Build Wealth and Grow Your Business with Expert CPA Tips

What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income now? If you’re wanting to get ahead financially and enjoy greater freedom of choice, if you want a comfortable retirement and you know you’ll have more choices, if you can do more with your money now, if you’ve wondered who else is creating ways to make their money work for them and you want actionable ideas with honest pros and cons and no fluff, welcome to the Richer Geek Podcast. We’re here helping people find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I’m Mike Stoller, and in this podcast you’ll hear from others who are already doing these things and learn how you can too.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Richer Geek Podcast. Today we have Chase Insogna. He’s a founder of Insogna CPA.

It’s a highly successful CPA firm in Austin, Texas. And what makes him different from others is that they also do investment advisors. He works with business owners in particular, so all of you business owners pay attention.

He helps you to build wealth while you’re building your business, something that I needed 10, 15 years ago. You know, welcome Chase, how are you doing? Chase Insogna Yeah, great. Thanks for having me.

Yeah I like the fact that you want to help them build their wealth or keep their wealth while they’re building their business. Instead, like some of us, it’s like, I’m worth some money, now what do I do? And then you tell me, it’s like, well, yeah, you lost a lot of it or you didn’t gain a lot of it. First, before we dive into some of these things, who are you, what got you started in the love of CPA and why did you choose business instead of like individual? Great question.

I started the firm in 2011. Going back from there, I’ve been licensed since 2009, the CPA. I was in corporate accounting for over a decade, but always was entrepreneurial.

Even in college, I would do bookkeeping and taxes on the side for people and small businesses. And I was working and studying with CPA, did the same thing. And then just had an opportunity to start my own firm.

So I started off buying a bookkeeping firm. I don’t ever recommend it, but it was a waste of money looking back. But it got me started.

We immediately became, for those listening or familiar with Dave Ramsey, immediately became his endorsed local provider for tax here in Austin. So that kind of helped with lead flow initially. I mean, we’re still one of his endorsed local providers now.

And here in Austin, we’ve been since 2011. But that kind of helped build the lead flow initially. And then from there, we just have grown organically.

So I started with myself and then eventually myself and a bookkeeper to help. I did all the taxes for five, six years, and then finally found a great tax manager that we have now. And we have a team of 20 people doing accounting, tax planning, mitigation.

Mainly, we’re getting into… We do the daily accounting to get into advisory and controller, fractional CFO services, where we’re focused on daily, weekly, monthly advising larger clients looking to grow their business, budget forecast, cash flow planning. Those type of exercises is where we add value today with our team. To answer your question on building wealth while building your business, where I got that from is, I always was more of like a business coach, business advisor than I was just a normal CPA.

That’s how people told me that I was approaching it years ago. And so that’s what we’ve continued to do. But I just kind of like, what would I do if I were in your shoes kind of advice.

And as I’ve built my business over the years, I’m not the typical CPA with a lifestyle business where I am waiting to the end of the rope, and then hoping I sell my firm and getting a check, and then I can do whatever, or die at my desk like a lot of CPAs have done. My goal there and myself and what I try to promote to clients is, yes, you’re reinvesting in the business. I do the same thing, but not all of your money reinvested in the business.

When you have gone over the hump and being able to have liquid cash that you don’t know what to do with, and it’s just sitting in savings, max out the retirement accounts. Obviously, you start there in the basics of IRA and 401k, and you get into maxing out the larger retirement plans, maybe defined contribution, or maybe it’s getting into tax mitigation strategies where you’re doing charitable contribution plans, or remainder trust, or deferred sales trust, or maybe buy a jet, and you get 100% deduction a couple of years ago. So those type of things, we are helping advise clients with their liquid cash.

And so same for me, my philosophy, I love dividend investing. So for me, it’s like paying the tax in an ultra low tax rate environment we are right now, 325, and investing it for the future. That way, I don’t have to wait for the rope and the check at the end of the day, where 85% of small businesses never sell is the Forbes statistic.

So everybody waiting for the end of that rope that one day comes, likely will not come. Are you going to be the 15% or the 85%? Most of the people are the 85%. So let’s save along the way, let’s build and have a recurring income through dividend investing.

That’s my goal. Other people have their own goals, but that’s been my goal. So that’s what I’ve been working towards.

And so I don’t have to wait for the end of that journey to cash out and go do what I want. I could stop doing what I do now and still enjoy life. Yeah.

Something that I learned, get big enough, ladies and gentlemen, with your business, where you can draw a W-2, or you can draw a salary, or just owner draws or whatever. How important is it? I found this out, to put a certain amount of your money into a tax-deferred whatever, because usually, if you take a salary and just put it in your account, that is taxed higher than maybe when you grab it from a tax-deferred, because now it’s not this whole income, you’re just paying taxes on what you’re pulling, right? Or how does that work? Yeah. Many different strategies.

A lot of them depends on the tax bracket. Obviously, the state you live in. I’m referring to Texas because we’re based here in Austin, so I don’t have state income tax.

But if you’re in California or on the East Coast, certainly it makes sense to defer it because you got to add 5% to 10% on top of the federal effective rate you’re paying. And then looking at those strategies, if you’re in those high-tax states, because deferring it today, and then things like you got oil and gas leases, or you can invest in exotic wildlife. Here in Texas, there’s a big ranch and a business that does it, where you get back that capital over three to five plus years is the goal, in addition to getting 40% to 80% tax write-off in the first year or two as an active investor if you qualify.

So those type of things, I mean, we don’t do that internally, but we know of it and we’re recommending a third party to go talk to to make that happen. But at the start of it, we’re seeing the numbers day to day, month to month, and that’s what we’re looking to advise our clients with going back to, we’re not just doing bookkeeping and taxes here. That’s part of the coaching and the advisory and the planning mitigation that we do throughout the year before we get close to the end of December 31st year.

Yeah. It’s something that I learned really quick is to get a CPA that also advises. It’s so important.

What I hated a couple of years ago is I get the tax bill and it’s like, oh, you owe X amount of dollars. I’m like, why? You couldn’t have told me that six months ago that I was on track to start doing this. And then that was the last time I used that firm.

And now immediately, I don’t know if you do monthly or quarterly, but what is the importance of sitting down and saying, okay, this is where you’re at Q1 and then compare it to Q2 and then saying that, hey, you know what? You need to do this or that because you’re seeing a trend and preparing them for what they’re going to see or need when they actually file their taxes. How important is that? It’s very important. And it’s what we’re trying to communicate when we’re onboarding somebody or talking to a new lead, because a lot of times they’re just price shopping.

And I always say, you get what you pay for. Okay. Because if you are looking for just tax services, you’re only going to get transactional.

That experience, whether they’re CPA or whatever, if you’re just paying them to do taxes, they’re not going to check in with you. They’re not incentivized to call you monthly and say, how’s your business doing? That’s what your bookkeeper should be doing or your fractional CFO if you have one. But if you aren’t at that level yet, that’s why we at least require business owners that we work with to reconcile the books.

Half our businesses, it’s necessary to have in-house accounting, but we’re at least getting our hands in the data at the end so we know it’s accurate on what we’re advising on. The other half, obviously we do it all for them, data entry all the way through. But that allows us, to your point, to have that conversation in real time.

Larger clients doing eight figures, we’re doing it weekly. If you’re five to six figures, maybe it’s monthly, quarterly. The one order consultants, maybe it’s semi-annual, or at least checking in in the summer, seeing how things are going.

How’s the business going? And then Q4, we do formal analysis, making sure we’re on track before December 31st. But that’s the real key, is to find a firm that’s engaged in at least those services. Because if you just have a bookkeeper and you just have a tax person, and maybe you have an additional fractional CFO controller, those three are not incentivized to communicate with each other at all.

And you’re missing the boat if you don’t bring those services, most of them, in-house. And that’s where you’re going to get left with the poor experience on, why is it April 15th and I’m owing so much taxes? Because nobody is incentivized to be proactive with you. Yeah.

Or it’s October and we haven’t even filed yet. There’s that. Yeah.

And then there’s that, the other side of it. So for the small business people out there, let’s say that they’re making six figures, one to 500,000 a year or something like that. They come to you and say, you know what? I agree.

I’ve been using just a CPA. They’ve just been punching stuff in the software and giving me a bill. How do you onboard them? What is that conversation? How personal do you get as far as what their needs are? Are they looking to sell? Are they looking for a multi-generational business? Give me some examples of what you do specifically that sets you apart from the others when someone actually comes to your firm and wants to talk.

Yeah. In the one to 500 range, depending on what the business activity is, sometimes accounting is necessary, sometimes not. A lot of times it might be one of our consultants, just they can keep track of their expenses to keep their costs down.

But how we engage them is on a monthly recurring price, we’re basically looking at annual CPA costs and dividing by 12. So we’re including those likely semi-annual check-ins or quarterly if necessary. We’re looking at bookkeeping if we’re doing it for them, if necessary.

Payroll, likely an S-corp. From there, what’s your reasonable salary? We have a third-party tool to tell you what that salary should be based off the task you’re doing, not just guessing a number. And then retirement planning from there, do you have the cash flow to do it? And if so, how much do you want to contribute? As an S-corp that needs to run through payroll, as for the employee portion.

So you don’t want to run payroll before you make that decision. Paying kids, paying the spouse, that’s kind of low-level stuff. And then from there, making sure we’re keeping track of the expenses properly, if they’re doing it on their own or we’re doing it for them.

If it’s semi-annual check-in, again, in the summer, we’ll check kind of soft check-in. How’s the business going? How are you doing? If we’re not doing the accounting, we don’t have the insight to the numbers. And then Q4, we’re checking in.

We’ve done their taxes. We’ll run it through our tax software, see what strategies are out there, if they want to take advantage of them before year-end. And then sometimes you have a big contract and you’re blowing it out of the water.

Maybe you went from 300 to seven figures, and maybe it’s a one-off thing. So getting into the mitigation strategy. But if you’re looking to buy a house or looking to use the cash to pay down medical student debt, that’s the smart way to do it in a low-tax-rate environment that we’re in now.

But if you have extra cash available, then looking at the mitigation strategies, talking to our third-party referrals, seeing if it makes sense for you to take, get that write-off in hopes of getting the capital back in three to seven years, though you don’t actually lose the cash. It comes back to you and the tax write-off you get. Let’s say they’ve been doing this.

They’ve been slowly growing. At what level do you approach the business owner and say, you know what? We need to talk. You’re growing, which is a great thing, but now we need some other strategies.

And what are those strategies? Yeah, all levels. From one-hour consulting, you’re doing a couple hundred thousand, 300,000 a year, because again, we’re having those regular check-ins with our monthly clients or recurring clients, I should say. And then those that we keep track of accounting for monthly, we’re certainly seeing the data.

I mean, we’re data entering every two to three business days. We’re just reconciling obviously in the months. So my team is identifying spikes up or down in net profit and classifying things correctly, purchases, whatever, and having those conversations.

Whether we have the formal check-in on the list or not, maybe you’re quarterly. But next month, something happens. So let’s jump on a Zoom call, have a conversation.

What’s going on in your business? Let’s talk about it. We want to be on the forefront. We want to be proactive with our clients.

We’re all about communication here. So we don’t want to wait six months and then talk about it and it’s too late to do things. Or maybe your business has dropped during COVID or this year has been a weird year for some industries depending on what you’re in, 2024.

So maybe your business has dropped. So let’s have a conversation. You shouldn’t be payrolling yourself.

You should stop and just take owner draws. Maybe you don’t have the cash flow to contribute to your retirement this year, hold off on it. Those kinds of conversations just proactively is what our team is all about and what we’re trying to mitigate at the end of the day.

So it’s not April 15th and you’re looking back and saying, why didn’t I have this conversation six or nine months ago? But that requires paying for what you get because if you’re just paying us to do taxes and send out an agreement in January, we’re not going to do that proactiveness with you. We’re not going to be checking in like that. Yeah.

As we talked prior to hitting recording, I dealt with that also. And ladies and gentlemen, the importance, some people are like, oh my God, I’m not paying a CPA that much. They have to get out of the mindset, even though it says CPA in your title, you’re just so much more than that.

You can’t look at, I don’t pay CPAs tens of thousands of dollars. You’re so much more than a CPA at that point. You’re becoming the advisory part of the team.

And you’ll also get to the point where, hey, Mike Stoller, you’ve been investing in we’re doing everything in your business, but now it’s time to invest in yourself or your family. What does that conversation look like where you’re starting to take the W-2s, you’re starting to take all that sort of stuff, but now there are this level of stuff that W-2 people don’t have access to. But because I’m an entrepreneur, what are some of those things that people don’t even know about that business owners can open up in order to either defer taxes or save payroll stuff, or just all these different retirement type accounts that entrepreneurs have? What are some of those things that you advise on? Are you talking about like just basic retirement plans, maxing them out? Retirement stuff.

I’m, let’s say, 50 years old. I now have built my business up, but I don’t have any retirement accounts. I don’t have anything to draw on.

I’ve just been spending it, or I’ve just been putting it in a checking account. There’s these IRAs that are specific to entrepreneurs, all these different things. Yeah.

I would say the first step is what level of financial discipline are you? Because if you’re just spending a lifestyle, then it’s going to be hard to save for retirement. So that’s the first step. What are you doing with your money and what do you want to do with it? Just from a basic level, if we’re talking about 1 to 500,000, first level is are you maxing out an individual IRA? And then from there, is it a SEP IRA, depending on how much you want to contribute? We want to do like 20K plus, then we’re probably talking… We’re not a big fan of solo plans, but talking about solo 401k, what I refer to as a company 401k that we have a third party with that thinks with payroll and contributes it automatically.

And that company 401k allows you to do the 100% employer match, allows you to do the profit sharing on top of it. Solo plans are different because it’s just 25% of your W2 for employer match and profit sharing. So depending on the level of how much you want to save there, and you’re adding your spouse to that if we’re maxing their retirement out.

That’s the levels of what you want to retire. This is the onboarding conversation we have with clients initially. When they come on board as a new recurring client, my team is having a S-corp salary test and then the retirement conversation, because again, it needs to run through payroll depending on what you’re doing.

That’s one of our onboarding goals is to capture that information as well as what your financial goals are. As you mentioned in the very beginning, are you looking to sell your business? Are you looking to just kind of have a lifestyle business? Are you bringing on equity partners, et cetera? What is the goal there? And because that also depends on the business coaching and then the advisory and how we’re working towards helping you scale your business towards those goals, because they’re very different, all three of them. What are some examples you’ve onboarded a client and you just sit there and shake your head? You’re just like, man, we’ve got some work to do.

Or there’s some stories just like going, I can’t believe these people are doing this, but I’m glad they came to us because we can fix what just happened. Because some of our listeners may be doing some of those things. I would just joke and say that no client is like that.

They’re all perfect when they come in, so we can help them. But yes, what we get excited about is, we have a couple of clients that we’re onboarding now. They just haven’t… Their books are a mess.

They have no idea what’s going on in the financials, but we show them and educate them on what they should be looking at and what’s wrong and how we’re going to fix it so they know why our bill is going to be high when they get it in the project phase. But once we have it cleaned up, again, my team’s excited about adding value. So, what can we do to get you to the next step and get you to why you came here? Because you’re looking for something different that you’re not getting somewhere else? At the end of the day, that’s what we’re trying to do is just help people and communicate with them actively and proactively and help them reach their goals.

Helping them build their wealth while they’re building their business. And when it comes to S-Corps, we’ve been doing S-Corps a long time. So clients, the first thing is like, what’s your structure? If somebody comes to me making six figures in a Schedule C sole prop business, obviously, you’re getting what you paid for or nobody’s ever brought it to your attention.

And it seems basic to me, but a lot of people are wasting thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary FICA payroll taxes. That’s the first step. And back to your statement a while ago, where you talked about adding value for the price.

That’s what we’re initially looking at here, where we’re talking about the Schedule C. We’re not going to put you in an LOC S-Corp unless we’re justifying our costs. Because obviously, you’ve got an extra business return, you’re going to need to set a payroll, you’re paying us for the advice and the ongoing proactiveness. But even our fees included, you’re still saving money versus last year, you just paid it all to the IRS.

So there’s the mindset of like, do you want to pay it all to the IRS? Or do you want to pay us some and then still save some? That’s what we’re trying to communicate a lot on our initial calls is the mindset of like, yeah, we’re charging you, but we’re also saving you this much. And we get into that with Q4, when we send out our analysis, we show them how much they’re saving as an S-Corp owner to remind them like, this is why we got you into it. Because we’re saving you this much, even though you’re paying us a percentage of what we’re saving you.

But that’s, we’re not going to ever recommend anything that we don’t think makes sense. Again, if we were in your shoes, what would we do from a financial perspective? Yeah. And ladies and gentlemen, it’s so important.

It’s like, why bitch about, oh my God, the CPEs cost me 40 grand a year. Well, they just saved you 90 or 100 plus. So it’s like, shut up and pay it.

Because they’re saving you money. And it’s probably some protections down the road also on how you can keep it. But it’s just, it’s crazy.

Chase, before I let you go, is there anything that I did not cover? And then we’ll get into how people can find you. Is there anything that you want to let our audience know that I didn’t ask? No, this has been a great conversation. I love it.

And I would just say, we’re always promoting licensed versus unlicensed, look for a licensed CPA professional to have kind of a different view and make sure your information is protected. I don’t see a lot of CPAs on American Greed Show out there. So a licensed CPA is generally going to protect their professional license.

We’ve worked a lot hard for it. And a lot of times I see a lot of these unlicensed people offering ridiculous advice on TikTok and social media, and they’re not licensed. So they’re not signing your return.

They don’t care what they tell you. And then we have to mitigate what the facts are. And people think that we’re not proactive or like aggressive enough, but in actuality, we’re just trying to protect our professional liability of the licensed professional.

And you definitely need one on your team to make sure you’re protecting yourself. Oh, there’s no red flags at the IRS and you eventually get audited for stuff you shouldn’t be doing. Yeah.

Amen to that. That’s what keeps me up at night is just knowing that I have a good CPA, that I know that when I talk to my investors, when I talk to all these different people, they’ve got it down. Hopefully there’s no mistakes and you back your word.

And that’s why I also do not do in-house bookkeeping CPA. I want it all third party. I want me to not touch it.

I want you to do it. And so there’s no way that anyone could come and say that I was cooking anything. Number one, I can’t cook, but I don’t want to cook the books.

Chase, where can people find you? Yeah, please hit us up on our website InsognaCPA.com. Reach out to us, call us, fill out the form. We’ll immediately get back to you. We’re not going to sit on it for weeks like some firms.

We don’t go on vacation for months at a time. We’re here all year. I have a business deaf person that’ll reach out to you pretty much immediately within one or two business days.

Let’s have a conversation. That’s all we’re trying to do is see if we’re best fit, offer some advice, set you on the right path, whether you work with us or not. We’re just here to help.

Perfect. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s Chase Insogna, the founder of Insogna CPA. Thanks bud for coming on the Richer Geek podcast.

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Thanks for tuning in to the Richer Geek podcast, where we’re helping others find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom.

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