904. The Government Is Stuffing Your Pockets! Here's How With ERC Specialists

This program is one of the few triple wins out there. It's a win for a company like us because we can offer a product without charging anything up front. And that product, if you want to call it that, is, as you mentioned, Chris, free money. We can't really say that. So it is a tax credit and we can help them obtain that or qualify for it or see if they qualify for it. And the government too is trying to get money out into the system and all the benefits of that program. And so it is a win, win, win.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. If you are a business owner, you don't want to miss this. This could be a massive opportunity for you to get cash back in your pockets. This blew our mind. Chris and I interviewed these guys who I'm going to tell you about in one second and we found out that we are also eligible for cash back. So you guys are not going to want to miss this because today we have Sullivan and Josh Zaglowski on the show. Mark is the CEO of ERC Specialist. Josh is the co founder and CBDO. Mark has more than 20 years of experience building and scaling profitable companies. When Mark heard about ERC Specialists, he immediately saw the opportunity to help thousands of business owners recover from the pandemic. And he answered the call to lead the company as CEO. And I can tell you that even with my company, we really took a hit during the pandemic with long delays, nobody going to work at manufacturing and co packing and really having to sit and keep employees on or let go of people. You guys, it was a very challenging time for anyone who had a business. Josh has been an entrepreneur for almost 20 years. His primary focus is investing in residential and commercial real estate. His key expertise includes asset and portfolio management, broker relationship, investor and client relations, banking relations, economic and demographic trends, market analysis, due diligence, oversight, financing oversight, acquisition and disposition strategies, transaction oversight and business development. And all I can say is I didn't even know that this program was available. So you guys listen to the podcast in its entirety, make sure that you go check everything out and you'll be able to see if you're eligible as well. And you'll be directed to exactly where to go. So let's get started on the show.

All right, Mark, Josh, thanks for taking the time to be on the show. How are you guys doing?

We're doing fantastic, Doing great.

Thanks for having us on.

We are so excited to have you on. And you guys, you are getting a 2 for 1 today on earn your Happy and on The Chris Harder Show. So we heard about what you guys were doing, and we were just really excited to chat and ask all of the questions that we can and fill in our audience on some things that could potentially be really amazing for them.

Yeah, I mean, the truth is, you know, Lori and I like to think we know what's going on when it comes to business and opportunities, and we had no idea. And I really want to stress this. We have an incredible accounting team, and we still had no idea that we qualified for this ERC tax credit and how large it actually could be. And I feel like nobody's talking about this thing, and I don't understand why. And so we thought it might be a really cool opportunity because we have so many entrepreneurs in our audience to bring this out into the open and talk about this. I guess, jokingly, I almost want to call it free money, but legal has.

Said not to use that on our. But if you. If you want to say that it might be close to what this is.

That's wild.

Okay, well, let's start with this.

Let's go right for the goods. What in the world is the ERC tax credit?

It was basically started because there was another Covid relief fund, PPP and Eidl started in the pandemic. Technically, ERC started the exact same time as ppp, but you couldn't get one or the other. Then President Biden amended it, made what's called under the CARES act, the American Rescue Plan act of 2021, to make it so business owners can now receive this. And it's just another stimulus. I mean, even for me, I found this opportunity because I was actually trying to help one of my other oil companies with stimulus, because I don't know if you remember, but price per barrel of oil in 2020 was negative. $30 a barrel.

Yeah.

Insane.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, yeah. So if someone is hearing what this is for the first time, it's an acronym. ERC stands for Employee Retention Tax Credit. But there's a few things that are wrong about that you did not need to have retained employees, and it's not on taxes that you paid. It is a tax credit, meaning we're filing a tax document. But to summarize what ERC is, it is a refund to the business owner or to the business so that our audience that we're talking to are business owners. It's a refund on the W2 wages that you paid as an employer. So if you paid $40,000 in a particular quarter for your business, this credit might be 70% of that 28 grand back to you.

Wow. And that's just for a quarter. You get to add a bunch of quarters together.

Well, so it is $26,000 max per employee. So you have 10 employees. We're talking about 250 grand potentially as a credit. And I say potentially. Our average credit in that scenario is, is like 160 to 170,000. We don't always get to the max because there's a few factors, but this is a substantial credit.

That's funny, you mentioned 160. I had no idea that was the average. I went through the line of questioning, Right. There's really easy pre qual anonymous questioning that people can go through. Matter of fact, we should give them that website real quick. If you guys want to run through that, you can go to fast erce experts. That's experts with an S on the end. Fast ercexperts.com I went through the questions there, and after going a little bit further, I realized I qualify for probably around $160,000. So I am literally Mr. Average in the calculation of who you guys are helping.

Yeah. And another thing that I think is important because people compare this to PPP because it was in the same legislation, and with ppp, you needed to ask for forgiveness, you needed to use it for only certain things. This is wide open. You can use it for whatever you want. Business owners aren't expecting this. So in most cases, it goes to their bottom line and it goes right back to the business owner. It can help employees, it can keep them afloat. I mean, there's many things that you can do for it and you don't have to ask for forgiveness. This is truly a credit. The best out there from the government.

I think that's where a lot of people might get confused is most people knew what PPP was. Right. Payment Protection Program. And that was basically a loan you were getting that maybe got forgiven later. And then there was the Eidl, which the SBA put out. And that was a loan that does not get forgiven. It's just a low interest loan. This is a straight tax credit. And it kind of leads to the next question. This is not something that runs out of money the way PPP ran out of money and the way Eidl ran out of money. This tax credit is an infinite amount of money. Is that right?

Until the Federal Reserve can't write checks anymore and have them clear.

Yeah, that's a whole nother podcast right there.

Yeah, that's a whole nother thing. So yes, you're correct. There's no finite amount of money for this. As many businesses qualify, they'll actually write the credit for it. This is a tax law that's already passed, so the program has ended. So what we're doing is actually amending payroll tax very quickly because you mentioned no one knows about this. The reason for that, I think it's important for a business owner who's very savvy and is kind of wondering, is this a scam or what is this? To understand why no one knows about this. When this first came out, as Josh mentioned, you cannot do both. Then it was opened up, but it was still very vague. How do you even qualify for it? And then the IRS actually said, hey, here's a few things that make it very clear how to qualify for it. And. And then they thought it was going to be wide open. But the fact of the matter is, this is a payroll tax, and CPAs don't deal with payroll taxes. They don't deal with those forms. It's a 941x form that we're dealing with. They've never filled that out. So I think what you were alluding to is why hasn't my CPA told me about this? We deal with national CPA firms because they don't want to deal with it. It's not worth their time to deal with. It's a very busy work tax credit with the ppp. It didn't deal with accountants, but who was incentivized. It had to go through a lender. This doesn't go through any infrastructure that's existing that is already in place for them to take advantage of it. It's just a tax file. And your cpa, who typically takes care of that, isn't doing it. That's why no one knows about it.

That's. You know, I opened the show by saying, we've got a great accounting team. We love them. They bring incredible tax planning to the table, and they didn't bring this whatsoever. And I was like, what in the world? So that actually makes a little bit of sense. So should somebody go running to their tax accountant to apply for this, or is it easier to go through someone like you who's a specialist in just this one thing?

Well, fast. ERC experts, obviously, is the website. We've done at this point, $1.5 billion in filed credits. We've helped thousands of businesses. At the end of this will probably be the largest specialty tax service with erc. So there's a few reasons why someone wants to Go with us. This is a new credit and it's wide open and unknown. So we've taken it very seriously. We can go into all the details of what we've done to make sure that a company can go in and feel good about getting substantiated, getting qualification, and actually getting the credit. At the end of the day, they can definitely go to their cpa. But what will probably happen at this point, their CPA will acknowledge that this does exist, but that they don't do anything with it.

Yeah, they would have already mentioned it to them if they would do it. And I think, like, what you're asking about with the specialists and stuff, it reminds me of. Just because my friend's an attorney, if I'm going through a divorce, I don't just use him. I want to use a specialty divorce attorney. And that's really where. Because there's like this weird gray area. Who can help me with this? Well, the cpa. Majority of them are doing payroll. Okay, well then talk to payroll companies. Majority of them aren't amending this. They're doing active payroll each and every quarter. So it's like, okay, well then who can help me?

Yeah, so if you're a business owner and you're thinking, okay, this is a payroll form 941, well, who does that? At my company, it's typically a software program, QuickBooks, ADP Gusto. There's 80 different software programs that will automatically file that without you even knowing. But there's not a lot of people behind that, especially an infrastructure to do a manual credit like this. We deal with a lot of those types of companies, too, that don't have the infrastructure to support this credit.

What was the intent? Why do they offer all of this money?

Well, that might be a political question. My personal feeling about that is it is meant to prop up the economy when money needed to be poured in. We're dealing with the opposite effect right now, where they're trying to shrink it with inflation. But this is already tax law. You have two and a half years from when the three years when the 941 was originally filed to be able to amend it. But you do want to get in the door quick because there is a chance that they could amend it and do away with it, and they are getting backlogged. So you want to. If you feel like as a business owner you want to pursue this and look at it, you can go through the website, go through the questions. No obligation. We never ask for credit card payment information. We'll go all the way through up until finally in the credit. Before we even talk about that and we do charge a percentage of the credit. Nothing up front.

What's really interesting is, you know, I did a lot of research into this. People don't need to worry about their credit score. They don't need to worry about if they qualify from like a lending standpoint. They don't have to do anything other than have employees while we were all dealing with the garbage of COVID And if you did, then there's answer a few questions that you're likely going to have qualified for this. Is that a fair statement?

Very fair.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what about a newer company like mine where I was not launched but I was in business and you know, I got super delayed. I thought I was going to be launching last year, but due to just manufacturing and Covid and all of the things, I really was on complete hold while still holding on to my employees.

Kind of like ppp, you had to have your business before a certain timeframe. Right. And so a lot of people were like, oh dang, I don't qualify. Well, they made this where if you are before a certain time and our survey questions, our questionnaire that you talked about, Chris, goes through that.

Yeah.

The date is February 15, 2020.

Yeah. If you start a business after that at the end of 2020 in the first part of 21, whatever it is, they have a startup credit that's part of it. And based on your questions, our system will tell you, hey, you do qualify for the startup credit that the ERC added for this.

It's really interesting for your audience. Maybe this might be where they gravitate towards erc. Everything we've talked about up until this point, with the exception of the startup credit does have qualifications to it. And Generally speaking, maybe 60 to 70% of businesses qualify for it. Not everybody. On the other hand, with a startup credit there are no limitations in qualification other than a top line revenue. You can't make more than a million dollars in a year after you started this business. But as long as that doesn't apply to you, then you can get a refund. You're already medically qualified at that point. A refund on W2 wages that you paid and it goes up to $100,000.

Wow.

Wow.

Okay.

70% of the wages, payroll, W2 wages that you paid out up to $100,000. It's almost that simple.

I sometimes call it a rebate. Yeah.

So that's incredible. You know, it makes sense. Why? Because it's called the erc, the employee retention credit. It makes sense why, if you had been in business before the pandemic, you're getting a credit per employee. But companies like lorries, beverage company, supply chain issues, hasn't made a penny yet, has been burning money the entire time due to not being able to launch due to supply issues. Started after the pandemic. The fact that they still qualify, those are the companies that need this the most. So it's awesome that both sets of individuals qualify.

Yeah. And you asked the question earlier about why did they come up with this? Mark gave his opinion. The one thing that I've kind of noticed because I kind of thought, why did they start something like this? Well, now that a lot of companies have been receiving their checks the last few months, I've been getting calls from those clients saying, oh, yeah, well, I'm going to start another division within my company now because I now I have this extra money. So seeing that stimulus and added to our economy, that's, I think one of the, obviously the reasons why they did start this, something like this.

Yeah. And coming back to it, when I said it's political, that's the political, I think answer is of course to help the employees, of course, to help businesses, of course, for business expansion. I kind of think sometimes a little bit more, you know, the underlining reasons for it. And that is they need to get billions of dollars flooded out into the economy or else the bubble bursts anyways. But it's both of those, right? It's a win. This program is one of the few triple wins out there. It's a win for a company like us because we can offer a product without charging anything up front. And that product, if you want to call it that, is, as you mentioned, Chris, free money. We can't really say that. So it is a tax credit and we can help them obtain that or qualify for it or see if they qualify for it. And the government, too, is trying to get money out into the system and all the benefits of that program. And so it is a win, win, win all around.

People, you know, they might hear this and think, oh, too good to be true. You can literally go onto the IRS website and search ERC tax credit and it's all there. Like literally the 10 trillion words explaining who qualifies and how and all that is there now. It's convoluted and hard to understand, but you can go there for yourself and totally understand that, oh my God, this is a real thing. Nobody was talking about it. And I think, didn't they recently bump up the amount. Wasn't it a tiny amount at first nobody cared to talk about it. Now it's much larger.

Yeah, the steps to it is it started out in just 2020 credit which was up to 5,000 per employee. And then with the American Rescue Plan act, they opened it up to 2021, which at one point was an additional 28,000 7,000 per quarter. So that was a total of 33,000 per employee. With the infrastructure bill in November of 2021, they were actually faced with the decision. They said no one is doing this or knows about it. Do we fund it with more education and actually educate businesses owners or do we just scrap it? And they decided to scrap it, which at that point they were able to get rid of Q4. So that brought it actually down from 33 to 26. But it doesn't mean that a business owner can't participate. You do have some time to be able to amend what has already taken place and participate in this.

Yeah, it's super cool. Like I said, I went through the qualifications and figured out for one of our companies we'll get about $160,000 in money back, which is a significant amount of money. Now we just learned that you with your company because of supply chain issues, you're going to get something back. Who knows? We have to go. It's huge for launching. Right. So people would be silly not to go check this out again. If they want to go check it out, they can go to fast ercexperts.com so talk to me real quick here as we start to put a bow on this thing. Why are the two of you guys doing this? Why did you make a company of it? I know you have other successful companies. Are you just like bleeding hearts, want to help everybody or is, you know, is one hand wash the other? What's the why behind this?

Kind of like what I was saying about having that oil company. I mean my background's commercial real estate and I was just trying to find extra stimulus because no one could help me. Number one, like I used to tell people for the first six months of this company, the first thing I'm going to try to do right now is convince you that this is not too good to be true. I used to say that that was my opening line because myself when I was trying to find this program and someone could help me, I even told myself this is too good to be true. Like there's no way that this is legit because we're able to form a company that Way we then saw, like, there's a lot of business owners out here that don't know about this. Let's make a company out of it. And you know, you talk about supply chain. That wasn't even one of the amendments. The questions when we first started it was, you had to have a 20% revenue loss and you had to have a shutdown in 2020 and under 500 employees. Right. So because there's been so many amendments, and I say that also because as this has gotten bigger, like bigger as in, I should say longer. November 21, it was amended again, like Mark was saying, with the infrastructure bill. So people may have looked at this before, their tax person may have looked at this and said, you don't qualify. Well, it's been changed so many times that they could qualify. I mean, Forbes did an article, what, six, eight weeks ago that 70 80% of businesses under 500 employees qualify for this.

Wow.

Yet seven out of 10 business owners, in my opinion, don't know about it.

I'd say nine out of ten. I have so many entrepreneur friends. Nobody's talked about this. Nobody.

No. And so. And it's easy to get validation. Like you said, you can go to irs.gov, you can look it up, you can talk to your CPA. CPAs for the most part, know about it. They just don't know where to get started. We do all of that. That's what our service is, is to make it super simple to get qualified, to know which documents to upload for us to calculate the credit to the penny, maximize the credit, because there's several factors there, and then actually file for it. And then if there's ever communication with the irs, taking care of that as well. You asked why we did this. I think that for me, has evolved a little bit. I'm an entrepreneur, just like your audience. And so I've started different businesses. Some have been wildly successful, a lot of failures. This was one of those. This was a need that needed to be met. So I think that was the onset of why I wanted to do this. But something happened like a week or two ago. I don't know if I even told you this, but someone paid us our fee, which is a percentage. So because this is a large credit, can be substantial. I've never had anyone write several thousand dollar check. And in the memoir, thank you. Wow. Like, they were very grateful to pay us several thousand dollars for our fee because they were getting 100 and something grand. So that really just defined what this is doing for people. They are truly grateful and not to toot Josh's horn because he was the one. He's the founder of this. Without him, we've been able to help tens of thousands of businesses. And I think through your podcast you're going to be able to help thousands of businesses as well. Without that, as an advocate, like you said, they wouldn't know about this. So you can have a substantial effect to a business owner.

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It's not being talked about my circle, my circle is highly entrepreneurial. What about yours? Have you ever heard of this?

No. And it's needed. I mean I keep hearing about how obviously things are going up, ads are going up in order to get eyes on you, visuals, things like that. That's going up. I mean this could make a really big impact. I know just personally in my business, I know exactly what I can use it for. So I'm sure people listening know exactly what they could use it for. But no, it's not being talked about.

So let's talk about a couple of fear points to put a bow on this thing. Do people owe you any money to find out or is it until they're getting money they're not paying a single penny?

Yeah, that's also coming back to too good to be true. When we saw that that possibility with business owners too, we decided like rather than having payment upfront and because IRS does take six to eight months to send this money out, let's go ahead and just do the filing for free. Not for free, but no money upfront and we'll get paid a percentage on whatever they get when they get the money.

That's cool.

Yeah. So that way business owners was more open to that. Like, oh, I'll definitely do that.

Yeah. And so there's a few steps. So the first step would be going to the website. Going through the questionnaire takes as little as 10 minutes is the average time it takes. That gives us the information to know what quarters they do qualify for. And then the next step is a little bit of work. And the only work on the business owner and that is uploading some documents, like a 941 employee reports. It takes 10 minutes, but for whatever reason, that's the only step that some people just hit a brick wall.

Yeah, right.

And then we go to work and take all that information. It's a busy work calculation. Formulate the credit all the way up until that point, if the business owner wants to walk away, they've never been even asked for a dime.

That's incredible. I love the idea that there's no money paid until they're actually getting their money back. That's. That's the way it should be. That's how you know something super awesome. Legit. I love the way you guys set it up that way. My. I urge everybody, like, don't get to the questionnaire. Go to fast ercexperts.com there's an easy questionnaire. Don't get there and be like, oh, I don't want to do the 10 minutes of questions. Right. Don't be lazy. Go through the 10 minutes of questions. Then whatever paperwork it tells you to upload. It's just another 10 minutes. Email your accountant and say, hey, do you have these forms for me? And then. Or your bookkeeper, hey, do you have these forms for me? Upload them. And after that 10 minutes, your work is basically done. As the entrepreneur now it's in your guy's lap, right?

Yeah. I think that's the highest hourly rate you'll ever earn as a business.

Ever. Ever.

At least that's legal.

Yeah.

I love it, guys. Thank you for doing this. Thanks for being on the show means the world that, you know, you're willing to spend the time educating everybody. And hey, this is out there. Otherwise we wouldn't hear about it. You're not leaving it up to chance that it just falls into someone's lap. You're being real advocates of this, and of course you're going to make a profit from doing it. And I applaud that. And that's why we're excited to help you get the message out there. So everyone listening, go to fastercexperts.com Like I said, we found out we're getting a windfall from it. Now we found out Lori's business will probably get a windfall from it. On top of that, it's 10 minutes to fill out the questionnaire, 10 minutes to upload some documents. Don't be lazy because that's the best wage you're ever going to get in your life per hour. I love how you said that. But, guys, it means the world that you're rolling up your sleeves and making it easy for everybody.

Yeah. Thank you guys so much for coming on and sharing. And I'm so excited that you are just out in the world making sure that everybody knows about it.

Oh, you guys are helping with that. Lori, Chris, thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it.

Our pleasure, guys. So, everybody listening, here's your chance. Go to Faster again. Go to fastercexperts.com. fill out the quick questionnaire, find out what you're going to get, and you.

Can thank us later.

Thanks for listening. We appreciate you.