Coordinating tax planning with your existing advisors

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We've been able to wipe someone's tax bill completely, which has been fantastic. Our average client, we're saving them about 50% on taxes. There's never been a single person I haven't been able to help. For every 75,000 you spend, you get 100K back. You can literally wipe out all your taxes if you do it correctly. And then I got a call and it said office of the United States President. And that's how I learned from the most successful what they did. Maybe it's not a priority for the the government to teach you how to not pay them. the tax code is really written for business owners. Can you break down for us like what's been the most successful like tax mitigation case study that you've had? Yeah, I'd like to use one example. So, welcome to Beyond the Bottom Line. I'm your host, Joey Lon, and this show is where we pull back the curtains on how the ultra wealthy actually protect and grow their money without the gatekeeping or the complexity. Each week, I sit

down with elite experts working with top business owners and wealthy families to reveal practical strategies that business owners can take action right now to keep more of what they earn and pay less in taxes legally. Today I'm joined with none other than Ethan Eizy, CEO and founder of Esquar Enterprises, financial adviser, business consultant, speaker, tax mitigation expert who specializes in making what was once ultra wealthy only tax strategies accessible to any regular high-inccome business owner. So if you're a business owner, you're looking to reduce your taxes and you think you're overpaying in taxes and you might get some value out of that. So Ethan, welcome to the show. Appreciate you, Joey. You always pump me up. I'm excited. That's the whole point. Let's go, man. Well, Ethan, uh you've built your entire business off um around basically giving access to business owners the same tax strategies that was once only reserved for billionaires and the ultra wealthy of our country, right? So, why do you think that business owners believe that tax strategies used by

those billionaires are often out of reach and not even an option for them? It's a good question. I was thinking about this the other day. I don't know if they necessarily think that it's out of reach for them, but if they do is perhaps it's because they just don't know where to find the advice. Yeah. A lot of the people that we work with are going to be business owners or highly compensated W2 employees. Uh, but they might have like a CPA and the CPA, you know, the definition of a CPA is a certified public accountant and you know, they're very good at filing taxes for the most part. Um, but you're generally paying them, you know, 500 to a,000 bucks to file your tax. You're not necessarily paying them for strategic advice. So, if you're getting all your advice from a CPA or your financial advisor over at Edward Jones, Charles Swab, Raven James, whoever you're you're using, they're not generally tax strategists, nor do they often have the designations to advise on tax

strategy. So, what we found is um it sounds because it sounds like a big term, all the ultra wealthy are not paying money in taxes. And a lot of times that's a lot of times they aren't. You know, if you go Google how much did Jeff Bezos pay in taxes the past few years and you find like a zero dollar of what he personally might have paid. Um, but I think it's just cuz they don't know. Uh, and if you don't know something, a lot of times it sounds like it's more it's farther away than what it actually is. And it's still some if you if you seek the right counsel and the right people, you can apply it to your life. And that's what you need to do is find the right people that have the knowledge that are able to share it with you. And you got to build a team. If you don't have a team, you're you're you may not go as far as someone who does. It's what do they

say? You you're you're as uh you're as good as the people you surround yourself with. The the the five people. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Uh and it's it's really true. You don't you need to work with people who have experience in that arena and find them and then they will take you to that next level. 100%. And can you can you recall an example where like a business owners came to you and you had to basically break their belief in some of that area of like they didn't know what to do, how to reduce their tax burden, how to be more tax efficient. And through what you know and your network and your team, you kind of were able to break his belief and kind of prove him wrong that there was some stuff that he was not applying that you could help him with. Anything you can remember? Yeah. Um, you know, it's almost a similar theme though. You know, I've I've never had a no cuz people come to me and there's

never been a single person I haven't been able to help, which has been awesome. It to me it's it's it's so cool because I spent the last few years trying to figure out how do I have an offer that's impossible to say no to. At least, you know, Alex from he's always saying something like that. Yeah. So, that's what we did. And we found offers that are so good it's impossible to say no to. But then, so these business owners are going on Tik Tok or they're going on Facebook or Meta now and their Instagram and they're looking up tax strategies and then now your feed's all full of tax strategy. Yeah. But when they finally find the answer they've been looking for because it is sounding too good to be true, then they get scared. don't move forward. Um because they then take it they take the ad the answers they found from our firm or some other strategist that has the designation to talk about it to their current team but their team

isn't licensed or have the knowledge to advise on it. So then their team says it's out of our scope don't do it. So you get this cycle of people actually finding the advice, but then take it back with their team and their team shoots it down because it's their friend who's been their CPA for 20 years that one they don't want to step on their toes or that CPA says because I don't understand it, because I don't understand trust law because I'm a CPA or I don't understand that contract law, I'm not going to sign off on it for you. And that's where you get in trouble. It goes back to having a team. Yeah, I was going to say that. I totally agree with you. And I think for example, whether it's your CPA or anybody else that you're working with. I think it's such a stigma. It's a taboo subject to talk about taxes or paying less taxes cuz there's this this clan that not like, oh, the rich needs to pay more

taxes and then there's the other clan that, oh, we don't want to pay. So, it's kind of taboo and it's scary, right? You don't want to mess with the law. You don't want to do something that's not good. And most of the time, your CPA are playing safe, right? when they say that to you. So do do you believe that that's one of the main thing that's bringing those business owner back in terms of improving their tax strategies just relying on their or being underserved by their team in certain uh aspects. I think they are I met with a guy last week for a specific example and he had a lot of the stuff set up. I I was thinking about him. He has um a financial adviser who does his stocks. Yeah. He has a CPA who does tax strategy. He has a lawyer who he's currently setting up a trust with. So I I asked him, I said, "Hey, when's the last time your CPA has talked with your estate planner? When's the

last time your CPA talked with your financial adviser?" And he goes, "Never." And I was like, "Well, why didn't you do that?" So I asked him a simple question. I said, "Okay, cool. So your financial adviser, what has he done for you?" and he goes, "Yeah, I got some mutual funds and he set me up a a life insurance policy that grows my money." I said, "Cool. That's great." Um, so what's the purpose of the the life insurance policy? And he says, "Well, it's going to grow my money. It's going to pay out money to my heirs if I pass away as well." And I said, "Awesome. Are you getting a tax deduction for it?" And he goes, "No." I said, "Okay, so you made there that's going back to my point. Why didn't your financial adviser speak with your CPA or tax attorney to show you how to get a tax deduction for it? And you go, I didn't think about that. It's like great. That's what we're we're here for. Uh so we

positioned oursel as a family office. Yeah. And we found so we've got those team in house, but they're all speaking together on your behalf. And so you can if they're speaking together, you can do a lot more because they just don't know. I mean, you you're limiting yourself by speaking to someone who's really good in their one specific lane. They don't know all the other lanes that are out there, but they all work together. Everything works as a tool. It's just going back to diversification. Don't put all your money in one spot because then you're stuck. Yeah. And then the other thing we were working on with him was he was putting money into he was a trust for um for so that when he does pass away the money's going to avoid probate court and you know you heard that term own nothing but control everything is what the Rockefellers say. But that trust didn't give him a tax deduction. So, he was setting it up for what most people set trusts up for,

which is for estate planning. But it wasn't also set up correctly for tax mitigation purposes. And you can do some creative things where opening up certain trust to move your money into, pay no tax for the money that goes in there, and then some trusts are tax deferred, and then you can set up promisary notes or loans against the trust and pull the money out taxree. You can literally wipe out all your taxes if you do it correctly. But if you do it wrong, then you're in trouble with IRS. So, really just make sure you have a professional that's going to do it correctly. Otherwise, you could get into issues. That's so good. That's so good. And I've heard that so many times while speaking with uh with people like you and other people on the show, it's it's most of the time that I hear it's the team, they have individual silos and they're working in silos. And it's it's I I was just thinking about the analogy. It's like if you were going

to the hospital, right? Like when you go to the hospital, um your cardiologist speaks with your um with with your general doctor, right? Or with your people that that takes care of your lungs. Like if imagine if you went like individually to each one of them and they never talk to each other. Like you're never going to get the most efficient, right? Um recipe to get back healthy. So I think it's very similar to what you're speaking to right now. So that's uh that's really good. Yeah. And then and take the advice as well. My my the funniest thing is when uh we'll we'll advise someone and because now uh I'll bring in a tax attorney on our team to speak with a client. Yeah. And then they they go to their cousin who's a plumber and they say, "Hey, this guy's telling me to do this. What are your thoughts?" And then the guy's like, "I don't know what that is. That sounds crazy." And then they come back to us and say, "Well,

my cousin said no." And I ask him, "So what was the what's his license to say no? What does he do for a living? He's a plumber. What are you doing? Why are you taking advice?" So, so follow the advice and then go forward with it. If it seems overwhelming, it's okay. It's your first time learning about it. But, uh, but also don't jump into something too fast because there there are a lot of people on internet that are I I think that aren't designated to talk about things. So, be careful what you hear as well. So, make sure look at the designations behind someone's name before you take the advice. Yeah, for sure. And just to make it tactical for the listeners, the business owners watching this right now that perhaps might just have a CPA or working in silos with their team, like what what would be the first step you would recommend them to do? Um would it be to I don't know find talk to other business owners and through referral

based like more successful business owners and them asking them okay what's your team and trying to get uh their own their own team. Is that the first step you would you would propose to them? Yeah, find a great team. Like not don't go a don't settle for average. You want to, you know, like when you hire employees, you want to interview your financial advisor as if they're going to become your employee. That's what you want. I mean, you're not sitting down with one CPA. You're talking with a few different CPAs say, "What are you going to do for me?" Because most of the time what I find is they're going to these CPAs and these CPAs are going to say great uh you should be happy you're in a position to pay the amount of taxes you are. So just be happy and let's do a here's a couple tax write offs and but that's it. You're not really getting advice from them. then you end up having to go on the internet and Google

what are tax write offs that I can do and you find something like uh oh I can write off the square footage of my office and then you take that back to the CPA and the CPA says oh yeah you can do that but the CPA didn't tell them that they could or the big one now I see on TikTok is the Augusta rule and all those of things but you're right you need to interview someone this and ask them what are you actually going to do for me not just go hire the first person you find. And if you have to pay someone a higher fee, it's worth it if they're going to give you better service. Think about it as an investment, not a cost. If you're going to hire a CPA to just file your taxes, yes, go find the guy that's going to file it for 250 bucks, not $1,000. But if you're trying to mitigate your taxes, find somebody who's actually going to build a strategy for you. And if

they happen to cost $2,000, but they're going to save you an additional 10, it's worth it. Find some. It's all an ROI. And that's what people forget it. Saving tax is an ROI. If I can get someone back 25 to 50%, our average client, we're saving them about 50% on taxes. Um, we guarantee to save them 25% or they don't pay us anything. But let's say we can get them back 25% of their taxes. That's an ROI. you put that into a compounding interest calculator, 25% return on on an investment, you would have to take on extreme risk to find 25% return. But reducing taxes, that in itself is a way to exponentially just get your investments at a such a higher level without taking on more risk um to do so. And so that's what we got to get in the frame of mind on is taxes in itself is the biggest ROI. It is a it's a it's a wealthcroing situation if you're just going to pay all the taxes. Um but you

got to go interview the right people, find the right team, and ask them what are you going to do for me? Because if they're going to come back to you and they're going to say if they don't have a plan, that's a red flag. If they don't have additional ideas that you don't, you could file your own tax. What's the point of using somebody except for saving yourself time, but they need to have a strategy and a plan on how to save you? That's such a great advice. So, go ahead, find your team and and yeah, and be careful with the advice you're getting from uh from from your current team and be open to to to to finding new new ways uh if you're stuck at the same place, right? Being complacent is one of the worst place you can be in business. So that's that's very good. That's very good. And um I want you you made that that thing that you said about the a lot of CPAs saying uh yeah, you

should be happy paying that much taxes, right? It means that you're you're successful. Uh kind of brings me on to the next question I want to ask you being like what's the what's the biggest lie that you're being told that or business owners believe in your opinion about those advanced let's say tax strategies from what you've seen? The biggest lie I I don't I mean that's a big one. It's just just be happier paying it and pay your fair share. Yeah. Which is good, but I just think of all the other good that I can do with my money if I'm saving my taxes. I can hire more employees. I can reinvest in my business more. It's not that I'm just going to go buy a bunch of Ferraris for myself. Uh maybe one or two, but not you don't need a million of them. No, exactly. just um I think the biggest thing is just people are scared that they don't want to do one little mess up and then the IRS is going

to come after them. Yeah. So just get with the right person who you know has ha who has the financial backing has a good track record. So when I when I the CPAs that I partner with for example we have one on our team that is in his 70s. He's been in business for 50 years. That's all he's ever done. Yeah. He's 100% successful. Every single um tax amendment or tax filing he's done, 100% have all gotten approved. And if there ever was an audit, uh you're bound to have a client that gets an audit at some point. They've all been they've all passed. Yeah. So, you want someone that has not only the strategies and the designations, but also the ability to back up and say, "Look at my historical performance. We've always followed the law." Then you can feel comfortable moving forward with it. But the number one thing is people are just nervous to try something new because there's the chance of what if the IRS audits me and I get in

trouble. Yeah, at some point there's going to be a random selection, but let's just make sure you have all of your documents in order and that's why you're hired a team to do to do that for you. You're too the business owners are way too busy to file all their taxes and to learn the strategy on their own. You should be making money. The team you have behind you should be saving you money and showing you how to invest it. You need to know how to learn more skills to be more valuable in either your job or your business. And that's where your mind should be 95% of the time. Yeah. No, that's good. And I'm a business owner myself, right? And and again, I'm I'm actively looking for those strategies myself and all that stuff. So, um, and one thing that I that I found that never never fails, it's always to look at the track record. Like to build a business, if we're talking to business owners making millions of dollars, tens of

millions of dollars a year, um, like you you got to be smart to get to that point, right? So the the the best thing you need to do is uh I don't know who said that but confidence comes from having undeniable proof right of doing the same thing over and over again and having the same result. So if you look at someone if you're if you're doubting if it's true or if or if you're going to be in the right or anything like that just look at the proof ask the track record. If they're not able to give it to you then you got your answer right? So but if you have the proof you have the track record then you should have no worries to be worried about that. So, I think that's fair to say. Yeah, it's a good point. It's all about trust. And if you don't have trust, someone told me, uh, business moves at the speed of trust. Yeah. Yeah. You have to have that. That's the only reason things

don't get done. But you got to, that's why I say go back to someone's track record. And whenever I hire an employee, I'm looking at what have you done in your past successfully that proves I can trust you. Or yeah, you know, background check. Oh, you've done something fishy in the background. I don't know if I can trust that. But got to have the trust. U go out to lunch with your financial adviser. Go out to lunch with your CPA. Get to know them because if you blindly trust them, you don't really know them. you you really want to get to know the people that are going to because those those are end up they really end up being some of the most important people that are going to be around for you. Yeah. Because they're managing your most important things. That's your money. Like besides God and family, the number the next thing in line is wealth. Your your money. If you don't have money, you can't eat. You can't pay your bills. You

can't support your family. You can't donate to charities. They're managing that. And if they do it wrong, it could blow up. One, you could get into legal trouble. Or number two, 20 years later, if you weren't if you weren't saving that 25% on taxes, you'd have 25% less of a portfolio. So, you want to be able to trust them, get to know them. It's an investment. Yes. Cuz you're busy, but it's so worth it to, you know, date your adviser for a little bit and then you can put the ring and marry them. That's what it is. It's a lifelong relationship that you're building. Don't commit day one. Get to know them for some time. And that's huge. You know, learn about their family. Learn about what makes them angry. Learn about what their goals are. When are you going to retire? You just going to like sign me up, build me a strategy, you retire in 5 years, and then the strategy I take to my other financial adviser or CPA, and they don't

understand what's going on. You need to have an exit plan, know everything about what that advisor is going to be doing and their vision for their future, too, because you're now partnering together. It is a partnership with them and you're both going to be making money because of it. That's exciting. That's good. No, absolutely. And I think it's Yeah, it's insightful. So, I think first thing from what I've gotten from what you said so far is look at your current team and see if you can if if there's any holes or gaps or communication within them, right? And if that's the case, then looking uh looking on internet, looking on on social media, looking on on referral base to see if you can find a team that again has a track record and uh has been audited and and audit proof and you can make sure that you can have the right person get to know them on a deeper level. I think this this is very really good tactical advice for business owners that

are looking to to get in a better tax efficient situation. Um, I know you talk about you're you're you said you can save on average about 50%. You're saying in taxes to business owners. Can you share the biggest amount you've saved a business owner in taxes? Yeah, I mean we've been able to wipe someone's tax bill completely like out which has been fantastic. You generally not one strategy. You kind of have to layer things in. Yeah. Because you could do one strategy then it prevents you from doing another one. So, it's also the order of operations that you do them. Yeah. And th that's I mean it's business owners you can do a lot more work with. You can save them a ton more. W2 it's generally a little more difficult because there's less options but there's still a lot of options for W2 employees. And then there's also some things you can do retroactive too. we were able to help people and look at their prior return and see what we can get them

back and um we also guarantee you 25% return back on prior year's taxes or you pay us nothing for those because that's how confident of a team that we are because we only hire the best of the best on our financial advising team. I mean we've got a tax attorney voted the top one in the entire country uh just a few years back uh and last year. We'll see what happens this year. And we've got a CPA who's been in business for 70 years, IRS enrolled agents. We even know some IRS workers. We'll call them up because we have connections. Yeah. And ask them. It's like, "Hey, have you ever been in this situation before? What are what do we look out for?" So, we're also using clients hindsight as new clients foresight and we want to see, you know, what we're learning from them to apply to these people. And whenever you hire someone, look, you know, ask them, do you have any opinion letters that are written about you? Uh, as in with

these strategies that you're implementing it, how do they hold up in court? You have any case studies that have gone through court before? Um, ask whenever advisor shows you some sort of strategy, ask them what are the pros and cons to it. Um, what's the best case scenario? because you could do an amazing strategy, but then I don't know, we've had some clients with like uh land easements and also things like um studies that they've done that they wrote off that then three years later the court comes back and says, "Hey, we're going to review those and vote if we still accept them or not." So, so there's risks of everything that you do and you want to ask what are the risks of the strategies that I'm implementing. So, that's it's a big piece. People don't think about that. They think as soon as I I do my taxes, it's one and done. But sometimes there's laws that have been changed and do people. So, find some that have been around for 150 years.

The laws have never changed and you you beat the risk. Example, that's pretty crazy. So wiping out an entire tax bill, are we talking like could that be six figure tax bill or could is that below six figures or it doesn't matter? It Yeah. So generally you're going to need a 400k income about $100,000 taxes of what you owed to get into that 50 to like 100% tax savings. But again, doing it the right way, layering it with things. Anything lower than that, you can still do some things, but you have less options. I mean, the tax code is really written for business owners and generally those that make more higher incomes. Got it. That's usually where the big tax breaks are going to happen. And if you were to explain it to me like I was a 12y old, how do you go ahead and wipe out an entire tax bill to someone making 500k income to up to millions of dollars in income? That's why people pay me. But uh give us the

juice. Give us a little sneak peek. I'll give you a few different ideas of what you can do. Yeah. Uh because you know um they're they're they're all out there and they're not of course. Yeah. As long as you find the right people to help you implement them, you can do them. They're they're available for individuals. Mo a lot of them you have to be accredited investors to do. But here are a couple examples. Uh there's you can do some things with uh convertible bonds that you purchase them at a certain level like a $75,000 cost and it's going to refund you about $100,000 in taxes. So, for every 75,000 you spend, you get 100K back. There's going to be things like tribal credits. There's things like solar credits that you spend and you get a a credit for your um for what for for the amount that you paid in. There's some of those have those pros and cons. So, you got to be careful and study which ones you do. So, don't just

go out and implement that. really research. Uh, and then of course there's structures where you can and set up your LLC and S corps versus C corps. What's the pros and cons to save you taxes? How do I set up a trust that I can just route money into? That's u going to allow me not to pay any tax on them, but it's just a tax deferred asset. Then you can pull the money out taxfree if you do it correctly by or the right way. Um other things like bonus depreciation, that's going to be a big one for this year with what the big beautiful bill by Trump just voted in. You can write off 100% of the bonus depreciation. Um there's you you go buy some land uh through a if you don't want to go own it, you can or farm equipment that you can purchase and then you can write off the tax benefits for that and um you just run it through a firm, but you're basically just spending money to

save money. Um yeah, you know, it's got to hit all the requirements to do it. Again, you got to have your economic substance. You have to have all of the right requirements. Don't just go do it yourself. Make sure you're speaking with your legal team, of course. Yeah. Yeah. So, those are a few different examples of what we've been able to use for clients. Some we don't use anymore, some we still do. Yeah. Yeah. I think like speaking with experts like you, uh what I've realized is that all of that information is out there. Like it's not the information that's missing. What's hard is putting that those puzzle pieces together in the right order like you're saying, right? So again, goes back to the importance of having the strong team that knows all of that. So you kind of know which piece of the puzzle goes right after the other. Is that is that what you're referring to? Yes, that's true. And and even then it's you can a lot of the information you can

find on the internet or or you go to chat GGPT and type it in Gemini whatever you use you'll find about half to 75% of those types of informations on you know Augusta rule or can I write this off can I write that off for the most part you'll find all of that out there but if you're talking about the more elite strategies it it's it isn't quite there yet with chatgpt if you like look at and see about those because it doesn't understand the tax code to a te just yet and how that puzzle piece fits in with this puzzle piece because you got to ask it the right questions and it's all about order of operations and how it all flows together. So it doesn't quite help you to that extreme yet. So that's why you do need to go to an expert of an expert of experts. I mean, you're not just going to a general if you, you know, if you have a shoulder issue, you're going to a general practitioner.

No, you don't go to a general practitioner for a shoulder issue. You're going to a specialist. Um, so you don't just go to a doctor, you go to a specialist. And that's what you want is um someone who specializes in either a specific tax strategy or a specialist who knows a few different ones and how they all work. Um, and then build that team out like we talked about. Yeah, it's crazy because there's so many analogies with uh with healthcare, right, with go because and I think we're doing this because a lot of uh business owners or people in general, they trust the doctor. They trust healthcare whenever they go there. It's like, yeah, like you have a a nice little dress on and and you've got your your your graduation, your your certificate on your on your in your office. Therefore, whatever you say, I'm going to do it. Right. Um and uh and but again there's a lot of misinformation out there so we don't we cannot blame the skepticism uh nowadays. So

um c can you break down for us like do do you do you recall like one like case study of or a business owner? What's been the most successful like tax mitigation or tax saving case study that you've had over the past few uh few years? Like which industry they were in, why they came to you, all that stuff. Yeah. I like to use one example. It it's it's it's and it's a very generic example. It's not specific a person so I can leave their name and info out but yeah. Yeah, for sure. What I like to explain to people is okay, let's think about it as a process. So, first step is let's look at what we can do on the last three years of your tax returns. So, our compliance will allow us to look back at our past three years and then we'll bring in our CPA and tax attorney to look at that for the client and that's uh usually the statute of limitations. You can amend the last three years.

Typically, we'll see what can we can get you back. Our team guarantees we can get at least 25% back from what you've already paid in for those last three years. So, if we can get you 25% back in taxes, then we take that money we saved you and then route it into let's say a investment that can grow taxfree. Well, now you're avoiding capital gains tax. So, let's say your capital gains tax rate is 15% federally and 5% on state. That's a 20% tax savings there, too. Yeah. Then let's say we can take that money and then grow it. You know, the average person's making about 9 and a half% in the S&P 500. Um, our financial adviserss and our team were able to get our average client to closer to a 15 to 17% growth by structuring in alternative investments with the market strategies. Y, but add all that together. So, if we just save someone 25% from their prior year, took that money and put that into an invest an investment that's going

to save them 20% of capital gains between federal and state, and then we got them a 15% return in the market slash alternative investments. I mean, that's a 25 plus 20 plus 15. I mean, that's almost what was that's like a 25. I mean, that's a huge return. I mean, you if you add that together, that's over 70% return for the client. And if you're going to try to make that type of return anywhere that you have to take on substantial risks to make that and that's the power of tax savings. It has an ROI. If you can save money in taxes, the ROI of that is compounding like no other investment can be. Um, so that's the power of just saving investments or saving your taxes and then investing that money back into some sort of place. So don't just save it and go spend it. Save it and invest it. Put it in your business. Put it into something else. But then if you're talking about a case study of how do we

save money clients throughout the tax year? Yeah. Um, one thing that we did for a client was we kind of layered some strategies in where we said, "Okay, first let's move some of your money into a like a spend thrift trust that was able to uh be a deduction for their dollars that we were able to set it up that way. they were able to put about half of their income in there. And then if they were to access the money out, we used our attorneys to set up a promisary note or a uh let's say some sort of uh loan that they cuz you're never taxed on loans. So they can pull their money out taxree. So that wiped out half of their income. Yeah. Which saves half of your tax. Then we layered in some of the other strategies like some convertible um notes that would lower your income for when you purchase them. And then we always maybe layered in some solar credits on top of that. Uh just some some things

in there to get you closer to that 75 to 100% tax savings. So that's it's an easy way to structure it. It's a case by case. It doesn't work for everyone. Everyone's a different spot. Yeah. It depends on how you set up your LLC. if you're S corp, CC Corp, if you're a W2, uh it all really matters. But that's but again, just it's about layering them in order of operations of which deduction or which credit you implement first in your strategy. Yeah, that's crazy. I'm laughing because like again, I'm a business owner myself and hearing that like I'm learning as well. By the way, thank you for being an open book and sharing all that stuff. But right now, I'm pissed. Like, why why don't we know that before? And why do why do you think business owners don't know that? Because it does sounds really good, right? And some might say too good to be true, but like why does regular like business owners don't know that is possible? I think it it

just goes back to where you're getting your information from. If you maybe you went to college, you got a business degree, but what are they actually teaching you? I don't know. I got a theory though, you know. I I think college may not be here in the next 101 15 years. I I just I don't because I was sitting in college when I you know, we we didn't have chat GGT at that time, but we at least had Google. So, I'm sitting here laughing because the the professor is just reading out of a textbook and all this information I literally just could Google on the internet and find the same things. Um but now we have chat GT GPT that I can just it's a har it has multiple Harvard degrees in itself. I can just ask it a question and it gives me an answer. So people don't find this because it's not taught in schools. Like if you go to school, what are you really learning? If you're, let's say you're a business

owner. Now maybe if you're a going to be some lawyer, yeah, you got to go for that. But for like a business owners and our high net worth people, there was no tax classes. I didn't get taught on tax um for whatever reason. I don't know, maybe it's not a priority for the the government to teach you how to not pay them. So maybe that's why we can understand why. We can understand why though. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, there's there's always things you can do um for a client. I think the funniest one that we found was um we a client of ours got a tax deduction for he was during it was during 2020. It was in a certain city in the United States that if you were if you happened to be gay and you owned a farm in that specific city, every single dollar that you put into that farm, you would have no taxes on it. Uh and you could wipe out like half it was like

and you would get a multiplier on the taxes. We found that for and um he happened to be a gay farmer. Yeah. It had to be within city limits. So we found it was such a crazy never heard of that before. I just think that was it was interesting. U so we were able to help him do that. Um you had to be a part of like you know LGBT or Q and um so that was an interesting one. But again I mean there not there's not materials on the internet you can generally read for the higherend ones. For the you know the small ones like I'm going to write off the square footage of my office. Yeah. You can find that on the internet. But all the more advanced concepts, I don't I maybe people just aren't willing to put that on the internet because they're making too much money by keeping that information in house. Yeah. You have to pay uh and it's not cheap like to engage with our firm or even

other firms that have this level of knowledge. You're not paying $1,000 to file your amendment. I mean, you're paying, you know, tens of thousands for this to work a lot of times. Um, so if that information then got on the public, u maybe they would lose some of their income. So perhaps that's another reason. That's crazy because I think you just proved the the core mission of the show because I think that's the reason we have this is because we believe that a lot of that information is skate kept because of that reason, right? A lot of people are not willing to put that on the internet. Uh because from what I understand what you're saying, a lot of that stuff is is really based, right? It's who you know. It's who you know uh that can help you out with that those types of niche problems and you need to find the right people to do that. Uh we're lucky today that we have access to network and it's easier than ever to network

with social media, with ads, with all that stuff. But uh that's really what I'm getting out of that is it's really it's networking, right? It's finding the right people. Um and and that's that's not easy. It's not easy. You have more options, but it's not easy to find the right people. That's still that's still a scarce resource. So, no, that's the that's you're you're definitely right when you say that. Um, if if if someone's if a business owner is listening right now and realize that they've been again missing out on these strategies, like what what's step one in their journey that they can take right after this show, find someone that's more successful than what you're doing and apply it to your life. As simple as that. If someone you know, it's all about networking. U Yeah. And that's that's how I started my career. It was I was in college and I asked people who was who is more successful than you. Um I got a story if we have time for it I

can share with you. Yeah. Go for it please. So when I was in college I had a commitment one day to um it was it was a school project and they said hey you know do a project. It was a business class. do a project for and they didn't have any requirements. They just said it was entrepreneurship class. Create a project. So I said, "All right, my project's going to be I'm going to meet a bunch of successful people." And but I had to lay out how I was going to do it. So my task was ask someone who's more successful than you for an introduction every single day. So I first started out where it was me asking my teachers if they knew anyone that they could introduce me to. So they would introduce me to their other colleagues. Um and that went so far but it really you know actually started with me. I would ask my friends I said hey can I speak with your parents to learn about what they do

for their for their work? Yeah. And then I would go with him and says like, you know, tell me about what you've done for a living and how you got there. Do you like it? What's made you the most successful? Give me one little nugget I can write down for my life. So I would get that. Then I would ask them, okay, client or uh not client, but um father of my best friend, can you introduce me to one person who's more successful than you? And that was the one question I had to ask them. who is one person you can introduce me that's a little bit more successful than you. So those parents would introduce me to their parents and then their boss and then I would I would meet the boss's boss and then the boss's boss would introduce me to to their executives and eventually I'd meet the owners of the company. Um well throughout this journey there was eventually one person that as I did this I asked them I was

like hey do you have someone that's more successful than you that I could be introduced to you uh introduced to and he says sure let me reach out to some people and you may or may not get a phone call in the next few weeks. I said great. Well, I for I completely forgot about it. And then I got a call, a random call um and it said office of the United States President. I was like, that's interesting. I was like, what is that? So, I I was like, all right, this is probably a scam call. So, I swiped it and I put the phone up to my ear and it says, "Please hold for the Office of United States President." And then the sec uh it was a secretary of the United States, former United States President. It was one of the former ones and says, "Hi, the um one of the former United States presidents would like to," and I'm not saying his name for, you know, privacy purposes. Uh it says, "We'd

like to meet with you for lunch." And I was like, "What? This is crazy." Uh so, u they they you know, they said, "All right, can you be free at this time next week?" And I said, "Absolutely." So I canled I took the day off of of uh my last year of uh or of my class and I drove down or I drove up to go see him and so you know social secret security is uh you know everywhere every you make one little moment a movement all these heads pop and you're just guys from the newspapers are you know looking around in the corner. Um, so I met with him and you know the number one I asked him I was like same thing who's more successful than you that you could introduce me to and then he was like sending me like Mark Cuban's business partners address and his other people that are like millionaires and billionaires and that's how I got to start meeting high netw worth individuals that had these strategies

that I could learn and write them down and that's how we then grew our business. We learned from the most successful what they did and then just applied it to my personal life, built the team around me that could support this. And then now we go out and help people do the same thing. And that's um what I find is the biggest thing is just go find people that are more success. Success isn't that hard. You just have to go replicate what's already been done. It's not a secret. Just find someone that's more successful than you. take their advice and actually apply it. The moment you don't apply someone's successful advice, u maybe that isn't smart. I think that you should if it's already a proven path, you should do it and then you can tailor it toward who you are and maybe a little more about uh yourself later, but first do what's already proven and then you can uh kind of change up the the formula to it later. Um, but that's the

thing is just go find people that have already done it. It's not a secret and most people are willing to share what's made them successful. Yeah. So, that was really good, Ethan. Thank you for sharing that again. Um, I want to I want to hit you with that last recurring question I'd like to ask all the guests before we uh we part ways and I call it a legacy question. So, if this episode were to outlive all of us, uh, which probably will at one day if YouTube, uh, stays on, what's the one lesson about, uh, what we just talked about that you want every business owner to remember? Uh, money's great, but just don't make it your god. Remember what's most important because it doesn't go with us when you pass away. Uh, we can talk about it all day long. Save you a bunch of money, make you a bunch of money, but it's not the most important thing in your life. Just remember, remember that. And I think that will take you

very far. Amen. Couldn't have said it better. Well, thank you for your time, Ethan. It was amazing. If you're a business owner that watch this episode, all I'm asking if you got any value out of it is to hit the subscribe button. There's going to be an episode dropping every single week with elite experts like Ethan sharing as much as they can to help you out keep more of what you earn and pay less in taxes legally. With that said, I'll see you guys on the next one.