336 Should Bookkeeping Firms Get Into Tax Work?
30 Sept 2024 · 31 min
Jason Staats discusses whether bookkeeping firms should expand into tax and advisory services, arguing that hybrid firms (bookkeeping + tax) are increasingly common and often advantageous. He recommends a staged, low-risk approach: (1) partner with an external tax firm and package services together; (2) outsource technical review/QA while building internal capability; (3) move to fully in-house provision only after gaining experience. He covers practical choices — starter tax software (Drake), surrounding tech (SafeSend and workflow tools), practice management options, staffing (including hiring in the Philippines), and turnkey advisory products — and emphasizes mindset, specialization choices, and joining peer communities for support. The episode ends with an Arnold Schwarzenegger motivational segment.
Chapters
Jason, I am a bookkeeping firm that wants to offer tax and advisory. I'm drowning in research. What software do you recommend for a slow start with tax and advisory clients? Tax pros right now, like Z Snap, get off my lawn bookkeepers. But let's talk about it. Should bookkeeping firms think about getting into the tax game? It's a sticky one. Come on in, let's dig in. Bookkeeping firms getting into taxes. Foreign. Okay, man. In the US there is no sexier firm right now than the hybrid firm that does both tax and accounting. I actually think increasingly if you just do one or the other, there will be an increasing amount of pressure put upon you to do both because it's just what a growing number of firms are doing. And it will take more and more like market power, like over time, it will increasingly require of you some sort of specialization to be able to get away with doing just one of those things. There will always be a path to just doing one super, super, very specific thing. I mean, there's firms that just do tax planning. Like there's firms that just do one very specific thing where, like, how could they ever get away with running a whole business just doing that? There will always be a path to be able to do that, just the stuff that you want to do. But it may have to come with some market power, like you may have to be perceived as guru to justify people being willing to come to you just for that one thing. And I think this will actually increasingly be the case. I think it will be harder to just do bookkeeping. I think it will be harder to just do tax because the market's kind of shifting towards people doing both. Right. It's what I did in my accounting firm. It was an 80 year old tax firm and I rolled a bookkeeping practice in it and people loved it. And it's much more, it's, it's interesting. It is much more acceptable, acceptable to go from tax to bookkeeping than it is to go from bookkeeping to tax. You go from tax to bookkeeping and people say, what? You are so progressive. Good for you. Your clients are going to love that. Most people go from bookkeeping to tax and everybody's like, wow, you sure about that? Are you sure you really want, do you know what you're getting into? And I'll, I'll preface this whole conversation with the fact that there are maniacs out there who get into doing tax in a wildly irresponsible way. There's, there are wrong ways to do it, but there's also Totally legit ways to do it. And it may be the right thing for many bookkeeping firms to do. And so that's what we're going to focus on today. If you want to like, seriously do this, what's the responsible way to step into it? Because it is more than software. It's a whole lot more than software. So three thoughts followed by two thoughts followed by the outro music. So first thought, if you're thinking about wading into tax, there's a version of tax that you can do with without you having to do the tax yourself. And I think this is probably the best place to start. Look for another firm that you can partner with that will do your tax work, but you can package that outwardly to your clients as like sort of a unified package. And we don't, like firms don't often build this sort of partnership thinking for some reason, because it's, I don't know, living in different firms, that's not a thing that you can do. Let you in on a secret. There are a whole lot of accounting firms out there where they. Their legal entity structure is such that they're like two completely different entities doing bookkeeping work, doing the tax work. Oftentimes that a test entity is like spun out into its own thing. But then more the advisory and the bookkeeping, the cast side becomes its own separate entity in my mind. Like, the way to explore is this the thing that we're going to want to do, start selling tax services. The way to start that is probably selling somebody else's tax services. And you could like package it up to look like a unified thing on your landing page. It could be a referral agreement where you're like, yeah, we can do both. We got a super tight partnership with this group that'll come in and help us out. And the setup really isn't any different than if we did it in house. You're still going to be talking with the same people. So I would say absolutely start there. Because it's one of those things where the work that goes into either figuring out how to do it yourself or the cost of pulling people that can do it. You really don't want to be out all of that only to then find, ooh, this isn't quite doing what I'd hoped it would do, or I actually just found out I don't really enjoy this. And so we're looking for a reversible decision here where we can find a low stakes way to get into it a bit, learn more about it, maybe try it with some of our clients so that if we got a bounce, if we got to hit reverse, we can still do that. Now one tricky thing here that's just a practical consideration is many great bookkeeping clients that have a lot going on and some technical things and you can actually charge them a decent amount. Those are not gonna be entry level tax clients. Like the way you normally wade into, like the way somebody comes outta school and goes into doing tax is by doing super simple 1040 work. You're not doing like meaningful bookkeeping work for 1040 clients. So you're a bit up against it. If you're running a relatively mature bookkeeping firm that's solving problems for even slightly complex businesses. Those are tricky companies to support on the tax side. Much harder than if you tippy toe into doing basic 1040 prep. Obviously I'm talking about US tax stuff here. Yet another reason to start like with a partner on this. Now that would be step one in my opinion, as you start with that partnership, like validate that it is going to do the things for your business that you want it to do. Also along the way, because in the question this person did say tax and advisory, there's a whole lot of other stuff you can do besides, besides bookkeeping that are not tax. And just doing advisory I would argue is a whole lot better than to say we do tax and advisory. Because tax obviously is a whole can of worms in and of itself. Tax advisory is a can of worms inside of that can of worms and then just more holistic advisory, like CFO type stuff, while tax can factor into it is more about the strategy of the business and what are the biggest profit drivers and that sort of thing. And so those are all very different things. If you try to jump in on all of them, you're absolutely not going to do them all well. So consider if there are other things that might be easier to wade into than tax, like simply advisory calls, you know, at month end, bill pay, payroll, cash planning, tech advising, even wealth management, the normal sort of adjacent stuff that you see bookkeeping firms growing into, maybe this firm has already explored those things, but a lot of those might be like lower lift than getting into tax. So stage one, find somebody to partner with. Stage two, if you're digging that and you're like, okay, I'm actually enjoying this, stick with that partnership and basically contract out the review portion. And this is especially true for those solo hustlers or small firms out there who don't really have like a second set of eyeballs to fall back on this is where setting up a partnership with another firm makes a ton of sense, even if it's just another person. If you are building this expertise in house or if you are doing the work yourself. And it's probably worth digging into that because those are two very different things. You could absolutely go out and develop all this expertise yourself. Depending on what state you are in, there's going to be different requirements for what credentials you need or don't need to sign. Tax returns for people like Oregon, I think is really good. They've got sort of this progression of this Oregon specific credential. You go out, you get your EA CPAs. Super overkill. If you just want to do tax work, EA is probably the shortest path there. I had a gal come and work for me, super high achiever. I knew her because she was like a consultant for a client that we were working with and she was looking to do something new. We started talking and she was like, what would it look like to get into tax? She knocked out the EA stuff in like two months. Like, she was a super high achiever. In fact, she might be listening to this right now. She was a super high achieve. So that's not for everyone. But it is like if, if in your mind you're thinking the CPA and schooling and years of all this, and that doesn't have to be that. Like, that's a. A wildly inefficient way to start doing tax. This episode is brought to you in part by Live Flow. So you've been around. You probably already know what Life Flow does. It connects your accounting ledgers to your favorite spreadsheet app, Excel or Google Sheets, QuickBooks or Zero. But we're on kind of an AI theme lately. With this new open AI model coming out. You want to know a wild hack that Live Flow can enable? How about syncing selected data out of your accounting system that a language model can interact with? So in the AI tests I've been running lately with this new OpenAI model, you can't upload files to it. It's all text. And so I'll like drag and select the text from these big financial reports. Paste it in there. Fine. But what liveflow lets you do is build whatever custom reporting you need to even like reference the cells in one sheet to the cells in another sheet to roll up all this data in totally customizable ways, even across different companies, because they support consolidations as well. But let's say I wanted to augment that with AI Buddy. How about creating all of the context in one view that your AI needs to do some sort of job. Quality assurance, whatever it is. I set up those sheets in Live Flow. One big select copy pasta into my language assistant. It's got all the data it needs to do the review or anything else. And then because with Live Flow you can template all these reports, you simply change the company that is connected to that spreadsheet. Boom. You've got all the live data for the next company. Obviously loads of useful ways that you can like pull all of your accounting ledger together. And that's kind of the beauty of Live Flows. You can pull whatever you need out of the platform, organize it however you want. And if you're exploring using AI for like quality assurance and technical review, stuff like that, boy Lifelo could be your best friend there. It's actually a pretty cool idea. Learn more about Lifelong down in the show. Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Team up, who will help you find talented folks in the Philippines to work for your accounting firm. They have recruiters on the ground in the Philippines. We'll find you awesome people. I'm looking at a bunch of them right here. Rona, that's her name. She's got a bachelor's in Information systems. She went to work for a US firm as a virtual assistant. They're paying her 1070amonth. She had four years experience. She's handling people's inboxes, calendars and scheduling their social media. A firm hired her through Team Up. How about Aaron? He's got a BS in accounting as a cpa. Six years income tax US income tax prep experience. So he's doing everything business, personal hustle and ultra tax. US firm hired him. They're paying him 1965 per month. Farah, she's got an MBA and a CPA was last running an entire team of bookkeepers. Six years experience. US firm hired her, their painter. Just over three grand a month to run a team. A team gang. Whether these folks are in the us, whether they are abroad, they are capable of running any part of your accounting firm. Particularly as a lot of firms are moving towards like kind of a relationship manager model where you have an onshore person that is managing the client relationship. That's really like the one blocker for some folks is they won't put offshore folks in direct contact with contact with clients though even that is kind of evolving. But our worldview around offshore work is oftentimes misshaped by the fact that menial tasks and other contexts like support will be delegated to India or something like that. The reality is these are super talented people that are capable of learning absolutely anything your onshore team is learning. And you've got big four firms, you got regional firms, you got all sorts of firms employing tens of thousands of people in the Philippines that are absolute experts at their craft. And I've shared before, my last four hires were in the Philippines at my firm. Completely changed the way we approach getting the work done. And that is, again, how I would build a new firm tomorrow. To learn more about Team up, check out the link down in the show notes. So you could, you could start building that expertise yourself. But on this podcast and out in the world, we talk with all sorts of people who have no technical expertise, but have the audacity to buy a tax firm, to launch a. A tax firm. And, and there's another situation where our mind goes to the maniacs, the people who are doing that irresponsibly. But there's a whole lot of people that are doing it really, really well and responsibly and pulling in the technical expertise. Because on the other end of the spectrum, the biggest blocker of most small firms is the notion that you have to be the best at everything, and everything has to go out the door with your blessing. And for those people, as their firms grow, if they do want to continue growing their firms, arguably the biggest blocker for most of us, when we go through that, and I went through it myself, is you mean to tell me I got to let that thing go out the door, like, and not have eyes on it, that this staff person of mine, this senior person of mine, they have permission to sign that stuff and ship it off? It's my name that's on the door. Why is that? Okay, so there's two ends of the spectrum there. The folks that want to do it all themselves, oftentimes they ultimately get to a point where they have to have to, like, pry their fingers off of that. But the other end of the spectrum, in some states, you might need a CPA or you may need this or that to be able to call yourself an accounting firm. But a trap in running any kind of business is having to position yourself as the one that needs to be the alpha, the peak expert at every single thing that happens inside of your business. That is just a lonely, lonely road to sadness. So you could build this expertise yourself. You could also hire this expertise. And I would really, unless you're trying to do a solo thing, if you're serious about getting into tax, I would really encourage you to hire somebody with the right tax experience. If you've never worked in a tax firm and you don't have anybody in your firm with any experience in somebody else's tax firm, there's just going to be a lot of, like, reinventing the wheel from scratch and just stuff that you don't know, that you don't know where, if you pulled the right person. And it could probably save you some time at this second stage here. Remember, we're just doing the prep. We're doing a contract agreement with somebody else to do the technical review, which is going to be super valuable ultimately in any kind of accounting firm. As you know, because you run a bookkeeping firm, what matters is the quality assurance process. What matters is ensuring that it's correct when it goes out the door. I honestly don't really care how the sausage gets made up to the quality assurance step, because that's, that's what actually ensures that everything conforms when it goes out the door. So when you're getting started here and you don't have a huge degree of conference confidence or technical capabilities within the firm to ensure that everything is going out the door correctly, then that partnership for you is going to be invaluable. And it's not until you have kind of let that see its course that I think you go to the third step and go fully diy. You do all the prep, you do all the review, you do all that stuff internally. And again, don't try to put all of that on just your shoulders. That's an exceptionally hard thing for anybody to do, even if they have a bunch of tax experience, to run a firm solely on their expertise. Like, if you came of age in a larger firm or even, you know, a firm with 20 people, it is such an amazing resource to be able to ping somebody with a question or like, hey, I heard you were working on this thing for this other client. Can you tell me how that worked out? And like, give me some shortcuts. If you're in an itty bitty firm, having to figure every single one of those things out for yourself, especially if you're a general generalist firm, that's. That is a lot of work. I will say the Internet makes that a little bit better. In fact, some folks we know and have even talked to on the podcast went out and launched the. What is it? Insight Tax community. We'll put a link to that down in the show notes. It's Insight Dot Tax. The whole idea here is like, it's a community of tax pros that are Supporting each other on, like, tough technical things. And so if you are a small firm runner or a solo operator, having an online community like this of other tax pros who are in a similar position, that can help you get to your answers quicker, that's invaluable. But don't think that you got to do it all yourself. Also don't think that, like, tax is the only option if you're trying to go deeper with clients. I would say tax maybe in some ways can actually be a trap because taxes are oftentimes the generalist solution. Like, everybody needs tax work, but what's something that is more specific to a client avatar that I want to do more work with? Like, if I do tax, it will attract people generally, yes. But if I do this, like, you know, specific compliance reporting for loggers or for oil refineries or, you know, something very, very specific, that's the sort of thing that honestly is a much lower bar to learn and figure out than income tax, which is exceptionally complicated. And it puts you out there for a more specific type of client. So it's easier to systematize, it's quicker to learn, and it makes you more likely to stand out in a crowd of. I mean, how many accounting firms are there now that do bookkeeping and tax? I mean, there are, I don't want to say a dime and a diamond, a dime a dozen, because that kind of cheapens them. But to say I do bookkeeping and tax is not like a specialty like that doesn't make you unique these days, especially as a growing number of firms are virtual, are distributed, can support clients anywhere in the country. The effect of that, of having, you know, thousands of firms now accessible to you because they will serve people anywhere in the country, that ultimately squeezes out what was once just more of a local market. That'd actually be a really interesting statistic. If you look back even just the last decade where 10 years ago, what percentage of folks were just working with a local accountant, as opposed to today, what percentage of those people now work with someone that isn't within 100 miles of them? I got to think that number has changed a lot and it will continue trending in the direction of folks shopping less local when it comes to professional services. So if tax, if you're thinking tax, is like a means of specializing or standing out, it's probably not going to do that. There's probably easier ways to get there now. Definitely still some benefits clients like all in one. If you are a generalist firm and a client is comparing Them apples to apples, two firms side by side and one will do both your bookkeeping and tax and one will just do one or the other and there's nothing else differentiating them. They will pick the firm that does both nine times out of 10. So there for sure are some benefits there. Now you mentioned software. What is the software starter pack for a US tax firm? We got to start with the tax software that actually like completes the forms and all that. These days when you're getting started, I think most people would probably say go to Drake. It's not like a, like a super, I don't know, progressive tool by any means. You could go beyond that to the more premium tools. They're just really cost prohibitive, especially in the early days. One really tricky thing with, with tax software is like there's a, an element of muscle memory that you develop with tax software that's unlike any other software that we use where it becomes really painful to learn a new system. There's just so, so many input fields in tax software for every single jurisdiction and all these different little codes and inputs and they take forever to find the first time. And then the notion of going to a new software platform and relearning all that is a real pain. So if you're going all in on tax, maybe it would make sense to go up market from Drake to you know, an ultra tax or something like that. But for most firms, like just getting into, I would probably say Drake, one thing that's really changing in the tax software landscape is we're having, you know, it's, it's a frustrating spot because you've got all these legacy tools that are the tax calculation engines. But increasingly we're getting better and better tooling on the tax workflows surrounding that talk tax office. So how we intake information, how we put together the work papers and even how we deliver that work on the back end, tools like Safe Send, like Soraban, like Stanford Tax, I always make the mistake of starting to list them and then I inevitably forget ones. But all that is to say there's an entire tech stack to be built around just that. Core tax software. Now practice management systems like taxdome that are more tax pro leaning, they'll handle some of that for you too. But I don't know that I'd recommend if you're doing both bookkeeping and tax, especially if it's primarily bookkeeping. I don't know that taxdome would make sense. This episode is brought to you in part by cloud account staffing. Hey, let's hire some talented people in the Philippines because that's what I did in my firm. You know why? Well, let's compare this to the traditional hiring method. Going with a traditional recruiter. Startup fees 15 grand. I don't know. Startup fee with cloud account staffing Thousand bucks. That's it. Annual employee salary entre for a senior accountant. They say 75K. I think that's reasonable. That checks out. Annual salary for the equivalent Philippines hire 30k. That was 75 versus 30 with traditional recruiters. You got to make a long term commitment. Cloud accountant staffing commit for two months. That's it. Hire in the Philippines usually in about six weeks onshore. You're probably going to deal with two to three months or also maybe eternity and your offshore team benefits, payroll taxes. You don't have to manage that stuff yourself because it is no fun. As opposed to to working with super talented people in the Philippines which is very fun. I did it myself as I've shared if I built my firm tomorrow, still what I would do hearing from a growing number of folks who tune into this stuff who are like had never really considered it before. Honestly thought you were a shill the first time I said it. Now I've made my first hire and I'm super happy with it. To which I say cool because it's totally how I would roll a firm. Still learn more about cloud accountant staffing. Check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Financial Sense. You want to talk about software companies that have stepped up their game in the last few years. Financial Sense. They are right at the top of the list actually. Really like intelligently breaking through some assumptions we have about category tech. Like tech in the accounting space being more expensive than general tech. If you are a solo firm operator right now, Financial sense has a $9 a month plan. It's stupid, it's frankly wrong and they shouldn't be doing it. It's irresponsible. But solo firm runner, look me in the eyes if you're listening. Look me in the ears. Solo firm owner. I see the spreadsheet that you're using to manage projects. Okay. I see those stanky old lead sheets. Stop it. You know, you know you shouldn't be doing this. No amount of analysis paralysis. Well it's working for now. Makes that okay. All right. Financial Sense going to unlock a whole bunch of stuff for you like automated requests, having a system that you can actually pull other people people into and scale a client facing portal so clients can self service and like grab copies of stuff, you know, the niceties of a practice management system. And if you are not a solo firm runner, I got a deal for you. I'm drop, I'm going to drop a little coupon code down the show Notes, then get you 10% off the big boy plans from Financial Sense. Okay. One thing I've always loved about Financial Sense, anybody can head over to their site, literally click a button and start using it. And that is the signal of a purpose product that believes if you can touch it, you like it. Maybe don't trademark that one, but they wouldn't be letting you use it for free if they didn't believe that once you got in there, you were gonna like it. Okay, solo firm peeps go out, get Financial Sense on the cheap. Bigger firm peeps grab that coupon code down below and learn more about Financial Sense. Now software around advisory, on the other hand, there are like solutions out there that are a more turnkey approach to advisory. One that comes to mind is Live Plan. I don't know if they still, I saw them around a lot like three to five years ago. That's live plan dot com. We can put that in the show notes. Basically it's kind of a soup to nuts. Like more turnkey approach to advisory work. And whether you buy that turnkey approach off the shelf or whether you develop it yourself, like that is the key to doing advisory. Well, don't just rock up to a meeting and plan on having insights like there are people that can do that for sure. And maybe for those people that's the best way to advise. Maybe that's superior to the advising framework like pulling it off the shelf. But for 99% of us having a turnkey way to do that, that is ultimately the best way to run your firm because you can plug other people into that. You can standardize what meetings look like, how you prep for meetings, what the deliverables are. And as we get a bit more specialized, you can shape how that advisory works to be specific to the pains that that type of entrepreneur has. And, and then you're really doing some cool, like meaningful stuff. One of the big pushbacks for specialization is people are like, ah, it's all the same, it's just marketing. And on day one that might be the case. But becoming a good advisor is like developing those frameworks that are specific to the problems that that type of person has. What are the things that just keep beekeepers up at night? Just keep taxidermists up at night Developing a framework to solve for Those things that's cool. Like, those are, those are the, I think the coolest firms and the ones that stand out like they are unique in the market, that that client isn't going to look across the street at the other accounting firm and be like, why don't I just have them help me? Because what you do is unique to them. Now I can tell you now a lot of very logical, like nuts and bolts practical stuff there, right? But I can tell you why people don't do this. And what your main blocker will be is like self limiting beliefs. The bookkeeper is listening to this. The main thing that's blocking you is you telling yourself that you're a bookkeeper. I don't do tax. Maybe a degree of I can't do tax. And if you don't know tax, no, you can't do tax. I said, it's funny how there's more shame going from bookkeeping to tax than tax to bookkeeping. Boy, nothing proves to you just how much tax pros don't know how to do bookkeeping than trying to launch a bookkeeping practice inside of a tax firm. Being able to hustle debits and credits and pack some ajes into the ledger does not make you a bookkeeper. And so being able to run a bookkeeping practice efficiently and knowing the right way to do all that stuff and the tools to use and how to make that stuff as turnkey as possible, that's absolutely a learned process too. Like, tax pros don't just roll out of bed and know how to do that one day. But there is like this, this mystique around tax that either either right or wrong, that's a tougher hill to climb for bookkeepers to get into tax. But you just got to be aware that like, there's a really big force here is going to be you telling yourself whether or not you're capable of that thing. And for me, the best hack for that has always been how do I surround myself with some people who are either on the same journey or a bit ahead of me on that journey. Like, there is virtually no. I've talked about this before. My favorite example is around tax advisory because most tax firms, they sell, quote, unquote, tax planning and they charge like next to nothing for it, while other firms, like, won't take on a tax advisory project for less than, you know, 10 grand. Because those fees can be framed more through the lens of like, how much money am I going to save for you? Or how much tax am I going to defer by doing this tax planning project. And tax pros will see and stick with me. Bookkeepers. Like, this is like my, like, the most powerful analogy to me about how you reframe your thinking. Tax pros will look at those other firms that can charge astronomical rates for quote, unquote, tax advisory and think, either that's irresponsible or, or they're just straight up making it up, because I can't even imagine doing that. And so how do you take that other firm's reality, where you have people that are happily paying for that, and make it your reality? You surround yourself with people for whom that is normal. If you went to lunch once a week with four other firm owners that were charging 10 to 15 grand for tax Advisor, just having casual conversation, that is going to program you, that's going to become normal for you. So what are the things right now that feel, like, unimaginable for you where you look at your other firm and you're like, boy, like, I don't even get it. I wouldn't know where to start. My clients would never go for that getting to there because, like, like consider, like, do I want to be there? And oftentimes the answer is yes. And there's like an element of, of jealousy. And we can. It's easier to, like, it's easier to, like, bury that with they're not telling the truth, or that's irresponsible, or they're overcharging. But if that's something that we want to learn more about and, like, figure out, how could I make that normal for me, the best way to do it is by spending time with those people, being able to pick their brain, building a network of other folks like you who are on similar spots on that journey to you, finding them online, being the one that's willing to send a DM and be like, hey, would you mind just, like, hopping on a zoom? And we can, we can chat. Besides, like, the social awkwardness of that and not being able to. Not being, not wanting to be the one that puts themselves out there and, you know, gets rejected, it's the exact same thing my kids struggle with. Besides the discomfort of that, oftentimes we can think if we're trying to get something from them that we have nothing to offer, man, it's totally not the case. Like, running an accounting firm is not that linear. I think just about all of us have something to offer to each other, even if it looks like they're ahead of you on that journey. And so if you're a Bookkeeper. And. And you might want to explore this, but it feels so foreign, and you just can't. Like, it's almost an identity thing. Like, you can't imagine being able to do that. The best thing you can do is surround yourself with people for whom that's normal, for whom, like, they're going through the same transition that is the ultimate brain hack. In fact, sometimes you just need a pep talk. Arnold, can you give me some. Maybe some tough love here?
Listen to me. Stop being a baby. You think I became Mr. Olympia by doubting myself?
No.
You have the skills to transform your bookkeeping firm into a tax powerhouse. You are just too scared to admit it. Stop whining. Get over your inferiority complex and start dominating like the champion you are. Now get to work.
I. I'll be honest. When I get out of bed in the morning, there's a lot of. Whole lot of days where I don't. I don't feel like a champion. And the notion of doing a whole new thing that is really hard feels impossible.
Enough of this feeling sorry for yourself. Champions aren't born. They're made through blood, sweat and tears. You think every day I wanted to lift weights or act in movies? No. But I did it anyway. You have to push through those weak moments. If you don't feel like a champion, then train yourself until you do. Now go out there and conquer your day.
Okay, so, I don't know. What do I do next? What should my first step be?
Seriously? You need me to hold your hand for every little step? Pathetic if you can't even figure out your own first move. Maybe you're not cut out for this, but fine. Start by immersing yourself in tax law. Learn the basics. Find a mentor. Or take a course. Do something, anything, other than just whining about it. Now get off your butt and make it happen.
You're right, Arnold. I need to stop being a little puny man and just get on with it.
Exactly. Stop being a puny man and unleash the beast within. You have the power to do this, so crush your doubts and show the world what you're made of. Now go dominate.
There you go. Stop being a puny little man and dominate. Okay. See you in the next one.
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