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- [00:00]
Chris Field
The vast majority of CPAs are paid to look backwards. They're never even asked to look forwards. And so of course they're not going to do that because that's not the service that they're being paid for. And so this is really a way for a financial advisor, if they're not also a cpa. It's a way for a financial advisor to link up with the CPA to make sure the client really has a team representing them. And in the case where the CPA is also a financial advisor, it's a massive opportunity to make the whole thing a turnkey situation because you're talking about some seriously material differences. I mean, as an example, we pull Elizabeth Warren's tax return off the Internet. She puts it out on the Internet for anybody to grab. So we use it as a sample. And Elizabeth Warren, on her 2019 tax return, she missed a QCD out of an IRA that would have saved her $8,000 in taxes. And so maybe she didn't want to save $8,000 in taxes, but she could have made an $8,000 charitable deduction, which would have increased her charitable deduction that she did make by about 20%.
- [01:14]
Rob Santos
Welcome to AFO Wealth Management forward, a podcast about finance, accounting, technology and entrepreneurship. We apply our decades worth of experience and insight into what makes businesses work so we can help others grow both personally and professionally in this ever evolving marketplace. We help firms and financial advisors grow their practice through the adoption of holistic wealth management services. Learn from industry leaders and subject matter experts to unlock the secrets of their success. A podcast that shows people and companies the transformative power of technology so they don't fear it, but instead harness it. Don't fight the robots, team up with them. And here are your hosts, Rory Henry, Director of Business Development and CEO Rob Santos of Arrowroot Family Office.
- [01:57]
Rory Henry
Today, Rob and I are joined by the Chief revenue officer at HolistaPlan. HolistaPlan is a technology used by thousands of financial advisors to efficiently and effectively scale their business through tax planning strategies. Our guest is also the founder and CEO of the Mercy Project, which is a nonprofit organization using sustainability and empowerment to help rescue children out of slavery in Ghana, Africa. He's also the author of the book Disrupting for Good. Using passion and persistence to create lasting change. With all that being said, Rob, I am very excited to introduce our guest today, Chris Field. Chris, how are you doing today?
- [02:32]
Chris Field
Hey, I'm doing great guys. Thanks so much for having me.
- [02:35]
Unknown
Welcome to the podcast. Chris, so popping right in. Could you share a little Bit about the background and services of Holistaplan and then a little bit about how you came to go work over there in your background. That would be great.
- [02:50]
Chris Field
Yeah, absolutely. So two years ago we were launched. Holistaplan was launched by two CFPs. One ran an RIA in Texas, one ran an RIA in Virginia. And really the purpose of Holistaplan was to make tax planning more efficient. I mean, they both loved tax planning. It was one of the most valuable things they could do for their clients. The way their clients, many of whom had been with financial advisors for years, getting their money managed, their investments managed. But they never had anybody look at their taxes. And the way they would find material differences, opportunities in somebody's taxes that led to tax planning opportunities was it was just like this light came on. The problem was super not scalable. It was taking them an hour, two hours for every single client. They had five spreadsheets and three checklists and two word documents. I mean it's a mess. I mean it's a huge message. And so they were sitting there having beers together, they knew each other from some affiliations and they said, what if we built a software? They used machine learning to do the heavy lifting of reading this tax return and aggregating it into a simple 2, 3 page report that both summarized the gargantuan tax return and also identified tax planning opportunities. And so that's what they built. So we're two years into this thing now and we've had a ton of fun. Have almost 3,000 firms using the software now. Everything from solo advisors all the way up to some really large enterprise, some of the biggest names in the financial planning industry from an enterprise standpoint.
- [04:32]
Unknown
And involves Arrude at the top of the list.
- [04:37]
Chris Field
That's right. Absolutely alphabetically. Absolutely alphabetically.
- [04:42]
Unknown
Why we started it out with Air Root.
- [04:44]
Chris Field
Absolutely.
- [04:45]
Unknown
So.
- [04:46]
Chris Field
So my journey to come to holistic plan. I've been in the business of helping people for a long time. Started the nonprofit 11 years ago doing anti child trafficking work in Ghana. But even as I've done that, I've done a lot of business consulting, a lot of nonprofit consulting, a lot of sales and marketing. Own a social media company that's helped more than a hundred small, medium sized businesses leverage social media. Really even before people were doing that on social. Started that business five or six years ago, really early in the small business cycle of getting on social media. And so I knew one of the founders, Roger, and he'd seen some of the stuff that I'd done here we Live in the same town. And he'd seen some of the stuff that I'd done and he reached out to me and said, look, you know, we're a startup. There's really no roadmap for what we're trying to do. Everyone has lots of ideas, but what we need is somebody who can come in and can be really creative and can help us. We know we've got a great product, but we need to figure out how to get it out to more people. And so it's a cool opportunity for me to come in and use all these years that I've been doing stuff in shoulder industries and positioning products and telling stories and getting people excited, I mean, all those things kind of converged and came together and so that's what my role is here. It started as Director of Partnerships and just slowly, slowly moved up VP of Sales and Marketing and now Chief Growth Officer. So Roger and Kevin are awesome to work with. The product is fantastic. And I feel lucky every day that I get to help advisors as they help their clients with tax planning.
- [06:25]
Rory Henry
That's great. And we talk about, through our program, AFO Wealth Management Forward is really helping small and mid sized accounting firms help small businesses. They are the backbone of our economy. And we really let them know that, you know, there is a holistic way to approach a client's finances. Can you kind of talk about, you know, holistic plan and that holistic approach and how important it is to look at someone's whole finances when advising them? Chris?
- [06:52]
Chris Field
I mean, I think what we're discovering more and more is that when there are many different ways we're going to talk to a client and work with a client, almost all of those things are going to touch their taxes. So if they're doing investment management, if they're doing 529s, if they're doing estate planning, I mean, every single piece of anything we're doing around finances is going to touch taxes. And the other thing, so much of what happens in a, from a kind of a prototypical, you know, financial advisor role is to remind the client to stay steady and be patient and stay the course. Which is great advice and, but it also doesn't make for great touch points because it's like, hey, same thing I told you last year, just keep doing what you're doing. It's like, really? I'm paying you for that again? I mean, it's tough. We live in a very much a culture. It's like, what have you done for me lately? Well, guess what? Every single person Has a new tax return every single year and tax law changes every few years. And so and people's financials, you know, somebody says to me, sounds like, well, I assume this software is not helpful. If somebody's just W2 and their salary pretty much stays the same. I'm like, are they getting married? Are they getting divorced? Are they having kids? Are their kids graduating from college and not becoming dependents? Are they giving more to charity? Are they getting a new mortgage? I mean, are they getting near retirement age? Need to start thinking about rmd, Social Security. They live in a state that has state income tax where these federal implications are going to roll over. I mean, there's a million variables on every tax return is the financial thumbprint of every single American. And to think that we couldn't take the thumb financial thumbprint of an American and find something. And here's what I always tell people. Worst case scenario, you get to tell a client they're not paying too much in taxes. That's the worst case scenario. You get to say, Mr. And Ms. Johnson, I've spent some time with your tax return and I just want to tell you something. First of all, congratulations. You are not paying more than you need to be paying in taxes. Because the truth is, Whether somebody makes 50,000 or 50 million, they're worried they're paying too much in taxes. Every single person. And so with a tiny, tiny little investment, you can at minimum have a positive touch point, a meaningful conversation and share with the family that they're not paying more than they need to in taxes. That's a huge win for anybody. And more often than not, you're going to identify numerous opportunities for a family, great conversation pieces which just deepens your relationship with them, which just makes you more sticky, makes you more valuable, reminds them why they pay you every single year.
- [09:41]
Unknown
Yep. And you know, just so for listeners that haven't gone to list a plan or tried it, you know, you know, securely sending tax returns in, the data does what it does. It creates a beautiful report with your logo on it. Very insightful. Breaks down the facts, gives you the ability to go in there and adjust different assumptions. You know, for us and everyone else that was going through Covid, this was the longest tax year ever. Right. So it was the most useful tool for us to be able to visualize things with people moving out of New York or California. You know, one conversation we got all the time was, what happens if I move to Texas, which is by you guys. Or what happens if I move to Miami or out of New York and the tool for us to say, here you go. You know, this is, this is what, dollar and cents using your tax return on what you are earning this year. This is the effect that it's going to be, which would have taken, you know, multiple different things. Could you maybe just spend a second and talk about the use case, some of the basic use cases that a lot of advisors are using the technology for today?
- [10:51]
Chris Field
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first thing that I think a lot of your listeners will get a kick out of because they're just going to shake their heads and be like, yes, is it's to demystify taxes. I mean, people just, it doesn't matter how successful someone is, taxes are just a mess. I mean, it's just, there's so many things going on. Tax returns are now dozens and dozens of pages. You know, you don't, you've got all these schedules. You don't know when A is linked to L, which is, points back to R and you have to subtract Z. I mean, it's a total mess. And so that tax report, which just to be clear and just kind of reiterate what you said, Robin, when you upload a tax return, 10, 40, if it's an electronic copy of a tax return coming straight from the CPA, we generate that client deliverable in about 60 seconds. And so you could take a 40, 50 page tax return and 60 seconds later you have a two to three page client deliverable that highlights their key figures. It's going to calculate their actual marginal rate, their effective rate, because a lot of clients, they, they think they're, they say I'm paying 40% taxes. Like you're not paying 40% in taxes. Like, I know that feels like a, I get it. I understand that there's a tax bracket that you're in that may be close to 40%, but your effective rate is not 40%. And we actually do that calculation right there at the top key figures. And then we're going to go through all the MAGI categories. The report's going to highlight Medicare Part B and D premiums. We're going to highlight your tax deductible donation. You know, the, the charitable donations that you made, your mortgage, I mean, the above the line stuff, like, it's just a beautiful, clean, neat summary. And then at the end it has those observations that says, listen, based on your income, it looks like you don't qualify for a Roth conversion. But this would probably be an important time to talk about a backdoor Roth conversion with an Advisor and you know, even sometimes points out things that they may not know, very educational, like why they're being taxed 85% of their Social Security versus 50%. So it's a great way to demystify a tax return. And most people are not going to read through their 40, 50 page tax return. But if you have a three page deliverable that summarizes and hits the high points and then has talking points at the end of next steps, basically it's a great opportunity. The second thing is the back end of the software is our scenario analysis. So when you upload that tax return, you're going to get that client deliverable tax report, but you're also, at the same time it's going to pre fill a column in our scenario analysis. So if you want to work a Roth conversion, if you want to work a qcd, if you want to work rmd, if you want to work even things like stock options, long term, short term, cap, all of those various things, you can model all that out right there in that scenario analysis. You can compare four columns at a time. We have a lot of advisors, they're putting that up on a big TV right in their office. When the client comes in, they say, hey, today we're really discussing four possibilities. Here's last year's tax return. If nothing changed, it's going to be pretty similar to this. Here's three other options on the sale of the business or the, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, whatever the thing is, and that's able to show in real time, if this, then that, if this, then that. And it's just a really powerful way to communicate the, you know, what's happening with your clients and to look into the future with them. And here's the thing again, I think your audience will appreciate this. People ask us all the time, they say, when a financial advisor is doing this, does the CPA get mad that the financial advisors like catching things the CPA might have missed? And we say no, you're misunderstanding. I know very, very few CPAs that are paid to look forwards. The vast majority of CPAs are paid to look backwards. They're never even asked to look forwards. And so of course they're not going to do that because that's not the service that they're being paid for. And so this is really a way for a financial advisor, if they're not also a cpa, it's a way for a financial advisor to link up with the CPA to make sure the client really has a team representing them. And in the case where the CPA is also a financial advis, it's a massive opportunity to make the whole thing a turnkey situation because you're talking about some seriously material differences. I mean, as an example, we pull Elizabeth Warren's tax return off the Internet. She puts it out on the Internet for anybody to grab. So we use it as a sample. And Elizabeth Warren, on her 2019 tax return, she missed a QCD out of an IRA that would have saved her $8,000 in taxes. And so maybe she didn't want to save $8,000 in taxes, but she could have made an $8,000 charitable deduction, which would have increased her charitable deduction that she did make by about 20%. And the point of that is even people who have financial professionals, even people who are pretty on top of their stuff, there's a good chance that you're going to help them find some really material differences. And what's really cool is when you have a family you're working with or somebody that didn't think they were able to start a 529 or somebody that thought they were going to have to work until they were 78 because they weren't going to be able to put enough in their retirement when you can find a 3, 4, 5, $7,000 bottom line difference. And now they're able to fund that 529, now they're able to put that much more. They're able to do their entire Roth max it every year instead of doing partial. That's pretty amazing feeling because that's really money they shouldn't be paying in taxes. And they don't know. They just don't know until somebody comes along and educates them. And that's really what the software does very simply and very easily.
- [16:42]
Rory Henry
Yeah, and I think this is so important coming up with, you know, the coming tax law changes and what's going to be going on next year for, you know, taxpayers to make sure that they're being tax efficient with their, with their investments. You know, and Rob and I talk about the convergence of these professional services. You know, life insurance agents are becoming financial planners, financial planners are doing taxes. You have accounting firms like the ones that we have in our program starting to do financial planning and wealth management. Can you kind of talk about maybe the adoption rate that you guys have seen from a financial advisors taking on this role and getting into the tax world? And where do you see that growth happening here in the future?
- [17:21]
Chris Field
Well, I think what we're seeing is that right now the market penetration for tax planning software is very, very low, which tells me that there's still a chance for people to be leaders in this segment instead of followers. And I also think we're seeing fee compression and all these conversations around robo investments and all that. There's really no question in my mind that in 10 years, if you're not doing tax planning as an advisor, then you're going to be way behind everybody else. The only question is, are you going to be a leader in doing it proactively and being one of the first ones to market that and lead in that, or are you going to follow everybody once the table has already been set? I really think that's the only. Look, our tax code is not getting less complicated. Tax implications are not getting less complicated. People's fears and stress and worry around taxes not getting less complicated. And so the question is, do we just keep hoping that some libertarian politicians gonna come in and it's gonna end up with a flat tax, which we know is not gonna happen? And.
- [18:31]
Rory Henry
And that won't be changed in four years?
- [18:33]
Chris Field
Exactly. The reality is this is just a huge part of people's financial futures. There's just zero question about it. And as people become more educated, they begin to know enough to be dangerous. And what they can know is that there are tax planning opportunities, but not know how to leverage those. And that's where the joint financial advisor, either the CPA that's also an advisor or the advisor that's also a CPA or the advisor who partners with the local CPA firm, those are going to be the ones that really win the day because they're going to be able to comprehensively. We call it comprehensive financial planning. And really that's being code in a lot of ways that's been code for investment management. We cannot call ourselves comprehensive financial planners if we're not also looking at people's taxes. That's just the bottom line. It's a huge piece of the puzzle for every single person that's out there. And so look, instead of running away from that, we need to run towards that. I mean, there's no. The barrier to entry has never been lower. A Premium subscription to Holistaplan for 75 uploads a year is $999. I mean, that's insanity that for $1,000 you could take 75 clients and have this client deliverable and scenario analysis to give them true comprehensive financial planning. I mean, there's no excuse at this point other than just wanting to put our heads in the sands, you know, and hope that things change and they're just not changing. And so let me tell you something that I found really fascinating in the industry that is really kind of fun, especially when it comes to the folks that are probably listening today. You know, when we built this software, it was two financial planners who built it for financial planners to do more efficient planning. That was the goal, that was the dream, that was the vision. What we've seen happen, which is frankly kind of surprised us. We get it now. It seems obvious, but we didn't see it coming. And that is advisors that are using HolistaPlan as a business development tool. And they're saying to, you know, they're meeting with a client who's meeting with three or four different advisors, and all of them are talking about small cap, large cap, you know, culture of our company, portfolio management. Our software is so great. I mean, everybody's saying the same thing to some degree. Everybody's saying the same thing. But then when you have right now, the last data we saw, one out of four financial advisors are using tax planning software. So when you're the one of the four and you bust out a tax report, white, labeled with your logo at the top and your disclaimer at the bottom, and you say, hey, just as an example of one of the things that differentiates us every single year, we're going to sit down with you in your taxes and we are actually going to take your tax return and do tax planning with you and for you and alongside of you. And just as an example, here's the kind of report we'll generate for you. All of a sudden now the market differentiation is huge. And I told you guys, I was at a conference last week, I had three different conversations with three different CPAs who are moving into the financial advisory space. And everyone, to a person, they were dreaming way too small. The way they were looking at holistic plan. They were saying, you know, one guy specifically, I'll tell he's from Michigan, he said, yeah, I got about 1200 tax prep clients and I got about 100 families that I'm doing advising for. He said, so I think I'll probably, you know, I'll probably do around the hundred, around the 100 upload plan. I said, sir, with all due respect, I'd like to give you an alternate possibility. I said, the 1200 tax prep clients that you have every single year, how sure are you that some of those would probably make great financial advisory clients? You just aren't sure which of the 1200 it would be. And he's like, oh, I know I'm missing some because it's just I can't get to them all. And I said, do you know with $10,000, 99.99 a year, you can run a thousand tax returns and it would take you an intern or an administrative assistant probably three days to run a thousand returns on the software. And they'd be able to bring you the hundred 150 clients that are right now not getting advisory from you, that are ripe for it because of something found in that tax return. And it was like you could watch the light bulb go off in his head because he was doing the math, he was thinking about what's the value of one client? To me if they become a financial advising client against that $10,000, what's the lifetime value of one client? And it became the most obvious open, closed, just no brainer for him that if he could turn those 1200 returns into 2, 3, 4, 5 new clients, he's going to make his money back multi times. And the chances that it's only three people, we both know, almost impossible, right? It's going to be 50 or 100 of those 1200 are going to be ripe to be approached to talk about financial advising. So when you talk about what moves are being made in this space, I think you're going to see a revolution among CPAs in the next few years that are finally leveraging technology to identify the right opportunities to have these most powerful conversations and get people to become financial advising clients in addition to tax prep clients.
- [24:01]
Unknown
Yep. And you know, we totally agree with all of that. You know, part of, part of what we say for our program is partner with the robots, don't fight them. And so, you know, using technology like this is really powerful. You know what one question I would have, especially for the small mid sized accountant firms that are listening is, you know, they're bombarded with tax planning software, tax filing software, and you know, part of one of the issues that we really try to help people with in demystifying a lot of the processes and software partners that we use in wealth management forward is that there are simpler, straightforward software solutions to take care of very, you know, unique issues here. Could you talk about your competitive advantage versus those, you know, 360 degree behemoth tax planning software, you know, takes, you need a master's degree and a summer to learn how to use it and maybe go into a special conference or two. How do you guys compare out there in that neighborhood?
- [25:12]
Chris Field
I mean I think the most simple way I can answer that question, I hope is not going to come across as arrogant because I really don't want to. I'm proud of this. We've been around two years. Some of those other tax planning softwares that are used by both historically financial advisors and CPAs, some of them have been around, some of the big names have been around for a decade or longer. In the latest T3Tech survey, where they surveyed financial advisors, we had twice the market share of the closest competitor. And I think that tells you everything that you need to know. There's a re. You can't come in in two years and take twice the market share of somebody that's been around for a decade. Unless one of those softwares makes you want to pull your hair out. Lori and I, of course, you're right for you, Rob.
- [26:04]
Unknown
I got a big forehead.
- [26:06]
Chris Field
Oh, well, we're, we're way behind. God, you look great, man. You look great. We take that in a second. But you know, that doesn't happen by accident. That only happens because exactly what you said, like if you have to go in and spend hours modeling things out for one client, the scalability is just not there. It's, it's just not there anymore. And are there special cases where a client might need tons of modeling and to go, I mean, 10 miles deep? Sure, there are fringe cases out there, there's no question. But for the 95% of people that are going to fall within the guidepost, within the buoys, in the, in the lake, something that can immediately come and tell them exactly what the opportunities are. It's just, it's, it lets you, you know, here's what I would say. We have to choose. If we, sometimes we have to choose. Do we want to do fantastic tax planning for one client in a day, or do we want to do great tax planning for 25 clients? And that's really what we have to ask, is that holistic plan is going to catch some of those fringe cases we might miss. But the 95% of people are going to fall squarely within those lanes and they're going to get exactly the kind of tax planning you could get on the cumbersome software with far less stress for the advisor or the cpa. So that's the bot. You need to understand. It's not CPA software. It's obviously not tax prep software. It's not spend eight hours, although scenario analysis. I mean, we had a guy one time on a webinar, he had like a hundred scenarios in his scenario bank for one client, you know, like he had gone crazy. So, I mean, you can go pretty deep. But this is really when you're trying to scale tax planning and add value across an entire book of business and show each one of those people how to move much further down the road than they are right now, but in a way that's actually scalable.
- [28:12]
Unknown
Yeah. And you know, for a lot of the accounts like you're talking about, you know, compliance work, backward facing work has been the bread and butter. Right. And even though there's some fee compression going on on the wealth management side and things like that, the fee compression side on the compliance side of tax is tenfold.
- [28:32]
Chris Field
Right.
- [28:33]
Rory Henry
I always say when you're up against free, free, free, free, free, free, free, free commercials on tv, you know, you're in trouble as far as a business model.
- [28:41]
Unknown
So for, for a lot of our listeners, you know, and a lot of them are starting to get this, switching to an advisory model like you said, a forward facing model. Right. And incorporating that into your tax advisory work. Just not, you know, not making a huge change, not becoming a financial advisor right off the bat, but saying, okay, we're going to provide some forward tax advisory and we're going to, we're going to build that into an annual advisory fee. And you know, that protects margin. That's great business development. You know, taking it to the next step of partnering with an investment advisor or becoming an investment advisor, you know, that's the kind of work that, you know, holistic wealth management is used everywhere. But that doesn't just mean the asset side of the business, that also means the liability side, that also means the tax side. And so it's just a tremendous opportunity. And then leveraging, you know, artificial intelligence is scary to a lot of our listeners. They hear, you know, artificial intelligence, they think cyber threats, they think, you know, danger of a lot of these things. But holistic plan, we really believe is one of those perfect examples of how secure, compliant artificial intelligence can take the work of, you know, call it 20 interns or 20 analysts and compress that down into 60 minutes of the stuff that they want to do. So it's a real life ability to leverage the power of cloud computing, artificial intelligence and cyber. Could you maybe talk to some of those folks out there that are saying, well, we got these tax returns, we're really scared about putting them anywhere. Can you kind of talk about how you guys take precautions around the cyber?
- [30:34]
Chris Field
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Roger and Kevin are advisors. They knew coming in this was going to be the number one question. If they couldn't answer this question, it didn't matter what the other 10 questions were going to be. We would never get to the next questions. So right off the bat, they came out of a world with compliance, where you had to make sure all your T's were crossed and your I's were dotted. That's just the bottom line. So all the best practices around how everything's encrypted and backed up, and we do penetration testing to make sure you can't get into the soft. I mean, all that stuff. But even since we started, we've added new things just to give people that extra little bit of comfortability. Things like you can redact the name and Social Security number on a tax return, either with a Sharpie or with something like Adobe, and we still read it the same as we would if it weren't redacted. We've also got a feature you can turn on as a, as a subscriber in our firm admin, you could turn on an auto delete feature. And that means as soon as we've read that tax return in 60 seconds, it's deleted off the cloud forever. It doesn't live anymore in that cloud. And so we've done these things for those advisors and for those clients, subscribers of ours that are, they want that extra little bit of comfort. They want to know like, hey, I want to be 100% sure that, you know, nothing is going to go sideways here. And it's like, we feel very confident, obviously, but we'll add just these extra things. If you're that worried about it, just redact the client's name and Social Security number from the, from the tax return before you ever upload it. And then you can name that tax return whatever you want. It could just be client number 423. Their name can be nowhere on that tax report, if that makes you feel better. And of course, we're not reading in the Social Security anyways. That Social Security number doesn't appear on the tax report, doesn't appear in the scenario analysis, doesn't appear anywhere. All it is is on the actual tax return. So, you know, all of that is done. It's exactly what you'd want. I think that the other thing I want to make sure. Rob, one thing. You said 60 minutes. It's actually 60 seconds.
- [32:48]
Unknown
60 seconds, yeah. Sorry.
- [32:50]
Chris Field
No, it's great.
- [32:52]
Rory Henry
Rob's favorite movie is gone in 60 minutes.
- [32:56]
Chris Field
Those guys are like, I'm going to put this thing in Dr.
- [33:00]
Rory Henry
Five miles an hour.
- [33:04]
Chris Field
But the other thing you said that I think is so great. I follow a bunch of CPAs on Twitter and this has been a miserable tax season.
- [33:12]
Rory Henry
Hashtag tax Twitter.
- [33:14]
Chris Field
Yes. And it's just been a miserable tax season. Right. It's just been hard. It's been really hard. And I think the great thing about adding a tax planning component to your business, it's not, it doesn't have to be done before April 15th or October 15th is that it's a truly year round thing to fill the gaps. That doesn't have nearly the just hair pulling, just smoke coming out of your ears urgency. That tax season, that tax season does filing taxes. And so I know all the CPAs are about to take a huge sigh of relief, right? You know, coming up here in a couple of weeks. But the truth is there is sort of a dead period, typically, and it is great that we are not having to do the hustle, but what if we could create revenue in those slower months that let us say no to those problem clients on the crazy months and let us actually have a better quality of life in the spring, Historically, the spring, instead of just feeling like the wheels are constantly about to fall off. I mean, it's not hard to imagine charging as much for tax planning that results in a material difference as you do to actually do tax Prep, but with 10% of the urgency and stress. I mean, it's amazing to think about that. It wouldn't be surprising to me if there were CPAs that actually flip this model and they stopped doing tax plan tax prep and only started doing tax planning.
- [34:54]
Rory Henry
We're seeing it more and more here, Chris.
- [34:57]
Unknown
Yeah, it's a different model.
- [34:58]
Chris Field
It's a different amount of stress. It's a different job. Right. It's truly, it's moving from a historian to a forecaster to looking into the future. And there's something really rewarding, by the way. There's something cool about making sure all your numbers are right back there. There's also something cool about looking forward and making sure the numbers are right before we get to them. And I like to use the analogy that a CPA can look backwards and tell you what you hit in the road back there. But when you do tax planning, the CPA can move you into a different lane so that you don't have to hit that thing that's in front of you. And in some ways that's a heck of a lot more fulfilling than having to explain what that roadkill is behind.
- [35:47]
Unknown
Texas analogy. That's a West Texas analogy.
- [35:50]
Chris Field
If I Ever heard of one? Thank you. Thank you very much. I should have donned my cowboy hat today.
- [35:57]
Rory Henry
I'm just imagining Nicholas Cage in a Porsche just speeding off over a bridge. All right, well, Chris, I really appreciate you coming on the podcast and speaking to us about holistaplan. This was phenomenal. What's the best way our audience can get in contact with you and Holista Plan?
- [36:15]
Chris Field
Yeah, so holistaplan.com and anyone can do a free seven day trial which allows you to upload three returns. And at the worst, I always tell people, especially CPAs, go upload your own return and see what kind of nuggets the software is going to give you just as an example of what's out there and grab your moms, grab your cousins, grab your brother in law's, upload a couple returns, see how fast the software works, see what kind of recommendations it makes, and then begin reimagining what your practice would look like if this became a cornerstone of what you do. And we've got a fantastic support department that's there today. Actually, I want to brag on this. There was all these conversations out there around this new tax law proposal. As you guys know, everybody's talking about it. Well, one of our developers went into software and he built a what if scenario. So right now, already in our software, you can go in and when you're doing scenario analysis, you can toggle between current tax law and proposed tax law. And we ran a seminar today, webinar for our subscribers, and we had almost 1,000 subscribers that registered for this webinar. We just announced it on Thursday, ran it today because everybody's getting this question. And can you imagine the power of being able to call your clients, say, listen, Rory, I got those emails. I know you sent six of them. Don't worry, they all came through. I've actually gone ahead and worked up a side by side. I know it's not law yet, but I knew you were really worried about this. Why don't we jump on a zoom? I can show you my screen and I actually think you're going to be really pleased to see we're only talking about a $5,000 difference a year for you. Or there's a significant difference and we really are going to do some need to do some work together to make sure. But don't worry, I'm going to walk with you every single step of the way. I'm not going anywhere. This is exactly why I have the job that I do. I mean, that's the joy for us is helping those conversations happen between the advisor and the client and just deepening that relationship. So that's what we're committed to and we'd love to share more about that@holistic plan.com I love it.
- [38:24]
Rory Henry
I love it.
- [38:25]
Unknown
Go ahead, Rob. I also want to say thank you for all the work that you do for us. It's been a tremendous privilege to be able to work with team. We're really excited to see what you guys have in store in the future, and we're looking forward to having you back on sometime soon.
- [38:42]
Chris Field
Yeah, awesome. Thanks guys. I really appreciate it.
- [38:45]
Rob Santos
Thanks, Chris all opinions expressed by Rob Santos and Rory Henry on this website podcast interview are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Arrowroot Family Office, LLC or their parent company or affiliates, and they have been previously disseminated on television, radio, Internet or another medium. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their opinions. Past performance is not indicative of future results.