Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here. Another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is gonna be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Business RadioX. If you’re a business coach or business consultant who’s tired of being a best kept secret, set up a call with Stone Payton at bookstonephone.com to unlock your perpetual prospect pipeline. Today on the show, we have David A Perez, who is the CEO and founder of Tax Maverick AI, welcome.

David A. Perez: Thank you for having me, Lee.

Lee Kantor: Well, I am excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a bit about Tax Maverick AI, how you how you serving folks.

David A. Perez: Well, so interesting enough, I’ve been in the tax industry for over the last 18 years, and I used to serve thousands of clients through filing their returns, reconciling their books and, and just really meeting deadlines. And in 2021, I had this big epiphany, which was never not very many accountants or tax professionals trying to help their clients save money. And in 2021, I, I realized this because one client that I had just had such a tax bill and it challenged me to figure out how to solve it. And in that process, I found that there was this newfound passion of serving clients. And so at 21, I realized that I loved this. And I started to move towards what I would call an advisor to my clients rather than just being a tax professional. And that became the movement for me. And today what I do is not only do I help clients, I also help tax professionals see that potential for their clients. And so we help by offering tax strategies and systems to help streamline tax savings for all taxpayers.

Lee Kantor: So in your work, are you a CPA? Are you do you do people hire you to be their CPA? Is that your role?

David A. Perez: Great question. So I am an enrolled agent. That is an EA by definition of the IRS. So I’m designated to represent clients in front of the IRS. I’ve been tested and, you know, I don’t know, battle tested by the IRS to be able to do taxes and tax returns. Um, I do work with clients, um, in a one on one basis, but I also work with a lot of tax professionals across the country to ensure that they help their clients at the highest level.

Lee Kantor: So is that the focus of your business is serving other tax professionals.

David A. Perez: Correct? Tax Maverick. That’s what we do today. So if you one of your listeners here today has a client, has a has a tax professional they work with, but their tax professional is not giving them the best tax strategy or best tax advice to save on taxes. Um, what we do is we support them by giving them access to the best strategies and helping them make sure their clients don’t pay taxes.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you find well, I don’t want to lead the witness here, but, um, tell me about your experience with CPAs and tax professionals. I have found over the years, uh, that they are backward. They like to look backwards and they’re not really proactive.

David A. Perez: Well, I would agree with you, and I don’t think that’s by default. I think what’s happened here has really transformed in this industry is that many accountants today are what I would call overworked and overwhelmed. And it’s not by by choice. It’s just that many of the clients that they serve today have grown with the firm. And as they grow, mostly the workload grows. But the fees don’t grow, grow in lockstep, if you will. And so most firms will continue to take on new clients without being able to really hire new staff or bring in new resources. And so they just get overwhelmed and they get stuck in just doing the work. And it may look like they’re looking backwards, but they’re really just doing is just trying to keep up. And so many of them don’t ever get the opportunity to really explore the advanced tax strategies that are out there, or they don’t get the opportunity to really grow themselves personally. They’re just, I mean, really chained to a desk. And it’s, it’s really not by design. It’s just really a symptom of an industry that needs to change.

Lee Kantor: And when you’re working with them, is it something because it sounds like you’re, you’re trying to pull them a little bit out of their comfort zone.

David A. Perez: I definitely am, but I wouldn’t say it’s comfort. I would say I’m trying to get them to see that proactive planning is the way of the future, that artificial intelligence coupled with workflows. And I’m just a lot of technologies that are moving so fast that a lot of the backwards compliance file return stuff is getting automated today, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to be without a job or that they’re going to, to just, you know, disappear. Tax pros disappear. It just means that when something becomes done very easily, it becomes more commoditized when something becomes commoditized, the price is the only lever that that people choose based on. And if that’s the case, if they don’t have a healthy business. Now imagine themselves in three years. So they have to focus on something that can’t be what I would call AI. I would say they have to focus more on their AI, their human intelligence, their decision making, their intuition to help clients make better decisions.

Lee Kantor: But just from a personality type of the person who’s attracted to this industry, that seems to kind of that’s a big ask.

David A. Perez: Um, I would say yes, but I mean, same, same thing. What I would say is, um, when you’re hungry, you have to, you have to find food. And I would say that even if somebody was maybe not necessarily, um, an extrovert or somebody who is, uh, maybe proactive in nature, um, their behavior has to change if they want to stay in business.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you find, uh, that the people you’re working with or would like to work with, or do they believe you when you’re saying these things? Or are they skeptical and think that it’s business as usual?

David A. Perez: I would say that, you know, we’re in a trust economy, right? People don’t trust a lot of things. But I mean, I come at a common sense approach. I just say, if you ask a tax firm owner right now, a CPA or an accountant and you say, um, has your firm grown exponentially in the last five years? And every one of them will probably say no. And you’ll say, is it because of a lack of clients or a lack of revenue? And they’ll say, well, I got a bunch of clients. I just don’t have the revenue. Well, why is that? And they would say, well, my clients continue to complain about the fees that I charge. And I said, well, did you raise your fees? Not significantly. So then it’s not really the fees. It’s that they don’t see value in the work. So if they don’t see value in the work, what are they asking you? What are the most common questions. And most clients come in today and they say, hey, I’m going to start a new business. I need to set it up correctly. How can you help me? Hey, I got this letter from the IRS and it says that, you know, I need to start making big estimated payments. Uh, how do I start solving that? Hey, I saw this TikTok video about how to pay my kids. What do I do? They’re like, they’re coming in with all of this. I need help advice. Yet most accountants are tax farm owners are just going to do that work for free because they believe it’s part of the engagement that’s already in place. But that’s not true because it’s a different type of engagement. It’s a totally different perspective. And they’re giving away their best opportunities to their clients. And for the sake of just trying to retain people, that’s really what’s happening.

Lee Kantor: But I don’t know. I’ve seen so many. I’ve had relationships with multiple CPAs over the years, and it just seems like they all say what you’re saying, that they want to be of service and be available for help and answer questions like that, that you described. But after a short, very short period of time that what it appears to me that what they really want to do is just do the tax work, that they don’t want to do that advisory work. I mean, because if they do want to do that advisory work, they have a funny way of showing it because they’re not actively engaging with me to find out if I have those questions.

David A. Perez: I think it goes back to the lack of time. Uh, honestly, I don’t think it’s because they don’t want to do this. I think there’s just a lack of time. Um, they have so many demands, so many deadlines, so many looking, uh, research and, you know, for forums. I mean, most accountants aren’t researching the tax code anymore. They’re researching how they can get their clients to give their forms on time. And that becomes a job on itself. And so I could see your perspective when it comes to a lot of accountants, not necessarily being proactive, more so reactive versus, uh, comparison comparatively to being maybe introverted versus extroverted. I don’t think it’s from a lack of, of, of not caring or concern. I think it’s just literally they’re burned out. That’s it. They’re just burned out.

Lee Kantor: But I mean, from a, I’m not a, a tax expert. I’m not a CPA. I’m none of those things. I’m just an entrepreneur. I would think that today and maybe this is wrong, and maybe this is a false assumption by a layperson that the tax part of what they do is done primarily through software. It isn’t them, you know, with a pencil and an eraser and a calculator.

David A. Perez: You’re right on that for sure.

Lee Kantor: So if, if most of the work is done kind of automatically, how can they justify any type of high fees if that’s all they’re doing is plugging in data into a software? Why? Why? I mean, more and more people are doing kind of a do it yourself version of this now anyway.

David A. Perez: That’s exactly what my point that the majority of of the work today is becoming commoditized. Because if if you think, as you just referenced, that anybody can do it or it can be gotten anywhere, then their fees can grow up. And I think most firms are experiencing that their, their labor costs are going up, their software fees are going up, the operating expenses of the business go up, yet their fees are staying stagnant or even declining. And so the reason that they’re still more aware of advisory is as a way of generating more revenue. And actually delivering on a promise is because their business isn’t growing anymore.

Lee Kantor: Right. But on one hand, you’re saying they’re so busy that they don’t have time to be proactive and, and build relation human relationships and interact and check in and do the stuff that human salespeople would do. Um, what are they busy doing? If not that, if the software is doing the heavy lifting when it comes to doing the tax.

David A. Perez: That’s a great perspective. Well, they’re hunting down forms from the clients that don’t give their forms on time. They’re responding to notices that their clients received from the IRS regarding past filings. They’re having conversations with their clients that are not proactive, but more reactive about maybe forming a business, putting money into a retirement account, establishing new entities, what entity structure needs to be done? They’re already doing this proactive advice, but they’re they’re not doing it proactively. They’re doing it reactively, which causes more workload for them.

Lee Kantor: So when you start working with your clients, these tax professionals, what are those kind of conversations look like? Is it just kind of restructuring how they’re framing their services? Or do you have to kind of kind of look at their business with new eyes and say, look, that was the old you. This is the new kind of world order now.

David A. Perez: Well, they have to we first start with a conversation of what the future looks like for the tax industry and for tax professionals specifically. And we believe it’s advisory and they have to buy into that because they have to see the AI changes. They have to see that, you know, reporting the history stuff is going to go away. And they need to see that the value in what they’ve been doing for free in most cases for years is something they could charge for number one. Number two, we have to help them identify how they should engage every client moving forward. Because, um, currently the way they engage them is you give me work, I do the work, then I bill you for the work. And that doesn’t work for any other business. Like that’s not a business that you want to be in. You want to be in a business that gets paid prior to the engagement. Because what that does is it allows you to grow your business and allows you to hire the right people. It allows you to get the right team, software, all those things. So we flipped the model from, we do all the work for free and then beg for money to, hey, we need to start offering proactive advice to help our clients win and save on taxes. And we need to get paid up front for that so that we can grow and help our clients scale.

Lee Kantor: So then you turn the kind of transactional, um, relationship they had with their clients into kind of more of a membership or subscription relationship. No.

David A. Perez: No, it wouldn’t be membership or subscription. First off, I love that you used the word transactional. I would say we’re more, uh, to be very like, this is going to sound like fluffy, but it’s like from transaction to transformational. Um, and we believe, we believe in value based pricing based on the results that we can produce for our clients. And a lot of clients today are looking for strategy. And we don’t believe strategy is the solution. We believe that, um, a strategist is the solution. I believe that in the future, um, clients are going to want people to help make better decisions, not necessarily give me, you know, a return done or a tax saving strategy. They want somebody to help them make better financial decisions. And everything revolves around a tax return, meaning a lending becomes part of a tax return. Employment becomes part of a tax return. Retirement becomes part of a tax return. Like everything focuses on a tax return. So if we’re the center center of all that, why can’t we be more of a guide in the decision making of finances for our clients?

Lee Kantor: So how do you implement kind of the value based pricing? What’s an example of how that works?

David A. Perez: Everything begins with assessments. So what we do is you engage with me as an example. I’m your tax professional and or you’re maybe looking for a new one. Um, we begin with a deep dive assessment where we get to know your unique situation. So we review prior tax returns. We review current year financials. We do an in depth discovery call where we get to know you and your goals, your retirement goals, your income goals, your investment goals, so that we can then forecast liability for the tax year and then put together a tax savings analysis, which we call an assessment, which is going to identify tax savings opportunities, entity structure changes, um, ways to make investments that have the best tax savings benefits. And then we present that to you. Now once we present that to you, We didn’t get to identify where we want to begin. And usually it’s going to be on the biggest strategies or the biggest opportunities. But then we say, hey, you don’t really want the strategies. What you want is for me to help curate these strategies to match the, the, the flow, like based on this, we should invest here or do this this year because what we have seven years to retirement or we have this new business coming up, or he wanted to buy this real estate. And so we walk them through this. We need to know you before we actually start doing the work. Then once we know you, we want to help make the decisions on what the work looks like. And so that’s how we lead every conversation with every single client.

Lee Kantor: And then, but you’re equipping your clients to do what you just described.

David A. Perez: Yeah. And this is exactly the way I grew my practice and this is how I still serve clients today. But yes, this is how we train accountants and tax professionals.

Lee Kantor: So you have two businesses. One is that you execute on on the system and the other is you teach other people the system.

David A. Perez: Yeah, I would say that we don’t take on very many clients anymore. In our own firm. You have to have $1 million tax bill or greater for you to work with me and my firm these days, because we just we don’t take on new clients. My majority of my focus is tax maverick.ai, where we work with accountants directly.

Lee Kantor: And then what size accounting firm is a good fit for you?

David A. Perez: Um, typically an accounting firm that’s doing over $500,000 in revenue.

Lee Kantor: Uh, is that a solopreneur or is it a small team?

David A. Perez: Uh, that’s typically 2 to 3 people plus the owner.

Lee Kantor: And is there a story you can share that maybe illustrates the impact this can have on an organization? Don’t name the company, but maybe share the challenge they came to you with and how you were able to help them get to a new level.

David A. Perez: Oh for sure. So I can name several, but one comes to mind. So we have, um, an accountant from Maryland who reached out to us and, um, he was doing about a little over $300,000 in revenue and uh, where he was stuck is he had a lot of new clients. Um, they were asking for advice and he was giving a lot of work away for free. Um, he was buried in compliance work. He had one employee at the time, and he reached out to us and he says, hey, David, I see you’re doing strategies, I need help. I said, okay, let me see if I can help you. And so what we identified is that what he was doing, which we call an assessment, he was doing that for free. So he was meeting with every client. He was evaluating a lot of the things the client could do, but then he was not actually charging for it, which really was eating a lot of his time. Then when it came to implementation, he was doing one off and he was like, you could just do this one strategy and it’ll be this much money, which was good for him. But the problem was the client wasn’t getting the best service because we believe that you should work with clients throughout the whole year. It shouldn’t just be a strategy or a case by case. And so when I showed him that, he says, oh, well, maybe I need to start doing value based pricing, the annual based pricing. And that’s what he moved to. And so, uh, over the last 18 months that he’s been working with us, he went from a little over 300, 000 to on target by December to do $1.1 million in revenue in his firm.

Lee Kantor: So what’s the difference between value based and traditional pricing? Like so the if if you help me make more money or save more money, then you get paid more.

David A. Perez: No, it’s not based on a percentage of anything. What we base it on is typically we have what you would call clear and transparent pricing. So a person who would come to me as an example and wants me to work with them. Um, we look at the number of strategies and the workload that we would be taking on throughout the year, and we give them a transparent price that’s going to be this much, um, you know, most firms in the, in historically will charge based on hours worked. They’ll say, well, you know, we charge, you know, $200 an hour or $150 an hour and well, how many hours are you going to take? Well, I don’t know. You know, in our case, we set a flat fee from the beginning. Mostly it’s going to be the same for almost every customer unless there’s a unique circumstance. And that’s how we build. So it’s always transparent. You never pay a dollar more, you get exactly what we promised. And it is not based on savings. It’s based on the value that we bring to you.

Lee Kantor: So you’re you’re reframing it into the value conversation rather than the, you know, whatever the tactic or whatever the, the, the thing you’re doing is.

David A. Perez: Correct because we believe that you don’t, people don’t pay for strategy. I mean, they may want to, but they really want a strategist and that’s what they pay for.

Lee Kantor: And then like, what is when you say this is value based, what how do you frame that for the customer so they understand the value that you’re delivering?

David A. Perez: So before every engagement, we outline what we’re going to do as an example, I would say you’re going to have a dedicated person on my team. And in that case it would be somebody on my team, or it could be the the tax professional. But we have a dedicated person on my team who’s going to work with you, who knows your unique situation, who meets with you monthly or quarterly, who answers your questions. Anytime you make a financial decision that’s going to impact your taxes, this is where you reach out to. We say every strategy we outline, we’re going to implement with you. In addition to that, we’re going to implement new strategies. As they become available. We’re going to file the returns that we’ve identified here, which are your personal return and any business returns. We’re going to make sure that we guarantee that this return, if it gets audited or anything happens that we back you up and represent you. All of this is included in the value that we give you today. And this is a one time fee of. And then we give them a fee.

Lee Kantor: So all of the services delivered are in and around your taxes.

David A. Perez: Yes. Correct.

Lee Kantor: Tax saving now for the CPA that wants to expand into, you know, maybe more consulting and business growth, is that also kind of in your playbooks or is that something you’re like, nope, we’re the tax people.

David A. Perez: Well, we’re, we’re tax strategy and consulting would be very close to that. So we don’t do just tax prep. It’s tax strategy. It’s it’s it is entity formation. It’s business structure. It’s um investment optimized. It’s tax savings. That’s what we focus on.

Lee Kantor: Right. But so everything’s in and around delivering something to the IRS.

David A. Perez: Um, well, yeah, I mean, I guess so now if you wanted to do other services, like let’s say, um, CFO type work, which is like reporting of metrics and things and analysts and analytics, those are services that we think are on the back side of advisory, because every single person who engages with you is going to have a tax problem. And it’s the biggest pain point in their life. Once we solve that problem, you could do anything else. Now, do we train on those things? Um, we have resources for them. But me personally, we don’t do that.

Lee Kantor: Right. So your lane is tax correct.

David A. Perez: Well tax strategy let’s be specific. So tax strategy.

Lee Kantor: Right. Tax strategy. But it isn’t advisory. Or if they want to grow their business or should I open a second branch or. That’s that’s not the lane.

David A. Perez: Not yet. Um, it’s. I’m glad that you’re bringing this up because this is actually the future of what we call tax maverick AI. Um, we believe by 2031 that almost every single business owner that works through a tax maverick, um, client, like one of our community members is going to require that type of level of support. And our AI technology is working really hard to be able to do that. Um, we’re going to use industry trends based on NCIS codes, which allows us to identify if a of a, of A business’s margins are in line with industry standards. Uh, we can evaluate expenses and income based on benchmarks. Um, we’ll be able to, to help clients make better decisions when it comes to payroll, when it comes to investment activity inside of their business purchases, um, this will be something that we are evolving to because we believe that the future is like a primary advisor. And then you’ll have other advisors, like financial advisors, legal advice. You’ll have all those people. But we want to be the primary advisor.

Lee Kantor: Right. Somebody has to be the quarterback.

David A. Perez: Yep. And that’s the future.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, what’s the website? What’s the best way to connect?

David A. Perez: Great, taxmaverick.ai, if you’re looking for if you’re an accountant looking for support or you want to refer your account over to us or taxplanexperts.com, if you have $1 million or greater tax liability code, a taxplanexperts.com.

Lee Kantor: Well, David, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

David A. Perez: Lee, I appreciate you, my friend.

Lee Kantor: All right. This Lee Kantor we’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.