The Small-Business Playbook: Strategy, Taxes, and Timing

I'll never forget very early in my career, I was meeting with a couple talking about their financial plan. One spouse went off to the bathroom and the other one remains. "Whatever you do, please tell him he can't retire. He thinks I want to have lunch with him every day." You know, I think it's really important though to have both people at the table. Both people should be talking about what do we want our lives to look like. We get so caught up in the economics, we forget to focus on what matters. Welcome to "The Informed Investor," where we break down the latest financial headlines, bringing in research and insights to help you separate the news from the noise. If you are a business owner, and especially if you're thinking about selling at some point, you definitely wanna be tuning in today. Welcome to "The Informed Investor," a show brought to you by Dimensional Fund Advisors, a global asset manager bringing financial science to investing. And you'll notice our background is a little bit different here today. We are in our Charlotte, North Carolina office. We're a hosting event for financial advisors and we're very fortunate today to have two of them join us on "The Informed Investor." So Pat Collins, welcome. Great to have you here. Michael Goodman, great to have you here as well. Both of you are with Greenspring Advisors. We've been fortunate to work with you for probably 20 plus years. Great relationship, a long history together. So, I can't wait to dive into this concept of small business owners. So, hey, before we get into it, Pat, why don't you give us a little bit of background about Greenspring and how you guys got into the business and where you are today. Sure. Thanks for having us. Greenspring is coming up on 22 years. We manage a little over $10 billion of assets. We have four offices, mostly on the East Coast, so we're Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. We have about 70 employees at Greenspring at this point. And one of the things I'm really excited about is, this is an area I think many of us, including myself, at the firm are really passionate about, is working with small business owners, people, how to increase the value of business if you're thinking about selling your business. So once we get into some of the strategies and topics, I'm excited. Okay, great. We love to use headlines on this show. So I'm getting read a couple headlines, Michael, then I'll get your reaction to these and we'll talk a little bit about small business owners here. All right, the first one. "The Silver Tsunami is Reshaping Small Business: Why Exit Planning Can't Wait." Then one more, "Lack of Succession Planning Puts Small Businesses at Risk." Quick reaction to that, Michael. Well, the demographics do indicate that there's a lot of people reaching their later years. So though we see in here more people wanting to work longer than ever, the challenge is that as the second headline indicates, a lot of people don't think of themselves from a respect of succession planning. They don't think about where am I gonna do, what am I gonna do with this business, how will I exit it, are there people within my organization that might wanna own this business at some point in time. So, that is one of the bigger challenges I think that a lot of small business owners come upon. Hey, before we get into it, let's just talk a little bit about what do we mean by a small business, the owner, like size of firm, type of firms. Give us a little bit of background on how you think about that. I think it's really almost anybody that has ownership stake in a business. So it could be somebody a family-owned business. So it could be manufacturing. It could be professional services, like an accounting firm, or a law firm, or a doctor's practice. It also could be somebody that owns a hundred percent of the business or it could be sometimes kind of multi-owner type structure where there's partners in a business and you own maybe a small portion of that business. But we would consider all of them to be small business owners. And some of the things that you guys get into just with your I'll call your more regular clients, wealth management, the planning, the tax work, as you think through some of the behavioral parts that applies just as much to small business owners as well, which we will dive into it here a little bit. So with that, which one do you wanna start with as you think about business owners and maybe we start with the planning side of it as you think what do I have to do and when to get ready perhaps for exiting my firm at some point. Well, there are very different criteria or concerns for somebody that owns their own business than it would be somebody who is like a W-2 at another company. You're thinking about almost as there's two beings. There's the client themselves, and then there's their business. Not only because they're so emotionally attached to their business typically, but also because there's a whole set of financial planning elements that need to go on within a small business. Everything from not only profitability, but tax management within the business. The idea of setting up benefits for your people, and also taking advantage of some of the laws that exist for small businesses to allow that, allow for that. So, there's a whole different set of financial planning criteria that you wanna dive in on on the small business as well as the individual. And obviously, they dovetail and need to be considered together. As you guys bring on, let's call it a prospect and they have ownership in a business. Do you see some pretty consistent things, missing gaps, mistakes perhaps, that have been made around that? I think the biggest mistake I see is just a tremendous amount of concentration of wealth in the business. And sometimes, that's just unavoidable because you are building this business, you're building equity in it and it becomes, you know, 70, 80, 90, maybe 99% of your net worth is just tied to this one business. We all say as investors, "That's usually not a good thing." But at the same time, that's what's made them successful over time is this business. So, I think starting to think about that from a personal planning standpoint is how much risk do I have when everything, my income, my net worth is all tied to this one business. I'd say that's most common mistake we tend to see is just kind of an over-reliance on that. And also because you know it so well, sometimes you're a little bit blind to the risks associated with it. We would all say if you put all of your money in one stock, that's risky, right? But if you talk to a small business owner, they don't perceive that typically as risk 'cause it's just all they know basically. And they have some level of control over the business that they may not have with the stock. But I think that's one thing to be considering if you're a small business owner and you're getting up closer to retirement, things like that is how much risk am I really taking right now. How would you address that? You know, if you're a business where, you know, you're just putting all the profits back into the business, how do you get rid of some of that concentration? I think there's a few things. So first, if it's a business that's generating cash flows, one of the things we talk to clients about is just diversifying away from the business. So if I have a business that's generating a million dollars of cash flow, yeah I could go and try to continue to expand my business or maybe I take some portion of that and I'm actually reinvesting that maybe in a diversified equity portfolio, or bonds, or whatever it may be. I think that's number one. Number two is you may not have a great opportunity to diversify away from it no matter what you do. If you're successful in your business, you're just gonna keep growing it. So, planning for an eventual exit is another part of that and how do you make sure you maximize that. I think that's a big planning element is how do you build shareholder value in your firm and how do you increase it knowing those levers. Okay, Michael, where do you see some potential gaps missing in time? I think it's important for us to break it into two different types of business owners. Some business owners are intentional business owners. There's another group of people though that never really intended to be a business owner. They just had a passion about doing something. They couldn't figure out a way to do it within an organization. So, they thought they'd start a company and they're really talented at whatever it is, the product or service that they're able to do. But they don't have the skillset of running a business. They don't have the experience of running a business. They don't have the financial acumen or frankly even the desire sometimes. They'd much rather work on what their expertise is. So, those are two different types of clients and I think you have to go in with a different approach depending on which one you're dealing with. 'Cause we've come across some business owners that are highly skilled around running a business and you wanna talk to those people in a different way. The idea here that we talk about the diversity is critical. As Pat said, we wanna make sure that we're making them aware of the risks that they have. At the end of the day though, also as Pat said, you have to be keenly aware that some people are very successful and frankly, the best investment they have might be their business. You just wanna kind of coach them and show them some ways to mitigate some of that risk to the extent possible. I was just thinking as you guys were talking, it's very similar in the wealth management space as well, right? You get people that have gotten into the business 'cause they love taking care of clients. They love the planning and the tax and investment aspect of it. And lo and behold, they have a real business and you know, now you gotta run a business. And there's a lot of complications that come with that all across the board there. So, it's you guys are right in the middle of that as a small business owner as well. I think that's part of the reason why we both are so interested in this space and love advising is we're them, we're kind of in their shoes ourselves. I'd say one resource potentially for any listener that's maybe a business owner that feels like kind of maybe reluctantly business owner just kind of got into it. there's a great book called "The E Myth," and it talks about this concept that mostly the E, the myth of, and then the E stands for entrepreneur. The myth is that we're these big risk takers that wanna go out and start these huge businesses when in fact most business owners were great technicians, as a doctor, a lawyer, a financial advisor, and they just thought, "I can do this better myself." So, they go hang a shingle. They create a business and then yeah, a few years later they realize, "Wow, I'm actually a business owner and the skills that may be good as a technician are not the same skills that I need to grow this business." And it's a great book to kind of hopefully get people on the right path. I've heard great things about "The E Myth," you know, from entrepreneurs. One of them is that, you know, you think about your business as a business. Yeah. Right, not just necessarily your expertise in what your service or your widget is perhaps that you're making, but thinking about higher level as a business around that. One of the things that you guys do again on I'll say your traditional wealth management services you look at is insurance in place, right? Life insurance, umbrella insurance. Do you find that as kind of a gap there with business owners? You know, in terms of founder's insurance and some of those things, are they properly insured from a business perspective? I've found it can be. It's I think it probably to Michael's point, the kind of the reluctant business owner, a lot of times they've basically created a job for themselves. They're not thinking about it as a business and sometimes therefore, they don't put the necessary risk management in place to be able to manage it that way. So, I think insurance is definitely one that I see that there can be gaps in. I think there are other parts that it's kind of the cobbler's kid has an issues sometimes types of situations where, you know, there they're just so focused on running the business that they forget about their own personal finances, their own personal, you know, financial plan, retirement, tax. Much of that stuff just gets left unoptimized, I guess I should say, if that's even a word. But it's just not optimized well because nobody's really paying attention to it. So, one of the things I think we've seen a lot of times with small business owners that become clients is the appreciation of just overall coordination for them because they don't have the time and just giving that them that time back is valuable to make sure that somebody's overseeing their taxes, their cash flow, their retirement plan, their insurance, and doing it in a way that all coordinates because they just don't have the time to deal with it 'cause they're running a business. Yeah, which brings you guys in, right? The role of the advisor is so incredibly important in doing a lot of those different services. Part of this is to talk about then ultimate is there an exit for some of these owners? You know, one of the things that's so important for that is the behavioral aspect of it too, and that can go in a whole bunch of different directions. But Michael, I'll start with you and how you work with some of your clients around, are they really ready to exit the business that they perhaps founded? Yeah, it's something that needs to get, the conversation should get started a long time before you're thinking about an exit. And one of the big challenges is when you own your own business, at least for a lot of people that own their own business, the business becomes a bit of their personal identity. They've built it. They feel it's kind of like almost like a family. In some cases, it is a family business, but it's a family asset and it's not something where I work for this company. It really is you and there's a hard transition for a person that's owned a business for a long period of time to separate sort of that relationship between themselves and the business itself. So, you do want to try to make it as dollars and cents as you can, but at the same time acknowledging the emotions around getting out of the business if that's something that they really think they can do and determining what's gonna be an attractive solution for them. What do they really want? Are they wanna get rid of the responsibilities of running the business, but they still want to be a practitioner if it's in a, in like a professional services firm or is it that they truly just wanna get onto the second part of their life and move forward? See, I think as financial advisors, a lot of us are coaches and we want to kind of talk to our clients in that way first before we get into the real nuts and bolts, tax, math if you will, around getting outta the business. Yeah, what's the point? What's the purpose of that? You mentioned you wanna start well in advance. What do you start well in advance before you think about exiting? I think you can't start early enough if you're thinking that that is gonna be a... Everybody has to exit their business at some point. It could be through a sale. It could be through a death basically. But you're, no, you can't manage your business forever. So, I think starting to think strategically about that early is really much better than kind of getting under the gun and having a few years. And then really, your options are limited at that point. So, we'll have some clients that want pass it within their family. So, you tend to see that. And there's all sorts of issues with that around estate planning. You know, typically when you're passing assets to the next generation, if it's large enough, there can be taxes associated with that. So, how do you plan for that? That can be through life insurance. That can be through cash. There's a lot of different planning there. If you're selling it to an external party at some point, you know, then you have, well who would you sell to, what that's gonna look like. Private equity has become prevalent in so many different industries now. So understanding what that landscape looks like, what are the pros and cons of selling to a private equity firm, are you gonna stay on, are you gonna get equity in the new entity after somebody buys it. There's all these different things to think through. And then, there's kind of the nuts and bolts of the tax and how do you minimize the tax on a sale longer. The, you know, the more time you have to plan for that, the more you can minimize that. And then, there's the estate planning that goes on, which is maybe this business has turned out to be a gigantic asset and that in a lot of our clients' cases, that's the case. And so when I do liquidate it, not only am I gonna pay tax, but then when I pass away, there could be more assets here that I'm passing in the next generation. Being a small business there, it rely, it kind of presents opportunities to do different estate planning techniques. It probably could be a whole other podcast. But that's some really interesting things kind of just to consider I guess as you're starting this is can't start soon enough. I think getting a good team in place is really important too. And maybe we can talk about the the different players. Yeah, go ahead and run with that one a little bit, right. You need expertise in all those different areas you mentioned there. So, who's pretty key to do any sort of a transaction? Well I think the, I think obviously with a business, your accountant is gonna be very instrumental in figuring out kind of like how the business works. You know, preparing financial statements, which are all gonna be important when if you're selling it. You wanna have clean books and records and things like that. When you get into the actual sale or the transaction, you're gonna have an attorney most likely who's gonna wanna review all the documents. You're gonna have probably bankers that you're working with potentially. It could be investment bankers, people are helping you sell your business, finding people that might wanna buy it. You're probably gonna have some insurance folks that you wanna talk to through that. And then finally, you have the financial advisor that should be involved. And one of the things I think we try to take a role in is coordination of all this stuff. Because it's easy to get to a place where I talk to my accountant about my taxes. I talk to my attorney about the transaction. I talk to my maybe it's an investment guy about what I'm gonna do with the investments, but none of 'em are all talking to each other. And I think a really good advisor is figuring out ways that let's bring all these people together. So, it's a cohesive strategy. It fits in line with their personal plan. Absolutely. And you mentioned the bankers, they probably do the valuations as well, probably in conjunction with CPAs perhaps. Maybe working together on that part. You talked about depending to whom they sell, family, third party, is there one that works better than another? I know there's family dynamics involved in every family out there. Have you guys seen that work well? Is it challenging? Yeah, the most challenging situation we've seen on the family side is where you have multiple children. Some children wanna be in the business and some don't. So, some children are willing to take the risk and purchase the business from the founder, or the parent, or the uncle, or the aunt. And then, there are some kids that wanna have nothing to do with that or have different career aspirations. So, how do you equalize that amongst the children? That's kind of one of the biggest challenges. And I gotta tell you, you could try as hard as you want, but there's no way to perfectly equalize that. It really depends on the situation in the family. So, that is a really big challenge. The easiest thing, of course, is to just outright sell the business and walk away. That's gonna minimize a lot of the potential challenges that go on there for sure. That probably sounds attractive to a lot of folks too perhaps- For some, yeah. For some. There's a psychology that's really, if you're not a small business owner, I would equate it to your children. It's kind of like another child is, you know, you've birthed this business essentially. And you're at this point where you've seen it grow up, you've seen it mature. And it's hard to sell it for a lot of business owners because it's kind of like letting them go. You know, they're often and you really won't have any influence anymore over their, over this business life. When we are talking to business owners, it's really having that conversation is like, "What's the next step here if you haven't thought about it?" It's gonna be very hard to transition away from a business 'cause your identity is kind of tied up in this business. All of your time has been tied up in this business. When that goes away, you know, it can be like dealing with grief or loss. And so it is a, it's, you know, it's obviously financial, but it's an emotional time for people to go through. So I just think it's important anybody that doesn't own business is thinking about this. It's not as simple as just what can I get the most value or how can you know, what's the best way to minimize taxes. Probably the bigger thing is what's my life gonna look like after this is done. Yeah- So- Yeah, go ahead Michael. I'm sorry. I was gonna say, you know, it's kind of just to back in our mission is to help our clients live their best life or their ideal life, that doesn't necessarily mean having the most money. It means, and that's how we would start this conversation. What do you want your life to look like? Maybe there's a part of business that's just burning you out, but we can figure out a solution to solve that piece of the business. But you can keep your business or maybe frankly, you transition this way. You might get a little less money, but you'll be much happier along the way. What do you want to achieve? What do you want your life to look like? We'll use your assets, whether it's in your portfolio or your business to help you achieve that. But what's important to you? You know, what matters? And let's run a financial plan. Let's figure out what you need from the business. As opposed to just maximizing your sale price, let's figure out maximizing your life and figure out what's important. What do we need cash flow wise to make all that happen? And part of that in helping people understand that and draw that out from 'em, do you guys bring in counselors, family counselors, industrial psychologists, things like that just to help people prepare for we'll say life on the other side. We've had situations where we have brought in kind of, you know, therapist type roles when it's called for I think. I think the bigger thing is just getting people to start to think about it and not focus. Sometimes, you can get so focused on a deal that you stop thinking about what's gonna happen after the deal. You get to this point where you're like, "Well, we gotta get this done and we gotta do this and we gotta do that." Nobody ever pauses and stops and say, "Well what's life gonna be like two months later, three months later after I sell this firm? 'Cause I spend every waking hour thinking and working in this firm." And so what's, you know, what's gonna happen next? So, some of it's just taking a, giving people enough time to pause and ask the questions and have 'em, you know, think about these questions. I think that's maybe one of the most important things 'cause sometimes you do get wrapped up in the numbers. It's a lot of money a lot of times, and you just wanna try to get it done. It's also really important if there's another part of spouse in the relationship. Maybe business owner has got all these emotions and feelings tied up in the business, but nobody, you know, nobody's engaged the spouse in a conversation about what's gonna happen. I'll never forget very early in my career, I was meeting with a couple talking about their financial plan. One spouse went off to the bathroom and the other one remains. "Whatever you do, please tell him he can't retire. He thinks I wanna have lunch with him every day." You know, I think it's really important though to have both people at the table. Both people should be talking about what do we want our lives to look like. We get so caught up in the economics, we forget to focus on what matters. I remember my dad, he was an orthodontist and when he retired, he was retired and went to the grocery store with my mom and started questioning things that she's buying. She's like, "Okay, this would be the last time you ever come to the store with me." The big joke in the planning profession is in sickness and in health, but not for lunch. Do you find when people exit the business, let's say they sell their business into a non-family, a third party, they probably love the first year, right? I don't have the headaches. I'm having to manage people, take the stress of running the business, financials, all that stuff. But then after that year, are they're getting a little itchy, they're getting a little bored, or is it sort of that year... I've read different studies where it's about a year's where it starts creeping back in. Have you guys found that? Yeah, I think you have to figure out, you know, what element of of happiness is the trigger for you. For some people, it's having meaning and maybe they got meaning from work. We see that a lot with doctors when they retire, right? You're meeting with people all day long and getting tremendous value out of feeling good about helping people all day long. So, you wanna plan for that and figure out how are you gonna satisfy that void after you you retire. Meaning getting, you know, doing that. For some people, it's just bliss, right? They just wanna retire and have no responsibility. For other people, it's curiosity. They wanna learn. They wanna be engaged in something. So set yourself up in advance. Think about that. Okay, what can I do? What can I experiment with that's gonna gimme that same satiated feeling of learning and being curious? How about from a spending perspective? So now they have money, right? They had a liquidity event. They've probably been, in many cases, I imagine we talked earlier about plowing the money back into the business or perhaps being, you know, very frugal. But now they've got this pile of money, how are they behaviorally saying, 'I'm comfortable spending some of this money'? I suspect some probably are good with it, some probably struggle with it. There is definitely a very significant transition that somebody goes through when they're getting direct deposit or profit distributions on a very regular basis to now living off their portfolio. And that's regardless a business owner or an employee, although an a business owner probably fell a lot more in control than an employee would or a W-2 type person. So, there's a lot of discussion and planning that goes into making them feel good. Time is gonna be the best solution, but we wanna talk all about that and kind of give them that direct deposit from their portfolio, so that they feel on the first of the month, they're gonna be able to pay their bills. Yeah, no doubt. Anything you'd add to that? You know, I think the Michael mentioned this concept that our purpose to help every person live their ideal life. And when you think about what's an ideal life for a business owner, there's elements that we believe is kind of the same for everybody. And that is that you need to kind of have three elements in your life to really feel like you're fulfilled, you're living your best life, your ideal life, and that's security, belonging, and purpose. And so, the security part typically gets covered when you sell a business. It's you kind of get to this point where I have this big pot of money. Most of the time people are a little bit older at that point. They've built this business. And going through the planning process with an advisor, you kind of get a sense like we're gonna be fine. We're gonna be fine. Maybe our kids are gonna be fine and our grandkids are fine. We have that much that's kind of built up. The belonging and the purpose is where things get more challenging for someone selling a business. You know, a lot of times, and I can speak personally to this, you feel a lot of belonging to your colleagues, to the community you've built inside of your firm. And so, you lose that to some degree. You probably lose maybe all of it if you've completely sold out. So, you need to figure out where is that you're gonna get that sense of belonging. Maybe it's your family. Maybe it's in the community somehow. And then, purpose is the other one that I think Michael was talking about is that I think if you lose your sense of purpose. Life's hard. You know, you kind of kind of question what am I here for, what am I doing. So I think, again, thinking about that ahead of time and saying "I've probably derived a lot of purpose in my life from my business and growing it, helping people, whatever it was they they were doing. Where is that gonna come from now?" And a lot of our clients that year that you mentioned, it's pretty spot on. I tend to see a lot of clients after a year, they played as much golf as they can. You know, they've gotten, you know, meddled with too many things around the house and they've realized, "I wanna get it back into something." So, we have a lot of clients that tend to, they have so much knowledge, so much they've built up over the years, a lot of 'em will go back into consulting we found. And they can still add just tremendous amounts of value just not to their own business, but maybe to others. And they get a lot of fulfillment and purpose out of helping people. So, we try to encourage that. But I'd say that's probably the most common is about a year. Not all the time, but I'd say for people that haven't thought about this purpose question, a lot of 'em wanna get back into something. Yeah, well and you know, I think about wrapping up this part of their conversation, I think some of the things that jumped out to me from what you guys mentioned there, one is start early in thinking through all this. Get a team of experts together to help you with that, and that for sure includes the behavioral aspect of it. Really be very clear on what you're trying to accomplish or want post-transaction incredibly important. Probably perhaps one of the most important things, right? It's probably not the money. It's what you're gonna do with your life and like you said, get fulfillment from. Anything you guys would add to that part of it, kinda that summary. I think that covers most of it, yeah. All right, so that's the small business owner. I've got a couple other questions I wanna run by you guys while I have you here. And you can just, as my son's high school teacher would say, "Spew pearls of wisdom out there." I'm gonna shift gears to the retirement side of things. You guys have a significant retirement planning business at Greenspring as well. And a couple questions for you and you know, I kind of bring sort of my kids into this aspect of it, you know, as they've graduated and gotten jobs and now they're participants in a 401k plan. You know, they're like, "Dad, you know, how much did I contribute to my 401k," versus "I need money to live and all that stuff." So, let's almost walk through the guidance you'd give young adults kinda get in the working world and contributing to a plan. And then, we'll compare and contrast with maybe somebody who's been working for a while and how do they think then more tax optimization on like pre-tax, after tax contributions, stuff like that. I think it's one of those things where you can try to optimize it perfectly and it's impossible because we don't know the future. So if you told me exactly where tax rates are gonna be and what investment returns are gonna be, I could tell you probably pretty closely how to do it. But what I'd say is probably most important is foundation. Get the foundation parts right if you're young. So start with cashflow, build margin into your budget. Meaning that you always have more money than you, you know, kind of left over at the end of the month that you can save. You know, ideally, what we're trying to tell clients is if you can save 20% of your income, that's a really, really good spot to be. You can kind of mess up some other stuff and still be okay if you do that consistently over time. Obviously if you're working at a company, you'll probably have a 401k, take advantage of the match, how much to put in Roth versus traditional. That's one of those things where there may be some, it's hard to give general advice there. It's also hard to predict because we don't know where tax rates are gonna be in the future. Usually, what we tell people is maybe the best approach is not all or nothing. Take a, do a little bit of both, do half and half if you're not sure. So, I think that's kind of a good start. If you can get the cash flow right, that's where most people get it wrong is they spend almost every dollar that they have. They go into debt. Those are all kind of really, really bad kind of outcomes typically when you look 10 years later. But if you can get to a point where you are basically in a position where you're saving 15, 20% of your income per year, again, obviously, you know, you wanna invest it wisely and whatnot, but you can kind of dig yourself out of a lot of holes if you figure out how to do that. That 15, 20% is a fantastic number, right, for people to try to achieve. And that would include how much you're putting in your 401k. It would include how much you're, you know, coming out and putting in taxable savings and it's kinda the whole gamut. Right That's right. That's right. Okay, great. There's one other thing I was gonna ask you about on the retirement and there's something that you hear quite a bit about, which is sort of these Roth conversions. You know, and I guess it just depends on what tax rates will be in in the future, but is that something you guys work with your clients about quite a bit. It's a huge area that people are very interested in and I think there's just, you know, tremendous amounts of value if you get it right. I'll maybe give one maybe just practical tip for people to think about, which we tend to see a lot, which is the retiree who gets to, let's just say 65, decides to sell their business, stop working, whatnot. All of a sudden income stops. They have a portfolio but they have not started tapping into their retirement accounts yet, which is gonna create ordinary income. They haven't started taking social security yet. So then this kind of, they call it, you know, the retirement income valley is a lot of times what people call it, which is a time where you have very little income coming in. Those are the ideal times to do Roth conversions. You're paying tax at low rates versus waiting till later and paying tax at higher rates, because you're gonna now be taking minimum distributions from your IRAs. You're gonna be getting social security, maybe both spouses. So, it's something for people to think about is when you retire it's not like the planning stops like, "Oh, I have enough money. I'm good." We found more planning opportunities tend to happen right at or after retirement than they do maybe in your, you know, or as many when you're in your 20s and 30s. Yeah, well then you mentioned philanthropy and a lot of things you can do there too. Yeah, right. To really enhance some of that stuff. Yeah, there's some things you could do to try to offset some of the cost of those Roth conversions from a tax standpoint. I think the other thing that's, it's kind of rare, but we've seen people even in high tax brackets the idea that they have a large taxable estate. They don't want to saddle their kids with ordinary income from the IRAs that they might inherit, as well as the fact that they're gonna pay estate taxes. So some parents go as far as to do Roth conversions, pay taxes, even at high rates, but they're also at the same time, by paying those taxes, they're bringing down their estate a taxable estate depending on, you know, what the rates are like and where they are. So, there's a lot of different strategies that could be done in that area. All right, so this stuff can get complex pretty quickly, hence the need for professional help. What guidance or coaching would you give somebody listening out there that says, "I do need help from a financial advisor." Like what are some questions they should go ask an advisor that they meet with just to make sure that they're in good hands there and they have the proper person they're gonna be working with. I think that's a great question and I think sometimes people don't know the questions asked, so I think this is really good. I think there's a few things maybe we'll get like inside baseball here as far as some of the questions you should ask an advisor from an advisor. I think number one you wanna understand is how are you compensated. I think that's a, it's an important question. Incentives matter in all areas of life. And so figuring out what, how are they incented? Are they incented to sell me a product? To sell me life insurance? To sell me, you know, do they get commissions on anything? Does their company behind the scenes make more revenue if they sell product A versus B? Those are things that we typically tell people you should try to avoid because it just creates conflicts of interest. You don't know if the advice you're getting is truly independent or if it is more favoring the firm that's giving that advice. That's number one. The other one that I like to tell people to ask is ask about the advisor you're gonna work with, "How many clients do they work with?" I think that's a really important one, because if you are working with an advisor that has 200 clients, how likely is it that you are going to get personalized service that can help you with these types of questions that we're talking about? Roth conversions are very, you can't just give blanket advice, you have to do a tax projection. You sometimes have to do multi-year tax projections. It takes a lot of time. You can't do it for 200 people. It just doesn't work. So, I think really trying to understand how much bandwidth does this advisor have to work with me. And I think the best way to do that is understand, you know, how many clients do you work with, is there a cap on the number of clients, or could you, you know, in five years could you be working with hundreds of clients and I'm just one of of several hundred. Great. Michael, what would you add to that? That was a great answer. I would add that the advisor needs to be somebody you're gonna be able to really open up to and feel that they're gonna wanna work with you in a way that's supportive, not just tactically. I always say to our young financial planners, "Don't just be financial planners, be advisors." So really try to understand what's important to them. You can give them the the options and say, "Look, these are your choices. This is the math on that, but let me tell you what I'm hearing from you and which one of these solutions seem to get to the crux of what's important to you." And I think making sure that you can work with an advisor that's gonna really understand and get you, if you will, is important. If they're not asking you these questions about what matters to you, what's important, then they're probably not a good, they might be technically proficient, but I don't think they're gonna be a good advisor. It seems like everything comes back to an effective listener, doesn't it? That's right. Because if they're listening well, then they can articulate perhaps what they're hearing and kinda get you in the right direction. That's right. And the irony is when you're an advisor, a young advisor, all you wanna do is share all you know, because you're so excited. You spent all this time, you're 10,000 hours of learning and you're so eager to give the client all the solutions, but half the time those solutions, while technically correct, might not apply to the situation until you've listened effectively to what the client needs and wants. And that's why we always start with a blank pad and say, "What's important to you? Why are you here today?" All right, well listen guys, thanks for your time here today. I've been very blessed to work with you guys for 20 plus years here. I've seen the work you do for clients, the impact it has on families, and so congratulations on that. You should be really proud of the work you've done- Thank you. Yeah, thank you. For those families over 20 plus years. Thank you. Appreciate it. Yep, so thanks for being here today. Thanks for all of you for joining in here today. And remember, if you are a small business owner, go out there and get that expert advice and plan what you're gonna do post-transaction. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.