Liberating solutions for taxes gobbling your wealth | The UnNoticed Entrepreneur

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. You know, this is the show where I work to find great entrepreneurs that have solved problems for themselves, have managed to turn that problem into a solution for others, and are now expanding their offering by getting noticed. And really delighted today that we're going to go to Utah, just outside Zion National Park, which is beautiful, to talk to Scott Smith. who runs a company called Royal Legal. Scott, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me here.

Well, delighted to have you on the show because you're going to help us to understand how you have overcome the obstacle of defining a product that finds a market, but also the challenge of then articulating and selling that solution to a, to a bigger market. So many people have built something and then Selling it, getting the word out, is a really fundamental challenge, and you've managed to solve that. You're originally a lawyer. I know that you graduated in 2011 from Albany Law School, which I think is in New York, isn't it?

Yeah, that's upstate New York.

Upstate New York. But you are now in the Midwest, in Utah. So Scott, tell us a little bit about Raw Legal, and then we're going to talk about the fundamental obstacles that you've faced and how you've overcome those obstacles to get your business noticed.

Yeah, well, you know, I really find that really great entrepreneurialism really happens whenever you're solving a problem that you have for yourself. Because typically, if it's a problem that you're having, then it's probably a lot of people that are similar to you having. And in today's day and age, there's no problem that's too niche. And the problem that I was always really driven by was the problem of money. How did money work? Because I knew that it was important to have money. Wasn't really sure why, but I always knew that it was important, even from a really young age. And so that's what led me from, you know, growing up pushing lawnmowers to, you know, going to law school to starting to invest in real estate and owning auto repair companies to now helping people with their wealth at Royal Eagle Solutions and their asset protection, estate planning, tax and insurance and all those great things. It's because it's once you have gas to put in the car and you got the money to do that, then life becomes a super fun road trip. You just got to remember that it's just about how do I get enough gas to put in the car, make sure I'm going to have more gas to put in the car, and then just go enjoy the freaking road trip.

Well, yeah, you, and you've taken yourself from upstate New York across to Utah to build your business, but your business is national, isn't it? And you are helping people that want to be on their own personal, if you like, asset road trip. You know, people that are buying assets to generate passive income, um, to, to maximize and optimize, for example, the tax strategies. And you and I were talking before that really there is no such thing as passive income, is it? There's— once you've got assets, that attracts challenges of tax and management. Tell us, tell us what you do and some of the savings that you can help people to find. And then we're going to talk about How you communicate those to people?

The game of wealth is actually surprisingly simple. All you really have to do is create a business that generates your active income. This is where you're trading your time for money each day, and that will always be your best revenue generation. Then you have to protect it from expenses and taxes. Turns out taxes are one of the biggest expenses you can have. That you can easily avoid if you know how to strategically plan for them. And then what does this do? It leaves you with a big pot of money that's left over. And what do you do with that? Well, you simply take that money and invest it into very boring things like self-storage units, for example, that are— have great returns. Nothing really happens with them, but they kick off cash regularly. And then they also give you a bunch of depreciation, which lowers your tax liability. So once you can learn to play this game called, I make money and then I use some tax shelters to help protect it from taxes, and then I use my investments to give me cash flow, but also give me extra tax benefits. That's where you start paying, you know, 3 to 5% per year in taxes. If you save anywhere 10 to, some of our clients save over $100,000 a year in taxes, and then you get to invest that money that you saved in taxes. Into your portfolio, which grows even faster. And that's how you build massive wealth very, very quickly. And then you get your time back by building systems, processes, and teams to help you manage the wealth. So that way you can get down to only needing maybe a couple hours every quarter, maybe under 10 hours a year to manage your wealth and time. And if you really want to get free, that's the way you do it. That's the way I do it for myself.

Well, Scott, you make it sound remarkably simple. And for those people that can see on YouTube, Scott has got some very interesting artifacts from around the world behind him, plus a snowboard. So he's living evidence that he's managed to sort this out for real. But is this the preserve, Scott, of the rich only though? I mean, what the kind of asset protection and investment you're talking about, what stage, if you like, of income generation should people be thinking about this kind of tax planning?

So I believe that everybody should have this as a primary objective because until you can get free of the constraints of the needs for money, you're never actually making choices that are good for you. What you're doing is you're making choices that are based around the fear that you're not going to have enough. Which means you're not actually living your life. So what I did is I created Royal Legal Solutions and the website, it was up top right-hand corner. There's a section called the Vault where I put 11 eBooks, hundreds of hours of videos of training, how all this stuff works. And the reason why that's important is because everybody can get educated no matter where you're at inside of your wealth journey. Now what we do is we provide a turnkey service that implements all of these things for everyone. And we typically find that that is best served for people that are currently making over $150,000 in household income and paying over $20,000 in tax. So not much money is actually needed to start working with a company and learning like mine to be able to start implementing the systems, the processes, the teams, and the strategies to start learning about how to do this thing called, I'm going to build a wealth-building company for my life. And use these fractionalized teams and existing processes to make it really easy for myself. Because it took me years of really hard work, spending millions of dollars on education and mistakes to be able to learn how to do this. And that's what I guess if you want to call it mission in life is now. It's my labor of love is to say, well, my company is an extension of how can I help other people at any level get on the right track and get to this place where living and life is so much better.

Scott, wonderful. It's very generous of you as well. For those people that are looking at this on the YouTube, you can see the website. For those of you that are listening, you can go to royallegalsolutions.com, and there, yes, you can find videos, download books, and opportunities to save. And people are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes. Then, as you say, liberates free cash that they haven't had to work for. They've just not sent it to to the Treasury, which I think most of us are feeling a little bit difficult with at the minute, just as the tax rates seem to be going so high. Scott, you've obviously built a way, a methodology for yourself as an entrepreneur. How have you then spread the word? Because it's great to have your own understanding and build your own wealth, but you're very generously sharing that. How are you getting the word out and how have you been getting noticed for what you're doing?

Yeah, primarily it's podcasting. And then it's something that we call video sales letters that are about 30 minutes long. So the work that I do is pretty— it's not difficult, right? And it's not complicated, but there are moving parts. And a lot of times, what we find is that people have never really gotten educated on how these things really work. They think it's like some mystery. I said, well, great. We'll go into the vault. You can start to study. You'll see that it's not mysterious. But what we did is through podcasting and then producing like these 30-minute videos that we'll put some advertising behind, we find that that amount of education is enough to be able to explain to somebody like, here's how you become the CEO of your wealth-building company. Here's all of the legal, all of the estate planning, all of the tax planning. the fractional CFO to plan for your cash flow? How do you need to optimize your portfolio? What kinds of investments do you need next to be able to get to your goals? That all that's there and you need long-form content with this kind of stuff.

So it sounds as though, Scott, it is an education-led strategy that you're fulfilling. Would that be fair sort of way to position it?

Yeah, of course.

Yeah. Okay. And you mentioned there about Podcasts. Why podcasts, Scott, when one might have thought you would benefit from, if you like, YouTube, or from, say, placing articles in magazines and newsletters?

Most of the time with the work that I do, I'm looking for podcast hosts to work with that are struggling with the problem that I solve. Because I work with money and investing and taxes, most everybody that I talk to in this field is also struggling with those same things because podcast hosts are just people that are trying to invest and become financially free like everyone else. And so then the conversation typically turns about like what's going on with them. And then I'll say like, and so then it becomes a really good conversation because most of the time what we really want to hear, my experience, is a real conversation. We want to hear somebody that's actually struggling with a real problem, asking the real questions about, well, how would I implement that? What is that going to do? And that gives it like a real sense of authenticity instead of just book learning. And so that's what I like to do.

Oh, so that's interesting. So you've identified me as someone that's obviously plainly struggling to make my podcast into a into an asset, uh, which I think so many of us are trying to do, is to, is to find out how to monetize the time we spend. But also, we're on a mission to find good entrepreneurs to, to share our stories with, which is fantastic. So what, what would be an obstacle then, Scott, in terms of seeing a podcast as a conversation but then also making that into, let's face it, something of a, of a funnel from a marketing point of view?

So it's 2 things that I think if you can be successful at really are here, right? So for this podcast, for example, right? And we come in here. I also have like affiliate offers that come in and says, great, if we can partner together in a way, then I can create things that are gonna be really valuable to you and your audience that allows podcasters to do something which is really difficult called monetize their channel, right? And says, great, can we do that in a way that says, That it helps the audience, that there's really high education that's given away for free, and that there's a monetization event. And I find that this is really the magic of being able to form strong relationships with people that have groups of people that they influence, right? Can you really fundamentally help the community by giving away a ton of stuff for free, right? To be able to really impact their lives. Can you understand where they're coming from and challenges that they're having? And can you provide them an opportunity where we share in those wealth of being able to help this group of people that they influence at a deeper level. So that way everybody is, is winning. The audience is winning, Royal Eagle is winning, podcast host is winning. And this is what it really takes if you want to have a viral or a sticky marketing plan, is that it's not just a one-off statement or a slogan. It's finding a way that everybody is gonna be able to win.

Scott, that is absolutely music to my ears. So are you saying that you've got an affiliate program or you've got some kind of an offer then for the Unnoticed entrepreneur for my community?

Yeah. No, yeah. Like that'll be like part of it really simple, right? And it'll be like a link that we'll have there that'll give everybody free access into the vault. So they get all of these like ebooks and education for free that would otherwise cost thousands of dollars. And that, and we say, great, Jim, do you wanna, do you wanna be an affiliate? And anybody that clicks that link and gets stored as a contact in our database, if they end up buying stuff from us, you know, the podcast gets monetized as part of your podcast efforts, marketing efforts, right?

So Scott, I think you've raised There's a couple of really interesting points. One is, as a podcaster, I appreciate the opportunity to offer something to my community. They get something for free, which otherwise they'd pay for. They're getting a unique gift. I get to offer my community something that they couldn't get from somewhere else, which helps reward them for their loyalty. And then you're also getting access to people that are interested and prequalified that are coming to you from the show.

Yeah.

What you're also doing is articulating a channel strategy as well, Scott, isn't it? So the affiliate program is a bit of a channel strategy. Are there other platforms as well that you're using as well as the podcasts to, if you like, go to different communities and dive into new networks?

Sure, not everybody has a podcast, right? But there's a lot of groups out there that will say talk about wealth, right? And so then we'll go ahead and we'll approach those groups. And then what we'll do for them is do like coaching sessions. Like, great, well, have me in front of your group once every 3 months and I'll talk to 'em about whatever the group needs to hear about. If they're interested in estate planning that quarter or asset protection and corporate structure, if they're interested in taxation or like what kinds of investments that are out there that are giving people 30-plus percent yearly returns in real estate, like what do they want to know about? Right. And so then it's this way of just being able to drip in education. It's not explosive, like in the short term, but it gives you like a steady piece of it. Because some— only 10% of the people are going to be buy ready at the time that they hear the message. But there's another 40 to 50% of that chunk of people that will be buyers, but just need more time. It's like a timing issue, a credibility issue, a trust issue. And what I find is that if you're going to work in high ticket, Offers that what you really need to be good at is giving away a ton of stuff for free, and always just saying, "Great, I actually will give you everything for free besides where I actually turn the wrenches for you." Right? And then that's the piece that those are the people that are your actual buyers anyway. It's because they don't want to turn the wrenches. The other people were never going to buy from you to begin with, and and it's in this way they're able to build deep relationships over a long period of time. Because remember, the goal isn't to get rich. quick. It's to build wealth, to get to freedom, to make sure you always have gas in the car. And that's why you think long-term in relationships because there actually is no out. Like, and that's what I try to tell people. You think that there's going to be a thing you're going to do that like, I'm going to build this business and I'm going to sell it and I'm going to have all this money and then be like, but then you're going to have another problem, which is how do I manage this money? And then it's going to require you to have relationships again to help have people helping you manage the money. So you're never out of the relational game ever. There is no such thing.

You know, that's in a way reassuring, isn't it? Because if you take the pressure off yourself that it's not about getting rich quick, it's about building wealth over time, you could take a lot of pressure off yourself in terms of trying to rush. But also listening to you, Scott, it's clear that this sort of education and serve-first strategy has enabled you to build a very successful and grounded business. As well. Out of interest, how many podcasts would you aim to be on per year, or have you done in the last 3, 4 years?

Yeah, so I think I did my first podcast, BiggerPockets 109, in 2015, which actually launched the major push where I realized that, oh my God, everybody really wants the stuff that I'm doing for myself. And I just went on there to share. I think now I do about maybe about 100 podcasts a year of all different sorts. I find that podcasting is really essential for a few different reasons, really. It really comes down to one, it's a great way to be able to connect with the audience through somebody that they trust, which is the podcast host, which is essential to being able to develop the right kinds of relationships for high-ticket complex offers. Also, what it does is it gives me the ability as I talk to people that are coming in to be able to say, well, what lights them up? What are they really interested in? And then oftentimes those are the same messages that I'll repeat on the podcast. I'll say, yeah, this is actually what people— this is the way to say that thing that they will then resonate with and understand what it is. And then I'll learn from them by talking to them. And then I repeat that onto the podcast and then it turns into its own beautiful cycle. And sometimes the host will offer new ideas or new ways of saying things. And I'm like, wow, that's better than anything I ever thought of. And then I get to learn from other people about how to do that. So I really think podcasting is absolutely essential to anybody's marketing plan, especially if you're an early-stage entrepreneurial cycle.

Well, Scott, obviously being a podcast host, I— that's music to my ears, uh, and, and I'm here to try and help connect people like you that have got solutions with my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs who are looking for them. So as you say, we, we're all getting something positive and constructive out of this. You've built a business in what seems to be a very sort of textbook way, with a lot of hard work, a lot of service, a lot of great value. I have to ask this without meaning to be cheeky, uh, Scott, about any that you've made or a mistake from a marketing point of view that you would suggest, you know, people don't try themselves?

Yeah, so the mistake that I thought was, I was like, oh, well, I'll start doing like launching a bunch of ads, you know, to be able to drive traffic. And what I found out was that ad traffic actually, it's just a totally different person. Like they literally have only spent 3 seconds To be on, on the relationship before they came in to like take a call. And I was like, oh, you're actually not invested enough in this relationship yet. So I was like, oh, okay, great. So I actually found out that it was, it was a totally different thing to buy somebody who was like, oh no, I've listened to you on a podcast. I've listened to some other podcasts that you've been on. I went into the vault. I started studying some of the materials to get familiarized with it. I watched the video that was on the homepage. And I've done all of this work to really study and understand what it really is before we ended up having the opportunity to connect. And so that's a bunch of money and a bunch of time that just ends up getting flushed down the toilet because you're like, oh, it's not about just raw numbers sometimes. It's actually about the quality of the conversation, the quality of the people. And I find that's best through podcasting and these other channels.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I've had so many guests on the show say that Facebook and other ads that they've done have not been a good ROI. Somebody somewhere is getting an ROI because people keep buying those ads. But for entrepreneurs, by and large, especially in our sort of startup to mid-journey, direct engagement, and as you say, have a conversation. But also what you've been talking about is listening. To the conversations from your customers, but also on the podcast and learning at the same time, which you don't get with ads, right? Because it's just pay to display.

That's right. The game in early and mid-stage entrepreneurialism is you're launching a product and then you're continually pushing to market to be able to, of course, generate more additional leads. And a lot of mistakes people make is that they try to get out of the conversations with the customers. And it's very important that you actually stay in conversation with the customers. as well as inside of what your marketing channel is, because that is really the golden ticket that tells you what is the product that you're really developing for the market that you're actually going into. And the market that you're going into might not be the market you came from, and these people might think differently, they might have different value systems, might have different things that resonate with them.

Yeah, and it's amazing, as you say, how often people kind of are so busy building that they're not spending the time engaging with, with their potential customers or their existing ones for repeat business. Scott, Scott Royal-Smith, and you started this company called Royal Legal Solutions. If there's one tip that you'd like to give to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs— we've talked about podcasting, which, thank you, and I'm grateful because as a host I'm delighted to hear that it's a platform that delivers so much value— but Is there one other tip that you'd like to give for my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs when it comes to getting noticed?

Yeah, I mean, I think it really, the deal is, is that I find that in life we're actually only able to reach for the things that we feel safe to be able to reach for. And the reason that I focus so much upon wealth and say like, it's never too early to start taking action steps to start building wealth is because wealth is like a safety net. And when you can build and incrementally build your safety net in place, what that also frees you to do is to take bigger and bigger steps for yourself about reaching out. It's like, what is your true message? What is the thing that you really want to reach for? What is the thing that actually lights you on fire that other people might think you're silly for? And when you can get ahold of like that truth that's inside of you that burns that brightly, and if you don't have that yet, then it's a great thing to work on because we all have it. You just need to uncover what it is. Then your message will be so strong that people won't be able to help but notice you because it'll resonate with a depth of truth that everybody else that shares that truth will say, I have to go be with that person and do what they're doing.

Scott, what a beautiful, beautiful answer. Turning away from your wisdom, which is extensive, although you've only started the company back in 2014, I think, so still relatively young. As a business, if you've got a book or a podcast that I could ask you to share that you'd recommend, what would that be?

Yeah, so it's the things that I've found that are most essential. So I have a podcast called The Real Estate Nerds where I talk about people about their best and worst deals and what they did or didn't do that led them there. This is where you can get to see like, what is it actually like to be in the shoes of somebody, the psychology, kind of go deep with them about like what's actually happening inside of them and their thinking. And their emotions and whatnot that actually makes them have good deals. It actually turns out it's totally predictable whether you're going to have a good deal or a bad deal has actually nothing to do with the deal. You can actually know it by what's happening with you when you're getting into the deal and will actually tell you whether— how's this going to turn out? So my podcast is a great place to start if you're interested in this kind of mindset framing. I also wrote a book called No Bull Leadership, and that's the leadership skills that I've learned over the years that allowed me to be able to construct the types of teams that allow me to go do things like, can I go live for a few months at a time with the Yawanawa people in the Amazon and be totally off the grid and know that the company and all the customers will be taken care of? Well, that comes from having a lot of mistakes in leadership to say, here's actually how real leadership works. It takes more time. It takes years to be able to groom the right people. You can't just hire people. to work in your company and actually have them lead it while you're away. So I would say that's a great place to start is either through the Vault on Royal Legal Solutions, my podcast, Real Estate Nerds, or my book, Noble Leadership, depending upon what challenges you're facing right now.

Scott Royal Smith, if you want to find out about you or connect with you, where can they go?

Yeah, best thing to do is just to connect with us through the website. If you go to royalegalsolutions.com, sign up for the vault, you'll start getting, you'll get added to the list to be able to get updates for everything I'm doing on Instagram, any speaking that I'm doing, all of the group coaching that we offer every single week for free, any new information that we're pushing out. And that's really our best channel is if you're okay on email, then I'll get you into the Instagrams and to everything else that's going on.

Great. And Scott, presumably if people say they've come from the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Then they will get a big smile and maybe an extra moment with you through a phone call.

That's right. Yeah. Everybody that comes from this, from the show will actually get freebies for free bonus education materials, as well as some of my videos that are about entrepreneurialism and how do you combine that with wealth-building skills.

Very, very generous as I've come to expect from you. Scott Rossmith, thank you for joining me on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur today. Thank you so much.

Yeah, great to be here. Thank you so much.

Well, wonderful to hear Scott Royal-Smith, and his business again is Scott— is Royal— sorry, his business is— I made a mess there— is royalleagalsolutions.com. So we've been all the way to Utah and just outside Zion National Park, which is absolutely beautiful. And one of the wonderful things I've really been getting from Scott today is one is The power of podcasts, because, you know, I'm a passionate believer. I've interviewed over 350 entrepreneurs. I've learned a lot, but hopefully you've learned a lot from listening to these interviews. If you have, do please review the show and follow the show because it really helps if I know that you're reviewing and liking the show, but it also helps the algorithms to know that you're enjoying the show. So big takeaway from Scott today, probably for me, is really about the need to Educate. So if you educate to serve your community, they will eventually need to come and see you because they will have bought into you and trust you. And that's a wonderful way that podcasts can serve. So thank you so much for joining me, Jim James, on this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating.