation that allows you to avoid that self employment tax. It also allows you to take some deductions that are not available to you with the Schedule C. The Level 1 Schedule C, when you go to Level 2 S-Corp, you get deductions that were not available to you on the Schedule C. And the things that you were able to take on the Schedule C that you weren't on your sole prop, you also get to take at the 1120S. And not only do you get to take them, but you get to take all these deductions in the S, and then it flows down to your 1040. Well, you probably have another Schedule C, another LLC that's a formatted. It gets you to take further deductions, further write-offs that allow you to reduce that income. You ever been to a wedding where they have the big tower of champagne glasses, you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. And they come out and they pour the champagne and it fills up the top one, then it flows over and it fills up the next and it goes down, blah, blah, blah, right? So intimacy optimization, which I can talk to that. That's that concept. You fill up the top entity, the taxes flow out. Now it's gonna flow into that second level of entities. It fills that up, right? You got your tax savings there, flows into the next one, you fill it up there. And the goal is at the end of it, on your 1040, when you get to the final step, you want that tax bill to show $0 due, right? You wanna make maximum money, But you want to pay $0 in taxes. And I've done it consistently for years. I pay 2018 we sold the dealership. I didn't take full advantage of some strategies that I should have for the capital gains there. We pay tax. Last year, I was waiting on a loan to close, pretty big loan to close. I believe what the bank said, another mistake, that they were going to close this thing in December. They did not. And so because that didn't close, I went into the tax year owing taxes. So those are the two times that I've paid taxes in, I don't know, 10 years or more. And I consistently make a million dollars or more every year. So because of using tax strategy, it allows me to either not pay it through the strategy or to defer it. And so this gets people tripped up a lot. So I say, hey, look, we can do this. It defers the taxes. Well, why do I want to defer it? If I defer the tax, I've got to pay it eventually. And that's kind of true, but kind of not true. You can defer things out so far that either the tax dies with you, or it gets absorbed by something else. In real estate, qualified opportunity zones are huge. I'm sure you've heard of these, you're familiar with them. They're great. I love a qualified opportunity zone. For me, I look at a property and then I want a 1031, exchange it. You take the gains on that property that you sell, you roll it into the next, So you don't pay any taxes on it, you've deferred the taxes, the new property, you defer it into the next property, right? That one you own for a while, you probably are going to do one more 1031 exchange depending on the base, but maybe not, you know, it's generally two 1031 exchanges, and then the third one, or sometimes the second one into a qualified opportunity zone. So you buy a property, you make a bunch of money, you take loans against the property that the loan pays back. So that loan money is tax free, you don't pay tax on loan money. So you've got all this money you've loaned against this property that you get to spend tax free, you get to sell that property, roll it into the next one, that one, you do the same thing, you know, you get to take the loan, spend that money, and you get the tax deferred into the next concept, which that third one should always be a qualified opportunity zone. This one you're going to own longer because it's a 10 year for the most part, there's exceptions to the rule, but 10 years qualified opportunity zone. And then all of a sudden it's tax free. So you've deferred, deferred, all of a sudden it's tax free. So those two deferrals became free money, right? Great system to use. It's probably one of my absolute favorite for real estate. Um, you know, the big, beautiful bill that, that passed recently, uh, enacted January 20th, I believe that one has got some really good stuff. You know, you can, do the interest deductions now. It went back to EBITDA, which is a huge thing because now it's, you know, basically above the line. So you get to do that, you get vehicle, you know, right off with the homeowners, you know, get interest for the homeowner. That's a massive win for everybody. Like that's huge. So they keep passing things. And here's, I'm going to go super tangent. I apologize ahead of time, but yeah, people look at these tax laws and they say, well, they create these things for the rich. And I'm not gonna argue that, that is true. Most of these tax laws are passed by the people that are in office or their rich friends. The piece that people don't realize is you can't pass these and not allow everybody that's a taxpayer to benefit from them. So you can do one or two things. You can sit on the sideline and you can pout about the rich taking advantage of all these tax credits while you keep paying money like an idiot, or you can get off the sidelines and take advantage of the same thing these rich cronies are taking advantage of to get your taxes down to zero. And me personally, I'm not gonna complain about what somebody else gets if I can take advantage of it myself, right? Yeah. And that's a crazy, like, even at the low level, we spoke to a high income earner, but they're W-2, no LLC, just W-2 earners. And I kind of hurt their feelings. I said, you know, I said, I, as a W-2 earner without doing any tax strategy at all. And I said, you were told a lot that you can't do tax strategy. That's a lot. You can a hundred percent do tax strategy, right? Yes. There's more things to an LLC to a business owner. You can a hundred percent do, uh, do tax strategy. In fact, real estate should be your primary focus, right? You should be buying real estate to the level that it allows you to not pay taxes. And then when you do a cost segregation study, especially with a hundred percent depreciation, that money that you use to put down to buy that property is gonna come back to you, right, with the tax sales. So yeah, maybe you gotta spend $70,000 to get into a rental property, right? But instead of paying $70,000 in taxes, you bought that property, you cost saved that property, you take that appreciation, that$70,000 tax liability you had just went down to zero. So would you rather donate $70,000 to the US government Or would you rather not pay it and now own a cash producing property? It It does. It reminds me of something, another question that I thought of was when people don't want to switch to like, because I've heard this and I don't know if it's just, I've heard it from somebody or it's just, I've seen it, but like, what is the, when people don't want to shift to like a S Corp or LLC because of, retirement savings. Is that a myth? You can put more away, not in an S-corp. And if you're in a C-corp, you can put up to $55,000 into an Um, it's, it's a real thing. That's a myth. That's not true. Uh, so say that, um, it does change the format, right? So as a, as an LLC owner, things have opened up to you that you can take advantage of. So you do have to be a little bit more strategic, right? So it's. Again, it's the whole concept of do a little bit more work to get a lot more rewards. If you just stick with the traditional thinking, I want to go traditional 401k, I'm not interested in any other options. In that case, if you're not willing to try other concepts or to use the tax code to your advantage, then yes, that myth would be true for you. The problem is, is there are so many more options. We have a client just recently came to us. They have a massive tax bill. We looked at it, you know, before even getting into the tax strategy, I said, well, what, what kind of retirement accounts do you have? You're like, oh, you know, we just, you know, we didn't, we didn't really do anything this year. You know, I've got the match. And so we did the match, but you know, we haven't really, I'm like, okay, you're a, you're a business owner now. I get that you're W2, but you guys have started a business. It's made money. You know, you're getting compensated from that. I was like, you know, it's, it's not, the year's not over for 24. It's over for 401k. Right. So if we're looking at traditional, well, if you're even looking at a raw, a lot of those, those are done, right. You should have done those last year, but you still have the option of a set IRA. Yeah. And they said, well, like, well, I don't know that I qualify for a set. I was told I don't qualify. I'm like, absolutely not. Who told you this? You know, like, where did you get this? And I'm not going to say where it was to talk, but they got really bad information. So I said, no, absolutely not. Like I said, you're on extension. You can set up a step IRA before your extension, your October 15th. You can set it up. You do have to fund it. But because you both make money, you're both earners and you make a lot of income from this thing. You can put $138,000 into this retirement account right now, before October 15th, and that just reduced your taxable income by 138,000. So you're gonna get 30% roughly, right? 30% of that money back immediately just by doing that. So if you've got the money to do it, do it, right? A third of that is gonna come back to you, real dollars, cash money in your pocket, you're not paying the tax. I'm like, well, why didn't people tell me about this? Why didn't my CPA tell me about this? Because your CPA is doing your taxes. Your CPA is not a tax strategist. They're two completely different things. When I asked this question, I'm not trying to pick on their CPA. That's not my intention. But I said, okay, I said, you tell me this. I said, put yourself in their shoes. They're going to collect the exact amount of money from you for doing an hour of work Or they can collect the same amount of money, maybe save you some money, but they still make the same amount of money and nobody's going to really know the difference, but they got to put 10-15 hours into that to make the same money. You want to make a dollar for working an hour or do you want to make a dollar for working 15 hours? down there like, yeah, no, I get it. I get it. Yeah, I don't do that. And I'm like, Okay, well, it's also why tax strategy is a lot more expensive than just getting your taxes filed, right? Like, can you find somebody to do them for 1000 bucks? Yeah, all day long? Are they going to be done? Well, no. Are they gonna have tax strategy? No. So you get your taxes done for 1000 bucks, but you pay $70,000 in taxes, or use a tax strategist that maybe cost you 10, and you pay $0. But I would much rather pay $10,000 all in didn't pay 71,000 because I got a discount on No, that is a, even, even myself. I mean, this is the most, it's very educating what you're telling people, because I think everybody probably could take a step back like in really. you know, take a look at the whole picture, like you're saying, and really benefit because you're spot on what I pay in taxes. And I'm like, wow, I owe tax. You know, it's like the CPA, he's so busy. Like they got so many things to do. I mean, they're busy year round. Checking boxes, man. Checking boxes and getting out the door. You know, like it's, it is the, you know, I always say it's the race to the bottom, right? Like, When we advise, you know, business owners say, look, there's, there's really two things. You can either sell premium, right. Premium product, premium service, you know, like put it out there, high quality product, good experience. Like we're going to crush it. Smaller number, higher ticket, right. You can sell on quality. You can race to the bottom, right. You go against everybody else. That's trying to be the cheapest in the market. And you can race to the bottom, bottom price point. to get as many clients as you can possibly get, as many headaches, really, is the real thing there, as you can get to hopefully make as much money as you would make off of a few clients selling the premium and have a much better system, a much better client base, and a lot less stress. Me, I'd rather be the premium. I would rather deliver a supreme value to my clients that they understand that this is 100% worth it, right? then do a whole bunch of things for clients that are just looking for the cheapest price they can get it. But it is a far and superior product, right? Like, I would never feel comfortable telling somebody, yeah, you're gonna pay $70,000 in taxes. But good news is I'm gonna charge you 1000 bucks. I would feel much more comfortable charging that guy $25,000 and being like, hey, look, it's 25K, but you're going to pay zero in taxes. How does that sound? We wouldn't even charge that much, but even if that was the reality, you're going to charge a third of what you save, that's still better. That is infinitely better. It goes for everything, any product you're going to put out. If you're a roofer, do high-quality roofing. Talk to them about solar. upgrade their system, make sure it's gonna last forever. Don't put some crappy product that's gonna last seven years and then they're gonna come back to you because they're upset, the roof's leaking, you know, the insurance won't cover it, whatever, right? Put a high quality product up. You know, I'll coach you, even if you're a service, right? If you're a lawn care guy, go out there and make sure that it's the nicest looking yard in the neighborhood, right? Do a high quality job and let them be the envy of the neighborhood because you're gonna spend a lot less money in ads when every single person on their street, hopefully their neighborhood, sees the yard, and they're like, they see your yard sign in the yard, because you've already worked that out with them, and they're like, man, that yard looks amazing. I want that yard, right? The guy that looks like your eight-year-old cut it, because they're out there, they're just trying to knock it out really quick, and they move on to the next one, you got burn marks, and the trees are all jacked up, and you got weeds poking out, like, it's done, but it looks like crap. That guy's not getting any referrals, right? That guy's spending a ton of money on Google ads and everything else, just trying like heck to get clients in the door. I'm a quality guy. I think it's the way to go. I'm not gonna say that there's not an argument to go the other direction, but to me, it's quality or Yeah, it's true. That is a race that I don't want to be in either. I don't, but I think in your spot, it's like, you know, most people they're playing what, you know, defense with their finances rather than offense. And I think that's that my, you know, you gotta, you gotta shift that even myself sitting here. Um, I'm going to take my, take a step back and shift my mindset a little bit because like, you know, it's been a lot, it's eyeopening. Some of the stuff you're saying, you just don't until you actually, like you say, like open another layer of your brain and really like dive in with an expert Yeah. And hold people accountable, right? Like hold your employees accountable for what you expect them to do. You know, don't hire somebody. And if they don't do the job, you're like, well, at least I've got somebody in place, right? That's not the way to be. You don't hold them accountable to what you've expected of them. They're not gonna be 100% of you, but you should hold them accountable to a 70 to 80% of what you can do. Same thing with anybody that you're gonna do business with, right? Like hold them accountable for what it is. You hire a tax guy, a tax strategist, hold them accountable. We do a 4X. Every one of our clients gets a 4X guarantee on it. Like whatever we charge, we're gonna guarantee 4X of that in savings. So if it's a $10,000 tax strategy, you can guarantee you're gonna save at least $40,000 or more I have never once had to make good on that guarantee. So we crush it way above Forex every single time. And all of my time of doing this, not a single time we've not been able to deliver on Forex. So we set that because we know it's always above that. So your expectation should be high, especially if you're going for a premium. And you should always hire premium employees. Don't hire the cheapest person. That's an option. They're not going to do a good job. They're going to cost you more money than you're paying them, I guarantee you. Hire the high quality person. But set the expectations. If you can buy a product for whatever, $10,000, then you should expect way more than $10,000 in value. And if you can hire an employee for, say, $70,000, and that's the norm, and you're just fighting to try to find somebody good in the $70,000 candidate range, raise it to $80,000 or $90,000, and see what that pool looks like. because there will be some duds in there that they've tried to get a higher pay for less work, but the person that's worth 80, 90, 100K, they don't want to work for 70, right? They want to work for 80, 90, 100. So get the high quality person, but then hold them accountable for what it is. And do that for yourself. Your product that you put out, you should know without a shadow of a doubt, and you should be extremely confident in the fact that whatever the product or the service that you put out that you are delivering far above in value over what you're charging. And if you feel comfortable with that, sales is really easy. Like to me, it's super easy. You know, my Forex guarantee was the, that was the best thing that ever happened. Because I know if I talk to somebody and I say, look, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this. But I tell you what, you don't have to believe me at all. Here's a Forex guarantee. You know, like, all right, you know, where do I start? It makes it a lot easier. If you believe in your product, your service, sales are going to come. Yes, you still got to do things, you still got to market, you still got to do all the stuff that's part of it. But if you're providing that quality service, a quality product, if you're putting that out and you believe in it, people are going to see that. They don't need to really be sold, they need to be educated. That's That's, I love that. Yeah. The, we always say that we don't, we don't sell, we educate because yeah, people don't like to be sold. That's one thing I I've definitely learned. So, um, man, this has been a, it's really been an awesome episode. I really can't wait to share this with entire family. I mean, there's, I feel like everybody can learn something out of this episode and, and I know you're on Instagram, right? It's at the underscore CFO AF. And that's the website to see. We'll have that in the show notes, which is CFOAF.com. And you can book a call on that website, too. And I know that'll change Oh, yeah. Yeah. We do. We do free analysis for, you know, for tax savings, which is great. You know, we've had plenty of people. They say, hey, like, I don't know if it makes sense. So we do the free analysis. You know, they upload their returns, we run through them, we find out where the savings are, and we give an estimate on what that looks like. You know, so it's really, it's no risk. And worst case scenario is you walk away better Yeah. Wow. So you get a free analysis and you're guaranteed four times. I mean, how can you, how can you, no wonder why you're so successful. No wonder why you got that McLaren out there. Yeah. This guy knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing. We can all learn from you. So I Of course, man. Thanks for having me as a, it was a blast. I know I probably talked way too much, but man, I get passionate about this stuff. Like I, I want everybody to win and I want nobody to pay taxes. Like that's the ultimate goal, right? Like, Yeah. Well, I mean, in the main thing is you're, you're just playing by the rules. That's kind of what, what you're doing. It's not like you're cheating anything out or doing anything wrong. That's just, you're playing by the rules and Yeah, I mean, ask what's available, right? Like, you know, I've seen all time people like, Oh, well, you know, I got to do this, or this is it just is what it is, or whatever. You know, man, test that, you know, like, if you think that's the only way to do it, man, test that theory. If you think that it just is what it is, test that theory. You know, like, so many times I've seen that when people just have these, these self limiting beliefs that come from nowhere, right? Like, why? Why do you have that? You know, where did that come from? You know, and then you like, you change the mind, you're like, well, you can definitely do this. That's actually not true. Here's the reality. Why didn't anybody tell me? Here's your sign. That's what I mean. If you're tired of playing small, here's your sign. I'm sure you can take your business, build wealth like a grown I was going to say grown-ass business owner, but you know, we're going to keep it like that. Grown-ass business owner. That's what we're doing. This is your sign. Yeah, let's go. So no, I appreciate coming on here. And if anybody wants to reach out to you, obviously Instagram, show notes, have the website and go ahead and get your strategy going for next year. Absolutely this is Elevate with Elsner where we don't do Stu fluff. We do fire. See you next week and one Thanks so much for tuning into this episode. We sure do appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show wherever you consume podcasts. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. And if you feel so inclined, please leave us a review and tell your