Episode 38: Gamification and Taxes with Adam Hollander and Tom Wheelwright

Live but not live.

Live but not live. Yeah, we're gonna go mute a few seconds. Sorry.

Live on mute.

Okay. There's a kid laughter.

From the studios of Fractal Recording for the last time ever.

Ever. Last time ever recorded in the studio. It's a little bit sad in this space. Oh, yeah, no, the show's gonna continue. Yeah. But this is the last time in this space that we're gonna be recording this episode. And this episode is number 38, the profit first podcast. Bring it.

O. Oh, geez.

Oh, we can do all the vowels. A, E, I, O, U.

That's just me punching you.

That's like a weird version of the Ramones. What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Profit first podcast. I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowitz, the author of Profit First. And we started this podcast specifically to talk about profitability. Everything you need to know about driving your business profits. And we talk about from every angle. Today's episode's gonna be very cool. Everything from GAM education and marketing to tax free wealth. Everything under the sun.

That's right.

And I'm joined by my favorite friend right here.

Put your profit in your pocket.

Nice with the visual too.

I love it. You did a little dance with that one today. That was good.

So we're available on itunes and Stitcher and Tune in radio and Profit first podcast dot com. Yeah, that's the website. All our episodes, all our great guests, which Christina helps books.

Yeah.

Right.

Schedule. We then put the episode up on there for y' all listen to.

Right? Great content.

Yeah. And you know what's cool about our podcast is Christina goes through the entire episode like she'll do with this episode, documents all the stuff that Tom and Adam are sharing with us, and then adds it to the podcast. It's not a. What they call that itinerary, dictation of everything.

Oh, transcription.

It's not a transcription. It's the highlights of the show. So you can read along with the different highlights that you're learning.

It's awesome. Go check it out.

Yeah. Coolest podcast on the planet.

How you been, man?

Dude, my anniversary.

Really?

Yeah.

How many years?

18 years. 18 years. 18 years, yep. The reason I started saying 17 is I always think of my daughter's age. She's 17. And it was one year before that we got married. Oh, yeah. So we had our daughter right after that. That's better. Right after.

Yeah.

Yeah. So we're going to. We went to this Badass steakhouse called the Strip House, which is a New York steakhouse. The number one rated in some magazines. Peter Luger's is number one in others. You know, everyone has their number. Sparks.

Chris, Bruce, Chris.

Yeah, everyone's. So according to the Strip House magazine, the Strip House is the number one. But they have a killer lobster bisque, if you like that.

Okay.

I threw a look at Christina. Say something.

I hate lobster.

Silence for the drama.

Threw open her own mouth. What have you been up to? About.

So I've had a beard for the last over 10 years.

I can see it's crazy.

And I recently shaved it off. So I'm clean faced. And my wife's like, who are you? She said I looked like a plucked chicken.

Oh.

So I actually had to go get pictures taken of me because every picture.

For the last 12 years, nobody recognizes you.

What compelled you to shave yourself?

I don't know. I just thought it was time for a change. Well, also, my beard was getting very white. I mean, I'm 43 years old, but my beard was getting really white. And I'm not gonna dye it. I'm. I'm not one of those kind of people. It is what it is.

I don't do that stuff like tidings bullshit.

Well, change is good. That's why women dye their hair. I was blonde for a while.

Oh, were you really?

Oh, yeah. Blonde.

So this is your natural color?

This is my natural color.

I like that color. I like that color.

Thank you. And I did red for a while too, so sometimes you gotta switch it up.

I actually saw there's a picture in the office of you with red when you're singing.

I think, oh, yeah. One of my characters.

That looks good.

Nice.

So what's it feel like to have a freshly shorn chin?

It's good. I looked weird for two weeks. I looked in the mirror and I'm like, what?

I remember, first time I saw it.

Weirdo staring at me.

I remember coming in here, first time, like, is Chris here? I'm looking at you. I'm Chris. I'm like, you're his twin. His evil beardless twin. You know, we have some cool guests coming up.

I know.

We're going to. He said, bring energy, dude. I know. Bring it. Adam and Hollander of fancy sales teams coming to join the show. And then right after him, Tom Wheelwright, your boy who wrote. Who wrote Tax Free Wealth. And we're gonna sing them in Christina, so be prepared.

Okay.

Yeah.

So you have their intro lines right there. So I want you to sing the first line for both of them. Yeah, you do. You're the one who wrote this. Okay, okay. But before we do that, someone needs to be. Before we do that, a quick shout out to our sponsors. The people that fund this show include Fundera. We did not have to take a business loan from them. They actually wrote us a check to support this. They're a great corporate sponsor. If you listen to a few episodes back, we even had Jared Hecht from Fundera join us.

That was cool.

If you listen to many episodes back, you'll go back to the Matt Days. Matt Rissel days. He is the founder of tsheets.

That's right.

Company we love. And then nextiva, we're trying to get Tom on board from nextiva. He's the president. Nextiva is such a large company. He is going to stock exchange meetings and all this stuff. He is struggling to. We may have him pinned down while I'm at New Orleans doing the Sage Summit. He's supposed to get down there. We may try to do a remote show somehow.

Awesome.

Yeah. And next to you, of course, the VoiceOver IP phone system. All right, let's get down to business.

Business.

Taking care of business.

So here's the deal. You've heard about the technology and the talks about gamification. That's where you make your business engage people in your business by having a feeling of games. That's where you're marketing or you're rewarding people through this kind of game mentality points and so forth. You can drive profit with gamification. Did you know that?

What a fascinating subject. Really. I can't wait for this interview.

Yeah. And so we have the CEO of Fantasy Sales Team. Now. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna start screaming from top of my lungs, so you gotta sing them in for us. Sing him in for us. His name's Adam Hollander. Adam, before you say a word, we have a guest who's just going to sing you in. Here we go.

I don't even have a note. You want the original starting note?

All right. His name is Adam Hollander.

Okay. His name is Adam Hollander, the founder and CEO of Fantasy Sales Team. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Welcome to the show.

You've been sung in. How many podcasts have done that for you, Adam? Has it ever been done for you before, Adam?

No. That is absolutely the first time I have been sung in on an interview.

That is awesome. Good.

We asked him earlier, have you heard the show? He said he didn't get a chance to Hear the show. We're like, oh, boy, oh, boy.

He's gonna sing him in, sing him in.

Good for you.

I'm thoroughly entertained so far.

Oh, great. Well, hey, tell us about fancy sales team. What exactly does your business do?

Sure. So you mentioned gamification. We are, of course, a gamification company. It might surprise you to find out, though, that I had never even heard of the term gamification until we had almost 40 customers. The reason we created this company was not to gamify anything. It was to solve some very specific business problems that would end up yielding increased revenue and profitability. I'll give you a little bit of background. I've spent most of my career in sales and sales management. And a number of years ago, I was managing a team of sales reps. And like most sales managers, I was always looking for ways to motivate and incentivize them to do more of just about anything, whether it be find more opportunities, close more deals, sell more of a certain product. And like most sales managers, I was always running contests and spiffs and incentives and trying to get them to do so well. One day, about four, four and a half years ago, a woman from my operations team, she sits me down and she shows me a spreadsheet of data and essentially proves to me that I'm not getting anything out of my sales contests and that I'm essentially wasting my time. And I was blown away by this. I didn't understand it because the contests that I was running with my team were very similar to those that my old managers had used with me when I was an individual contributor, and they always motivated the heck out of me. And I didn't understand why I wasn't seeing the same uplift from my reps, so used it as an opportunity to start talking to some of them. And very quickly I uncovered two big problems with the contests and games that I had been running. The first was that I had a set of top performing reps on my team, and not surprisingly, they were winning almost all of my contests. Now, it's not that I was oblivious to the fact of who I was handing the prizes to month over month, but it hit me like a ton of bricks how big of a problem that was, because in reality, what happened was. Sorry, I had to hang up.

Yeah, I think you had a sale coming in there.

I hope it wasn't a sale. So I realized that I had this set of top performers, and even though they were winning all these contests, I had never realized this was a problem because what was happening was they were taking home all the prizes, and it was demotivating and frustrating all of the rest of my Reps, the other 80%, and especially the middle 50% that I wanted to focus on. As a sales manager, you don't generally run contests and incentives to motivate your top 20% because they're already driven. It's in their DNA. They're going to overachieve anyway. And so what was happening was I wasn't really focused on the right set of my team. I was focused on the folks that were going to perform regardless. What I also found out from talking to them is that the moment a rep falls behind in a contest or an incentive, not surprisingly, they disengage and they stop paying attention. If they're out of contention to take home prizes and to win anything, then they go back to their status quo. And so every day of the game, you basically have fewer and fewer people paying attention. And so when I took a step back, I realized that what I've done is I've created these games that are motivating a small and wrong portion of my team for a very short duration. And of course, that's not the goal at all. The goal is to figure out how do you motivate as many people on your team, as many of your employees as possible, and how do you keep them that way for as long as possible? So I started whiteboarding out ideas or ways that we could fix this problem. And I came up with two basic concepts. One was, I'm going to let my reps start earning points for everything that I want them to do. So, not just closing deals or bringing in revenue. I'm going to let them earn points for every phone call they make, for every opportunity they uncover, every meeting and presentation that they hold. And I figured that if I could give my sales reps ways to compete with their activity and their behaviors, that will keep them in contention a lot longer than if I'm just focused on results. And that was pretty novel at the time, but now there's actually a lot of companies out there that have leaderboards and point systems and badges and trophies and allow reps to do very similar types of things. But the second thing that I thought of was, well, if my reps are all earning points, it was coincidentally football season, and a lot of my reps were playing fantasy football. And I said, you know, if they're going to be earning points, maybe I could let everybody in the company draft a fantasy team of my sales reps. And this way Everybody from our CEO to the managers, to the reps themselves, to finance marketing, the person sitting at our front desk could all become invested and excited about the success and performance of the salespeople. And I figured this could solve my problem. This could get everybody pushing and relying on each other, really create a cultural change where it's very hard to disengage from the game because everybody else is paying attention to what you're doing. And it's not just about you anymore as an individual, it's about how's your team doing and how are you affecting other teams. And so I got pretty jazzed about this concept, but pretty quickly as I was designing it, I hit a wall. And that wall was that it was going to be an operational nightmare to run this contest and spreadsh and whiteboards and email, it was going to be essentially a full time job just to track all the points for my reps, let alone all the teams and all the other things that I needed to do to keep this visible and exciting. So what I did instead was I hired some developers and went out and built a simple piece of software that inevitably of course became fantasy sales team that would allow me to run contests this dynamic. And after about eight months of building it, we had a beta and it was very remedial compared to what we have today. But it worked and, and we ran it with three companies as a test and the feedback that we got was beyond my wildest expectations. The reps were coming back saying this is the most fun we've ever had in a sales contest. Managers coming back saying we've never seen our reps this engaged. And of course they were saying that they were really excited about continuing to use this, willing to pay for it. So that was the point when I left my sales management position to run the company full time. If you Fast forward about two years to today, we have over 150 customers. We work with some very, very large companies like hp, Dell, Comcast and others that use this. With hundreds to thousands of reps at a time and dozens upon dozens of small and mid market business, any industry you could imagine, software services, financial, health care, car dealerships, retail. And we found that this approach of allowing the reps to earn points based on their activities, behaviors and results, and then allowing the company to build and draft teams around their salespeople and getting everybody excited and engaged around what's going on, it really does change the culture in a way where everybody stays involved and invested and engaged much longer. And it tends to motivate the Whole team, not just the traditional top performers.

What an amazing.

I've got several examples I can share about results.

Yeah, yeah. What an amazing idea. Let me ask you this. When it comes to team selection, do the sales reps themselves pick or establish a team or who's picking the teams? How do you get to assign to a team?

Yeah, so everybody in the company, including the reps, can draft teams. The way that it works is in the setup of the game. The administrator, which is generally the vp, director of sales, the sales manager, somebody in operations, they will divvy out all of the reps into a position on a field. And so we have baseball, football, basketball, soccer, racing. But take baseball as an example. You might take all your top reps and you put them at first and second base, and you take all of your lower reps and you put them at third base and left field, and you take your customer service people, you put them in right field, and you take your OPS people and you put them at pitcher. And what happens when everybody logs in for the first time is that baseball diamond pops up on their screen and they have to draft a team by putting somebody at each position. So in that example, you have to choose a top performer at first and second base, lower performer at third base and left field, you know, a customer service person in right field. And that way everybody has a level playing field of who they're choosing week over week.

Now, do you have to be on your own team, though?

Always? Yes.

Yeah, yeah. Chris is saying no in his head. You have to be in your own team because otherwise you'd be playing against yourself effectively.

Well, we don't allow people to just fall asleep for a week and still win the game. You always are contributing to your team's performance in that sense. So if you're made a pitcher in the game, you're always your own pitcher. If you're a second pitchman, you're always your own second baseman. And then you draft a team around you.

I see. I can picture like an office admin somewhere, like bringing in energy drinks and like food for the. For the sales guys on their team, giving them special stuff.

Have you experienced stuff like that, Adam? Where True. Supporting administrative staff or people that are not on the sales team are trying to encourage and support the success of the sales team because now they're involved in their success.

Oh, without question. And we have information around that in our case studies around folks that genuinely start coaching those around them and figuring out how can they somehow affect performance. And so what you have is support Staff and marketing trying to work better with sales in the sense that they really want their reps to do well and achieve against the metrics that have been embedded into the game.

This is such a genius.

Then you have the sales guy going to the customer service rep, talking, maybe giving advice.

He's like, dude, our team, man, turn it up. You're on my team.

Well, and that's actually what we've started to see, is that it allows you to create games that break down walls and boundaries because you can put inside salespeople, outside people, lead gen people, call center reps, customer service people, even marketing people into the game, giving every set or role their own metrics and ways to earn points. This gets everybody in the company pushing on each other and paying attention to how everybody's doing when usually they're very siloed.

Now what if you're a small business? You mentioned some very large companies, but say you have a small company, maybe you have only two or three reps, maybe. I don't even know if your system supports a company that small. Can they use some fundamental principles at least to get started and build up to using an application like yours?

You absolutely can. So we work with companies with as few as three to four reps when you log into our system. Beyond the fantasy aspect, there's a lot of other features that create engagement. So you can choose an avatar, you can smack, talk with your peers and engage and chat inside the platform. You can earn badges and trophies, you can, you can see stats, meters, leaderboards, you can stream results to tv. You can use our mobile apps with push notifications. And so it really does create an environment for all of your reps to engage, regardless of team size. Then when you want to start playing some of our team based games, I would say the fantasy aspect, to really make it sing, you need at least 8 to 10 reps. But if you don't have that many, then we have other game models that you can use in the meantime, where in the very least you can just allow everybody to earn their own points and complete as an individual.

Would you have a tip for us? If someone isn't using your application but just wants to get their sales team a leg up, they want to get people more motivated. Is there something as a business owner that we can do to get the sales team moving and motivated without necessarily starting with an app like yours?

Sure. So actually most of the things that we do in our app can be accomplished without the app, but it's just a lot operationally more difficult to do.

Right, I know, I get it.

So I would argue, for example, that if you're creating sales contests on whiteboards or with spreadsheets with a very small team, start thinking about incorporating activity and behavior metrics and ways to compete in addition to the results. Start using the very foundation of team based competition. If you only have four people, instead of pitting all four against each other, do two versus two and get them actually partnering up and pushing and relying on at least some aspect of your organization. Get your executives involved as coaches and have them actually building their own internal team. So that way in a small business, maybe the CEO has two people and the, you know, vice president of sales has two people and that way they're competing against each other. There's a lot of ways that you can take the premise of what we've built, which is how do you get everybody relying and pushing on each other and how do you allow them to compete with more than just their traditional results metrics that motivate only the top 20%? You can incorporate a lot of that without the platform. But I will tell you, the platform makes it heck of a lot easier. And for a very small company paying on a per seat per month basis, you're not looking at a tremendous investment to use fantasy sales team for that.

Many reps. No, I love it. I love it. And one last question I have for you is what if you have a membership organization? Right, Christina? That's what we got. We have 80 plus accountants and bookkeepers that are out providing specific services around profit first. Could, could a membership organization use this as opposed to an internal sales rep? This is a outside team, but outside organization where these members are out there selling and doing different things. Could it apply to that also?

Oh, absolutely, it could. In fact, our platform is built in a flexible enough way that you can have anybody in the system measured on any metric. And so you could measure absolutely anything, you know, number of, you know, financial submissions or number of customer service requests responded to, or, you know, every dollar of revenue you bring in, every phone call you make, anything you can imagine, you can imagine embed into these games. And that allows you to use it for far more than just even sales or service. Although that's of course our general focus from a marketing perspective.

That's a fantastic.

We could do one for the show. We'll track funny jokes.

Yeah, exactly. It was going to keep coming back. It's like zero.

Chris will have zero.

Zero. Adam, an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. If our listeners, and I know listeners, you got to check this software out. Seriously, Adam, where do they go to check out what you got going on?

You can go to fantasysalesteam.com and we've got a video up there that's a three minute elevator pitch of pretty much everything I've walked through on the show. But something that you can share makes it a little more visual, and you can just click video right at the top of the screen.

Okay, thank you very much. You got the brat.

That's good.

Congratulations. All right, Adam, it was a pleasure talking with you. You know, Chris, I got another guest I want to bring on.

I know. I just hope with some of those, the fantasy thing that, like, one rogue person doesn't get nutty and start, like, slashing the. The opponent's tires.

Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah. Now you're blending reality with a form of virtual reality, right? And people get. Yeah, people go a little crazy.

I, I. Yeah, yeah.

But let's have Adam back and ask him that one. What's.

Adam, are you still there?

I'm still here.

Have you ever had, like, someone go rogue and get, like, try to undermine the other team? No.

At least nothing that we've heard of.

Okay. He totally lied. That was a stretch. I think you just lied, but okay.

Yeah.

Good.

Great job, Adam.

Thank you. Thank you. No, I want him back for another episode. I want a full episode.

We need. Absolutely.

I want to dig in deeper.

That's serious.

Yeah.

I'm blown away. Like, I just. There's so much about that that I don't know. And I'm just sitting here like, wow.

Wouldn'T that be fun? Even a little office like yours to get a little gamification going. I want you, my team. I do not want Ron.

Ron would win. I guarantee it.

I see. I question that.

Ron. I'm picking Ron on my fence.

Okay. See, this is where he got going. Well, good. He got you. Oh, okay. So listen, dude, now that we know the sales side and now you got all this money flowing in, right? You got your sales team, they're cruising along, Cash is flowing in. You're like, hey, my pockets are full with cash. Tax time. Tax time. What do you do when you have all these taxes coming? Wouldn't you want a tax free lifestyle?

You curl up in a ball in the corner and blubber.

Just cry. Just cry. Or you fly off to some other country blowing money everywhere. Or you would read this book, and this book is called Tax free wealth. The author behind it is none other than Mr. Tom Wheelwright. And with no further a Little further ado With a little bit further ado Sing them in Christine. It's our last episode.

I'm gonna give you more of a melody. It's be a little longer.

Here we go. Yeah, we want longer.

Let me step away from my mic a little bit here.

Oh, hang tight, Tom. Something big's coming.

As the tax free wealth author, CPA and CEO of Provision wealth in Arizona. Welcome, Tom.

Whoa, Tom. How often did you get that?

Whoa.

I hope you hit the record button.

That's awesome.

Awesome. Christina is an opera singer, so in training.

Yeah, clearly.

Yeah, yeah, she's. What do you want to do?

What?

Show Christina?

Well, now I want to be a more like legitimate opera production, singing arias and stuff. But, I mean, I would love to be in Phantom.

Phantom. That's what she's shooting for, so.

Well, that's what you were singing, right? I mean, I presumed you were singing from Phantom there.

No, I was actually singing Omeo Bambino kado, which is Italian Arya.

Wow. That was amazing.

Thank you.

So when you want your. When you want your reputation to become really good, you're gonna have to stop coming on this show.

Actually warm up before Isaac.

Tom, you are one of the few guys on this planet, I mean, literally a few guys on this planet who can make taxes fun, easy, and understandable and go away. And go and go away. How do you. What's the secret, my brother? What's the secret, Tom? How do you do this?

All right, so it's actually really simple. So first of all, let's make it fun. All you need to do is write down the word refund.

I'm doing it now.

Look at the three letters in the middle, and you'll see it's a lot of fun. So as long as you're getting that refund, there's a lot of fun when it comes to taxes.

I like that.

The key is to understand what the tax law is all about. So most people think, oh, my, Evans, it's tax time. I'm scared to death. I'm afraid of the irs. The tax law is too complicated. I can't do this. It's too hard. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, when you start looking at the tax law, and I've been Studying this for 35 years, what you recognize is the tax law is just a series of incentives. That's all it is. There's one line that says, all income is taxable unless we say it isn't. There's about 29 pages of charts and tables to tell you how much tax to pay, and then there's about 5,800 pages that are actually guidelines for how to reduce your taxes. So once you get that thought process, that's just a context shift. Once you get that thought process, now all of a sudden you're going, wait a minute. That means that the more I do, the better I follow the tax law, the lower my taxes will be.

And that's exactly what a perspective.

That's it.

I'm not trying to interrupt you. I was just affirming what you're saying. I totally ruined you.

Go for it. You got it.

No, but you building it was getting really good and I ruined.

He was about to start rapping and you just ruined.

I swear to God, I'll never be on your fantasy sales team. I will never. So. Okay, I'm sorry. Keep going. That was awesome.

No, no, no, no, you're right. And so especially business owners, you know, there are other. Other people that get benefits. The people who don't get benefits are employees. Employees get no benefits. I mean, they can do a 401k, they can do an Iraq. I mean, there's like nothing they can do. But business owners, like, okay, so here's a concept for you. Every expense you have, every dollar you spent personally or otherwise could be deductible under the right facts and circumstances, with like three exceptions, which include, like, bribes, kickbacks, penalties, things like that. But almost everything you spend money on could be deductible. So all you have to do. This is the way we say it. If you want to change your tax, you got to change your facts. And that's all you got to do.

I like the rhyme there. So let me make sure I understand this completely. If money goes out of my pocket, there's potentially an opportunity for that to reduce my tax consequence.

That's exactly right.

And is it Now, I own a business. Is it just money I spend through my business, or is this true also for money I spend personally?

Well, here's the key. So the key to make it deductible is to make it a business expense. So all you have to do is understand that there are three rules, really simple rules to make any expense a business deduction. Okay? Number one, it has to have a business purpose. There have to be some business reason for it. So I'll give you an example. Let's say that you, okay, you just celebrated your 18 year anniversary, right? Congratulations.

Thanks for being there.

All right, so my guess is if you've stayed married for 18 years, you've probably taken Your wife out to dinner more than once in a while?

Yes, I have.

Okay. Does your wife work in your business?

She does not. Should she?

She does not. But when you go out to dinner. So you're business owner, right? So you go out to dinner, you tell me that there's one time you can remember in recent times that you have not talked about business at dinner with your wife.

Yeah, I always do. I always talk about business, of course.

Because the business purpose there is you want to bounce something off of somebody who's not in your business, so there's a real opportunity. There you go. Wow. I've got this opportunity to bounce something off somebody who cares about me and cares about my business, but doesn't really participate in my business. So there's your business purpose. The second rule is it has to be ordinary, which means it has to be typical. Well, that means that you can't go out and buy $3,000 bottle of champagne. That's not typical. Right, right. But you go out and you have a typical dinner on a Friday, Friday evening or something, to go out once a week with somebody to bounce something off of. That's pretty typical. You know, again, we're not spending thousands of dollars. We're reasonable. The next is it's got to be necessary. And necessary just means that the purpose of the meal is that you're going to improve the profitability of your business. That's it. And then you have to document it. Okay? There's. There's real detailed documentation, but it's really just with receipt. Who, what, when, where, and why. So it's. It's really simple. Okay, but now what you're doing is now you're taking expense that normally you'd call that date night personal expense. You're not deducting it now. You just made it a business expense by documenting it, by showing that to the irs, that, wow, you know what? I really got a business benefit out of this. I can do this. We can do this with travel. We can do this with your home. We can do this with. Seriously. I mean, we can do this with just about. Just about any expense you've got.

I love it. Now. I wouldn't. So to my wife, I'll still call it date night. But in my own head, I'm like, this is tax refund night.

There you go.

Yeah, there you go.

No, the practical question. Let's say you take your wife out every week, every Friday. Could you literally do this every Friday? And then. Because the obvious question is, if you do get audited and they come and they look at the receipts and you tell them, yeah, we were talking about business and it was necessary. Does that really fly?

I absolutely think that would fly. Now, if you take your wife out every night, I think you got an issue.

Gotcha.

Okay. We have another saying in the CPA profession says that pigs are. Pigs are cute and hogs get slaughtered.

Right.

So it's okay, you know, you do it once a week. I would have no issue defending that audit. No issue at all. Let me give you another example. So let me tell you. Let me tell you exactly why does. I mean, the next question I would. That most listeners are going to have is, well, why does the tax law allow this? Is this a loophole? And the answer is not at all. The tax law is intending to do this because recognize that what Congress, what they realized back, really started back in the late 50s, early 60s, is they recognized first of all that people hate paying taxes. Okay? Right. Everybody hates paying taxes. Very few people say, ooh, it's tax time, let me pay my taxes. We put those people in the loony bin. Right. We don't let those people out. But people hate paying taxes. So if I give you a little incentive, me being the government, me being Congress, I give you a little, let's say I give you a 10% credit for buying equipment, you'll go out and spend. For a $10 credit, you'll go out and spend $100. Well, that was actually the very first big incentive was the investment tax credit. It was 10%.

Interesting. So was that trying to incentivize people, to stimulate the economy?

Yeah. And so if you look at the tax law, it really is promoting policy. So it's primarily economic policy, but there's also promotion of energy policy, agricultural policy, social policy. Why do you think you. I mean, social policy. Why do you think there are education credits? That's social policy. Why do you think there are deductions for kids? That's social policy. Okay. That's not. Oh, well, you know, we need to give people a deduction for their kids. No, that's social policy. Actually, Australia gives a lot more than the U.S. they want you to have kids more because they need the population growth. So there's a lot of different policies in it. And that policy is what drives this. So people always say, well, yeah, if you take that deduction, you're not being patriotic. Where it's really quite exactly the opposite. If you're not taking advantage of these, you're not doing what Congress wants you to do. So it's very important from a fiscal policy standpoint that we do this. And I can give you a quick story. So I had a client a number of years ago. He wanted to deduct. He and his wife went to New Mexico. They lived in Arizona. They went to New Mexico every month just because it's beautiful. You know, they were in the mountains, et cetera. Just gorgeous. So that's why they went and they asked me. So they sent me down and said, can we make that deductible? I said, absolutely. Said, here's what you have to do. Here's the amount of time you have to spend. What you have to do is change your facts. So you have to spend some time doing business and so forth. So he goes out, they go to New Mexico. They come back, they sit down with me. Said, okay, so we did everything you told us. Are we gonna get a tax deduction? I said, yeah. I said, so, you know, his business was real estate. So he was going out and looking at real estate and spending the time. He just had to spend four and a half hours a day of a weekday doing that, and then he qualified. Okay. So I said, so we actually calculated that he would save about $4,000 a year in taxes by getting, you know, making this travel to New Mexico deductible. I said, okay, but you seem really excited about this for $4,000. I mean, it's the guy who made some money, right? And he said, well, here's the deal. He said, so you told me I had to go look at real estate. I found a deal.

Nice.

I said, so tell me about the deal. He said, so the deal will nip me after net profit, after everything, over a million dollars.

Wow, Tom, he better. Taking you out for dinner and taking a tax deduction.

Exactly. He should take me out to dinner. I should call him. He should take me out to dinner and my wife.

Yeah.

So, exactly. So, but, but, but, okay, but, but think about what really happens here, because this is. This kind of the point here is that what really happens here is that he's on that million dollars. Even with good tax planning, he's going to pay $300,000 in taxes. So the government has said, we will give you a $4,000 tax benefit every year with the hopes that at some point in time, you're going to pay us $300,000 in taxes. Now, I, you know, I'm an accountant. I do math all the time. I will tell you, 4,000 exchanged for 300,000 is a good deal for anybody, including the government. So what I'm saying is these are all on purpose. None of these are loopholes. This is the way the tax law works. And that's what Tax Free wealth is about. It's about how the tax law really works and how to use it and take advantage of all those incentives.

Well, the last question I have for you is, I think about the complexity. You said there's 5,800 pages. The layman, the entrepreneur. I don't have the time to go through this, but do I have to hire a specialist? Do I have to call Tom Wheelwright only and is this the only guy who can help me? Or how do I go about actually employing. Employing these techniques as you do? A deep breath into my ears.

Absolutely have. You absolutely have to have a tax advisor. They need to be a cpa. And you have to choose the right cpa, and that is perhaps the most difficult task you've got. So chapter 23 of tax free wealth is how to find the right tax advisor.

And does it just say Tom Wheelwright and that's it? Well, it should. It should.

I mean, you know, we do serve entrepreneurs. We serve entrepreneurs in all 50 states, 30 different countries, all over the world. So we are happy to help, but there are other good. Don't get me wrong, there are other good tax advisors out there. Okay. So this will kind of make you a little crazy, but my wife, who actually, we just got married last month, she is also a cpa.

Wow.

And she has her own firm. So I do know that there are other firms out there that you know that. Smart people. There's one, because my wife. My wife owns one.

That's awesome. You know, Tom, you're literally the first guest I'm going to ask is. I want to have you back and. Because we got to get running. But, Tom, would you be up for coming down in a future show with us?

Of course. I'd love to. And just so you know, I'm go check out fantasysalesteam.com too, because I actually think I can use this with my tax people.

Yeah. I love.

Awesome.

No, I love it. I love it. This is one of my favorite episodes of all time. I got so many notes here. Tom, thank you for this. If people. I'm not gonna say the word if. Damn it. Listeners, buy his book. He just saved you money. Where can you get your book, Tom?

You can get it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. It's on audible. I read it myself. Three days worth. And you can go. Also, you want more information, go to Tax Free Wealth Advisors.

Okay. Tom, thanks for being a guest on the show. We can't wait till you come back and share more of these great tips with us.

You're welcome. Hey, thanks for having me, guys.

Thanks.

Thanks, Tom. Great job.

So I'll tell you, man.

Wow.

This may be my favorite episode of all time, Right?

Literally, just the attitude he has towards tax is awesome, dude.

He's, like, all hyped up on it.

Finally. Finally, guy says, write down refund, and he goes, circle fund. That's awesome.

He's like, dude, go to New Mexico.

For God's sake, Mike, you took your wife out. Why are you in Jersey? To save $35 by taking a refund. Make that a business expense. It's your goddamn anniversary. Make it a business expense.

Order dessert, please. Get the.

Wait, what's expensive dessert? I was going to say creme brulee.

Yeah, that's good.

That's a creme brulee, man.

I can see Tom, like, you're sitting down. You're like, hey. The waiter comes, like, may I interest you in dessert? And he brings a tray out, and you're like, I don't know. Tom comes out, no worries. Hits the tray out of the waiter's hand. God damn it. They'll take everything. Everything here at the table. We'll take two. It's a business expense. Oh, my God. Tom's awesome. Adam was awesome.

My brain's just trying to crawl out of my skull right now. There's so much going on.

Right? It's a great episode.

And, dude, when an author reads her own book, Always better.

Yes.

I'm buying Tom's book on audible. I want to hear. Listen to his energy, man.

What'd you learn?

What'd you learn, bro?

Oh, my goodness. Well, from Tom, just about what makes a business expense, you know, it has to have a business purpose. It has to be ordinary and necessary, and you have to document it kind of. I mean, they're common sense things, but no one ever put it that simply to me, so I like that.

Yeah. Like, yeah.

So. And also with Adam, I learned about. He was really interested in motivating the middle 50% of his salespeople. So the really high performers are great no matter what the low performers are, you know? Thank you.

Enough said.

Yeah, but the middle, that's where your opportunity is, so I love it. What'd you learn, guys?

No, I'm just piggybacking off of what you said, like, what Tom said. Every dollar that you spend can be deductible as long as you're using it in the right form, which, I mean, it's so silly to think of, but it's really true. And then also what I found interesting about Adam was he said he didn't really know anything about gamification until he had about 40 customers. So again, he was starting off as a sales guy and he just fell into his niche and he's taken off with it. That just amazes me that people can do that.

Unbelievable. It's absolutely unbelievable. And for me, when I was at nextiva's offices, I went out to Scottsdale to visit those guys. They had a leaderboard. I'm wondering now if it was fantasy sales teams leaderboard, but they had it up there. What I learned from Adam was the. Thanks, Christina, you ruined it there. The head. The head jiggling. What I learned from Adam was that you measure every element, not just the. How many sales did you have? How many times you pick up the phone stuff? So you look at all the different elements. That was huge. Tom, when he said 50, here's what he said. There's one line that says the. The government has the legal right to collect taxes based upon your income. One line says that. And then 5,800 pages it says, here's how you get your money back. I get it. The government's on our side. I mean, not really. But in this document, I'm like, oh, my God. They give me 5,800 pages of how to get my money back. And one saying, we're going to take it. I don't know if the opportunity exists there. I wonder how much stuff I'm missing.

Out on there it is.

Well, like he said, if you know the rules, you can play the game better. And then you can buy me dinner. One of you. Should somebody buy me dinner?

The best thing is if we can figure out how Tom can buy us all dinner. And then we take the tax deduction on top of it. Hey, so I know you had some apps in the last couple weeks. I've been messing this up.

That's okay. Give me an app today for all small business owners. Get this app. It is called Join Me. We use it in our office all the time. I know, Erin. Specifically, it's a great way to collaborate with your customers just to improve meetings overall. You can join an online meeting from everywhere. You can view someone else's screen so they can walk you through, step by step, what you're trying to do. And it is free.

Yeah. I mean, literally right now, we come in talking to Tom and he could throw up. Join Me. And we could be going through the tax code with him. He could point to the different pages in the book and say, see this? I say, I see it. And he's like, it's a tax deduction.

Can you also control the screen? Like actually click things?

Yeah.

And reverse it.

Right. The person who's in charge of it and is showing the client.

And you can do what's called a handoff. You can do a handoff another person controls. It's free, dude.

Because sound effects from your home studio we might be using. Join me.

So.

So I'm going to have to have a computer with the sound.

Oh, and I can just dele over there. I can deal you from a doodle it, dude. Did I dle you? And you'll be like, yeah, you ddled me again.

Again.

How'd it feel, Chris? Oh, so cute, dude. Dude. Three sponsors. Nextiva.

Nextiva.

Guess what I just learned. If you use your voice over IP phone system, that's a tax deduction. What about if you go to Fundera? You know, that's the loan source. The company gives you a loan. Once you get that loan and you spend the money on some equipment you buy, perhaps you buy an Xtiva phone system with a Fundera loan.

It's a tax deduction.

Yes. I got one more for you. You pay for T sheets is an application that tracks your time. And once you're paying for this, what is it?

It's a tax deduction.

It's all tax deductions.

What did you say?

Deductions, Whatever that is.

Dude, we got a rock and roll man.

Yeah. This has been great. Thanks everybody for listening. I'm Chris Curran. I'm founder of Fractal Recording and My website is fractalrecording.com and I help podcast authors. Wow. I produce podcasts for business authors. Wow.

You know, Tom, I know you're listening to this episode. Tom Wheelwright, who we spoke with. I hope you have a podcast.

Oh my goodness.

If not bro, talk with Chris Rocket. But if you're an author, you gotta work with this podcast. Our podcast has exploded in popularity. We get business through this podcast. Unbelievably with the insanity that we do. And all of our sponsors are are getting leads. So podcast freaking work. Me. What do I do? Me, Christina, Ron, Jackie, Aaron. We are the team behind 80 plus members. Yep. Of accountants and. Hold on one second. I push the button right now, bruh. See, when I push it, it doesn't hit it right. Then I got time it right. So we have an organization called private first professionals. Accountants, bookkeepers that drive profitability in your business. So if you got a business, go to our website right now, profit first professionals.com, click on find. We will hook you up.

That's it, guys, it's been a pleasure.

Thanks for joining.

Thank you.

Yeah, so next time you hear us on episode 39, it's going to be all remote. You, listener won't be able to tell the difference.

You will not be able to tell the difference.

Us will be crying a little bit, the emotion won't be there.

See some videos.

You be in Colorado, you'll probably be stone.

We're going to have to video conference you in so we can watch each other.

Yeah, cuz he might be getting baked because it's legal out. Yeah, well we'll send out, you know, from last week, our guest David. We'll send him out there to drug test.

I was just going to say, yeah.

He'Ll come racing in his car. Drug test time.

Oh, you failed. Excellent.

Is the drug test the write off?

Yeah, right. It's tax deductible.

All right, thanks for listening everybody.

Later guys.

See you, Sam.