Steven Jarvis, CPA (00:51.583)

Hello everyone and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast, Financial Professionals Edition. I’m your host, Steven Jarvis, CPA. And joining me fresh off, having joined his first summit live in Arizona with us, Brad Wooten, CPA, welcome back to the show.

Brad Wooten, CPA (01:06.375)

That’s right, thanks, Jarvis. It is always great to be here on the show with you. I think this is actually my third time, so if you’re not careful, I might become a regular.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:13.458)

Yeah, there could be worse things, because we were getting ready for the show, and we still will talk through kind of your presentation at the summit. I heard so much great feedback from the attendees, getting to hear another perspective. I think they were also just relieved that they were able to find a second CPA that could make eye contact and carry a conversation. I think it’s instilling hope in this generation of financial advisors that there is more than one CPA like me out there, so I appreciate you doing that, if nothing else. Yeah, yeah,

Brad Wooten, CPA (01:40.250)

I had a ton of fun there.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (01:41.208)

Before we get to the summit, I want, well, I guess it’s related to the summit. I think you were maybe a little bit joking, but there’s a ton of truth to it of, hey, you came to the summit, you were excited to hear these really complicated proprietary ideas I had, and then I throw up in one of my sessions like seven most valuable strategies, which for me, it was like the seven that I use most often and see a benefit from, and your reaction to it initially was kind of like, oh, wait a second, these are the same things I’ve always seen.

Brad Wooten, CPA (02:08.791)

Yeah, yeah, so like you said, I think a lot of times as professionals, we maybe know too much, right? And so then we get that imposter syndrome too, and we start to think like, okay, if there’s someone out there who seems to be, or maybe actually is, either way, they’re doing more, they’re doing better, they’re charging a higher fee, their minimums are higher, talking about Matt, your brother too, charging one and a half percent AUM, a lot of people barely get above one percent or even two, one percent sometimes, right? And so, and then we’re clearly, they’ve got something that they’re delivering to make that worth it to the customer. They’re saving five figures, six figures in taxes. And yeah, you put up there, there was a seven best and seven worst, and I think the worst were just, you know, the least impact for the least used. And there was stuff we know up there like the Augusta Rule and things like that that aren’t necessarily bad or wrong, they just don’t apply that often, right? Or the Augusta Rule comes in, you know, I can rent my house for $10,000 a year for myself, not 50, like I was told. And so, those things, and then the seven best, right? Like, are you saving money for retirement, right? Are you keeping good records? So yeah, it’s like, I don’t need any more continuing education, or I know all these things, and I just need to get out there and implement it. And I think the harder thing to do is talk about them in a way where you’re communicating that they are valuable. Because I think too now with where we’re at with AI and with Google, the thing

Brad Wooten, CPA (03:37.666)

that when I started in 2008, those things were valuable to the clients, right? They didn’t necessarily know about them, they come in, you tell them kind of the tried and true basic stuff, and they’re like, “God, this is awesome.” And now, I think you’re still supposed to do the same thing because the clients still aren’t doing them. They’ve heard about them, but they’re not doing them. And so, if you can communicate it in a way where they still see the value in that, I think that’s the hardest part right now. It’s not figuring out some new strategy, it’s how we communicate it and getting the client to understand and say, “Wow, yeah, that is valuable and I wasn’t doing that and maybe I should focus on just, you know, keeping track of my receipts before I try to go have some, you know, 10 level holding company with all this complexity when I’m not even putting money into a retirement account, whether it be traditional or Roth, right?

Steven Jarvis, CPA (04:27.791)

When I’m not doing the basics. Well, because Brad, I think people have that natural tendency of, “I need some new piece of knowledge, I need a new strategy.” But as you talk about, “Hey, what’s that thing that Matt or Micah or Steven are doing that no one else is doing?” It isn’t a proprietary tax strategy. It’s the consistency of execution. It’s the consistency of communication. And so many of the summit attendees this year, I think yourself included, really highlighted that what stood out compared to other conferences they’ve been to is that emphasis on taking action. Because I absolutely could get up on stage. I mean, I won’t insult your tax background. You maybe even know things that I don’t. But for most of the audience, I could absolutely get up there and share tax things they haven’t heard of before. But it’d be really like deep dark corners of the tax code. It is rarely, if ever, applicable. And sure, we could check some boxes on, “I learned something new.” But what I care about more is, “Here are the things that I do today, day to day. Here’s how I communicate with them effectively.” And some of it is the confidence and peace of mind that they’re being taken care of. And at times, it is five and six figures of tax savings over their lifetime. It is very rare that I’m working with someone in a situation where they have six or seven-figure tax savings in one year. That’s the rare exception for the clients I serve. But over their lifetime, or over the lifetime of their wealth, we’re absolutely making an impact there. But it’s gradual over time.

Brad Wooten, CPA (05:48.041)

Yeah, and that’s one of the things, too, that I’ve talked about it in personal finances before when leading small group studies or something at my church, where it’s like, look, it’s not the home runs that are going to build your wealth, right? It’s the steady consistency over time. Because if you hit a home run this year and don’t do anything for 10 years, the person who consistently does what they’re supposed to do is going to be ahead of you in 10 years because of that. And so it’s the same thing here, too, where just helping clients understand, it’s not those big savings in one year. It’s doing things consistently over time. And if you want to throw in their sports analogy as well, right? Like, if the team is focused on fundamentals, they can beat a team that is more skilled than them who lacks the fundamentals. Absolutely. So, yeah, it’s just critical to hit those fundamentals consistently and continue to check those off over and over again.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (06:41.291)

Yeah. For me, it’s not any opposition to the more complicated stuff. That stuff’s fun, too. That’s an and, not instead. Like, we can’t skip ahead to the complicated stuff. We got to start with the basics.

Brad Wooten, CPA (06:51.125)

So, yeah, if you’re trying to throw a Hail Mary on every single play, right? It’s not going to be a great football game to watch, right? Yeah. It’s not going to work out too well. Absolutely. And that, you mentioned this, too. So, I was going to say this, too, because that was one of the things that stood out to me. Even as I was sitting there looking at the financial advisors at the summit, right? I’ve talked to a lot of financial advisors over the years. And seeing what you guys were teaching, I was like, man, I would refer, and getting referrals from CPAs. That was part of what I talked about in my talk, was it’s something that every financial advisor will complain about all day long is, “Why don’t I get these referrals? What’s going on?” And I just remember sitting there thinking, “If I knew financial advisors were doing everything that they just talked about, it would be really easy to send clients to them.” Because, one, I realize that they don’t have to be exotic clients, because it’s not just crazy stuff that is happening. It’s normal stuff for normal people that’s happening, right? And two, I know that they’re going to be taken care of, and they’re going to get these value adds throughout the year. And so, that was a big thing to me, and it was the consistency of what’s being delivered. That’s the one thing I took away for myself, was I’m out there doing things that I know how to do, that I’ve been doing for two decades, but I need to create it, put it into a process that is consistent and delivered the exact same way over and over again, not just so I

Brad Wooten, CPA (08:15.958)

can transfer it to other people in my team, so that I don’t have to be the only one doing those value-added things, but also so that I can consistently do it. I mentioned this before we hit record, was I may do it very consistently 99% of the time, but then I get off the call at least 1% of the time and go, “Oh man, there’s this one thing that I always say, and I didn’t say it this time.” And I was like, “Yeah, I just need to deliver the same thing every single time.”

Steven Jarvis, CPA (08:39.625)

Yeah, I think it’s financial service providers. I’m sure it applies in other industries as well, but especially for those of us who are entrepreneurs, it can be really natural to feel like we need to do something new and novel all the time. My favorite analogy somebody ever gave me on that was like, “Hey, when you go to a surgeon to have an operation, you want them to do the exact same surgery they did a thousand times before.” And you’re coming because you want that consistency. And it is tough to remind ourselves of that because we can think, “Oh man, I’ve said this the same way 900 other times. This client doesn’t want to hear it that same way.” But they do. That’s why they came to you. They want the confidence and clarity that comes from that practice and consistency. And to your point, Brad, making sure that we’re systematizing that, that we’re using checklists, that whether we create our own resources or find resources that we can leverage, that we’re making sure we’re giving ourselves every opportunity to deliver massive value to those clients.

Brad Wooten, CPA (09:29.666)

Even clients might come to us and say, “How are you saving me taxes this year?” It’s like, well, it may be a decision that we already made like an S corp. I mean, that’s something that you can’t say, “Well, here’s what we just changed this year that’s going to save you X, Y, and Z.” But it’s a decision that continually has an impact if you set it up for the right people in the right time and situation. But also, it’s like, well, not only that, but yeah, we’re repeating the same things over and over again because we don’t want you to stop doing them because that’s another risk. So there’s value. And I know financial advisors definitely understand this because one of the biggest impacts is just having people keep doing the thing that you’ve taught them to do. Because if they drop you and say, “Well, you taught me everything and you just keep repeating yourself every year, year after year, and I drop you,” what’s going to happen when the market goes down? What’s going to happen when my budget hits and I need to pull something else out? So they’re not going to stay consistent in it because it’s not human nature to do that unless you have someone else holding you accountable for it. And there’s tremendous value in that.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (10:30.625)

It works so well. I quit doing it. When things are going well, it’s easy to let go of the habits that make the difference. So yeah, there’s value in that over time. Brad, let’s talk a little bit about your session at the summit. This is your first time attending. And I know you had a lot of great personal takeaways, which is always fun for us to see. But I heard great feedback from the people who attended your session. I was able to pop in for the first few minutes, but unfortunately hosting a conference comes with a lot of responsibility. So I heard nothing but great feedback. But for podcast listeners here who didn’t have a chance to attend this year, number one, retirementtaxservices.com/summit, come next year. You see all this stuff firsthand. But Brad, let’s kind of do the condensed version of basically your session was how not to piss off a CPA.

Brad Wooten, CPA (11:10.250)

Yeah. Yeah. That’s what we’re talking about was how to not piss off CPA and how to actually perhaps get the elusive coveted referral from a CPA. Right. I wanted to reframe this question. So a big thing that I kind of came into and started out with was, you know, everyone’s like, well, how do I find good CPA? Where are the good CPA? I can’t find a good CPA. I don’t know where they are. They won’t call me back. They don’t do planning. All they want to do is look at the past history and stuff. And so I reframe that by starting out with my definition of what a good financial advisor was. And, you know, I put up on screen that a good financial advisor was something to the tune of, you know, a person who puts together a financial plan for the sole purpose of selling you whole life insurance. And, you know, there’s there’s some key words in there. You know, we all know whole life insurance has a place. But, you know, to do something with the sole purpose of selling you insurance, they’re going to earn a commission on. You know, I don’t think anyone would would say that’s a comprehensive financial planner. Right. So anyway, I wanted to piss off the room first sufficiently, you know, and and I’m always going to try to get laughs. Right. I may not always get them, but I’m always going to try to get laughs. So so I definitely tried that plenty of times throughout the talk. But the whole point was there’s not good and bad CPAs out there. There’s good fit and bad fit CPAs out there. And really, what you have to do is take the time to get to know them.

Brad Wooten, CPA (12:26.333)

Your job as a financial advisor is to vet this person for your client. Right. If you want to deliver value, it’s not to be like, hey, go find your own CPA. Because I can’t find one. Right. Like that’s not delivering value. So, you know, it’s it’s to find out. Let me interview CPAs. Now I have not one unicorn who I can send every single one of my clients to. Right. But I’ve got five. Here’s the one that I know if I’ve got a client that really just wants the prep done for a pretty low fee. This is the one I’m going to go to. And he’s a good fit CPA because this is what the client’s looking for. And that’s what they deliver. I want one who wants to let me take the driver’s seat in tax planning, but they still will get on a call and collaborate and answer my questions when I want a second opinion. OK, that’s the CPA. She’s the one I’m going to send this client to because that’s what I need in that situation. And so it’s your job to find out who the right fit is and to plug those pieces in. If you want to deliver massive value to, you know, to your clients, you’ve got to take that responsibility. I even talked about it like is it your responsibility for some of these things? Like, no, like it’s the CPA’s responsibility to reply to emails. But, you know, if you want to be mediocre, you let other people take care of that and you play the blame game and the victim card and say it’s not my fault. But if you want to be above me right, if you want to have a top tier financial advisor firm, then you have to take that on yourself and ensure that it’s going to

Brad Wooten, CPA (13:54.833)

happen and find the person who fits in the right puzzle piece. I mean, again, going back to coaches, I just thought about this. Was, you know, every year they talk about the best coaches. And I’ve seen this because my team doesn’t ever seem to have one of these coaches. And we play against a lot of teams that do, especially in the era of NIL, is that you’re going to have a different team every single year. Some coaches only know how to coach one way. Let’s say basketball, they’re going to run and gun, right? You might not have the players who can do that. The best coaches can adapt the game plan to the pieces that they have on the team that year. And that’s part of what you have to do, right? You have to you have to find the pieces, plug the right pieces into the right place.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (14:31.666)

Yeah, Brad, I love this framing of how you kick this off. Let’s use what feels, I’m sure, to a lot of people in the room, like a ridiculous example of, hey, a financial advisor, someone who only sells whole life insurance for the sole purpose of getting a commission. And that sounds ridiculous for us to say. But I do think financial advisors, maybe consumers at large, take that narrow of an approach when they think about a tax professional. They’re like, oh, I need a CPA, I need a tax professional. And then they assume all these things that that tax professional must, of course, do, because why wouldn’t they? But they don’t take the time to ask and understand. And so anytime I’m talking about tax planning to advisors, like I try to reinforce this idea of if you don’t set expectations, someone else is going to make them up and you’re never going to live up to them, which I think is what a lot of advisors are doing when they’re looking for tax help. Instead of discussing what the expectation should be, they make up this list of expectations for the tax professional and then get mad when the tax professional doesn’t live up to it. It’s like, hey, did did you ask them what their communication policy or what the response time was or what services they offer outside of the filing season? Or if they understand what an 8606 is like, if you didn’t ask any of these questions up front, like it’s really on you like later when that doesn’t happen, like you can’t get mad at them for delivering on something you never asked them to do.

Brad Wooten, CPA (15:42.750)

You know, going back to like to taking responsibility, honestly, you know, yeah, there’s some responsibility on CPAs. I’m not going to let them off the hook, right? One of the examples I gave was if if there there’s a 1099-R sitting in the file, it’s a distribution for exactly the IRA limit for the year. The client is under retirement age. They make over two hundred thousand dollars a year. It’s obviously a backdoor Roth, right? Like there’s nothing else that’s going to be. And even if you don’t know that, there’s some questions that need to be asked no matter what to dig more into that. So I’m not going to let the CPA off the hook for that. But, you know, hey, if you communicated to the CPA that there was a backdoor Roth with one of these, you know, letters, you know, the 1099 letter or the backdoor Roth letter that you guys talk about being a value add, then, you know, then it just takes that away. And I would say this as the person who ninety nine percent of the time is getting paid the most, it is your responsibility. So I would say that ninety nine percent of the time is a financial advisor. You’re probably getting paid more than the CPA. And so I think it does fall to you to make sure that that conversation happens.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (16:49.750)

And it’s also one of those things, Brad, that we can spend a lot of time trying to point fingers and decide who’s really responsible or or we can like remember our inner jocko and just take ownership for everything that we can control. And so that’s at the end of the day, that’s really what I’m an advocate for because I’m with you. So literally earlier today, as we’re recording this, I was doing office hours for our premier members, which we got to talk about at the summit. And it’s just great opportunity for advisors who are just looking for CPAs like us to be able to talk to on a regular basis. One of the situations that came up, this advisor has a rollover or a client that had a rollover in twenty twenty five. But the tax preparer reported it as taxable. I’m just going to make up a number. We’ll see it was a hundred thousand dollar rollover is a big it was a big dollar amount for the client. Whole thing gets reported as taxable. And since I’ve seen so many of these, the advisors asking the question more from kind of the standpoint of like, how could this possibly happen? And it’s like, well, I mean, Brad, you and I have seen enough of these 1099-Rs that it’s like actually without without extra context. I’m not going to let the CPA completely off the hook, but I can totally understand how this happened because a lot of rollover 1099-Rs lists the entire amount as taxable. And then mark the box that says taxable amount not determined. Now, my team works with financial advisors all the time. And so in our process for this, they know

Steven Jarvis, CPA (18:03.375)

that if a 1099-R says taxable amount not determined, they cannot send that return to me for review until they have asked why that box is checked. They’ve gotten the other context because they know I’m going to kick it back to them. If not, if I see that box checked, my team hasn’t told me why it’s going straight back to them. But most tax preparers who are doing a high volume, low margin game, they’re getting the form and they’re moving on because to your point, that’s what they’re getting paid to do. If you’re paying somebody four or five, six hundred bucks a year to do a tax return, they’re just grabbing the documents and trying to go as fast as they can through it.

Brad Wooten, CPA (18:32.500)

Yeah. I mean, I’ve even talked to some financial advisors who, you know, they reach out and I’m looking for someone who’s got a reasonable price that I can send my clients to. And it’s like, like, that’s code for like, I hope you’re cheap. But you do, you know, way more than what everyone else is doing. And it’s like, OK, like we’re starting off on the wrong foot here if you want both of those things. You want me to do more, but you want me to be cheaper. Like, where does where does this make sense? So, yeah, it goes back to those questions. Right. And when you’re sitting down and trying to find out there are the questions that you ask directly. Most of the people that I polled on LinkedIn and inside my tax firm owner community said that they would take any seat as long as they knew which seat they were in. Right. Financial advisor can have the tax planning head chair and I’ll come along and be on the team or I’ll take the head chair and they can come along and be on the team or I’ll just do tax prep. Like, they’re open to all of it. They just want to know which seat that you want them in. And they’re never told. Right. And it gets left up to the client. I mean, I offer three different tiers of service and the client picks. Well, then if the financial advisor reaches out to me, a lot of CPAs seem to just get frustrated and annoyed and angry for some reason and offended when, you know, it’s like, well, they didn’t pay me for that. So I’m not going to reply to the financial. Whatever, man. Just shoot an email back and say, hey, Mr. Mrs. Client didn’t actually pay me for that,

Brad Wooten, CPA (19:50.750)

but I’d love to charge them for that. Why don’t you reach out to them and tell them they should pay me? And so this gets into also how to get those referrals. Right. I told them, I said one of my slides, I think it was the second or third, I said, never ask for a referral from a CPA ever. Now, I also have told my kids plenty of times if you don’t ask, you don’t receive. So this kind of goes against that a little bit. So I understand. Like I do believe ask for what you want. If you don’t ask, you don’t receive. But in this particular case, I would say never ask because my experience has been if I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, I never have to ask for a referral. I didn’t ask anyone at the summit for anything. I just came and gave. And there were plenty who came up to me afterwards and were like, hey, are you taking on new clients? Right. And it was like, yeah. Well, maybe not in your state. But yeah. And so, you know, it’s like there’s no point in asking because if I’m going to send you a referral, if I think that you’re going to be good for my client, I’m going to send them to you whether you want them or not. Right. I’m even going to say, hey, I know you’re not taking any clients, but I’ve got so and so. And by chance, you know, is it a good fit for you? Yeah. You know, I’d love for them to get the value that you deliver and I’m going to send them to you anyway. And no matter how many times you ask, if I don’t think they’re a good fit for you, I’m not sending them. So what’s the point in asking?

Steven Jarvis, CPA (21:08.833)

Yeah, let’s pull out a couple of things and what you just said is kind of two unrelated topics. We’ll start with the referrals because you mentioned it earlier, like as you’re sitting in that room watching three hundred financial advisors learn from what we’ve seen work, you’re like, oh, if I knew that somebody was doing this, I would I would send them referrals. And so I’m with you that it has not proven effective for financial advisors to try to bang down a CPA’s door and say, hey, give me referrals. What has been effective and before we hit record, you’re holding up Matt’s book, Delivering Massive Value. And he has a whole chapter in this. What is effective is making sure the professionals in your network who you would like to do business with know what it is you do, know how you deliver value and who you serve and finding tactful and professional ways to share that through the 1099 letter, paying an hour for somebody’s time, you know, things like that. But because I’m with you, don’t go in there and be like, hey, give me your top five clients. It’s right. Just so you know, here are the problems we solve and here’s who we work with best. If that ever feels like a fit, please let us know. I’m not demanding you give me a referral. I’m planting those seeds so you know I sit in a room learning about those things.

Brad Wooten, CPA (22:11.500)

And ideally you do it where I ask you that you don’t just hop on the call and start telling me here’s everything I can do. And if you ever, you know, because I’ve been in plenty of plenty of calls with financial advisors where it starts with I don’t want anything. I’m just looking for someone that I can send my clients to, you know, hey, I want to send people to you. Don’t you want to hop on a call? And I can tell you that 90 percent of those it’s B.S. Because I’ve never gotten a single client from them. And so it’s like, yes, B.S. You really didn’t want to send me anyone. You just wanted to tell me about what you do so that I could give you something.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (22:43.833)

But let’s end up totally in agreement with that. There has to be intentionality in your approach. The other thing that you talked about I want to kind of come back to is this idea of what what is cheap and reasonable when it comes to tax prep. Yeah. And everyone listening. I mean, that approach clearly isn’t working for anybody to start the conversation that way. So I encourage you to think about it another way and think about other services that you look for in your life that you do take this approach on. Because I think a lot of us are savvy in other areas. But for some reason, taxes were also anchored on. Well, H&R Block is only 20 bucks or 100 bucks or whatever it is. Instead of starting with, hey, I want something cheap or you’re nice enough to use the word reasonable instead of cheap, you’ve got to start with what is it I want out of this? Like don’t anchor on I want it to be the same or less than what I’m currently paying. Because if you were happy with what you were currently paying, you wouldn’t be looking for something new. So rather than anchor on the price, what is the outcome I’m looking for? And as an advisor, you need to help your client see that of, hey, don’t start with I’m only willing to pay five hundred dollars for a tax return. Because if someone’s cranking out a simple 1040 for you and not communicating with you at all, great. Maybe that is reasonable, but more likely you want somebody who can answer your questions and who is going to be proactive and who can be a resource for these other things that are going to cost you more.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (23:57.541)

But are totally worth it if there are clear expectations on how it’s going to happen.

Brad Wooten, CPA (24:01.416)

Yeah, absolutely. And you know, as much as I do, right, maybe the audience doesn’t as financial advisors, but it’s all over the place. I’ve seen the CPA small firm charging 150 dollars for a tax return and you’ve got other people with minimums of fifteen hundred. Now, you know, the person with the minimum of fifteen hundred is probably not doing the same tax return that that guy is doing for one fifty. It’s a simpler return. But still, it’s just all over the place. You could find someone probably delivering the same value at five hundred as you can at fifteen hundred to a certain extent. That is possible, but you’re probably going to spend far more time and effort than a thousand dollars is worth trying to find that hidden gem who hasn’t quite figured it out yet. And oh, by the way, if they are that person within the next two to three years, their fees are going to be right up there, too. And they’re really only getting a one or two year discount before this person is swamped with work, realizes that they can’t do it for that price anymore and starts to increase the price. This is where I’ve been right. Like I start out in twenty nineteen twenty twenty is my first tax season. I got minimums of two hundred and fifty dollars. Now, you know, that’s that’s minimums. And I always started out with a three tier service. And my perspective on my tiers was my middle one is what you would typically expect from a CPA. It’s where I’m going to do the tax return, but I’m also going to be here year round. Anything you need. Shoot me a message. I’m going to give you advice.

Brad Wooten, CPA (25:19.958)

I’m going to help you out. The tier above that is some actual planning strategy forecasting in a second appointment. But the tier below that was almost like I never quite said it this way to clients. But the tier below that was, hey, if you want to treat me like H&R Block and just show up there at tax time and leave me alone the rest of the year, I’ll give you a discount and I’ll do that. Most of my clients actually pick that tier where they’re like, I don’t really want anything the rest of the year. I really just want you to file the tax return. Now that tier has gone up and up and up. And you want to know why, it’s because people can’t find anyone to do a 1040 anymore. Right. Oh, we only do dentists who make 500 000, Oh, we only do businesses. Oh, we only do equity comp investors who make a million dollars a year. And it’s like that, you know, the price for a normal return is going through the roof because I’m pretty sure none of you made it through, you know, your college degrees without taking a basic econ class where you learned about supply and demand.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (26:12.833)

So, Brad, I think the other thing there is that people think they don’t want anything outside of the filing season. That’s true, too. Yes. To me, it’s the same as well. I’ll buy insurance after I get in an accident. Yeah, that’s not how this works.

Brad Wooten, CPA (26:25.208)

Once I need it, I’ll buy it.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (26:26.583)

Yeah, once I need it, then I’ll buy it. It’s like that’s not that’s not how a good quality service works. And so that doesn’t surprise me that a lot of clients are like, oh, yeah, I don’t need anything else from Brad. But that’s just not the reality of how it works.

Brad Wooten, CPA (26:37.375)

So here’s where I’ll go with that, because I told you before we started the call that I changed my packages again this year. Yeah. It’s something that I wasn’t sure I would ever do, but I am moving in that direction was I started it last year, actually. So that basic tier was I’ll prep and file a tax return. And then last year, maybe the year before, the IRS started sending out these stupid no change letters, right? Like, hey, here’s what we changed in your tax return. Nothing. Zero dollars due. And all these clients start sending me these IRS notices. And so I’m sitting there thinking like, well, you know, to review and tell you, you know, like just to give you advice to look at the IRS notice and to tell you here’s why you got it. And here’s what you need to do about it was in my middle tier when none of these people had chosen my middle tier. So I sit there thinking like, OK, I either tell them that they have to pay me five hundred dollars to upgrade. And then I turn around and say, you don’t need to do anything. Yeah, which feels really crappy. Like, I wasn’t willing to do that. So I just said, hey, you don’t owe anything. Now, for the people who actually had something they need to do, I would make them upgrade. But that’s still I was worth five hundred dollars to people who don’t know if they need to do anything. Yeah, you’re losing sleep at night over an IRS letter. And, you know, you might be sitting there thinking, it said zero due. No one’s going to pay. They don’t know. They’re afraid of that. And so there’s value in that to get that

Brad Wooten, CPA (27:52.583)

confirmation that, hey, you don’t actually need to do anything. There’s value in that. So I move that into my basic tier. Right now, the year round support, the year round, send me your questions through chat or email and I’ll  give you my thoughts on it, advice, whatever. I just moved that into my lowest tier too for for twenty twenty seven calendar year and bump the minimums again, because, hey, there’s more in here. I’m going to bump the minimums again. It’s now seven fifty if you have a basic W-2 tax return. And that’s the minimum. Yeah, because whether you have a question or not, some people will. Some people won’t. It’s there. I want you to reach out to me, ask me questions. I don’t want you to be worried about bumping up to the next tier. And it’s got to be in there because I see it enough where, again, I get a question and it’s like, I can respond to this in five seconds or I can shoot them a message, tell them they need to upgrade, get the money and then respond to them in five seconds. And it’s just what’s the point in that? Right. Like, yeah. And I and I know Matt has this line, right? I’m going to botch it a little bit. But, you know, hey, I only do my best work. And, you know, I would say if I went fully with that, I would only offer the third tier. So I’m not fully going into that. But we’ll get you to do that next year. I’m only doing my best work, which, you know, another version of that is I’m here year round for whatever you need before. And if you need some extra services, you’ll pay for that. But but I’m not going to just do this.

Brad Wooten, CPA (29:17.541)

Stick the numbers in the form mess, you know. So,

Steven Jarvis, CPA (29:20.250)

Brad, I appreciate your perspective and insight as always. And thank you again for coming to the summit. You definitely helped make it an incredible experience. Again, for anybody who wasn’t or even if you were able to attend this year, the agenda will be different next year. We’ve already got new speakers. We’re lining up. There’ll be some familiar faces as well. So retirementtaxservices.com/summit. Brad, real quick, before we wrap up, if people are interested in what you’re doing and learn more about your services, where do they find you?

Brad Wooten, CPA (29:42.541)

Yeah. So for next year, I’m looking forward to how you guys do this 10 year tax plan. So that that’s actually what I’m because, again, I’m hoping that I get in there and it’s something basic and simple that I’m like, oh, yeah, I could do this. So, yeah. So if they want to find me, the easiest way is just go to LinkedIn, look up Brad Wooten CPA and then connect with me from there. Awesome.

Steven Jarvis, CPA (29:58.208)

Brad, thanks so much to everyone listening. Thanks for being here. Until next time, good luck out there and remember to tip your server, not the IRS.