#6- Charles Read

Okay Okay, then. So, you know, a new, here a pretty big deal. You know, you're a CPA, you know, when I first saw,

Jimbo, I'm Charles, Nash works for me, he set this up. I'm Charles Read.

And here's the thing. I've seen you a lot lately. And I just want you to, I just want to get like a brief summary of who you are.

Sure. I well, you know, I'm a CPA MBA, US Tax Court practitioner. After leaving high school, I joined the United States Marine Corps, spent four years including two years overseas, and a tour in Vietnam. Came back, I was stationed in Kansas City met my wife, married her with five children. It worked, don't ask me how but it worked. You know, I claim insanity. Went to school, got my degrees, went to work for major corporations. realized when I was in my early 40s, that I was never going to run a major corporation. I didn't have the political skills, you know, you got to be able to stab him in the back and toss them off the ladder to get to the top and I I can't do that. So I started my own company. So I'd have a company to run. I grew up in a family business. I started the business with my wife, I thought that was normal. Oh, it's not work for us. We were married for 45 years until she passed here six years ago. So that's that's this short synopsis.

Right? All right. So can we kind of begin on what motivated you to just get into a lifestyle of finances and accounting and money?

Well, you know, that's a good question. Because I, I had gone to school, figured on on business, and started taking some accounting courses in life. And so I started taking some more. And I had a choice at the, toward the end of my undergraduate, to make a decision whether to go into law, or heavily more into business, and finances were such that business and an MBA became the more viable option. So I went and got my master's in business, which really was a master's in taxation, but it was labeled as an MBA, which is what I wanted. I like tax I like working with that, you know, a CPA is a professional nitpicker. Okay, numbers, numbers, numbers, numbers, not too many people. And that was a lot of fun for me. As I've gotten older, I like people less, but you know, I get old. So, it was just that I liked that in college. And I was able to get, you know, 50 some odd hours of college counting attacks. I grown up, you know, around finances and, and insurance. And I was a stock analyst when I was, you know, 14, and this kind of thing. So, numbers were always fun. And it was just, it just grew into it. It's, I found my niche, you know, if you find, find something you like to do, and you never have to work a day in your life. So, you know, I like what I do. I like the accounting. I love the payroll, to me its exciting than accounting because I'm fighting with the IRS for my clients all the time.

So, you were kind of talking a lot about engaging with people a lot more than money as you're used to. Can you explain more about that sort of transition you had? Because you went from stocks to money to more people focus, you know, that's a lot of different things.

Well, as, as I, as I grew up, I realized how important people really are. My marriage was was a good marriage. My wife taught me a lot. She was far more of a people person. In the beginning that I was everybody loved my wife. Even people she didn't like thought of her as their best friend. Which I found terribly amusing. But being around her for 45 years, and with her influence, I learned to better understand people get along with them better. You know, in the military, everybody, you either jump for them or they jumped for you. I mean, the the hierarchy is is absolute. It comes down to the the the hour of the day that you got your your promotion if you got yours now Before the other guy, your his superior, which is insane on by itself. So with with her guidance, I learned a lot, I learned better how to deal with people, how to supervise them, how to work with them, you know, in a business, really, your people are your asset. Even as a CPA, I've got, I've got a dozen people that work for me running in my payroll company, I couldn't do the work without them. I absolutely would be out of business. So I care about them, I worry about them. You know, it's, they become almost like family, and my clients, you know, I've got clients that have been with me for 30 years. You know, after 30 years doing business with somebody and being there and pocketbook, several times a month, you better be friends with them. Okay, or they're gonna go someplace else. So we, you know, people are great. And and, well, a lot of people are there some, and I've learned that to. people who vexed me, vexatious people, I stay away from, I don't deal with them. We've had over the years, a few clients, we've had, you know, in the old hub clients always right? Well, up until the point you fire, there's some clients that want more service, and more hand holding and more of your time than they're willing to pay for. And so you have to make a choice. Am I going to, you know, go broke handling these people? Or am I going to move on? So, you know, I've had, you know, half a dozen over the years, I've had to move on, because they just, were vexatious. That's That's life.

Right.

Hopefully, they found somebody that they could deal with.

And, you know, speaking of clients, because you mentioned clients before, what type of service do you think you provide for clients, it's different compared to other, you know, accounting and finance based businesses?

Well, in the payroll business, our competitors are either very big or very small. There's not too many in the middle, and we're kind of in the middle. But as a CPA, I take a 2848. It's an IRS Form. That's a power of attorney, it's a limited power of attorney. And it allows me as a CPA, to represent my clients and advocate for them to the Internal Revenue Service, and to the states. That very, very few of my clients do that. And because of that, our real difference is compliance. We're compliance experts. I deal with the IRS. I was on the IRS Advisory Council for three years meeting with the, the commissioner and the commissioners of the various business entities and solving problems for them, not by myself, there were you know, 1520 of us, but we worked on IRS problems. And that allowed me to meet people, you know, I know they the chief of appeals, I know the head of OPR. I know the all the commissioners for the various business entities, I can call them if I need to. That allows me to do things for my clients. We had one problem, a penalty situation was $95,000. It was bogus. But it took us nine years to get it abated. But finally, in desperation, I called Chief of Appeals, because I couldn't get the right person to call me. And she said, I'm calling you he called me that afternoon. And months later, they sent my client a $400 refund instead of a $95,000. Bill. He was happy. So the compliance thing that we can apply, if, if you call one of our major competitors, and say I need to talk to a CPA about a tax situation. They don't have CPAs available. They'll tell you to call your own CPA. Well, if your own CPA was a payroll expert, he'd be doing your payroll for you. He's not so you're gonna pay him to come in and learn what's going on, and hopefully learned enough to solve the problem. We do it every day. And it's part of our fee. So you don't pay more. But you get the compliance on top. It's like buying insurance. You got car insurance. People buy insurance for the house insurance for their life.

Yeah.

We're paying for insurance. When it goes wrong. We can fix it.

So a lot of that stuff there, you know. And another thing is, why is it that you know, what do you think is the main thing most people get wrong about what you do?

Well,we seem unnecessary at times. To some people, we seem underpriced to other people. Yeah. People say, Well, I can do my own payroll. And you know, if they work at it, they can. But when they look at what we charge them compared to the time they spend, and analyze that and say, can I spend this time on my business, getting new clients, improving what I'm doing and so on, we become free. And then the average, this is something people don't see, the average small business gets penalized. I'm sorry, 40% of all small businesses get penalized by the IRS every year, to the tune of about $800, which is about what we charge for a year. So you know, in many times we're free, will fix that penalty, and you won't have to pay it. Because if you don't know how to fix that penalty. The exam when you're dealing with the IRS, the example I use when I grew up, Pele was the premier soccer player in the world. A Brazilian I don't know who it is today. But if you Paley's a superb athlete, but if you put them in a New York Yankees uniform at second base, he's lost. He's still a great athlete. But he doesn't know the equipment, the field the rules? Nothing, right? You take a businessman who's very successful at what he does, and you say, go deal with the IRS. He's like Pele, at Yankee Stadium on second base, he's lost. We do it every day, I can't run my clients business. I can't run the dog grooming salon, I can't run the generator company. The garage floor conditioning company, I can't run the construction company on and on and on. I don't know these things. But I know a county tax and payroll. And I do that every day. So when you say well, you know, I can do it? Well, you know, I can probably do your company to give me 20 years of experience and the right education. Yeah, I can do what you do. So why do you insult me and tell me that, you know, you can do what I do, just off the cuff? Because there's a lot more to it. The law is very complex. And there's 50 states, there's actually about 15,000 taxing authorities in the US that tax payroll one way or another. And we deal with most of them.

And another thing that I'm curious about is are your issues more? Do you handle more individual based issues or more business related situations?

In payroll, it's almost all business, because sole proprietors don't take payroll that they they're not allowed, yes, it's tax law, they take drawers instead. So on the payroll side, they have to be incorporated, even if they're just them. And we have some, their their lawyer or a doctor or, you know, an entrepreneur, that it's just them, and they pay their payroll because they're incorporated. So we do that, but our average client is about 17 employees. And most of our clients are, the vast majority of clients are under 50, we have some that run into the multiple hundreds of clients and employees. And yeah, we're glad to have them. But at some point, somewhere around 500 employees, it becomes cost effective to take it in house and hire a professional to do it. Because as you add employees, there's always lots of little problems. So as you build an HR system, and HR department, then you add a payroll department, either under HR or under accounting, and you do it in house, you buy the software, for the small business with 15, 20, 30 people, you know, we spend 10s of 1000s of dollars a year on software. It's just not cost effective for a small business to do that. We're able to provide software as a service and provide state of the art, software and expertise. You know, we're we're experts. You know, that's my newest book, The payroll book. We wrote the book on payroll, guys. So, you know, if you've got payrolls, what we do, you know, day in and day out.

Now, you wrote that book, right. Who is that book now for?

Yes, sir. The book I wrote, it came out at Wiley Publishing it came out last year. In August, it's 2995. From it's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, you know, from fine bookstores everywhere. And what it is, is 30 years apparently experience distilled down to 90,000 words. It's a reference guide. It's, it's not something you sit down, read fine. But when you have a payroll question, it answers most of them And my phone numbers in there, so if there's one, it doesn't answer, give me a call.

And it must have been a very crazy transition. You went from investing to general accounting to working with the IRS and your own business? Did you ever have to change your mind frame anytime? Or did you just naturally fall into each? Oh, absolutely. Everything changes in technology changes. But what I found for me is that everything I learned, whether it be you know, I've been a stockbroker, I've been a lot of things. You know, in my 60s, I became a US Tax Court practitioner, because the IRS was getting

harder to deal with. So I'm able to go to US Tax Court, even though I'm not an attorney, and represent my clients, there's about 200 of us in the country that can do that. It's an odd federal thing, but I actually have a US Tax Court barcard. So you know, I'm a counselor at the, at the tax court. All these things, make me better able to represent my clients, and solve problems and understand things. Knowledge is knowledge is never wasted. No knowledge is ever wasted. So everything I read, everything I study, everything I learned, makes me better able to run my business, handle my client, work with my clients, solve their problems, deal with the IRS deal with the state's everything. And it may not be this week, this month this year. But I've used things that I learned 50 years ago, in today's today's dealings, some things I learned are obsolete, but you know, I've learned what's obsolete. So that's, that's an important thing to know, too.

Now, I kind of went into how your clients wanted you, but who is the specific who or what's the biggest crowd of people that actually come to you and ask you for help?

Well, it has to be a business, you have to have employees, or contractors, we handle contractors, too. We get a lot of people who just they get a notice from the IRS, they don't know what they did, they don't know what they did wrong, that we get a lot of that we get clients from the major companies that have call centers, and you can never talk to the same person twice. My clients know that problem. And they can't solve with my people, they can talk to me, and you know, it's my company, so I'll fix it. So, they come from, from a lot of places, we get a lot of referrals from our existing clients. We don't, we don't lose. So, you know, we get good referrals, we have a sales and marketing staff, the book has helped, you know, and we're trying to grow like a lot of businesses, you know, you either grow or you die. So we're still trying to grow our business and be successful. You know, I'm still not sure I want to, I'm still not sure I know what I want to be when I grow up. But you know, I'll figure it out.

You know, what's one thing that you would have told your younger self to do to get to where you are right now?

Oh, there's a couple of things. First of all, if I'd known I was gonna live this long and have taken better care of myself, but I would have saved more. I mean, just $10 a week and I how I'd be rich today. Really rich. And I wish coming out of high school that I better understood people and that's been the key is is learning about people and learning to understand people. You know. People are so everybody's unique. George Washington crane, who was an author and a doctor and a lot of things used to write a column and in his column, he said, to get along with people just imagine that A tattooed across their chest, it says, I am important, because they think they are. And they are important to somebody to themselves and nobody else. And if you treat them that way, they'll respond much better than if you treat them like they're not important. They're not good. They're not valuable, because everybody is at least somebody. And so treat them that way. And it makes it easier for them. You know, be nice to them. Practice the golden rule. All these things, they work, they make your life easier, they make your life more profitable. They make for better sleep. Okay, you're not worried about things at night. So I wish I'd known that. Better my my father. I couldn't work for him. You know, we didn't get along. Well. He could schmooze people. But he never passed it on. And I learned that the hard way. You know, I go back and look at his example. I can do what he did now. But he never taught me how growing up. And that was my fault for not learning. So life goes on.

And when you're running your business, did you ever think to yourself? Am I doing the right thing? You know? Did you ever have any doubts, any questions? Not to add to that business not about being? Right. Go ahead. I'm sorry. And to add to that, what about your transition because I know a lot of successful entrepreneurs that have this transition from being a high acclimated college student to then running your own business or job to their own business. And that is a ridiculous transition. You know, how would you go from that expert headspace to now an owner, an expert headspace?

Okay, I've never had any problem with running the business. I've always enjoyed business. I've always, you know, once I got into what I've always known, I wanted to be my own boss. Coming out of college, I went to work for major corporations. My first job out of college was Texas Instruments. And I was just a minor cog in a huge organization. And that wasn't fun. And I worked my way up and became, you know, system controller and controller in various operations, CFO and so on. But I was still working for somebody else. And I'd grown up, as I said, in a family business. My father and mother worked together. And it was their own business. It was from the moment I remember that they had a business. And so I grew up with that. And I wanted the it's lonely at the top. But I wanted to make those decisions. I wanted to be that person in charge. I liked that. And so I started my own and I ran with it. It's been 30 years now. I've had a great time. I enjoy coming to work every day. Have I made mistakes? Absolutely. Have I screwed things up? Absolutely. If I was perfect, I would not only be rich, but I'd be a movie star too. I mean, you know, but I'm neither. So yeah, it's those changes those transitions. One of the, you know, I've had several major ones getting married as a major transition, particularly to a one with five kids. That that that was a life changing experience. Military going from civilian life to military, then going from military back to civilian life. Because after four years in the Marine Corps, and all of a sudden, you don't have superiors telling you what to do. And and, you know, every moment you of your life is accounted for all of a sudden you're on your own again. So there's that and then transition to college, college to work, worked entrepreneurship. I love being an entrepreneur. Now for the first 20 years, I didn't take a vacation but you know that that's part of being an entrepreneur, no work life balance just work

well, you know, you have to love what you do as well, you know, and who kind of who are some people in life that kind of helped you grow that love that you had not just you know how you saw but you know people that showed you it

Well, obviously, you know, I grew up in an environment where my parents worked and worked very hard and very long hours. So that was never a surprise. The Marine Corps taught me mission, complete the mission, you've got to complete the mission. And then people like Tom Peters, famous author, In Search of Excellence, and so on, I really liked his his thought process, you know, more so than even Deming. Because Peters was very much more of a people person, as opposed to a systems person. And so I found that to be useful and uplifting. And so I've read all the times books, and attended a number of lectures and so on over the years, I find that his his philosophy about business to be extremely useful. Me. So he's my major source of business thought, then I've read hundreds and hundreds of business books over the years. And hopefully, I can get a nugget out of him when I read them. You know, in the beginning, I got lots of nuggets, well, you know, repeated and repeated and repeated. So if I can find a new nugget, and I still read business books, you know, no knowledge is ever wasted, as I've said, so.

And what were some things that really taught you a lot about accounting to begin with, like, the more on a philosophical perspective, like what were some real breaking points during your journey of knowledge.

I will tell you, the moment I really decided to become an accountant, it was a spring morning. And I'm on the third floor of the University of North Texas business building. And I in between classes. And the term depreciation probably doesn't mean much to you. But it's how you allocate asset value and life against the revenue generation. And I was troubled with the concept and rolling it over in my mind, and that spring morning. It all fell into place. And I, in my gut, I now understood what it was doing and how it worked. Intellectually, I could do it on paper, but it didn't make any sense until that moment. And at that moment, it sunk in. And it's at that moment that I really became an accountant. You know, there's been lots of other moments of learning. And for those of you in accounting, in school, you don't really learn it in school, you learn that on your first job. You weren't you weren't all the all the the textbook, but you really weren't accounting in your first accounting job, I promise.

You No. Speaking of learning accounting, what do you think makes you just different compared to an accountant next door? I mean, you can't really find so many accountants like you next door, but you kind of get what I'm saying.

Well, you know, in any industry, there's good practitioners, and there's poor ones. There's good doctors and bad ones. There's good lawyers and bad lawyers. There's good accountants and bad accountants, and accountant that doesn't love what they're doing is not somebody you want to deal with. Okay? I like accounting. I like tax. I like payroll. I'm a very analytical person. I'm a problem solver by nature. Okay. It's one of the things I had to learn over time, is I can't solve everybody's problems and don't try anymore. I pick and choose. But those are the people that make good accountants. My partner who I sold the accounting practice to, is even worse than I am. But we're good ones. Good. Accountants are very analytical. They tend not to be people persons. Okay. And that makes me a little unusual as an accountant because I've become, over the years kind of a people person. Most good accountants, like actuaries would prefer to work in an office by themselves and the work to come in one slot and go out another and have a private door to the parking lot have, you know, they don't like people. So that's why accounts are hard to deal with. The biggest complaint that clients have about accountants and I've heard this over and over over the years, is they don't return phone calls, which is insane. You got a client that has a problem, that's an opportunity to to build them, man, you ought to be calling him because that's how you make money. So, but that's the biggest complaint about accountants is they don't return phone calls. And I, I no longer understand that so.

So I think another thing that hit me, though, is that you said you were a problem solver. But to me, it sounded a little bit like an obsession in a sense, too, because did that problem solving need ever caused you to go overboard and you're, you know, older times, or cost me to marry a woman with five children, I think that's overboard. I was solving her problems. Yes, it is, it can really

be a time consumer, it can be a money consumer. It can ruin your life, you can't solve them all. And if you try, it's going to destroy you. And there's some problems that just aren't solvable. Okay? I can't create world peace, I'm not going to start, okay, I can't change the world, I do my little bit. You know, I tried to be a good person and run a nice business and take care of my employees, take care of my family, be a good citizen vote. You know, don't, don't litter, pay my taxes, all these things. But when you're in business, and you have lots of clients, there's all kinds of problems that come in the door. And you've got to learn to pick and choose, if you don't, you're going to be constantly solving people's problems, that aren't able to pay you that consume your time, that ruin your life, that drive you crazy. And you can't do it all. You just can't do it. And if you try, you're gonna go crazy. And when I was younger, I tried to solve problems all the time. And I've learned that can't do it. And you just have to pick and choose. And sometimes it's very hard rendering, there's problems I would like to solve, but I don't have the money or the time, I try to give people if I can have some, some direction where they can go. Maybe they can call this, they can call that, you know. And maybe they can get their problem solved that way. But most of them come down to you got to suck it up and make it work. And I can't force people to do that either.

And, you know, we always talk about, you know, your people skills, and I kind of can pick this up too, you have a strong understanding of how a lot of people work. And I'm just thinking, was it ever difficult to kind of balance between these skills and your accounting skills at times, like sometimes you'd have to think, Okay, this really isn't working in terms of my skills. But this is a good purse. You know, did you ever?

Yeah, I mean, I've had to, not everybody's a fit for me. And I know that. And, you know, we we lose clients from time to time. When I brought in my partner, we lost several clients who could work with me, but couldn't work with him. And then that's part of it. And then, you know, I have people, I hire and fire people, my employees. They don't all work out. I try very hard to hire the right people. But it doesn't always work. For whatever reason I make a mistake in hiring basically, is what it comes down to. I didn't understand them well enough to know that they would not be a fit, or their life changes. And you know, they no longer were, who they are, and it doesn't fit. And I hate that. I absolutely abhor firing people. Okay. The only thing I can say is I never fired anybody that didn't know it was coming. Because I counsel them I talked to him, he said and what they need to do, and when they don't do it repeatedly, then I'll let them go. But it's never a surprise. And that's, that's part of people skills. You know, hiring people is very difficult firing them. If firing people, it's technically easy, you're fired. But Emotionally, it takes a toll on me, and it takes a toll on them. I don't fire people, I weren't yours. I know I've been I've been fired a few times. And I hate that. I don't fire people on Friday afternoon, I fire him on Monday morning. So they can immediately go down and file for unemployment, they can get used to be they could get the Sunday paper and start perusing the employment, ads, and so on. They didn't have to go home and think about being fired all weekend before they could do anything. That's just miserable. So that's one of the few things I do. I haven't had to fire anybody in years. Thank heavens. And, you know, we all made it, we all made it for COVID Just fine.

Yeah, you know, and the thing is, we're bringing up a lot of these topics about the struggles within a business, and what were your struggles, specifically, but with the business. So what were some obstacles you had to get through before you got into, you know, your book and your client network, like, your network probably wasn't like that, at the start, you had to know those people together?

Well, it's marketing, it was my biggest thing is learning to market and to sell myself. And my skill set, I'm not a good marketer, I'm not a good, you know, I believe in what I do. And on a one to one, you sit down with me, and you know, I'm very, you know, confident in what I do, and how I do it, and what we do, and the fact that, you know, we're worth what we charge. But to go out and try to sell that to, you know, hundreds of people over and over and over again, just, I can't do it, I have a real hard time with that I get, you know, to be a good salesman, you have to wash off that rejection every morning, okay, you have to be able to start start fresh with no rejection, mind builds up. And I've known that for, for many, many years. So my sales capabilities are are slender. And that's one of my downfalls. So, getting the business grown, and getting enough people in, where it was sustainable, and would continue to grow through referrals and so on. And now I have a marketing staff that, you know, that's the book is marketing, though it's very informative. We do podcasts, we do blogs, we do articles, we write press releases, we do all kinds of things. Because we offer a wonderful service, in my opinion, at a great price. You know, we're not unique, but we're pretty close to it as far as I'm concerned. So, you know, we do we do great payroll work, and compliance, and expertise, which is hard to find. So you know, it's all included in the package. So guys, you know, we take care of our clients we love to. So marketing, it was my biggest thing, money always is tight in the beginning time. I mean, you know, in the beginning, I was doing accounting and payroll and working 80 hours a week or more. You know, as I said, there's no work life balance for an entrepreneur, it's work. And hopefully, you know, you're married to somebody that that understands that my wife worked with me for many years. You know, after about 15, she retired and went and built some, you know, did other things. But for the first 15 years, it was her and me. People over time hiring that first non accountant secretary was tough, because she wouldn't bring any money in. But that person allowed me to do more on productive labor, which produce revenue. So once I understood that, you know, I can make it work and it's, it's it's been a very fun 30 years.

No, and you talked a lot about growing a business now, this is going to be a little more business plan related, but how do you scale your business? Do you just hire more people to pick up the phone? Or is it more technical on your end, where they're doing things like you both

technology has changed. We actually do more with less people now because of computers and email and so I you know, I remember when fax machines came out, and they're now almost obsolete. We use them out I was dealing with an overseas importer, and we would do up our footwear designs, email, fax them that night, and in the morning, there'd be revisions coming back from Taiwan. That was great. That was so much better than waiting four or five days each way for you know, DHL. So technology has changed computers, systems, software, it's gotten better and faster and more efficient. And so that helps. And then we hire people to work with clients and, and solve their problems, because a lot of it's hand holding, what do I do? How do I do this? Oh, this went wrong. Sally wants this. Joe wants that. What do I do, you know, the checkout last, you know, I got a letter from the IRS, you know, all these kinds of things. So we take care of that, and we hire people for that. So both aspects, technology has made us more efficient. You know, everything just makes us more efficient. We just put in a new VoIP phone system, which is a sweetheart. So all those things help. But you know, it basically comes down to people still have to operate the software, they have to turn on the computer, they have to make sure the stuff goes in, they have to make sure it goes out, they have to reconcile the bank account, you know, we we move several 100 million dollars a year money for our clients for payrolls. And that's a lot of accounting, and a lot of reconciliation. So yeah, we got to have people for that. But you know, systems are a lot better now than they were 30 years ago, I promise you. So it's a lot easier.

And what what necessarily made it easier, was it because of more revenue coming into the business and you're able to,

you know, pay off more and expand more kind of elaborate on that, please? Well, obviously, I'm interested to know, sure. Cash is always King. If you don't have cash flow, you're out of business. You can take on debt, you can do a lot of things. But without cash coming in to pay the bills. You're, you're screwed. Okay, so obviously getting bigger, getting better cash flow, allowed me to, to buy better software and better equipment, pay myself a little better. This kind of thing. And also, you have to learn it, you have to saw new learning new software is always frustrating. But if it's better, and it's faster, then you need to learn to do it. My staff won't let me do payrolls anymore. They do them the way I would do them because we have checklists and procedures and so on. But after the last time we changed software a few years ago, I I never learned that particular operating software. So they they don't let me in there to do payrolls. Which is probably a good thing. But I still deal with the IRS because that's, that's something I'm an expert at. They're not and they don't have the credentials for it. I have both. So my job has shifted internally, when we first started with payroll, I did them all. You don't like typed them in and printed them out, patch them up and shipped them off. I haven't done that in years. But when the IRS sends a letter, because the IRS made a mistake that comes to me, so you know, fun and games

I'm gonna kind of nitpick here, what was the time you kind of hit that break even point, you know, that time where that curve actually just hit upwards? Specifically?

I would say that I was comfortable with the size of our business. And the growth that was on it took almost 20 years for us to get to the point that I said yeah, we're gonna make obviously, we've been been been growing and paying our wage and, you know, put food on the table and, and clothes on my back and roofs. And, you know, I had a son in service in Germany who married a German girl and settled there. So she go over and see the grandkids but it was about 20 years in business before I really said yeah, we're there. And that I lost Ruth a few years later, which was too bad. Because you know, she was really getting to the point where we could you know, enjoy life and do some things but it took 20 years that's that's why I say work life balance for not to murder doesn't exist.

You know, what are some future plans you have for the business now, what is kind of the next stage? Well

We're continuing to grow, obviously, well, not Obviously, we're continuing to grow, we're adding new clients all the time, I'd like to continue to accelerate that we're adding new products, we're making our product line, wider and deeper. We're expanding our HR systems. So we can handle more more alternative situations, timekeeping, we've added multiple clocks, including biometric clocks and so on to the mix. We've added a just from a new partner that came on recently, that has a physical training aspect for employees. So we've added that to the mix. So we're adding more things to the mix, to give our clients you know, more one stop shop for payroll and payroll related things, employee related things 401, K's, this kind of thing, we're expanding all those offerings and want to continue to do so we're partnering with some some new health care benefit providers to better take care of the clients. You know, different clients need different things, and not every vendor can provide them all. So we have to have various vendors that can provide things for our clients. So we're trying to, to grow that to be able to give our clients you know, as I said, a one stop shop.

So, you know, this was a good talk. And, you know, what are some final things you have to say, to you know, anybody interested in, you know, what you do or going down your path.

There's two things that I have two sayings I love and I repeat them constantly. One, there's never a traffic jam on the extra mile. You go that extra mile for your clients, your competitors won't. That puts you out in front head and shoulders above your competition, because most of them won't do it. The second one is insane from Bill Gates. And he said "People will overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade." So stick with it may not happen this month, this year or next year. But you stick with it and you go for it. You'll be amazed what you can do in 1020 years.

Good words. All right then.

Thank you, sir. Jimbo, been my pleasure. Thank you for being on the show. My pleasure, sir. All right.