Welcome to the Retirement Tax Services Podcast with CPA Steven Jarvis! Don’t use vague generalizations for your digital marketing. This episode details the importance of knowing precisely who you’re speaking to and why.
In fact, if you’re reading this, you’re part of a carefully-selected group. Keep reading if you’ve crushed tax planning for years. Likewise, keep reading if you’ve just started.
Above all, stick around, in either case. Steven won’t waste your time. In fact, he has important actions to accompany the knowledge. Don’t think these are coincidences.
On Monday’s episode, Steven’s guest was was Taylor Schulte of Define Financial.
Taylor worked his way from a wirehouse to independence. As a result, yielded creative freedom for his marketing. Consequently from that, he discovered his gift for it. Today, clients seek out his services.
One of the secrets he shared is the need for a crystal-clear picture: Focus your understanding of who you’re out to reach and why.
Don’t miss the importance of this. For instance, sometimes the “pain points” of a demographic change. Keep up-to-date on their needs.
Taylor’s emphasis on keeping (and honing) your focus resonated with Steven Jarvis. As a result, this episode centers around his own background; his personal “why.”
Steven’s intended audience is a mix of tax planning newcomers and experienced advisors, alike. If you care about increasing your value delivered to clients, read on. You fit his target profile.
Furthermore, if you’re looking for tax-planning-specific actions; not just knowledge, you’ve come to the right place. Get ready: It’s not easy explaining some of the topics that come up.
Nevertheless, you’ll have to be ready to help clients understand. Moreover, there will be qualified disaster retirement plan distributions, premium tax credits, withholdings, and more. Whatever happens, if you’re not completely prepared, keep listening.
Steven grew up occasionally stuffing envelopes for a financial planner (though he eventually became an accountant). Therefore, he’s seen the ins and outs of finance for a long time. This could be why he was asked to help advisors.
Conversely, it’s nothing he anticipated while graduating from college. However, working with them over the years revealed something: There was a lack of CPAs sharing financial-planner-beneficial insights.
Certainly, there are great generalized resources available today. Nevertheless, Steven began Retirement Tax Services in partnership with advisors he’s worked with.
Rely on that. The strategies he provides here come—not from theories, but—from his own day-to-day experiences.
CPA Steven Jarvis shares more of his personal “why” in this episode of the Welcome to the Retirement Tax Services podcast.
Thank you for listening.
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 in this show, I teach financial advisors how to deliver massive value to their clients through retirement tax planning. On Monday’s episode I talked with Taylor Schulte, a CFP and the host of the Stay Wealthy podcast and the Experiments and Advisor Marketing podcast. We had a great conversation about taxes and digital marketing. And one of the things that really stuck out to me from my conversation with Taylor was his recommendation to get really clear on who you are speaking to in your digital marketing. And that’s what I want to do today, is talk about who I am speaking to and why.
This podcast is speaking to advisors who know taxes are important to truly providing the comprehensive financial planning that everyone includes on their website’s ‘about page’ and in their LinkedIn profile summary. I am speaking to advisors who care about delivering value to their clients and who are always looking for ways to increase the value they’re providing to those clients. That means that I am speaking both to advisors who are just scratching the surface of tax planning, who are looking for ways to simplify topics like Qualified Disaster, Retirement Planning Distributions, Roth conversions, premium tax credits and tax withholdings, just to name a few. Along with advisors who have been crushing tax planning for years, but are looking for ways to devote more of their time to the things only they can do, while still staying current on the ever-changing tax landscape and delivering that tax planning value more efficiently.
So regardless of where advisors are on that spectrum, I am speaking to advisors who are looking for tax planning action, to go along with tax planning knowledge, because knowledge is never enough on its own. Um, and to be honest, I am speaking to these advisors quite simply because I was asked to! I have talked to some of the leading coaches and mentors in the financial advising industry and the most common theme they hear from the advisors they work with is how do I better deliver value through tax planning? When these advisors looked around the industry for a resource to help with this -now they were looking for a CPA who dedicates a hundred percent of their time to working with advisors and their clients – they couldn’t find that. They kept coming up empty, on someone who really was dedicated to the financial advising industry. Now, there are some great tax planning resources available, don’t get me wrong. There’s some incredible stuff that gets put out by Kitsis and edSlott, Kiplinger. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, but nothing out there filled the need that these advisors were looking for, and the need that they were hearing from other advisors.
So I partnered with some of these advisors to create Retirement Tax Services. My background is as a CPA, not an advisor, although I did grow up around the industry for any of you have been around long enough, you can probably sympathize with my memories of folding thousands of letters, stuffing them in envelopes, putting address labels and stamps on the envelopes and sealing them all to invite as many people as possible to my dad’s next seminar on topics that quite frankly, as a nine-year-old, I could barely pronounce, let alone understand. That was my first exposure to financial planning and small business ownership.
So naturally I chose something completely different and became an accountant and spent the first portion of my career working for some of the largest accounting firms in the country. Over the past 10 plus years, I’ve been heavily involved in teaching, training, mentoring, and coaching. On top of that, I just wrapped up three years at Whitworth university as an adjunct professor in their MBA program, essentially teaching accounting to non accountants. I didn’t graduate from college with a grand plan of someday starting Retirement Tax Services and working exclusively with financial advisors and their clients. I’m not sure my experiences could have better prepared me for this if I had planned for it upfront.
Now, 14 episodes in I’ve already received a lot of great feedback from advisors who I have never met. And, and I really appreciate that support and the questions and feedback I’m hearing. What I’m most commonly hearing from advisors reinforces the need for an excitement around tax planning content that focuses on action. Which is the reason that all of my guests are financial advisors doing these things in practice.My experience and credentials have put me in a great place to deliver this content, but it’s so critical to learn what works in practice. The stories I share all come directly from the advisor community, even though I have spent my entire career in the financial services industry, the strategies I recommend on this podcast are in collaboration with advisors who are doing them in their own practices, so that I can feel confident that what I am sharing works in front of a client and not just on a keyboard or into a microphone.
One last thought on the why of this podcast, my whole life, I have loved problem-solving. Taxes impact all of us. And I look at not overpaying the IRS while staying 100% between the lines on compliance, as a problem to solve that is unique to each one of us. Approaching that problem by working with advisors simply gives me a way to amplify the reach and impact these strategies can have.
So while we didn’t go into a tax topic today, just thought it was important to take a few minutes and explain kind of who I am and why I’m doing this. And even though we didn’t do a deep dive on any tax topics, we’re still going to stay true to that action focus. And so we’re going to go through some action items. So the first action item I’m going to recommend based on my background and kind of my explanation of why I’m here, is that you make sure that you are committed to the why behind tax planning. It can’t simply be something you add because it’s on everyone else’s website, or because it seems like a trendy topic. You have to understand the value of tax planning to your clients, so that you really commit and follow through on delivering that value. Getting really clear on that ‘why’ is going to help give you the motivation and patience to really learn and understand these different topics, so that you’re effectively implementing them with your clients in your practice.
The next action item I’m going to recommend is that you submit a question for our tax Q and a Friday episodes. Like I said before, all of this is in collaboration with advisors. I want to make sure that this is as relevant and applicable to the situations you find yourself in. So the more questions and feedback I get from our growing advisor community, the more we’re going to keep this, um, addressing the things that are the top of your priority list. The next action item is the same action item I recommend on every episode and that’s to get tax returns for every client every year, because how else are you going to make sure that you are to use Taylor’s phrasing uncovering opportunities for your clients and making sure that the opportunities that you’re discussing with your clients get implemented correctly. All right, take a few minutes to go out to wherever you listen to podcasts, leave us a five star review and give us some of that feedback. We’d love to hear it. Love to hear from the advisors who are getting value out of this content. Thanks for listening everybody. Good luck out there. And please remember to tip your server, not the IRS
