Hello and welcome to the Savvy or Surrender Podcast. My name is Stephen Young. I am your host and owner of Savvy Tax Strategies and Bookkeeping. And of course, uh do this podcast to help others know more about their money, to be savvy and not surrender. We never want to surrender. We're going to talk about today the episode or the uh episode 17, the year in review. This is the second to last day of the year that I'm recording this. You're probably gonna see this on, or at least it's gonna be released to you on New Year's Eve. And so, you know, let's let's focus here on let's hang on a second.

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Woo, baby, let's go! All right, 2026. We're ranging Benjamins coming into 2026. But let's first talk about 2025. In this episode, it's gonna be a little bit different. Um, for the past 16 episodes, I've talked about profit first, income taxes, how to uh use strategies to avoid some of the income taxes. Profit first, uh business credit. Last week's episode, episode 16, check it out with my guest Jimmy Rios, talking about business credit and how you can get some of that. We talked about different cash flow strategies, and we're just getting started. I'm really looking forward to continuing to build this podcast. We're gonna talk a little bit more about it, about what worked, what didn't work, but let's get into the year in review and we're gonna start with uh money. We're gonna start with what worked. And so for me, in um in my business, in the the savvy tax strategies and bookkeeping, we had 570% growth in 2025. So it started off January 1st, 2025. I was still a full time, I was still a uh part-time in the business. I had moved into a SBA assisted office, meaning I had this bigger office, no separation, conference room, and everything was all together. Um, but the rent was kind of assisted by or subsisted by the SBA um so to help business owners to be able to launch. And that's really the goal of that building. Sub-launch businesses into the real world, into having their own business or having their own building and things like that. Now, there have been people in that business, in that in that building for years now, and it feels like they're never going to launch. They enjoy the uh rent control basically. I moved out, I was there for eight months, and then I moved into this new building here in June. Um, I originally tried to buy it and that fell through, but then I decided to rent it. And so we'll talk a little bit more about that too. Anyways, so it was part-time. I had one part-time bookkeeper um on January 1st, 2025. And now I have four employees. I have two bookkeepers, an accountant, a client coordinator, slash marketing, slash assistant. She's a little bit of everything. Thank you, Katie. Appreciate all you do while you she has the task of editing these podcasts and has to listen to me in her ear over and over and over again. It's gotta be horrible. I can only imagine. My wife would never do it, that's for sure. Um, but Katie does a great job. I appreciate her. And on January 5th, I'm actually getting her kind of like an assistant. We're getting a marketing person from the Philippines that's going to be working on a lot of the different social media and content that's going to go into the podcast or to be able to help podcast listeners get more information out of us. So I'm really looking forward to that. I think that's going to be very helpful in growing the podcast, growing the social media business side of the business that we have. Okay, so gross income. January or 2024, I closed my business, first full year in business. Uh,$57,000 is what I had done. About 50 tax returns or so in 2024. And the rest came from bookkeeping, cleanups, things like that. 2025, we did about 173, not about 173 tax returns. And then the rest, bookkeeping, all that kind of stuff. We will close the year uh with one more day. It looks like we'll close right at about$325,000. So 573% growth, somewhere around there, 570% growth. Uh, not too bad in a year, I would say. I'm pretty happy with it. My goal uh when I was trying to buy this building um was that I I put down that I would close the year at$254,000. So I beat my estimate by about$75,000. And honestly, when I put$254, I thought that was a stretch. So um I think I said in 20, in fact, actually, I have it right here. In 2026, I said I was going to do$351,000. So here's my projections. Actually, I'll just go ahead and share it real quick. Here's my projections. This is kind of an SBA type spreadsheet. If this is giving you um if if it's just like a bunch of garbledy gook, I'm sure probably that that would make sense. But this is for the next year, so for 2026, I was saying that I would do$351,000 in year one here. And this is, of course, great entertainment for somebody who is on YouTube. You can actually see this spreadsheet if you're just listening to this on the podcast. Basically, I am showing a spreadsheet that just uh shows the numbers of breakdown. This is what I had to fill out to be able to get an SBA loan to be able to buy my office space. So here you can see I estimated that I would do$254,000 in income for um for 2025. And so I beat that by about$75,000. So I'm pretty happy about that. So this building to talk about that here, real quick. So I was driving by, this is about five minutes from my house, and I was driving by and I saw these new commercial condos being built. And I thought, you know, I wanted to build my own office in a year or two. Um, and then I saw these and I thought, man, this would be amazing. So I reached out to my commercial real estate agent that's in my BI group, Katie. Also, that's kind of funny. Uh so Katie, I reached I sent her an email and I was like, hey, I have this pipe dream of being able to buy this office. I don't know if it can happen or not. We started running through it, found the bank, found the SBA, the community development company that they do the SBA loans. The there's two of them out here in my area that work with them. And uh the first one said no right away. And to be fair, you know, I had only made$57,000 the first year in business, and actually that was gross. Net, I think, was at like, you know, I deducted quite a few things in office expenses and stuff, and I think I lost like$15,000,$16,000 on taxes in 2024. Um, so they said no. The second company was more interested, and they said they were ready to go. They were gonna do it. They had me fill out all of this information. They kept asking for more information, and I kept sending it. And at the end of the day, a week before we were supposed to close, they pulled out and said no. Fine. So what do I do now? I guess I stay in the SBA office. And actually, the developer that were was building these buildings um reached out and said, Hey, how about you still go ahead and move in as a tenant and we'll give you a sweetheart of a deal. You can keep the the same price if you purchase it within a year, and all of the rent payments that you make for the next year will go towards your down payment. So very hard to say no to that. It was a little bit more the rent itself would be a little bit more than what I would have been paying um if I had just been able to mortgage it. But, you know, it moved it worked out. We moved in in June, and um, and so we've been here, you know, for the last six months or so. Um, so I'm really excited about that. Hopefully, in the next couple of months, we will get the loan completed and I will have purchased the office suite. So, again, pretty happy overall with those results, and that's how it worked with that loan. That was that was a tedious process, and it was one thing that I knew how to deal with the financials and everything. If you're a business owner that's going through the financials uh aspects of trying to get a loan and your books are not kept up, um, I don't even know how you do it. It's it's hard. And so that's why you need somebody like me, right? That's why you need somebody with the experience of one, getting loans, but two, know how to make the financials work, can show you a spreadsheet and help you complete it to be able to show the banks that you are one credit worthy, but two, that you can that that you're worthy of getting the loan and that that it'll work out for your business and for them. So, okay, enough of that. So the way I'm organizing this episode and and kind of going through the year and review, and the reason why I think you'll find it interesting is one, you just kind of knowing, especially if you're an accountant or a bookkeeper or you want to be one or something, maybe this will be interesting to you. But even if you're not, even if you're my normal person that I target to the contractors and and you know, business owners or real estate investors, let's take a look at your business. Do a year and review for your business. Sit down tomorrow, Thursday, cup of coffee, whatever it is, and and sit down and just do a quick year and review. And here's how I'm breaking it down. So, number one was what worked. Um, you know, I'm gonna break it down between marketing and operations. Two is what didn't work in really the same categories. Marketing, operations, um, biggest wins is number three. Number four is biggest challenges, and then number five is moving forward. How do we fix it? Right, because it's one thing to review it and to look at what you did. But if there are some challenges, and there probably are always going to be challenges for you, right? There's at least in my business, it seems like there's always challenges. While I'm pretty happy with the top line stuff, there was a lot that went into it that that was uh a big challenge that we'll get into it. So, what did work? Well, for marketing, what worked for me was BI. Um, business networking international is what it called, and basically it's networking group. And so, my particular networking group, I joined it was May of 2024. And so I've been there for just a little over a year, and it it represents about 50% of my business, I get from that group. And so the way, um, the way I look at it is called I what I call the six degrees of BI. You may have heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon. This is the six degrees of BI. And so if I meet somebody in my group, in my networking group, who then introduces me to somebody, who introduces me to somebody, so on and so forth, until the sixth layer down, that to me is a BI referral. It came from BI. And when I track that, about 50% of my business starts there somehow. The other part that worked was my Dave Ramsey leads. So I am a tax professional with Dave Ramsey, and I own 35% of the Boise market. So that equates out to last year, 100 or this year, I guess still 2025. I got 127 leads from them. Uh, that was a mixture between 40 to 60 per lead that I have to pay for. And my return on investment on that was just over 100%. So I made money on those, but not a lot. The goal, of course, is now I'm going to hold on to at least some of them uh for 2026 tax return. I know I'm gonna lose some because there were a lot of people that they had moved here into the Boise market and they only used a tax professional because they had sold their house in another state. They felt it was gonna be too uh difficult to do their own taxes. And now that it that's done, they're just gonna go back to turbo tax. And so I know that there's several of those that have told me as much. So I'm not gonna be able to retain all of them or even the amount that I would normally expect to retain on those types of leads, but ultimately I will have a very positive ROI from them, and then I'll continue to get more this year. And then uh what else? The chamber. So I'm a member of the NAMPA chamber. I was in the leadership, um, the the leadership class of 2025 for the chamber. That has helped me out pretty well. It's not a huge one, it's not really, I don't look at the chamber as being a um a leads group, right? That's not where I think I'm going to get a lot of business from, but I enjoy being a member of other small businesses. And so that is a membership that I will hold on to. And I do get business from it. People refer me to it. And when I go to chamber mixers and things like that, they remember me. And so then I get referrals from that. Referrals from current clients are huge. Of course, if you're doing the right thing, providing five-star service, you're gonna get referred from your current clients. And so that's been wonderful. And then also building relationships. I am a member of the Canyon County Regional Realtors. And so that's been great to work with realtors, mortgage professionals. If they need somebody to get their taxes done to buy a house, they know they can call me and get it done quickly so that then they can get the house done. Um, and so I get a lot of referrals from them. And then financial advisors, which that one honestly, financial advisors can be tough to get referrals from. Um, some of them either they've been working with somebody for a really long time and they are they guard that relationship, and I can appreciate that. Um, others, honestly, a lot of financial advisors, they don't have a lot of business. There's so many of them, I feel like, and they're trying to build their own book of business. And so a lot of times, if you are an aspiring bookkeeper or accountant or or you are one, you probably already know this. But a lot of the financial advisors, you know, they'll like to say, like, are you already working with somebody? Basically, they're trying to get the business from you, right? They want all of those people that are doing tax returns. So find the ones that are good. I've I've got a couple of them that I really work well with. They give me referrals, I give them referrals, and and I've got a good mix of kind of young and old and who I feel like is going to be a good mix rather than just always giving it to one. I I primarily give it to the person who is in my B and I group. He feeds me, I feed him. We're on our power team. But there is another person that I'll use on occasion when I feel like, hey, he might be a better fit for this kind of uh for this type of person or you know, whatever. Um so I do that too. So sorry, Andrew, if you're listening. You're not a hundred percent the guy I talk to, but you're like 98%. Okay. Okay, um, who else? Uh, let's see here. All right, so that was it. So the lesson with marketing and with what works was be willing to invest in what works. Know your numbers, know your KPIs, what what's working there, right? What are working in your marketing efforts? Because now I'm gonna talk about what didn't work. And it's really important to know what didn't work, right? Even more so than what did work. And what didn't work for me was Facebook ads. I ran a lot of Facebook ads. I spent thousands of dollars, over$10,000 this year in Facebook ads. Uh, I got some business from it, definitely did not make a return on my investment there. The rule of thumb is that it takes at least 30 days of spending$100 a day, so$3,000, for the algorithm to just figure out who to get your message in front of. And even then, I don't know that it works. And the reason I say that is because if I start running, if I start running Facebook ads for uh tax strategy clients, guess what I start seeing in my Facebook feed? Ads for tax strategy people, right? Like other tax strategists are suddenly giving me their ads. So Facebook has a hard time figuring out the algorithm, I feel like. And I'm not always getting the I'm I'm not getting the greatest quality leads. And I'm so I don't know, maybe the maybe I needed to give it more time and throw more dollars at it, more more Benjamins at it. Um, but it was hard to do continue to do so, especially when other things were working. So that one did not work for me. And then um the other thing that didn't work, honestly, was this podcast. So far, anyways, I've gotten one lead from doing the podcast. Um, I have we're at 121 downloads so far as of today. We have a little over 3,500 total views. It was 3,500 like a couple weeks ago. I didn't check it today, so I don't know exactly. But so it's maybe over 4,000 leads now or views on YouTube. But you know, views, I'm not an influencer, right? So views does not equate into dollars for me. So um that's one area that we are looking to grow. So far hasn't worked, but I'm definitely not pulling the plug on it. You're gonna get to keep hearing from me. Don't you worry. And then the other thing that didn't work for me so far, anyways, I don't know, I'll probably end up pulling the plug on it if I'm being honest, is the savvy CEO shop. I'm kind of I'm kind of bummed. You know, I designed some really cool shirts. I thought people were gonna dig them. And um, it's not really turning out as much as I thought. My wife is right. Not everybody wants to wear a shirt that says savvy CEO, I guess. So, you know, if if it's something that sounds interesting to you, prove me wrong by going to savyceoshop.com and buy a shirt on savvyceoshirt.com. And then I will know to keep it live. But if nobody goes and buys a shirt, I've sold one. If I'm being completely honest, I've sold one shirt. So, you know, if we want to keep this alive, it costs me, I think it's a hundred and hundred and sixty dollars um uh a month to keep the shop going with all the different tools or whatever with uh with Shopify. So, anyways, that's so far that that has not worked for me. And then the lesson there is um most business owners are flying blind. Things like profit first and getting really good cash flow clarity can help you with knowing and knowing your numbers, right? Those KPIs, knowing what's working, what's not, cut it out. If it's not working, cut it out. I cut off Facebook ads. I have not advertised in with Facebook in over five months, I think. Um, but that wasn't until after it had already maxed out a couple of my credit cards, and it was getting kind of painful, honestly, to keep seeing that charge every day$150 to$200 a day that I was spending and getting nothing really out of it or very minimal out of it. I have a couple great clients that I did get out of it, but you know, it's gonna take a while before they help me to break even. Biggest challenges. By far, my biggest challenge this year has been staffing. As I've grown, uh I've gone through, I'm on my third client coordinator. I'm on my third accountant, I've had the same bookkeeper. Bless you, Bobby. My senior bookkeeper has been with me from the very beginning. She is fantastic. I had an intern that um I brought on from a high school last year. He called me up. He's in college now. He wanted a job, so he's my junior bookkeeper part-time. He's been helping me out and he's been great. The current staff that I have now, I am super pleased with. I love Katie. I love Amy. They're doing great jobs with my being my accountant and my uh client coordinator now. But I've had to go through a few and had one that had a medical emergency and just kind of vanished. And it turned out she was doing a lot of her own stuff that not necessarily like her own work, but just kind of. Doing her own, making her own decisions, I guess I should say, um, things that I didn't know about, and she wasn't documenting things very well. And so we'll get into this challenge here in a little bit with how do we move forward. But um yeah, she wasn't documenting anything. And so when all of a sudden she was no longer available, like basically just left, I had to pick up the pieces and it didn't look great for clients. Now, thankfully, I had some clients who were very understanding and understood that, you know, these things happen. Um, but at the end of the day, when I want to provide that savvy Ritz five-star experience, that's not necessarily what they're getting if those kind of things are happening. And they're gonna happen, you can't necessarily stop it or help it or anything like that. You know, medical emergencies and things are gonna happen to everybody at some point, or it could happen to anybody. I mean, she was young, single mom. I don't want to get all into who that who it was or whatever, but it it um it definitely disrupted my business. And then, and then client coordinator, there are some issues there, and just getting work done, looking at more of a junior position can be difficult as well, maturity, stuff like that. So that was definitely my biggest challenge. And then my time on the business versus in the business, right? Emith revisited. Um, if you've never read that book, great book by Michael Gerber, talks about working on your business versus in your business. Like right now, doing this podcast, I'm working on the business. When those staffing challenges happen, I have to be more in the business. I have to be doing the tax returns myself. I have to be doing the bookkeeping myself and doing all those things that somebody else could be doing better, probably while I'm working on the business and trying to grow. Who knows? I could have been a half million dollar business this year had it every had staffing worked out well. I don't know, probably not, but um cash flow. You can go, you can grow broke, right? If you have clients coming on board that aren't paying you quickly, and this isn't so much in my business, but definitely with a lot of my clients' business, if you're getting paid monthly or if you're getting paid every two months or 90 days, but you have to make payroll every two weeks, you can grow broke quickly because you've got all these bills coming due before the money is coming in. So definitely a challenge, you know, just overall with cash flow, moving, paying way too much and Facebook ads and coaching and all that kind of stuff. It can definitely get tight. So you want to definitely have profit first, good systems in place is the key there. Um, and you're not gonna be perfect for everybody. I'm I am definitely not perfect. I have made mistakes. In fact, 100% honesty, last night I got my first one star review. And um, you know, it was it was a bummer to see because I don't feel like I deserved one star. I probably did deserve three though. It it it was a I did not perform 100% satisfactory for it. It was not a five-star Ritz experience for them. I understand that. I definitely take some culpability in that. They did come to me in the middle of tax season. I did the best that I could. I did get them. Um, everything was filed on time. And so the review, I feel like, is not a hundred percent accurate. In fact, I know it's not a hundred percent accurate. Um, you know, they claimed that there were$10,000 in fines that they had to pay because of me. That is definitely not true. You did not have$10,000 in fines because of what I did. You didn't pay the bill, maybe, and you got$10,000 in fines, but I filed the tax returns on time. So that's not possible. But I did not provide 100% great experience. So I do agree that, you know, there there was definitely some challenges there. But ultimately, my point is, without going too much in the soapbox on it, is you know, you're gonna have these challenges, you're gonna have these growth challenges. And one of the biggest ones for me was systems. I didn't have a great system because it was just me the year before. And so we weren't working in the cloud when I had multiple people doing tax returns and doing all these different, um, doing all these different things for the taxes. I'd have to go from like computer to computer to try to get it all done rather than having a system that had it all in the cloud for us. Um, and so that was kind of that was a big challenge for us. And so we've invested heavily into getting that correct and getting the technology correct so that that won't be a challenge this year. And um, and hopefully that'll be a better experience for everybody. I already know I'm not getting them as a renewable client, I understand, but uh I uh have continued to work on it so that I can provide that savvy grits experience. And I think that's the biggest lesson learned here is how do you move forward? Okay, so you dropped the ball. How do you move forward? How do you make it right? And so that's that's kind of the goal there. Okay, moving forward, um, just like taxes are um, just like taxes aren't the surprise, lack of planning is. I think that's what comes into effect with business as well. We've got a plan. Motivation is fleeting, and you know, it's not gonna stick around for you forever. Um, being savvy is about ownership. And, you know, the the whole reason of the man mantra that I have on this podcast, the name of the podcast, Savvy or Surrender, because I want you to be a savvy business owner and not to surrender. Being a business owner is not for everybody. I have a couple of clients right now that they probably are not going to stick with me in 2026 because they're not gonna stay in business. One of them has already specifically said that they are just gonna go back to being an employee. They found out business ownership's not for them. It isn't for everybody, it is difficult. If you've ever woken up at 3 a.m. trying to figure out how you're gonna make payroll or or you're uh you're at the San Antonio airport and you're trying to figure out what line of credit you can use to be able to make payroll, you know, not that I've been there or anything. No, definitely not. But you know, those kind of challenges that you have, that's what being a business owner is sometimes. And it's not all rosy. It's not all, you know, yachts and private jets and whatever else the social media stars like to show you. Maybe it is for them, but you know, for most of my clients, it is not. And I know definitely for me, it's not. So again, take a look at this. Do a year in review for your business. What worked, what didn't work, your biggest wins, your biggest challenges, and moving forward, how do we fix it? How do we put those systems in place? That's the biggest key. And I would say confidence comes from clarity, not motivation. Financial clarity gives you informed decision making, cuts unnecessary costs, optimizes profitability, supports strategic planning, and strengthens risk management, kind of that SWOT analysis, right? Looking at your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, your threats, all of those things. We help business owners to overcome a lot of those challenges, especially the financial challenges, not just simply helping you pay the least amount in taxes, which, you know, hey, we can help you do that, but also giving you those that cash flow care clarity, helping you understand your financials so that you can make better business decisions. And it's not just simply about right now, but how do you change the generational wealth of your family through your business? That's ultimately my goal is to help you to, you know, why did you go into business to begin with? It probably was not to get to zero every year, right? It wasn't to spend every single dollar so that you paid nothing to Uncle Sam. If that was the goal, then tomorrow go out and buy a truck, I guess. But if your goal is to change the destiny, the financial destiny of your family, then that's what we're here for. And so if this sounds like something that you're interested in, give us a shot at uh at doing a discovery call and see if it makes sense. You can go to meetwithsavvy.com and I would love to be able to have a conversation with you and see if we are a fit for you. With that, have a fantastic new year. If you're already listening to this in the new year, I hope your new year was great, and we will talk to you more with future episodes in 2026.