Welcome back to the Retirement Tax Services Podcast! Steven’s returning guest for this episode is Benjamin Brandt of Retirement Starts Today. Benjamin is an expert on surge scheduling who’s taught a Masterclass at The Perfect RIA.
Podcasting has helped grow Benjamin Brandt’s client base. In fact, his CRM holds data for 80 clients.
In a perfect world, he would meet each of those clients every December 31st. However, reality—including the time constraints of a 24-hour-day—makes this impossible.
So, his RIA does the best they can. The day before Thanksgiving is treated as the last day of the fiscal year. This means meeting with everyone over a 4- to 5-week period beginning in late October.
Next, when everyone’s returned from Thanksgiving, it’s time to review and process the post-meeting data. Similarly, the spring surge runs through April into May.
Spring meetings typically focus on review; what worked or didn’t over the past year(s). Meanwhile, year-end meetings center around planning ahead.
Cash flow and income taxes are both behavioral areas requiring more frequent attention than investments. Consequently, few client meetings occur without some discussion of both.
Brandt’s niche is retirees, so there are commonalities between most meetings. He usually reviews a report with them, discussing where strategies are effective or where fine-tuning is needed.
Since retirement taxes don’t work 100% like the wealth-accumulating variety, elements of education are often involved. He adds value by making the subtler differences clearer.
His RIA may have surges systematized to an unusual degree, but don’t let that intimidate you! If you’re willing to invest the time and effort, you can deliver massive value as a result.
In fact, Brandt points out that while instituting surge scheduling means work on the front end, it’s definitely less work on the back end. Assuming you’re educating clients along the way, surprises become rarer.
This is because people who know what to watch out for tend to be more observant. As a result, those clients often spot things and then ask, “What about this?”
The better educated they are, the better their questions tend to be. These proactive conversations are always preferable to why-did-this-happen reactive ones.
Medicare premiums, for example, require looking back 2 years. Most of us may struggle to recall our lunches over the last week.
So, when things have gone sideways, clients often want to blame their advisor. Nobody enjoys those hours.
On the other hand, surge-scheduled meetings twice a year keep many headaches from happening. Metaphorically speaking, teaching fire prevention is always preferable to putting out fires.
When clients are watching their horizons for smoke, you both have less to worry about. At the same time, regardless of your niche, there are probably commonalities you can explain and emphasize.
Even when nothing requires immediate attention, inspiring proactivity helps safeguard their long term success. So, get surges systematized at your practice. It’s a simple way to deliver extra value with less effort, overall.
There’s more to Steven’s discussion with surge scheduling expert Benjamin Brandt in today’s Retirement Tax Services Podcast.Feedback, unusual tax-planning stories, and suggestions for future guests can be sent to advisors@rts.tax.
Are you interested in content that provides you with action steps that you can take to deliver massive tax value to your clients? Then you are going to love our powerful training sessions online. Click on the link below to get started on your journey:
Retirementtaxservices.com/welcome
Thank you for listening.
Steven Jarvis:
Hello everyone and welcome to the next episode of the Retirement Tax Services Podcast, Financial Professionals Edition. I am your host, Steven Jarvis CPA, and in this show I teach financial advisors how to deliver massive value through tax planning. And I’m so excited to have on the show with me today, Benjamin Brandt, not only is he the co-host of the retirement tax podcast with me, that we use to talk to consumers, but Benjamin is an expert in surge meetings and just got out of his surge meetings. And I’m so excited to talk about how tax planning fit into that. So, Benjamin welcome!
Benjamin Brandt:
Steven. I always look forward to our talks. I’m so excited to talk to advisors for a change. You know, we talk to, to retirees and consumers all the time, but it’s always fun to talk with, with my peers as well. And hopefully I can, can help influence some really fun things into their practice and some efficiency, and obviously some massive value as well.
SJ:
Yeah coz we wanna talk both about how tax planning fits in obviously, coz this is a tax podcast, but the surge meetings are so powerful for so many different reasons. And I’ve heard you talk about this on a lot of different platforms. I know it’s something you are really passionate about. Well, actually, before we’re done, we’ll talk about a masterclass you’ve put together on surge, but really wanna take advantage of this opportunity coz you’ve just come out of surge meetings and I wanna highlight: Let’s start with kind of how the, the process for making sure tax planning is effective through surge. And then we’ll talk about some specific client examples of, of things that came out of this.
BB:
So my firm, Capital City Wealth Management located in beautiful Bismarck, North Dakota, 33 miles from the geographical center of North America. If you’re curious scientifically in the middle of nowhere, but I have a podcast, so my clients are all around the country. And we, we serve 80 households. So in a perfect world, I would meet with all 80 of my clients on December 31st because we’d have the most accurate year-end tax planning information available to us, but logistically that just wouldn’t work and I like to spend December with my family. My staff does as well. So we get as close to the end of the year as we can, with enough time to process all the stuff that comes out of meeting with all of your clients all at once. So for us, the last day of the year is the day before Thanksgiving. And then we take a break for Thanksgiving. We come back into the office for about two weeks, kind of on a part-time basis. Process all that stuff, do all the trades, all the journaling, all those sort of things. And then staff takes the last two weeks, which actually starts the day after tomorrow. And they take it, they set their don’t take computers home, they set an away message and they’re totally gone for, for two weeks, which allows them to come back rested and rejuvenated. So, so that’s what our surge looks like. We meet with every single client over the course of about four or five weeks and deliver massive value around taxes and retirement planning.
SJ:
That’s awesome. What are some of the things that go into preparing for that surge block? Are you sending things to your clients ahead of time? I mean, how are you setting the agenda to make sure that you’re prepared, they’re prepared that you, you can fit taxes into the conversation with everything else, cuz taxes, isn’t the only thing you do and make that a really valuable experience?
BB:
Yeah. Taxes isn’t the only thing we do, all of our clients are retired living off of their savings or, or some version of that. But I think that the cashflow that comes off of your portfolio and the taxes that we talk about, I mean, those are so into intertwined. They’re almost the same subject. So we, we essentially talk taxes every single time we visit with clients, we do a spring surge call that April may fall surge call that most of the month of November. But we’re looking at taxes essentially whenever we can meet, because there are a lot of things that we can focus on that aren’t good uses of our time. You know, investment returns, we can talk about that all day… doesn’t really influence the plan. Cash flow and income taxes, which are essentially forms of behavior, we can influence that. So we want to spend as much time as we can on those specific topics, cash flow and taxes.
SJ:
Now, Ben, I know that you get tax returns for all of your clients. Where does that fall in the year? Is that something that you do leading up to your fall surge that you’ve reviewed those returns and you can bring things up during the meetings or, or how does that fit into the process?
BB:
It all depends on how long they’ve been clients. You know, usually, the year starts out we’re visiting… April 15th happens, then our surge starts. So it’s like the last week in April until the day before my kids have their last day of school. So we’re looking, let’s say it’s May 1st and we’re in surge- we’re looking at, what did we do last year? Let’s say they’ve been a client for an entire year or two. We did a $25,000 Roth conversion. Last year, we locked in a 10% effective tax rate. Here’s why that’s important. Here’s where that tax up historically, blah, blah, blah. You know, your withholding isn’t correct. Let’s, let’s dial that in whatever that thing is. So may, we’re looking back to the previous year and, and just talking about that at the end of the year, we’re looking at, okay, we think our income is gonna be X, should it be higher or lower than that number? Should we accelerate some income? Should we do a Rath conversion? Should we calculate how much charitable giving we do in an average year? And, and should we double, triple, quadruple up 10 X that this year to take advantage of certain deductions. So we’re looking at where ideally would our income be at the end of the year and how close can we get to that number? So that’s sort of the difference between the may meetings and the November meetings. And we meet with every client twice a year.
SJ:
Okay. And this is getting into the weeds just a little bit, but just so it’s clear for advisors, how they can start implementing this: are you covering these with every client? Is this something that you review ahead of time? And if it’s not applicable, you just say, “you know what we got you covered. Let’s skip taxes this time.” I mean, what’s that conversation actually look like?
BB:
So because all of our clients, you know, we’re in a niche of retirement income planning. So all of our clients are in a similar situation. All of the meetings or many of the meetings are strikingly similar where all, you know, staff ahead of time has collected the tax return from the client. They’ve uploaded into our tax software holistic plan. And we’re looking at the tax report. So we’re reviewing what the client, your client, “your income last year was 120, $3,000. You paid, you know, $24,000 in federal and income tax. Thank you for your patriotism. That’s a 12 and a half percent effective tax rate. Historically that’s very low. We’re expecting a tax height in 2020, whatever, because of the sunset, we’re having this educational thing, because that gives context to other decisions we might make in the future.” Then we scrolled on the page and say, “now that you’re retired and you’re approaching Medicare, Medicare is an income based, you know, premium payment. So here are the different brackets. We think we can avoid this by doing this. We think we’re gonna be over this amount. So we need to need to take advantage of that in a certain way.” Even if that doesn’t directly apply to the client, we want them to understand how the process works because their life is gonna change. So right before we, we started this call, Steven, I got off the phone with a client who we, we specifically did not do a Roth conversion because he was very close to that, that first Irma bracket, or he was close to breaking through the second one, like 220,000 of income. And that was a month ago. We decided don’t do a Roth conversion. He called me today and staff relayed the message to me that he thinks he’s actually gonna be within a hundred dollars of that.
He doesn’t know if it’s gonna be a hundred over or a hundred under. And because we talked about that, even just though that we decided to take no action. He said, “I’m gonna, I think be over that bracket, let’s fill up the whole bracket.” He remembered that I, I told him in for a penny and for a pound. So even though for a dollar into that Irma bracket, if we’re talking marginal rates, well, you’ll only pay 24% on that extra dollar, not a big deal, right? But with Irma, if we’re $1 into that next bracket, we gotta pay just like we had 50,000 more of income. We have to pay the same. So he said, let’s do a $40,000 Roth conversion to get some more in there, without going into the next bracket. And because we had taken the time to provide massive value and educate him about that, even though he wasn’t directly impacted or the decision was to take no action. He was able to say, “I remember we talked about that and I want to take that specific action now.” So maybe that’s a long wayed way to answer your question, but we, we talk about things that don’t directly impact the client. Especially when we think it’s probably going to impact them later on, they need to understand some of the nuance of their plan and why retirement income taxes is different than when we’re accumulating our wealth taxes.
SJ:
Yeah. That’s such a fantastic example and kind of case study there of this conversation is so much more impactful than just, “Hey, can we do this tax planning strategy right now today?” That’s incredible that your client reached out to you because if they hadn’t, if you hadn’t taken the time to educate them, if this hadn’t been a recurring theme for you, your client meetings, so that they felt a little bit more empowered to be proactive on their own on taxes that client wouldn’t have called you. And most likely you would’ve discovered that next year in, in May or June, you got the tax return and you would’ve said, “Ah, crap missed opportunity there. They were a hundred dollars over. We, we tripped the next Medicare premium.” And like you said, in for a penny in for a pound, we, we, we now we have this bigger range we could have filled up, but the timing wouldn’t have worked out to identify that, except for the fact that you’ve spent all this time and you’ve put the hard work in to help educate your clients. Now for you, since you take a surge approach and you have a very systematized approach of the work that your team does to help you prepare, it’s maybe not the same lift as it might be for other advisors, but what you’re doing is totally accomplishable. Any advisor could put the work in and do this all I have to say it is some work, but the, the payout is huge for your clients, massive value for your clients.
BB:
Absolutely. And, and it’s work on the front end, but it’s probably less work on the back end. You know, if you’re, if you’re doing that work to educate the client, it’s so much less likely there’s gonna be a surprise down the road, or it’s gonna be something that’s gonna throw you a giant curve ball because you’re educating your clients along the way. So they’re gonna maybe see something that you miss completely and say, what about that? You know, we talked about that or I’ve got the benefit of having a weekly podcast that a lot of my clients listen to, especially clients that I got from the podcast. So they’ll be like, well, actually three weeks ago you said, this does that apply to me in this case. And, and so it’s more work on the front end, but I think it’s less work overall because you know, an educated client is gonna be a client that asks good questions and is helping you look out for things.
SJ:
Yeah. And just the, the overall theme of being proactive versus reactive. I mean, let’s, let’s think about the time that goes into educating and pairing those clients. You have a short piece of your client meeting that that’s on, on taxes that you’re reinforcing these themes that I’m sure that’s a very positive and constructive conversation. Everyone’s happy to be talking about it because at that point, nothing has gone wrong. You’re preparing for what could happen later and you’re studying expectations. And so if those conversations weren’t happening and not, not only had you not educated the client, but you hadn’t really even set the expectation that that was the possibility. Now, instead of having a proactive conversation, you’re most likely having a reactive conversation later when the client is frustrated that their Medicare premiums went up, even though their income was only off by a hundred dollars, what they expected. And now, instead of having this positive educational conversation, you’re having this reactive, like, let’s try to clean up the mess. Let’s try to make sure that the client’s not mad at me. And the whole dynamic has shifted.
BB:
Especially around those Medicare premiums, coz they’re looking two years backwards. You know, a lot of people don’t remember, myself included what they had for lunch yesterday. Do you remember exactly the conversation you had two years plus prior? But if you’re meeting with their clients twice a year and having a semi similar conversation about these topics, especially in the scope of an niche twice a year, you’re gonna be so much less likely to be having to put out a fire after the fact because you’re educating your clients along the way.
SJ:
Yeah. And that, that conversation continues to be more and more impactful as you get really clear on who your clients are. And you narrow that focus because maybe for some of our listeners, maybe you Don with retirees, so great talking about Medicare premiums all the time, isn’t super relevant, but what, what is relevant to your clients that you can highlight in every client meeting to say, um, you should at least be starting with “here is your taxable income, the total amount of tax you paid. I’d like to thank you for your patriotism.”
BB:
I still have from somebody else, but yeah,
SJ:
The, uh, the effective and marginal rates, those are all great things. And then find some things that are applicable to your clients. Do you have lots of business owners that you work with? Most of your clients have rental properties, whatever that might be, find some of those things that you can be reinforcing, even when there isn’t obvious act to take right now so that the client is helping you identify those things and proactively reaching out to you on those so that we are, we’re making sure we identify those when there’s still time to do something about it.
BB:
Yep. And if you’re a newer advisor, uh, or, or look an advisor looking to make a change, you know, there, there are riches in niches as they see or reaches and niches. If you put pronounce it that way, <laugh> in that if you can, if you can create a repeatable process, you’re able to deliver more value with less effort through systemization. So a niche is like a cheat code, basically.
SJ:
Yeah. But before we move on to another tax topic, Ben there might be some of our listeners who aren’t real familiar with what surge looks like. I mean, so you talked about meeting with 80 households in four to five weeks. That sounds like a whole lot of work. And I mean, really it, it is to make sure it’s, it’s systematized and effective, but talk for a second about what that schedule actually looks like. And then what the rest of your year looks like to highlight why this is so impactful for, for you and your family.
BB:
Yeah. So my surge week is about 19 appointments a week: four on Monday, five on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. And then I, I don’t meet with clients on Friday and that’s when staff has a chance to kind of catch up on some of the things throughout the week. So there’s no appointments for me or, or them. My office, my client relation manager sits in on all the meetings. Most of our meetings now are over zoom, some in person for local clients. So we need 80 slots. So 19 we’ll round up to 20, 20, 40, 68. I need at least four weeks to do that. And then you need a little bit of overflow because if, if a client has an issue where you need to beat twice, or if for some reason there’s a cancellation or, or the times just don’t line up, you know, you need about, you know, a hundred to 110% of your total slots.
BB:
And then you’re probably only gonna about 90% of your clients that can actually get into those slots. So, so you’ve got 10 or 20% of your schedule of wiggle room. And I just have that based on having made that mistake in the past where you’re trying to cram eight appointments into the very final day before Thanksgiving, before your calendar is closed for the year. So that’s just trial and error that, that we did that. We start prepping for surge a few weeks beforehand. So staff will reach out with a Calendarly link saying, you know, Benjamin is meeting with clients between these two dates. Here’s what we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna estimate your year end, uh, income for these reasons. Many of the clients have seen this before. So they know what to expect, collect the tax returns, staff uploads that they get everything ready for me ahead of time.
So that minimizes my case prep because they know what I’m looking for. They find that information ahead of time and put it on what I call a cheat sheet. So I can just reference what the pension amount was, what the social security collected was, what the year to date distributions are out of the portfolio year, date withholding. I’ve got all that on a cheat sheet. So I can just take a glance for each client, look at that. And then also take notes right on top of that cheat sheet. And then I dictate my notes at the end. I use mobile assistant, which integrates with Redtail. And so that makes my neck surge even easier coz I can scan those notes really quickly. It keeps my case prep time down to, to a, a shockingly small, small number while being able to deliver massive value. Of course. So it starts about four weeks out. Staff will, will email the Calendarly link. We’ll do it again next week. Everybody that hasn’t done yet next week, next week, next week. And then we’ll follow up with phone calls, two or three phone calls after that staff does all that of course.
SJ:
That’s an incredible process to have in place. And then part of what that does for you is that then now that you are condensing when you’re meeting with your clients and that puts you 100% focused on client meetings for that time, you’re at the top of your game, you’re delivering massive value which we’ve illustrated through this recent example you had with your client. The clients are clearly learning a ton from this, getting a lot of value, but then when you’re not doing surge meetings, you are not one of these advisors cranking out 60 hours a week to say the least. So, I mean, what does your none surg schedule look like?
BB:
Yeah, so, so if it’s four weeks of surge will round that up to five due to, to prep and things like that twice a year, that’s 10 weeks. If memory serves there’s 52 weeks in a year. So that leaves me with about 42 weeks to do other things like produce multiple podcasts, like create courses for advisors, create courses for my podcast listeners, create mastermind groups for other dad financial advisors, do all, all of the other things, continue education, go to conferences, expand my knowledge, you know, reinvest in my own personal development as an advisor or as a business owner or as a dad. And so, because I’m doing like a throttle on throttle off, I’m able to be hyper efficient. You know, I’m able to tune my brain into surge mode, client meeting mode, and I can just, just rattle that off.
And then we’re not taking clients anymore, new clients or additional clients I should say at the firm. But when we did, then we would have a surge of new clients in from like January to March, you know, and then onboard those clients. Then we’d switch to surge time in, in late April or early May. Then we’d take the summer off, get back into that after the kids start school in the fall and we would have the kind of this. So that allows me to take, uh, you know, roughly 125 days out of the office plus weekends and still deliver massive value to clients. So I’m working, you know, in the office 20 to 25 hours a week during surge time during the summer, I’m in the office about eight hours a week, two days a week, four hours per day, because I’m proactively delivering that value to clients. They know what that scheduled routine looks like. So because we’re being super intentional, it allows me to live life in balance and I’ve got six kids. So I need a lot of balance and allows me to, to be home with them way more than your average dad. Yeah.
SJ:
That’s incredible Ben, that, that you’ve built such an intentional practice and, and you kind of casually slipped it in there, but I mentioned earlier, you’ve created a course for advisors all out how to implement surge. We’ll make sure the link is in the show notes, but if, if you are interested in not just the theory, but how this works in practice, how, how Ben currently does this, how he built up to this, someone who is actively doing this, uh, Ben has a masterclass, uh, all about this.
BB:
Yeah if that class doesn’t give you, uh, 30 days back, next year of your calendar, we’ll, we’ll give you half your money back off, off the program.
SJ:
Yeah that’s incredible. So then there was one other story you had brought up to me that, that I wanna come back to because I think it highlights that, it can get easy to listen to Ben talk about his schedule and think if you’re taking 125 days out of the office. You’re only working these few hours. I mean, clearly you’re not doing much for your clients. That’s the only thing that can mean. And, and that’s just not true. You’re very involved with your clients, making sure you’re delivering that massive value. And as you were describing a situation with a client who had sold a piece of land, I mean, what was going through my mind is, oh, that, that wasn’t three minutes on Ben’s part. Like he is, he is involved in these events in his client’s lives. So can you talk a little bit about that?
BB:
Sure. Yeah. I’m available to my clients all the time. If they need me, they shoot me an email. And I, I don’t say, wait until October to do this. I mean, we do it now. It’s just because I’m proactively adding value. It, it pulls all the slack out the rope in that if a client has a, if I’m not doing surge, a client has a random question. I’m being reactive with my schedule, right? But by being proactive, I’m accounting for all those questions by strategically scheduling two appointments throughout the year and saying, you have to meet with me this month. You have to meet this month. So that takes all the slack or much of the slack out. 90% of my appointments are within those timeframes by design. But this client had inherited some land years ago and then decided to sell it.
They were actually, this wasn’t my advice to them, but they were anticipating higher capital gains rates. And it was a seven way partnership with siblings. And they, the siblings wanted to sell out before capital gains went up and, and they still have not gone up. So, who knows what it would’ve appreciated to in the meantime. So they had, you know, over a million dollars of personal income that year and working in tandem with their CPA, we were able to keep them to about a 15% effective tax rate because we prefunded their entire retirement’s worth of charitable giving. And beyond that, we were able to fund local endowments, which there was in our state, North Dakota, they happened to be local clients. There is I believe it’s a 40% tax credit for funding North Dakota based endowments. So not only were they able to have a million dollar income with like a 15% effective tax rate, they actually had like a 20, 30 something thousand dollars credit for 2021 and this is something that never happened before but the CPA reached out to me and said, “we need to do at least a hundred thousand all Roth conversion this year because they have no income. And they have this credit that we should use up” which, because we had been working in tandem, we all had, we knew we were on the same page about accelerating income out of the IRA and the client. It stands to benefit enough to offset my fee basically forever.
SJ:
Yeah, that’s incredible because there there’s work on your part, not only dealing with that particular situation, but building in that relationship with the CPA and collaborating with another professional building that, that trust and that relationship so that they’re proactively reaching out to you and that the client is well served. That’s more than a five minute phone call, right? I mean, when the situation calls for it, you are incredibly intentional with your clients. And then outside of those situations that, that you can’t anticipate you, you are the one driving “let’s consistently deliver massive value so that we’ve taken care of everything we can.” And then you have more time to go deep when that’s needed.
BB:
And every advisor can create their own schedule. You know, I’ve got six kids at home, the youngest three are four year old triplet. So it’s not like I’m going to Europe for three months, right? I’m firmly at home. So my calendar looks like, you know, I’m in the office, you know, two days a week, half days during the summer. So if a client needs me, I’m available from Monday from 11:00 AM till till 2:00 PM or 3:00 PM, whatever that is. So it’s not like they have to wait three months to get a response for me, I’m there in the same way, an advisor working 40-50 hours a week is, I’m just not being reactive to my schedule in the same way that that many advisors are. And that’s due to years of coaching and mastermind groups and courses that I purchased. And, you know, you’re looking at version 29.0 of Benjamin’s practice. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get there eventually if you’re listening.
SJ:
This well, and selfishly, since this is a, a tax podcast, even though we’re on version, I think 29, is that what you said? Yeah. Which version of Ben we’re on, correct me if I’m wrong, but, but taxes has been a pretty integral part of that for you for a long time, that, that didn’t just pop up in version 29.
BB:
True. I saw taxes as being a differentiator. The company that I came from, I launched Capital City Wealth Management seven years ago on actually happened to be on my 33rd birthday. And I looked at some of the things my previous room wasn’t able to do and what I would have as a differentiator and taxes was one of them didn’t know a lot about taxes. I was, I, I hope I was transparent with clients about that, but I would collect returns and I would look, you know, I, I would learn alongside with them and I’d get tax software and we would go through these things together. And, and just by immersing myself in retirement tax situations, and I’m a CFP so, you know, we’ve got basic tax knowledge, right? We could, I guess, technically submit returns, right? We’ve got that prerequisite of the CFP, but my knowledge is’ anywhere as deep as it is now, but it’s because I immersed myself in that world and producing weekly podcasts where I have to answer listener questions. I’m looking things up constantly and learning. Yeah. That’s been a differentiator of mine since day one, but my, because I’m constantly improving my knowledge today is as strong as it’s ever been.
SJ:
Yeah. That’s really exciting. That’s really a great framework for other advisors to follow. Uh, I mean, unless you work with clients who don’t pay taxes, which I I’d love to hear about that situation, I don’t come across that very often. This is some you, you just really need to embrace the importance of, and start running with. And I like that you, you said in there that you were really transparent with your clients about what you didn’t and didn’t know, cuz especially if you don’t have CPA after your name or Enrolled Agent after your name for most of your clients, that tax piece is gonna be a bonus. They’re not coming to you expecting the you to know all the answers, but if you put it out there, you can help be that resource for them to help them find the answers to just say, Hey, listen, you know, in this situation, there are gonna be some tax implications I’m happy to help work through and, and find out what the answer is. And I love that, that transparency.
BB:
So if you’re looking to do that for your clients, I think the first step is to, is to figure out a system or a process to collect their returns every year. You know, we use share file as a, as a link in all of our emails where they can upload an encrypted file. And then, and then purchase some tax software, have staff upload those returns to this tax software, and then just learn on the fly. I model out different income years for clients, you know, dummy that up, in the tax software. And you can learn so much just by immersing yourself in that. So you don’t have to be don’t wait until you are a quote-unquote expert to deliver this value to clients, you know, meet them where they’re at, find out what version 1.0 is and say, you know what, I can do this. I can review with each client, I’m gonna divide their tax by their total income. And we’re gonna talk about effective tax rates, right? Our marginal rates. We’re gonna start somewhere and provide value and then build on that over time.
SJ:
Yeah. So that’s great. Ben, you’ve already transitioned us perfectly into action items. So the first one there was making sure you’ve got a system for getting tax returns from all your clients. And then the second piece I heard at the end there was get, find to play and get started. Don’t just wait for some ambiguous day where you feel like you’re an expert, coz honestly that’ll probably never come… that you wake up one morning and you say, oh wait, now I’m an expert. So get started, embrace that transparency, but commit to, I’m gonna deliver value to my clients through tax planning.
BB:
Absolutely. And, and if you’re crazy, if you don’t see taxes as being a a giant differentiator, they are a giant differentiator. But if you are waiting until you become the expert, you’ll always be waiting. You’ll never be there. I mean, there’s, there’s stuff I certainly am learning every day, which means I’m not quite yet an expert, I suppose. Right. But also don’t be afraid to contract with a service that’s providing value in this way like Retirement Tax Service. I’m a client of theirs. There’s always resources available to people that wanna learn. So, you know, we’re not an island there’s resources out there that people can teach you on how to be more of an expert. So taxes are an excellent differentiator, make 20, 22 a year where you’re gonna provide more value in that area. I know I’m certainly committed to that.
SJ:
That’s awesome. Thanks. Shout out to Ben and that recommendation. And as you listen to Ben talk about search meetings, if you’re interested in learning more about that, like I said, we’ll link it in the show notes, but Ben has put out a masterclass that really dives deep and shares from his hands on experience of building this. And so I’d highly recommend that, that you go take a look at that. So Ben, thanks for so much for being on the show today. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you
BB:
Oh, I love it. I can’t get enough. I never miss an episode.
SJ:
Thanks. Really appreciate that. Thanks everyone. Listening, good luck out there. And until next time, remember to tip your server, not the IRS.
