Wall Street To Y'all Street

[00:00:00] in looking at the companies that you work with, would you say most financial planning at a company basis is reactive rather than strategic? Extremely reactive. Usually it's, I'm paying too much in taxes and they react, not preventative, not strategic. It's always reactive.
Or I hired 30 employees, now what do I do? Or I got a letter in the mail that says, now I'm required to offer health insurance 'cause I have more than 50. Where do I find this insurance? So then what do they do?
Would you say that if your exit plan started five years before retirement, is that too late? Yeah, I think five years. You have plenty of time. I would start sooner if I could, but I think five year plan, like I said, if, if you have what works today, also could help you at your exit, even if it's 20 years from today, if it works today, tomorrow, and at exit.
So today's the best time to start today. 'cause you don't know when five years is. That's true. You could pick going to sell in five years, but it could take you seven. It could take longer or so maybe it could come along tomorrow.
Hello friends. Most entrepreneurs think revenue equals wealth. It doesn't. Most business owners think that they'll be able to sell their company one day, most won't. Today's guest has built a [00:01:00] financial planning model designed to fix what he believes is one of the biggest blank spots in entrepreneurship.
Lack of structure. Brent White is the founder of Dallas-based Boss Financial Group, creator of the Financial Foursquare Model, and author of The Million Dollar Playbook. He helps business owners understand how cash flow, reserves debt tax strategy, and exit planning all work together or fall apart. In this episode, we'll talk about why so many seven figure businesses are still financially fragile, why most owners are building jobs instead of enterprise value, and how to create a business that can actually survive, sell, and someday sell.
And if you're new here, I'm Joseph j Rader, a former Wall Street lawyer with more than 20 years of experience across a hundred billion dollars in transactions. I'm also a former entrepreneur having launched two businesses. One I built and had a seven figure exit in less than three years. I rolled that into a national retail chain, lost it all during the pandemic, but I've rebuilt that i've generated tens of millions of dollars in both B2B and B2C sales. I've hit highs, had lows, and rebuilt from [00:02:00] scratch. My law firm rates or PLLC focuses on mergers and acquisitions, buying and selling companies and assets as well as securities laws to raise capital. I'm licensed in both New York and Texas.
My podcast, wall Street to Wall Street is where we bring you real business lessons from seasoned operators, founders and executives who've actually lived and breathed businesses, ups and downs. I'm not giving legal advice here. Always consult with your attorney regarding your situation. Enjoy the show.

I'm here today at Boss Financial Group Headquarters with founder Brent White.
Brent, thank you for your time today. Welcome. Thank you for having me.
So before we get into what you're doing now with Boss Financial Group and where you were before you founded this company, talk to us if you will, a little bit about your upbringing and how you feel that contributed to you becoming an entrepreneur. Grew up in a small east Texas town. About 11,000 people. So nobody I knew really owned businesses. Everybody worked at a factory. Even my dad was in the oil field industry and, [00:03:00] worked for Exxon for 40 years, then that was, you go to work, you get a job, you get a pension, you retire. There was not a lot of entrepreneurship around,
I always had that spirit in me. I always wanted , saw tv and I wanted to own my own company and own my own business. I always thought it would probably be in the real estate industry, but I didn't realize it takes lots of money to be an entrepreneur in real estate and at the time I didn't have it.
So we ended up going to college and, I was a basketball athlete, if you can believe that. It's six foot tall, , in high school. So I ended up going into college with that and I thought I was gonna play pro sports one day. It all falls apart and then you gotta get a job.
And , interesting enough, I was answering back in the day, you flip through the newspaper and that's where you find jobs, job opportunities, One called Mutual of Omaha was in the back i'm gonna call these guys. And of course you go in an interview and they hire everybody. they act like they're interviewing you, but if you can pass the test, you're gonna get hired. So anyway, long story short, I started off in employee benefits and back then health insurance was a big deal.
All the health insurance companies that were around so my career did this and then that immediately. I was like, what am I gonna [00:04:00] do now? And then, so over time I started a few businesses and learned the hard way a construction company and did some stuff in the oil field school of hard knocks, right?
Really learn how people take advantage of you if you don't know what you're doing and structuring things the right way today, and how that's gonna help you later, doing things right. Everybody thinks it's more expensive, it's actually cheaper. But that's lessons you have to learn the hard way.
So I think when I met, my wife Suzanne, she's in the commercial property and casualty space, I was like, man, I want to get back into this financial planning deal. 'cause I took a little break and started building software and that's how, we were able to build the Financial Foursquare and all those things, but.
so just, yeah, we're fast forwarding on that front. But just so I understand, I didn't hear any coding jobs or software or development. No, I did it on my own. Just jumped out and Wow. We built a product, YouTube, get on there and learn how to do something. And a partner of mine, which he was a really good coder, we invented a couple different products that we tried to use in the automotive industry, and they.
Super successful. Then we sold that product off then I had to find a job, right? So then I found something to do and financial planning was really my passion and that's how we [00:05:00] got back into, what we're doing today. But then we decided that we really wanna focus on the business owner space.
'cause I thought we had a unique perspective on what it is we're doing. I worked with one of the largest CPA firms in the country for about four years, in their insurance and back office. And I thought there was gonna be these secrets. That man, I'm gonna get in here. I'm gonna learn some things that I really didn't know existed.
This is probably as vanilla as it gets when you get there. When you say that, it's pretty basic advice that like fundamentals, that just so basic stuff that you think there's gonna be some magic. And there's a few things that they did that were out of the box, but for the most part it's, here's your information.
They do a tax return, they lay out a menu and say, pick one of these services. That you would like to have a property and casualty review or a 401k review? I will. What we find out is clients really don't know what they want. They don't really know what they need. I have a 401k plan. Is it any good?
Have you benchmarked it? Has it been, has anybody looked at this stuff to see that you're not overpaying in fees [00:06:00] or that the funds that you're offering to your employees or even up to date, are you in compliance? They have no idea. And really there's nothing out there explaining to business owners where to find this information.
Where do they go to even look? what we realized is we're all guilty of it. We start our company the same way I buy a truck or a bulldozer, I put it to work. And I charge, I make 10,000 a month. A bulldozer costs me five, I clear five grand. So what do I do?
I'm gonna hire this guy to sell on this bulldozer for four grand, and we'll buy another bulldozer. And then every company starts exactly the same way. It's very siloed. This money is here, this money's here. Then I have to buy insurance. Then I gotta pay this guy's benefits. And as long as he's working and it's making money, we're profitable.
And that may work for the first five bulldozers or something.
Yeah. But when you start scaling it, it breaks quickly. and we see people have major success with it too, because there's such a margin and they're like I'm doing incredibly well. Look at my numbers. You're 10 years away from filing bankruptcy and they don't realize that.
Yeah. I think the status 80% failed within 10 years, and [00:07:00] then after 10 years, 80% failed within 10 years. It doesn't change the number, it just compounds the problem. Yeah. We actually dealt with a client a few days ago and filed bankruptcy on a company on $17 million worth of debt.
And they thought they were doing unbelievable. Then one day they can't pay the bills. It just creeps up on you pretty quickly. But it happens. Using the kind of software that you've developed and your experience and seeing all of the businesses and from an advisory perspective, you can look at them, and say, Hey, look, this is where you're headed.
This is where you're going. If you don't fix these problems, this is what could happen. And we know as a business owner, it's not a straight line to growth. It's pitfalls and. I didn't see that. Oh man, that's a major setback. A COVID hit. I'm a restaurant. Nobody can come in my doors anymore.
I didn't see that coming. That's a setback. How do you prevent as many setbacks as possible to try to reach that end goal? So would you say the majority of business owners aren't building wealth? They're just building a job? Yeah. They're building something to do every day.
Yeah. Building income, maybe income. I got a stream of income. It's really good. My family lives great. Off of this. It can go away, just like this can go away if [00:08:00] the environment changes. And it can also just go away. If you're debilitated, you have a hospital run and yeah, you can't leave for 30 days or you leave for 30 days and it all falls apart.
I think the technology changing is one we see a lot. And one day, like we just had a conversation about tech developers and this ai scary stuff. Here's guys that are charging, we actually got a quote on some software development. A week ago it was $250,000. For the next round of development.
And I think I just did it in 30 minutes in my office before this podcast. It's amazing. Yeah. And that's scary because here's this guy not gonna hire him, you, he's out. That's a big deal. That's a huge swing in income now going for me to keep it versus this guy getting to take my money that I really need him to do it.
Now I can do it myself. And so you do have a bit of background in coding 'cause you're self-taught, but really it comes down to the prompts. It makes it so much easier. You gotten to a point where if you prompt AI to code something it'll, I can tell it what to do.
It'll do it. Wow. But people don't know what to tell it to do. I think that's where we have a huge advantage. It's also still early days. Yep. But it's coming. You see it? Sure. It's here. See, [00:09:00] it, I've never seen an AI program to work out the way, the work way I wanted it to until this one and this one.
I'll go find it, but man, it is crazy what it can do. Now I can do everything I was wanting to do. Instead of having to pay a lot of money, I can just get it done. It's also straight line, straight to the bottom line that six figures we're going to pay out for software. I gotta keep that money.
Yeah. The other cool thing that we see is, Nokia is a great example. I know I see you, you have a cell phone. I have a cell phone. It doesn't say Nokia on it. At one point, 90% of em said Nokia. Remember that? So the widget change, right? Or somebody came up with a better mousetrap and just because we're on top of it today doesn't mean we're gonna be on top tomorrow.
So we gotta be ready, right? We always gotta be prepared. Would you say in, in looking at the companies that you work with and the advisors you work with, would you say most financial planning at a company basis is reactive rather than strategic?
Extremely reactive. Usually it's, I'm paying too much in taxes. And they react not preventative, not strategic. It's always reactive. Or I hired 30 employees, now what do I do? Or I got a letter in the mail that says, now I'm required to offer health insurance 'cause I have more than [00:10:00] 50. Where do I find this insurance?
So then what do they do? Google. Or they ask buddy who handles your insurance for your company? John down the street. How do you know John's any good? And so how do you advise companies?
How do you prevent against that? I think, obviously there's some self-selection process in that a company hiring someone like you Yeah. Recognizes they have a problem. Sure. Maybe that helps. But I guess generally, how do you prevent against that reactive nature? Because that is. We tend to react to pain.
So if I'm gonna run a company and I'm gonna offer employee benefits, I need to do some research on it. Way before I ever offer employee benefits. That way when somebody comes in and they're saying, you need to offer this health insurance and these voluntary be, how does it, one, how does it affect the business financially?
Does it really have retention? Am I using the best products out there? Am I working with the best firms out there? I think doing that research, not just taking a referral and say my buddy does my insurance. Okay, let's use him. He's a good guy. He plays, you play golf with him, right? He's a nice guy.
Let's do a little research. Find out. What do I really need to offer my employees? What's required by law, [00:11:00] but what's the right thing? Same thing on property and casualty insurance. The people that do my home and auto probably aren't the people I need, right? my business, my retirement plans.
The guy who manages my personal wealth may not be the right person for my 401k. And things like that. And so it just goes on and on. Doing that research and learning something about it. So when somebody speaks to you, you gotta have some knowledge on these things. It's that financial literacy. Yeah, that's important.
Going back to what you were referring to or talking about earlier, about the statistics of small business failure. Just generally, and I think it is, it's 82% of small businesses fail within that short period of time. What are the top couple of reasons you see that happen? Obviously we talk about this all the time.
Have you ever seen a business plan. You ever seen one that says it's gonna fail? They all say they're gonna be successful. None of 'em say in year three, this is gonna tank. No, they all say they're gonna be successful. Underestimating cost, I think is a big one. Not really understanding what things are gonna cost.
Well, insurance, they just put down $1,500. Just put something down there. It may not be $1,500, it might be $15,000. That's one of 'em, I think. [00:12:00] I think what it cost to hire someone, the hiring process and onboarding, I think people underestimate that. It's very expensive to hire employees.
So hiring fire and high turnover is not something you want in your business. And then I think third is that corporate structure and paying too much in taxes, not understanding tax laws and surrounding yourself with people that really understand it. Yeah, it's amazing because a lot of people are, they don't wanna spend the money it takes to get that proper.
Yeah, tax planning advice, for example. It's cheaper to do it when you start, and it's cheaper to do it, get it set up the right way. And that's some good ROI right there, right? it comes back to you. And then I think also, with respect to the business plan, that's spot on.
I think a lot of people will, do it and then they'll just go running, and then 3, 5, 7 years later, the world's changed. But that snapshot in time. It is no longer applicable. And so even if they got that $15,000 premium Correct, that's not what it is at this time. So it's gonna change every year.
And then a lot of the clients that I deal with that are in that position, 'cause I do have to refer some clients to bankruptcy counsel. It's when's the last time you raised prices? We haven't, but the cost went [00:13:00] up. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. They were saying, let's just tax the rich people that own these companies.
All it's gonna do is drive the process of the widget up, right? Yeah. We're gonna pay it. In your business you have to adjust. Two things gotta happen. You gotta drive cost down, or you gotta drive process up. Or you go outta business, one of the two. 'cause that margin is what make a living on.
We focus not just on that gap, we focus on the whole picture. The cost of everything. What can we do to drop costs down? What can we do to, in that profit margin to reduce taxes or maybe make it a little bigger for you. And then we gotta make it all work together. It's all gotta be in sync.
So we had talked a couple of months ago when we first talked about how you came to come up with a Financial Foursquare model and Boss Financial, and I thought it was very interesting. I'd like if you can share that story. Okay. We worked at a really big firm and they had all the departments, they had everything from your 401k teams to your personal wealth management.
And they're really good at all these things. The property and casualty piece, the employee benefit piece, the group health insurance, all these different things. And a client would want a 401k [00:14:00] plan and the 401k guy would set 'em up and they were things great. And it's thanks for your business.
See you later. There could have been an opportunity for all these other things, right? So we created that software in that model and said, look, we can put all this on one model now and work together in the betterment of the client to reduce more cost or put more money back into their pocket. And the place I was working said, we, menu sale.
We don't do that. They let the client pick the client doesn't know. They may be really good at building that building, but they don't know employee benefits. They don't understand 401k plans or even deferred comp plans or key man insurance or their buy sell agreement.
We had a client two days ago said, read over this. I have a buy sell agreement, and we read, it's just an operating agreement. It has nothing to do with a death of a partner or a disability of a partner or a divorce, or a bankruptcy of a partner. What if your partner files personal bankruptcy could not affect your business?
it could drag that into the actual business itself, if it's not structured properly. So we wanna make sure that all of it works together. So that's why, we created the Financial Foursquare was to solve those problems. And so basically, if I recall correctly, you were at this large firm.
You [00:15:00] came up with this, Hey, let's try this. Yeah. And they were like, stay in your lane, buddy. Do, that's exactly what they said. Stay in your lane. And I looked at, and my wife worked at the same firm. I looked at her, I said, we can't work here. We gotta go somewhere else. And she's today I like, we gotta go, we gotta get outta here.
we had that epiphany of look what we can do that's so much better. And we wanna share this with as many people as we can share it with. And that's our mission now is to teach other people how to do this stuff as well. As I told you, we have a conference tomorrow.
I think there's 12 people coming to this one. The last one we had about 24. All 24 people wanted to join our firm. Like when they left here, they're like, yes, I wanna do what you're doing. And so give a bit more color as to that. Who are the people coming to the conference? How do they join the firm? Sure.
Like how, what is that exactly? They're financial advisors, independent insurance agents from all over the country. Everybody kinda has a specialty. we put a team of people together. I can't do employee benefits, but I have somebody that does it at a really high level. I don't do property and casualty insurance.
Like you don't know their assets, you don't have a list of it. So they go off the old policies. The old policies are incorrect. Now. They're just creating this snowball effect. we've asked around, I've never heard of anybody doing this before. We look at a [00:16:00] balance sheet to make sure the property and casualty team is doing what they're supposed to be doing.
And then we keep it all in the model. I'll make sure they're actually, Hey, you didn't insure these assets. So it's like a holistic financial planning for businesses. Yes, sir. And then. Going back to exit planning. Why do you think it is that? In my experience, most entrepreneurs wait until the last minute to figure out how they're going to exit.
That's it. True. They'll wait until, and maybe they've been running the business for 10, 20 years. And then six months before they wanna sell, they're like, okay, I'm ready. But without doing any groundwork, I'm trying to think who it was. It wasn't Warren Buffett, but it was one of the guys that said, you need an exit plan before you start your business.
I love that. you need to know how you're gonna get out. True. And we don't call it exit plan, we call it escape plan. How are you gonna escape this? You've done a great job, you're making a lot of money. How do you get out before this thing implodes? And we call it escape plan, but nobody plans ahead.
They always like, john, what's to buy my business? What do I do? We should've thought about this before. So business valuation is one of the things that we do every single year with a client. Every year we do another business valuation, show 'em exactly where they are. If you sold today, [00:17:00] what does that even look like?
Is 10 million enough with three partners and y'all have to split it up after taxes, you're gonna be able to live off this. Let's measure it and see and give you that environment of, no, this isn't enough. Or we need to do something else to be able to make this better. How do we improve that valuation?
How do we reduce some debt? Sure. How do we have another bucket of money in case? What if nobody wants your business? So an annual assessment and the owners know at any point in time, at least within the last 12 months. This is what my number is. This is the number today. Yeah. Yeah. I think I can get 20 million.
Your business valuation came back at 10. Push harder this year. we gotta sell more widge, right? We gotta work a little harder, we gotta cut some costs. what if we get more efficient? What if we can create another bucket of money that maybe 10 million now is enough because we were able to reduce taxes and put money in your personal pocket that now maybe 10 million is enough, so we gotta look at everything.
But you gotta know every option. Maybe junior doesn't want the business. I'm seeing a lot of that. They're like, no, thank you, mom and dad sell it. Great example, A friend of mine was a very, large financial services company.
He's almost 70 years old, [00:18:00] and his succession plan was his kids. His kids retired two years ago. Oh, wow. They're in their fifties. they're 50 years old, they retired. So he is what am I gonna do now? My kids don't want it. So he's having to completely build another succession plan. And, it's very interesting to see it in action. And we see this all the time. It's never what you think it's gonna be. It never just, I built my business, I filled it up. I sold it off 'cause it was worth millions of dollars and I've, bought a yacht and that's how it works.
It doesn't work that way. Yeah. No, that's the movies from the eighties. It'd be great if it did, but it doesn't work that way. And so we gotta come up with a plan that works in all scenarios if you can't sell it. What happens, if you can't do it, what happens if you can sell it?
What happens? So we want all the scenarios we're look at every option. What if nobody wants your ugly baby? We call 'em ugly babies. What if nobody wants your ugly baby? Because the last thing you wanna do is walk away from this assets that generating profit. And just walk away. That would be silly.
So maybe a half a million dollar income. You sell your company and you found out that now I invested and I can only do the, the safe withdrawal rate of about 4%. Maybe that four percent's only a hundred thousand dollars. So you [00:19:00] took a $400,000 lifestyle cut. Can you retire on that? Maybe not.
Yeah. We need to know. We need to know whether, hey, I need to do something else, right? I need to get this thing where it runs itself and maybe selling it's the wrong idea. Maybe hiring someone to run it for you makes more sense, but we look at everything. You have to see it.
Yet still financially fragile. Yeah, I love them. Are, great example, talk about passing your company to Junior. And we've seen scenarios where Junior has a criminal record or junior's got some bad credit. You have some bank loans and now the banker's I'm not loaning him money. Oh yeah. So what do you do now?
So now we gotta talk about how do we structure this corporation where down the road we can have corporate credit and everything's in the company name versus your personal name. And now it makes it a little easier to transfer that potentially to the next. Error the business. You gotta think about all those things.
They all come into play. Credit's a big one. How do you protect that credit and, your partner files bankruptcy. There's another example of now you're responsible for all the credit now. 'cause he can't get credit anymore, he or she. So I think that's a big deal, is now who's taking all the responsibility financially.
When another [00:20:00] partner has bad credit. It's bankruptcy, it's divorce, it's death. It could be all three inheritance to the wrong Person who has issues and, it calls, costs an acceleration essentially on a loan. Because they can't underwrite it.
They're like, look, this guy doesn't get our, it's terrible. Felonies. Somebody's a felony, all of a sudden they can't, we're gonna do a deferred comp plan and maybe there's some life insurance involved and somebody's a felony and they can't get life insurance. So now my partner did something and got a felony and now it's affecting the company.
Gotta take all, gotta look at all of it. Gotta look at every scenario and say, what if? And then what can we do to protect it In good times bad. It has to work, we call it has to work in three different ways. Has to work today, has to work tomorrow, has to work when you wanna sell it or retire.
And if it doesn't work in all three, it's probably not the right idea. So we need to come up with better ideas. Interesting. So on that note of debt, do you see debt as a strategic weapon or a slow poison? With business owners, we're seeing, especially small business don't have a lot of debt.
If they do his credit card debt, they don't have a lot of [00:21:00] physical debt 'cause they found out if I go to the bank I gotta put up collateral. And I'll just use my collateral and then just, I'll use my cash and just pay cash for stuff. So we see a lot of cash. Poor businesses that are worth a lot of money.
All a nut and bolt distributor company. Family owned, almost a hundred year old company had $10 million in inventory paid for. Just over time they've been paying cash. It is stacked up. These guys were bringing home $250,000 a year. Probably not a good strategy. Have all your money tied up in inventory.
Yeah. One big order that doesn't pay you. And now you're not making any income and you don't have access to capital. Gotta look at everything. But we see that a lot. We see a lot of inventory piling up with people paying cash for it. So I guess in that same vein, you recommend having, if not reserves, some line of credit to draw on?
Line of credit may be a, or a better way to buy that inventory over time with a line of credit. Versus tying all your capital up into right assets that aren't making you any money at all. When I sell it, I make money. You're gonna make money if it was financed or not financed.
You're still gonna make money. But don't you wanna see what that looks like? Let's look at it in every kind of scenario. Maybe you are the [00:22:00] personal alone in the company, the money versus. Borrowing from the bank. Maybe that's how you establish your credit. Maybe you're the personal bank.
Lots of ways to look at it, but you gotta see the whole picture. But we do see a lot of inventory. I think that's the big one. Inventory piling up. Interesting. Yeah. We see a lot, especially in the oil field industry. They buy drill pipe and drill stem and use it on one job. Then they keep it and then all of a sudden they have to, Have to use.
The only one that we see that really doesn't do it over time, and even they do it, auto industries even do it, as a car sits on a lot, they have what's called a curtailment. So you ever gone on a lot and they have five white trucks and one of them's $15,000 off. And it's just like the other ones that are only 3000 off.
It's set there a long time and they have to pay these curtails. So they've paid it off or paid the balance down really low and they wanna move it. They just want to get it off to get their capital back. So there's strategies to protect against that and we see a lot in car leadership.
You'll see a lot of inventory, especially when slow times hit, that inventory starts piling up and they have those curtailments they gotta pay. So a lot of dead capital sitting in those vehicles until they sell it. So it's almost like your oil field example. Yeah. Or your nut and bolt hardware example.
[00:23:00] They should take that, adopt that concept. And it's hard to track a nut and bolt or a pipe. Sure. Or a box of them, right? Yeah. And so the idea would be, hey, at a certain point, liquidate this, the capital is more valuable.
If you can deploy it. What do you think is the biggest myth about selling a business? Exiting, I think, what is the stat? 90% never sell. Yeah. And then of that 90%, very few ever get what they want. So you're not gonna get, you're not gonna get your asking price and you're probably not gonna get, probably not gonna be able to sell your business.
Maybe. But the odds are saying you're not gonna be able to sell your business. And then the people that do sell it, I think it's less than 10%, get what they want for it. And do you think that's because, for the last 10 or 15 years when people started the business, they didn't have that exit in mind.
They didn't, maybe they're leasing a building where they could have bought a building and built another asset that helps 'em sell. Maybe they have tons of employees that. Maybe they don't need these employees. I, I don't know. I think, and then you look at the gap.
What's the profit margins that you're looking at? Are they really small? They really big. And you may be doing 30, 40, 50 million a year, but you have real small margins. So now if somebody [00:24:00] buys your business, they gotta figure out how to cut those margins and be profitable or add, more in revenue.
Sometimes it's, if I was going into the roofing business, it might be easier to start my own. With a million dollars than it would be to go pay $20 million for one that's already in existence. It might be financially, better too. I think the smaller businesses have a better chance of selling in some of these bigger ones.
I think before they hit their plateaus. They're still on the growth because there's upside, there's growth. Still got that upside. Interesting. But yeah, selling businesses is not as easy as you think. Selling part of it to private equity might be easier than selling the whole thing off,
yeah. It also depends on where you are in the cycle. And there's 4 trillion on private equities. Balance sheet right now and they're buying car washes 'cause they don't know what to do with it. That's a good place to put it. I think, from what I hear, it's a good place. I'm doing the math one day and I'm like, okay, $25 a car.
How many cars go through this thing a day? And I'm like, I still don't see how they're making money, but evidently there's a thousand cars a day going through these things. And what we don't see is the ones who get the subscriptions. Oh yeah. And so they, they're not even coming maybe once a month.
That's the ones, yeah. That's ones you don't see killing on. So would you say that if your exit plan started five years [00:25:00] before retirement, is that too late? That's pretty good. Okay. Yeah, I think five years you have plenty of time. I would start sooner if I could, but I think five year plan, like I said, if you have what works today.
Also could help you at your exit, even if it's 20 years from today, if it works today, tomorrow, and at exit. So today's the best time to start. Today, 'cause you don't know when five years is. That's true. You could think I'm gonna sell in five years, but it could take you seven, it could take longer or so maybe it come along tomorrow.
Come along tomorrow. Make you the right number. And so people like, I would, I didn't know my business was worth this, but maybe the business isn't, but the property's worth a lot of money. But, it's all the more reason to do the annual assessment you were speaking about earlier.
If you don't know the number and you're scrambling to figure it out. How can you negotiate a deal? Gimme three months to figure it out. It's in that meantime, they could go somewhere else, buy another business, lose the deal. The deal that may not come by for another three years.
people that are buying businesses are looking, and if you don't answer, they're gonna go somewhere else. Whether it's a snow cone stand or a lumber yard, it's all the same thing. They're ready to deploy the capital, get it in your bank account. So you deal with a lot of business [00:26:00] advisors.
You've been around the block. You've seen a lot. Let's talk about the dark side of advisory. What are some of the bad advice Not to pick on anyone in particular. I can give several examples, but I think people are very siloed in what they do.
somebody may be really good at 401k plans and they come in and they're gonna sell you a 401k plan, but was that what your company really needed? They don't look at the whole picture. And so I think it's not that they're giving horrible advice or even bad advice, it may be the best 401k plan that you could ever have.
But for the business owner, it might not have been what the business owner needed. Business owner might have been needing more tax deductions than, $20,000 a year. So maybe they're needing a couple hundred thousand dollars and there's a better strategy. So it really comes down to consider the source what lens they're looking through. If, I have, clients who come to me, they're like, we're doing a business divorce, and I'm gonna sue them if they don't do this. And I'm like, can you help me or need to hire a litigator?
I'm like, if you hire a litigator, I promise you're gonna be suing them. Sure. Because that's what's going to happen. Yeah. And so it's consider the source and their angle of attack is what I'm understanding. Sure. Yeah. [00:27:00] Okay. What, it's all siloed. Everybody says I need a tax strategy.
And they go out and they find a tax strategy. Okay, now I need property casualty insurance, and they're gonna go get property casualty insurance. Then tomorrow I gotta do employee benefits. I'm gonna go do that and tomorrow I need a bank loan. But what if all of it works together? What if all of it could say, Hey look, if I raise my deductibles on my property and casualty insurance to $10,000 and somebody's it's a lot of risk, right?
What if it lowers my premiums about $150,000 and now I have capital that now I can buy my inventory with? Instead of maybe a bank loan or maybe I can set up that line of credit. I was, talking about or take care of a buy sell agreement, and part of my exit strategy.
And so what if that $1 can do a multitude of things? And if you look at what that capital can do over a year or three years, or five years and the position you're in, even if you have one claim and you have to pay that higher deductible, you still come out gonna win on top. Yeah. So it's again, a holistic analysis.
So Boss Financial Group is looking at things from the life side, the PNC side, property and casualty. And are there other angles? Retirement planning. So that's gonna count your exit If you sold your business, what does [00:28:00] that look like? Where are we gonna put the money? How much is that gonna create you an income?
What can we do today? The buy sell agreements. Key man, deferred comp. Your personal retirement strategy, what are you doing? Is a 401k. The right plan for you, should be you to be doing a ep, should be doing a cash balance plan, which could allow somebody to put a lot more money into a retirement plan, especially if they're a small business.
Had some really big tax deductions. Are captive insurance companies the right thing for your business? Maybe not. Let's look at the pros and cons. Are you gonna get audited if you do it? That could be a con, right? We don't wanna open an audit up. So all the things you have to look at, all the things that you have to surround yourself.
And what we do here is we surround ourself with experts that do the things we can't do. So I surround myself with people that, we have an attorney we work with very closely that was, with a big insurance company for 10 years on the inside. So he understands what we're doing, on buy sell agreements and corporate structure.
He is really good at that stuff. I can't do that. I can talk about it a little bit, but I don't want my divorce attorney doing it either. I want, you're a real estate attorney, you're a tax attorney or bankruptcy attorney.
and same thing, if I was buying real estate, I would want my real estate attorney to help me Buy that, purchase that building. So we [00:29:00] surround ourself with experts or bring him in on the case, but we all work together. And I think you said you have a couple dozen people now. Yeah.
So we have somebody that does everything. They have people that help people find lines of credit. That's their only job is to help find business because maybe the bank's not loaning money right now they are, but we've seen times where they don't loan money. It's, the banks are, they'll loan money when you don't need it.
When you've got plenty. So taking back and looking from a, putting your founder and entrepreneur hat on. You have this advisory firm. How do you scale, education? We gotta educate people to do what we're doing. We gotta teach more and more people to do, to have a sit into my seat and surround themselves with other people that do the things they don't do.
We call it the 80 20 rule, right? We've heard this a million times. You can only do 80%, somebody's gotta do 20, So you gotta bring those people in and they have to do 80 and you have to do 20 of what it is they're doing to really round out the model. And we have a whole book.
Our playbook really talks about that a lot in the playbook. The how do you surround yourself with a team of people? When you climb Mount Everest, you're not going by yourself. You're going with a team of people to get you to Mount Everest. There's people that leave the [00:30:00] day before just to take oxygen and stash it on the mountain so that you can climb up and have oxygen.
So that's a great analogy. Yeah. I love that. That's so true. Yeah. It takes a team to do anything. Leverage a whole team of people to do the things that I can't do so I can go faster. So surrounding yourself with people that do the things that you can't do.
So as a business owner, surround yourself with a firm like us to do the things that you're not gonna be an expert at. But we, our expert, will educate you on why you're doing it. This is why we're gonna make this decision. So we want you to know the why. Why did I do this? I don't know. My guy told me to do it.
Here's why we did it, we know why we did it, and we know what the outcome could look like. How's this gonna affect me? Retirement? That's a beautiful story. And so applicable to any service provider. Anything. It's do you wanna take a decade to do this? Yeah. Or do you want to build a team that can get it done in?
Think about the oil field industry. They have people that, their only job is called a down hole guy. Anything down that hole is his job. Anything above the hole, he doesn't do it. Somebody else that manages that part. It's just interesting, if you wanna get your diesel pickup worked on, you don't take it.
you wanna take it to a diesel mechanic. You go into the tire [00:31:00] store and say, gimme the best tires, and they come out with some NASCAR stuff and put it on your truck, it's not gonna work. we gotta make sure everything works together, but we also have to have specialists to make sure we're getting the right thing in those areas.
It's the concept of niching down too. Just focusing and you'll make so much more, you can't, try to sell to everybody and you'll make X but you niche down and you make x sure financially. So if we're gonna give ourself the best chance for success. It's the only way we're gonna do it. If you want your business to be successful, you're gonna have to surround yourself with people to do the things you can't do.
You're gonna have to end your business and running your business. I think there's two pieces, right? I'm not gonna help you be a plumber. But we can help you with the rest of this stuff. So you referenced the Million Dollar Playbook. How does someone go about getting a copy of that? I actually have it on a flipping book, so if somebody shoots me an email, I'll send 'em a copy of the digital version.
Okay. What is your email? Brent at Boss Financial GRP. Dot com.
Catch me there. And that's the Million Dollar Playbook. And, match up on LinkedIn. I put a lot of content on LinkedIn out this stuff there. Yeah. And we have [00:32:00] a YouTube channel, boss Financial Group, where we talk, we go through a scenario with a client on YouTube and there's eight videos on there.
You can see what we do in the process. That we go through. It's, so LinkedIn, YouTube, and then just coming back full circle to what you're doing now with Boss Financial Group, we're servicing not just Dallas, not just Texas, we're serving the US all over the country. Yeah. And it's industry agnostic.
Industry agnostic. It is weird because we fall into niche markets. we'll have right now, what's the one that we're working with now? Baseball field construction. Really? That's a thing all of a sudden. And it's a big deal. These little league baseball fields, huh? Are money making machines.
And we fell into, now we have four or five people that are in the baseball industry, but it goes in cycles. It's weird. Healthcare companies were big for a while. Nonprofits, we do a lot with nonprofits. But it, and now it's, I think, oilfields the next trend. And then they'll disappear and we'll have another niche market.
So it's really weird to have moves around like that. There's different cycles. Yeah. I wouldn't have called the baseball fields, I would've thought pickleball. I know, right? Maybe pickleball. I know. I see that trend everywhere. By buying old grocery stores and turn 'em into pickleball. Yeah. Do you [00:33:00] Indoor?
Indoor. I played, about seven matches total. And I've won every match, so I'll quit. I'm undefeated. You gotta stop playing eight year olds. I know, right? I'm undefeated at pickleball right now and I'll keep it that way. I'm not playing any more matches. I'm done. I'm impressed. Yeah. If someone comes to you what's the onboarding process? How does the fee structure just generally work? Like how do you operate? Okay. Couple of different ways. The onboarding process is real easy. We have a digital form, we send it to you. You can upload copies of documents,
Operating agreements, buy sell agreements, your insurance policies, your retirement, any documents. We upload it all into the system and it's gonna pre-populate our financial Foursquare for us. Makes it super simple. We, the business valuation piece, we do not charge for that. Couple different reasons is we want the information, so if we do it for you, we're gonna get all the information that we're needing as well.
That can be as much as, 10 to $30,000. That can be a charge. So that's why when we do it every year, we have an unbelievable software program that we use and that's a free service. The valuation, we do it as a free service, if you go through the process. So we don't just do 'em to handle 'em out.
But if they go through the whole process, it's a free add on. And then we make money on commissions. Like [00:34:00] everybody else, every product, everything that's ever bought has a commission associated with it. You buy a glass, somebody made a commission on selling that glass. If you buy a computer, somebody made a commission somewhere.
everything, every product, every insurance product, every investment tool, every investment product all has commissions. And that's where we get paid. So if someone comes to you, a company comes to you, they onboard, they go through this process, they get the valuation obviously, and that's done every year.
The only fees or is there like a monthly fee? Is there an onboarding fee? No. Okay. So the fees are incurred when they Buy these product. If they decide they wanna work with us. So they don't have to work with us if they don't. We want 'em to, we wanna run their business. Yeah.
And we're gonna give you all this stuff and we believe in what we're doing and you're gonna see the difference and you're gonna want to do what we recommend. Did you, is that how your other firm did it?
Or is this something because I don't think I've seen that. Usually there's a, they charge a planning fee Yes. Unless commissions were higher than the planning fee. Low. And then they'd block out the planning fee. Yeah. And so you're never gonna charge a planning fee basically. 'cause the commissions are probably gonna be more than the 10 grand p fee that you charged.
So it's a marketing thing that we do just to. Keep, stay busy and [00:35:00] we are busy people. Clients are lining up to go through the process. So it's a good, it's a good thing. A lot of CPA firms we're working with now because we give a deliverable of 180 page document.
Could be bigger, that we hand the client at the end and they can touch it. Everything is in this book. From the business valuation to the property and casualty valuation to the employee benefits, retirement plans, exit strategies, what you're doing now, what we recommend you do, all of it's in this book and we give that to the client.
Yeah, I think I saw on your website that the valuation report, a loan could be potentially a hundred page and we do the certified ones. If they need a SBA loan, we can do those as well. If somebody wants it certified and signed off on, they can actually go get a SBA loan with it. So it's not a. A, a crappy business valuation.
It's the real deal. It's actionable and it's utility. And just last question on Boss Financial Group. If someone wants to go on board, they just go to your website, which is. Boss Financial. R-P-G-R-P. Dot com. Dot com? Okay. wonderful. Find me on LinkedIn. Write on LinkedIn that you'll, I got thousands and thousands of articles that we've written over the years, and [00:36:00] that's how I found you.
I Started seeing your stuff and I clicked on one of 'em. I was like, oh, this is insightful. And then obviously you rid of my algorithm, so you kept coming up more. I was like, oh, this is looking forward to working with you talking.
We're looking forward to figuring out how to work together now going forward. No, I love that. Thank you. Thank you. This was wonderful, Brent. Thank you so much. Thank you. I know you're super, super busy. You got this beautiful office here and Dallas and you and your wife are busy bees. Yeah. So we appreciate you giving us, thank you so much.
Giving some time. Thank you very much. Yeah, great.