Transcript of The Proven legal $10 Million Tax Free Exit Strategy - Garrett Gunderson New

Welcome to the Proven Podcast, where it doesn't matter what you think, only what you can prove. Our guest today is Garrett Gunderson, a financial entrepreneur, author, and wealth strategist who has helped thousands of business owners create lasting prosperity by focusing on cash flow, efficiency, and economic independence. Garrett has proven that true wealth isn't built by sacrificing your life. It's built by maximizing your value, and keeping more of what you earn. The show starts now. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I'm excited that you came on back, man. Thank you.

Thanks for having me back, man. Appreciate it.

So the first episode, it was really kind of felt like you and I were just sitting around having a coffee, talking back and forth about life, liberty, and what it's like to be an entrepreneur. There's so much more to you and what you do. You're one of the leading individuals that I know on financial advice and financial expertise. I really wanted to kind of unlock that open on this episode and talk about what are some of the things that people come to you and they're like, well, I can't believe they don't know this. And what are the most frequent of the things that you talk about when it comes to financial advice.

Man, I feel like entrepreneurs don't know so much about tax. It's amazing, right? Because they get like a, they get a CPA or an enrolled agent and they're like, oh, I got a tax strategist. No, you got yourself a historian. They're going to tell you what you owe after the fact. And there's going to be so many things directly in the tax code that they're going to make you feel like, well, I don't know if I should do that. That sounds risky. That's completely down the fairway, black and white. And easy. And even further than that, the reason why most people don't know is because if you don't have an attorney that's coordinated the strategy with the accountants, you're missing out because the type of corporation you choose is massive. For example, if someone's a C corporation that's been in operation for at least 3 years, when they sell, they could sell for up to $7.5 million tax-free using Section 1202. And if they've been in business for 5 years, that's $15 million tax-free. Wow. Per partner. And yet, if you didn't select the right entity, you might not have that tax advantage, right? And maybe a CPA is not looking at that.

They're just going, hey, I need to file these taxes. And worst case, you talk to them at the, you know, next year for the previous year, and their only strategy is usually to delay tax. And delaying tax and saving tax are completely different things. So really, there's this easy framework. Number one, you gotta have the right team. So just timely data. You know, I don't care if it's a CFO, 'cause you're an established company, a controller, or a bookkeeper. You just gotta have the timely data. 'Cause if you're talking too late, you're missing opportunity. Second is you need the strategist that helps you maximize tax deductions. So deductions is kind of the second category. The third category is you have to have an attorney. Now, if you're under $1 million revenue, a corporate attorney's fine. But when you get above that mark, you want a tax attorney and they're responsible for how you classify your income, which is a game changer. And then finally, if you own real estate, you want an engineer, specifically a cost segregation engineer, because there's all this bonus depreciation people could take if they're in real estate now that gives them major windfalls of like deductions now.

Now, to a degree, that could be a deferral because if you just sell it outright, you have to recapture it. But I could have you borrow against real estate, not pay tax, roll it over to another piece of real estate, not pay tax, or do a charitable trust where you donate the real estate to a charity, then sell it tax-free and you get a lifetime income. Mm-hmm. While you're alive off of that trust, the charity just keeps at least 10% of what's left over. Rather pay the charity 10% than the government 20% personally. So, so that, you know, that's the team. The second thing is how do you maximize deductions? Well, every time you spend money, say, does this relate to my business? And if you're not sure, meet with your tax team, right? And that's either a tax attorney or a tax strategist. And man, Charles, I feel like the best tax strategists are actually financial people, not CPAs. CPAs are trained to file taxes. You want them. They're essential. They keep you compliant. But to expect them to be proactive when they're mostly reactive, they're filing 800 to 1,000 filings a year. It almost becomes a commodity.

You need someone that sees the big picture and sees how everything works together and helps you navigate it. Now, the better tax deductions, or the better, like, you know, category here is things like Section 199A. That's a 20% deduction off the top. Then you only pay tax on what's left over as a business owner. That's one thing that a lot of business owners miss. It's been out for several years now. 280G, which is you can rent your home out for 14 days to your business, write it off in the business because you're using it for business purpose, and then not claim it as personal income. So that's just 14 days of tax deduction most people miss. Maybe they had a team retreat, maybe they were filming. There's a number of things. I know you don't just let anyone over to your house, but you know, you might decide, hey, you want to film in other rooms than just what you're in now. Another tax strategy everyone should know, but I don't know why everyone doesn't take advantage of it, just having a home office. You get to write that off. It's a percentage of utilities, all that kind of stuff.

That's another piece that, you know, if you have kids, you could pay your kids just over $15,000 now per year, tax deductible to business, tax-free to the kid, and you still control that money. There's so many strategies like that that people just aren't doing that I would consider extraordinarily basic. Mm-hmm. But one that like I've had argument against is this thing called 132J. We happen to have an indoor pool. We have a sauna. As you know, I have a cold plunge. You know, I have a gym. So all the maintenance towards that, if I make it available to my employees, becomes a write-off. The maintenance does. Well, guess what? I have employees called my kids in one of my companies. So I make it available to them. And all of a sudden the maintenance is a write-off. Some people might feel like that's aggressive. It's just within the law. Now I know some people that might say, oh, I'm going to make it available to my employees. They don't make it available to all their employees. That's the problem. It's a specific company that's only got my family inside of it that make that available.

So like, these aren't the game-changing things in tax deductions, but there's a lot that's missed there. The better strategy is if you're a business owner and you do have a wife or kids, is you set up a family company that takes your write-offs instead of taking too many write-offs from the business. That way, if you have partnerships or that way, You know, if you have other people involved like employees, you're not just stripping that business to pay for everything that you want. You're taking money into your family company and then taking your write-offs there because that family company doesn't have value in the marketplace where the existing business does. And a lot of wealthy families do that. So I'll pause here for a second before I get to the big ones, which is how to classify income, which the tax attorney helps with. And there's 4 major ways to do that.

So I want to reverse all the way back on there. One of the first things you said was a different C company versus an S corp and all of that. When you're running into this and you have someone who doesn't have this experience and has been working with a CPA instead of someone who's a strategist and really understands this, is a true financial guy, how do you pivot out of that? How do you switch your company from like, hey, I'm an S corp, I probably should be a C corp 'cause I'm gonna sell and it's gonna be this exit and it's gonna be this EBITDA and it's gonna be this multiplier, blah, blah, blah. Is there a way you could do that after you've got the, you know, the cart down the road a little bit or you like, you're screwed and then you have to switch it around? How do you survive that?

Well, the clock won't start ticking until it's a C corp. So you're just, you know, if you just start a new C corp, if you convert your S corp, if you're an LLC, it's very easy 'cause an LLC can do an S election or a C election. So you just change the election of how you tax that and become a C corporation, right? So that would be suffice. If you're an S corp, you're going to have to convert it to a C corp or make that change, right? Or start something new and then maybe have that relationship with the business. There's a number of things you'd have to kind of consider to figure out what to do. And I'd bring an attorney in to do that.

Right. So it's, it's not that it's an impossible thing. It's just, that's when the clock starts ticking thing. You can't reverse the clock. It's not like, hey, I've had this company for 30 years and I just made it a C corp. They're like, we don't care. This is now going to be treated as a new entity and we're going to rock and roll from there.

Right. And you know, with the new rules that just came out with the big beautiful bill, it used to take 5 years for that to happen. You now start getting benefits after 3. So they have shortened it, you know, it limits it to $7.5 million total benefit after 3 years where it's $15 million after 5. And there are some exclusions, certain companies wouldn't, it wouldn't exist. So you have to make sure you're in the category and the type of company that would work for. We've had, you know, we've had companies sell in $70 million tax-free because spouse is an owner, kids have small ownership, trust is an owner, and the main individual is an owner. So we're, you know, there's a lot of tax benefit through that. And, you know, an LLC and S corp passes through. So one of the worst things I see is I see a lot of partnerships in an S corp. S corps are very frigid. They're very inflexible. And so I've seen businesses do huge numbers with an S corp, but I'm like, wow, you're, you're definitely first off overpaying tax and undervaluing the value of the business because the C corp gives you different share classes.

If you're ever raising capital, it lets you retain earnings so you don't have to pay tax. The people get scared because they're like, well, you have to pay corporate tax and personal tax, but you know, there's these other advantages that kind of help you out. And by the way, interestingly, if you have a C corp and an LLC or an S corp do a small amount of revenue, the C corp's going to pay less tax on a smaller amount of revenue than an LLC or an S corp because those pass through to someone individually. So S corp, too inflexible. LLC, much more flexible. C corp, you know, it's just a, there's, there's a little bit more onerous in managing it, but there is a lot more opportunity in managing it. So I, a lot of businesses are LLCs. That's the most popular one, but they may just want to consider like holding intellectual property in a C corp or holding a piece of that business in a C corp. So there is an option that they can have an exit and get some tax benefit and also retain earnings and maybe even have a medical reimbursement account, which you can't have in an LLC or an S corp from a tax advantage standpoint.

There's a lot of stuff right now about the virality of where you form your organization, either the Cook Islands or Delaware or Wyoming or where all these different things when you're going down this route and you're having professional financial advice, not just someone who talks about the past, but is solely focused on the future of your finances. Where do you tell people to kind of form their corp?

So there's the formation of the corporation, which if you're going to do offshore, like Cook Islands or Nevis, that's because you're moving probably towards an asset protection trust internationally. And then what happens with that is yes, you will protect your assets for sure. And you'll also make it a little bit harder to access that money at the same time. And I think it was like 2013, the US was like, hey, we're seeing too much money go overseas. We'd like to keep some of that money here. So they set up a domestic asset protection trust. Doesn't have the same precedent where we could see for decades that, you know, they're nearly impossible to penetrate and people haven't got into them. They just don't have as much, you know, data because they're newer, but they were essentially like, Well, Charles, why don't you set up here domestically? We'll give you a provision that says you can choose your distribution trustee. So you still don't own those assets, the trust does, but you can have access to that if the distribution trustee says yes. Now you might have a distribution trustee that you go sideways with. You can fire them and hire someone new.

So it's still arm's length. Own nothing, control everything. Those types of things, like a domestic asset protection trust, the state matters heavily because some states it takes 6 months before now it's irrevocable and nobody can get to it, including creditors. And some states take 3 years, right? So it might just take a lot longer if you're incorporated in certain states. Alaska was a big one early on, but they take longer than Nevada. You know, it seems like Nevada and Wyoming are really popular, but they're still taking longer than Utah. The problem with Utah is you now have to make it— you have to make a public declaration that you've set this up in some type of trade publication so your creditors have a chance to come and look at it. And it's a little bit more inflexible of changing trustees and stuff like that than Wyoming and Nevada. Wyoming and Nevada decided we want to make this easy because we want more coming to us. You know, they got registered agents, they've got, you know, entities set up where you have addresses and all that kind of stuff. So those are what I see as kind of the two most popular.

Although back in the day, as you know, Delaware was the king of C-corps way back in the day. It's not quite as much because we've just seen. You know, we know where people aren't going to go is California, right? People aren't going to incorporate in California and deal with those kind of laws and the kind of issues that might be, you know, might happen there. So yeah, it's more like your asset protection than your corporation. Although the corporation where it's set up in, you just got to look at like some states have pretty unfavorable laws to businesses. And that's why you want to be careful about that. And just because you're in a certain state and you set up a corporation somewhere else, You're still paying the state tax from the state you're in. You're just abiding by the legal structure where you set up the legal structure and the rules that they have, right? So who has better protections, who supports you or has easier setup and has, you know, things like that. But then even if we get into the third dimension here, which is trust, right? So we have, we have an asset protection trust, which is what we're talking about and corporations, but there's also perpetual trust.

People go to South Dakota because it's perpetual. You can keep that going forever. where Nevada eventually, after a certain number of generations, dissolves the trust. So, you know, that's another layer is like, what if you want this to go from generation to generation versus just what's best now? So it sounds a little bit complicated, but that's why you want to have a good attorney. They just kind of know what's going on. And, you know, then you, you can definitely use AI to figure some of this out, but we know that AI likes to make some stuff up.

So, you know, well, I think it's in the nature of AI. AI by itself is an artificial intelligence. It's always on a quest. It's just always incorrect. That's just the reality. It's just, you have to, you have to deal with that and embrace that. Speaking about being always incorrect, what are some of the things that people just blatant mistakes that you hear all the time? That guys, just please stop doing this. Here's the top 10 things. Stop doing these 10 things.

Well, so let me, I'll finish the tax thing because there's a lot of mistakes in this third category, which is reclassification. These are the 4 things. Number 1, you want more passive income for tax purpose than active income. Active income like W-2 has the highest tax against it. So one of the mistakes I see business owners doing is taking huge salaries instead of salary plus distributions. When you're operating as a business owner, you can take distributions. When you're operating as a business runner, you take a salary. When you differentiate those two, you can avoid self-employment tax, which is at least 15.3% on the top dollars and on some of the dollars at least 3.2% once you've maxed it out. But that's a perp— perpetual savings of 3.2%. just because you took 2 paychecks instead of 1. The second thing is when you can have a capital gain asset instead of an ordinary income asset. A lot of people put their assets in retirement plans. That means it's permanently now going to be an ordinary income asset. I've seen people be like, "Well, I'm going to buy this real estate inside of my IRA." I'm like, real estate's a capital gain asset.

Capital gain is 20%. Ordinary income is 37%. Why would you penalize yourself and you can't depreciate it anymore. So you lose that advantage. So I just see a lot of people lock their money away. Capital gain means we could borrow against it tax-free. We can pass it on the next generation with a step-up in basis, meaning it goes to them as if the full value is what was paid, no tax on that gain. And then also, if we do decide to sell, we've got strategies to offset that capital gain, which we wouldn't have in ordinary income, or we'd pay 20% instead of 37%. So I like seeing more capital gain-based assets. We know, you know, there's tons of people that talk about buy, borrow, die, where you're borrowing against those assets. And then, you know, when you die, it steps up in the basis so you can pass it on tax-free. You know, that's a big strategy. And then the third thing is people just aren't maximizing tax-free strategies. Like there's a lot, there's not a lot of them, but the ones that are awesome are you get to be charitable and you actually get a benefit from being charitable.

charitable lead trust, charitable remainder trust. So it's whether or not you want to fund something towards a charity now, which gives you tax benefits later, or whether you want to donate something now, which gives you income now and a little bit of a tax advantage up front. Like there's things like that, or donor advised funds or Section 1202. Like a lot of people make the mistake in business that they think they're going to sell their business and they wait until they get a letter of intent or they, they get a broker and then they try to do the tax strategy and they've just negated over half of the tax strategies. So that's a problem. And then finally, I think the biggest mistake in taxes will be the fourth one is people let the tax tail wag the dog. They spend a dollar to save 37 cents and they wouldn't have spent the dollar otherwise. Right. So they're buying something like a vehicle that they didn't really want that appreciates in value because they can do a Section 179, which allows them to write the whole thing off in that year. But now they have a depreciated asset that wasn't that useful.

So I want to use tax arbitrage, spend a dollar, get more than a dollar back.

Right.

There's not a ton of these strategies, you know, and they tinker with them all the time. Like there's equipment leasing strategies that you can, I don't love those because you're financing equipment for that. Could that equipment, I don't know the value of it in the future, but it gives you this bonus depreciation. Short-term rentals where you're buying a rental, you're getting huge depreciation on it right away, which is benefiting you. Historic easements, you're buying something that's in a historical area, you're preserving the facade. They give you a major benefit that you still get to rent it out and use it because you preserve that facade. Buying art and donating art, if you know how to buy art properly, it's a donation game here in the United States. So people could buy and donate and get more than what— in the tax benefit than what they spent. Again, if they know how to buy it properly, which usually comes from buying a collection of art at a discount, holding it for 3 years, and then donating it afterwards. So that's kind of tax arbitrage. So those are just 4 tax mistakes. We still got 6 more mistakes that are non-tax related.

But, you know, I think the fifth mistake would be a lot of entrepreneurs just try to do too much on their own. So it lands on their plate and now they're like, oh, you gotta handle my finances. And now they've gotta describe to the attorney what they heard from the accountant. It becomes confusing. So they just kind of like let it go. And then what happens is they overpay tax or they don't automate things. Like I think they automate investing. I'm about automating savings and deliberately investing. If you automate your investing, That'd be like automating your marketing. It's not working. You still put money into it. We wouldn't do that as business owners, but we do that with, as investors. So you automate the savings off the top, live off the rest. Don't overly budget, just be able to be productive with it because it's so much mental space, the budgeting. You've already saved it off the top and then invest in what you know. I believe in investor DNA. Investor DNA says, who am I and what kind of investor am I? Some people are great at real estate. Other people aren't. Some people are good at buying businesses, other people aren't.

Some people are good at intellectual property, other people aren't. Like, you've got to figure out what you're willing to pay attention to, what you're willing to dive in and create an ability towards, and then only invest in alignment with that. Diversification is when we want to preserve, not when we want to grow. Too many people prematurely diversify and spread themselves thin. It stunts the growth. And then what they do is they get frustrated when it's not performing as well as their business. Next, issue or mistake is they, they, I think it's really important to grow your business, but some people don't have a way to turn business wealth into personal wealth. So they grow their business. The business has an insatiable appetite and then they're one-dimensional. They don't have an asset class outside of that. So if you could start pulling some money off the table with an asset class that's non-correlated to preserve and protect that so that you have a baseline and a foundation, that's key. And then finally, I think we're probably close to the 10th mistake. Is they, they invest for accumulation instead of cash flow. Create cash flow so that you have financial independence, recurring revenue from assets that cover your expenses.

Then you can reinvest all your active dollars and exponentially grow versus save 10%, chase 10%, and wait for 30 years. That's a really slow, bad process that people mistakenly fall for.

The sheer volume of things that you just did was an absolute masterclass. There's, there's so much there that I'm, I'm going to have to go back and watch some of this because there's things that you're doing that I'm not even doing. So I love what you talked about with investor DNA and respecting that. There's people who've come to me like, do you invest in crypto? Did you do NFTs? Do you do real estate? Do you do, what are your things? I've learned from Melvin Simon, who, 64th richest person on the planet at the time. He told me, he goes, don't invest in shit you don't understand, period, full stop. If you do not understand it, do not put money in it. You got to stay where you're comfortable and stay in your lane and outsourcing that. And when you talk about investing, because again, you're one of the more financially literate individuals I know, what do you focus on for cash flow? What are you doing? Because I know what you're scaling and I know what you're doing. And again, because we have our dynamic, I know your backend here a little bit better than most people.

Could you share with what you do for your passive income and your cash flow and your generational protection downrange for your kids and so on and so forth?

So I've written 10 books and I look at each book as a piece of real estate. And then those books continue to produce even though they've been written in the past. So I'm an intellectual property to create recurring revenue kind of guy. So that creates, you know, right now my focus is media. How can I create reach and reputation? Because it's not just what I know, it's who knows me.

Mm-hmm.

And so how can I reach those people so we can sift, sort, and screen the people we can help the best, and then we can give away to the people that we can't help our very best, whether they pay us or not. So that's kind of like brand and reputation. And then, that intellectual property is evolving now because that's including certain tools that make something very easy and efficient to get done instead of big long workbooks of the past, right? Like, just we could help someone build a family crest like this with a tool. And so, when I talk about it, it's like, "Here, go ahead and do it." That engages them with us. So, with that, I then have a program called Multiplier. And in Multiplier, it is active because I do teach once a week, but I like teaching. But people are paying every month and they get coaches and they get, you know, an app where they can communicate with each other and they get a financial network. So, I'm actively building that, but the way that I'm building that is with all the intellectual property that informs them to like who I am and what I do, which is active upfront, becomes more passive as time goes on because I've got books that have been producing since 2008 and still selling and it's still in the, you know, top 20 in certain categories.

I think I have 4 books right now in the top 100 of Amazon categories and some in the top 5. Those are because, you know, it's, it's something I developed the skill for. And even though it's active upfront, it becomes more passive over time. And I think that's the myth of passive income. People think, oh, I just hand it off and I get passive income. No, the more active you are upfront, the more passive it becomes because of selection, because of strategy, because like, why would someone give someone 15% a year? just because they handed them money. There's got to be something more than that to get that kind of return. And so it's usually about like unique viewpoints and it's about like specific types of deals and quick timing or stuff like that. I don't want to be in that game of real estate because it just hijacks my life and I don't want to be tied down to a property that has property taxes and maintenance and that kind of stuff. I had 100+ real estate properties. I'm divesting. I'm only going to have 2 by the end of this year. You know, it's like, that's what I want to manage.

I think it was just like part of my early ambition. I was like, I must, I just want to own a lot of real estate because that's where people store wealth. That's where some people store wealth. Other people store it with like, you know, they go and acquire businesses and that's cool. Or they do intellectual property. I think that's the big 3. Real estate, business, and intellectual property are the big 3 kind of asset generators. Now there's 1,000 ways to do real estate. There's 1,000 ways to do intellectual property. There's 1,000 ways to— 1,000, 10,000 different types of businesses. So, it's about narrowing the focus and figuring out what to do from there.

Yeah. The Red Hot Chili Peppers just sold the entire book of all of their stuff and I was like, "Dang it. I didn't know it was for sale." Because those are some of those things that just produce and produce and produce. But I agree with what you said, passive income is actually a little active. And we talk about this all the time, the money is made before you sign on the deal, not when you're actually in the deal. It has to make sense before you sign.

Yeah. Make money on the buy.

Yeah.

Make money on the buy, right?

Isn't complicated in any way, shape, or form. So, when people reach out and they want to do that and they want to get educated, what are some of the normal problems they run to right off the bat when they come to you? You were talking about how you've got the books and you have all that, and again, author as well. What are some of the ones you're just like, "Guys, before you buy any of the books, please just do this for the love of—" What is the thing that you just wish they just do this or they brought to you before they started working with you?

I just like, I think it's hard for people to be honest about their finances because no matter how successful they are, they always feel like they should be further ahead.

Yeah.

And so they always like, there's this weird thing that when it's not going well, they're like, I just need to get to the other side of this. I just need to figure this out first. And so just delays everything because the thinking that got them in a situation isn't going to be the thinking that gets them out of it. And if they'll just get rid of the guilt, the shame, or the embarrassment and be open, they can accelerate the results because all progress begins when honesty exists. And so, we've just created a firm that there's no judgment zone. I mean, if someone wants to read the books or watch the videos to get there, it's just going to require more time and that's fine. We'll keep putting that out. We'll make it extraordinarily affordable. So, no matter where you're at, you can have access to that. But, a lot of people have more that we work with, they just have more money than they have time. So, they just buy the result because we can help with the sequencing and the implementation of it. But it's just a matter of being open and honest and, you know, not delaying because there's never a good time.

You're never like, oh, you know, I, in 2 months, I'm just gonna have all the time to finally get my finances handled. And then 2 months goes by, you pay more tax than you need to. You had more interest that went out the door. Your insurance isn't designed properly. So you're one accident away from having money that comes out of your account that didn't need to. You're overpaying those insurance companies. And there's a ton of fees in the investments that are creating drag. I remember I met this guy and I told him it was going to be $20,000 to work with us. You know, I just, I do a day and a half workshop. He came to it and he's like, $20,000. That's crazy. I'm like, well, we're going to guarantee that we save you that or we cover the difference, including the full $20,000. He's like, okay, that's cool. I said, and did you feel like you paid a lot in fees in your investments last year? He goes, not really. I'm like, well, we did the analysis. It was $19,130. Did you make or lose money last year? He goes, we lost money.

I'm like, and you paid $19,000. So we're, just barely more than that. By the way, he had 41 businesses, 38 physical therapy practices, and then 3 chiropractic practices. And we saved him $39,000 a month. But see, the way finance works is they just love to basically say, we'll just automatically take the money out so you don't feel or see it.

Right.

You know, instead of like, if you pay, it's a little bit like we'd have a revolution overnight if all the fees that went to finance had to be transferred manually or sent by check or put on a credit card. People would lose their mind, but they just don't see it.

Right.

So, it's a matter of like that visibility and seeing what's going on for you instead of learning a tactic and chasing some tool, like seeing and assessing where you're at and then finding 10% or more of that income that you can put back in your pocket. That's our specialty.

And when you get this and people are like, hey, I've got this extra 10% and you're reversing this and you're reversing the expenses, and people go, okay, I'm completely oblivious of what vehicles I need to use. And listen, you saved me the money. That's great. But I really want to talk about earning that income and look at those different things. And maybe they're not book people. Maybe they're not intellectual property people. Do you have an environment where you bring them in and say, okay, here's what you're going to want to do. Here's the best thing to do. Go buy a bunch of parking lots or let's go flip businesses or whatever it is. How do you help them get to that next part? Because most of the people, and I run this all the time, If you're great at being, I don't know, a lawn care guy and you're phenomenal, you own 700 different locations, you probably suck at certain other things. You're probably not that great over here. And thinking if you're a great pitcher doesn't mean you're going to be a great hitter. You need to understand that and letting go of that.

And there's a lot of ego that involves with entrepreneurs. And I think one of the most proven thing is, "Hey, I'm intelligent here, therefore I'm intelligent here." And it's just not the case. So, when people come to you and they're like, "Listen, I'm going to run my business and I'm going to scale it and I'm really good at my business, but I suck at the passive income play. What do you do with those guys?

Yeah. And in those, that's my favorite situation because I'm going to encourage them to grow the business. I'm going to say that is your wealth generator is the business. Let's pick one asset class that we can take money off the table as you're growing that business so that the business is insatiable appetite doesn't eat up all the profit, you know, and so we just pick that one asset class and it, like for some it's what's the least risky thing that we could do that it'll, it won't even earn close to what the business earns, but now it's stable. It's secure. Usually makes their spouse feel amazing because they're like, oh cool, we've got this there that we can count on. You know, maybe it's, maybe it's only getting 5%, but it's, you know, keeping up with inflation and plus it's 5% without taxes. But we look at is this, We've done the research. The average 401(k), 401(k), if people could double their rate of return versus just save the tax that we help people save and just save the interest by either restructuring loans, renegotiating interest rates, or reallocating funds, they're 400% better off with efficiency than doubling the return with the average account balance.

So we go there first because now we've got this extra fuel, we've got this extra money. So maybe they don't even have to take any money out of the business. We've just found it through tax savings, through interest savings, through investment fees that they didn't know they had, or insurance that was— it doesn't design properly. And then we build that asset class so they could just keep growing that business, growing that business. Because if they start going, I want to get good at passive income, I'm gonna start buying real estate, I could tell you what's going to happen. They're not going to have to spend a bunch of time in real estate, or they're going to go to a syndication, and the syndication they have no control over. There is no liquidity. They hope it works out. They hope the economy doesn't change. And if it does, They just took a loss, which means now they feel bad and now they're upset because they're not as productive in their business because they're fighting with their spouse because the money that was lost in this real estate syndication they knew nothing about, they had zero control over.

So I'm all about simplification and focus. Business, asset class. We'll find the money to help finance that asset class. If we can't get all the way there, we'll do it through some business growth. But like, I'm just going to discourage a lot of the other investing that's out there unless they're worth tens of millions of dollars. And at that point, I'm going to refer them to other firms that this is all they do full-time. Private capital, venture capital. I'm not going to touch that with them because I'm here to help the people that are on the way up get to that place where they have access to the people that are in that upper echelon that have been around for 50, 60 years that have handled different economic cycles. That, that's their whole thing is due diligence on that all day long. I just couldn't, if I try to do it, I'm serving too many things and I wouldn't be an expert at these other pieces. Yeah.

I think it talks about, you know, what you were saying before, stay in your lane. Kind of inch wide, mile deep. If this is what you're doing and this is what's generating your income stream for you, let's protect that. Let's scale that. Let's reduce the taxes. Let's reduce your exposure and let's put you in the best vehicles that when you do want to exit it, that you're already lined up for that. And most entrepreneurs just aren't having that conversation. When they form the business, they're just like, hey, I had this idea. I'm like, I don't really care about your idea. I want to know what your exit plan is before you start your business. And if you don't do that, we're going to run into massive issues. So I think coming in also on top of that saying, okay, this is my exit exit plan. Yeah, sure, I have this idea of the business, but I now know my exit plan. But on top of that, I know how to protect my assets and I know how to protect myself from taxes and any liabilities that are going to come into. I think that's where you come in where most people just don't have that.

They've got someone talking about the past but not talking about the future, which is kind of like driving forward by looking in the rearview mirror. It just doesn't work very well in any way, shape, or form.

Yep.

From there, when you go into it and your students are talking to you, what are some of the questions that, you know, you mentioned this before we started recording, there's people that you work with, they're like, hey, I didn't even know that, that, that was a thing. And you're like, oh, well, hey, I'll give you this. No problem. What are some of the things like, wait, you don't know this? What are some of those that you run into?

Yeah. What's interesting, you mentioned it earlier, just because someone's really smart at one thing, people almost assume they're smart at a bunch of other things. And so like the thing I, here's what people don't know. They don't know how to sense when something's a scam. That's the shocking thing. Now, look, that's what happened to me in my 20s. I thought everybody, like, because I made the mistake of— I was 19, I bought my first home right before I turned 20 and rented it out to other college roommates and, you know, sold it for— bought it for less than $100,000, sold it for $170,000. I'm thinking, dude, I'm so good. My brother-in-law needed some cash for an investment deal. I gave him $25,000. I put it in escrow. He got the deal. He gave me back $50,000 3 months later. I'm like, dude, I'm a badass. And my buddy Joel's like, hey, I got a friend going to lose his house. You could buy it, you could rent it to him because I just got him a job. There's a ton of equity in it. He said when he refinances, he'll split it with you. We know how to improve his credit.

I'm like, great. So no money down, you know, sells for $190 grand more than I bought it for. We split that 50/50. So my first 3 deals, I'm in my early 20s being like, dude, I'm so good at this. I'm so good at this. And so if that's good, I might as well do 100 properties and I might as well start a hard money lending fund. And I, and all of a sudden I get into all these things. that I'm not the expert in, but people trust me because I'm articulate and I've got other expertise. And what I had to learn the hard way was I bought a 45,000-square-foot building that I was 45% owner in. When that person got into trouble, that meant I got in trouble because I didn't have the money to buy it out. And then we lost the building. Like, I just got— had my fingers in so many things, starting new businesses, complementary things. But then what happened was my health starts to suffer. I don't have— And it's like, this is what's fascinating to me because Social media is trying to paint a life for people that if you just grind life away, you'll have all the great things, but you'll be alone to ever enjoy them.

And that's the thing that's hard to understand is why people are so motivated by crappy stories around money, because they think there's a shortcut or there's a secret. And if they get that, they'll get ahead. I mean, I know that's probably different than what you expected me to say, but I just see so many entrepreneurs that lose so much money putting it in things that don't make any sense because the story was so compelling. I wrote a book called Money Unmasked, and in that book, I talk about this category of person called the high roller. The high roller plays a game called opportunity, but they make— they cut corners, they take shortcuts. So they're kind of like, ride the highs and lows. They're likely to go bankrupt more than once, and they bring people with them because they're great at fundraising. They're awesome at parties. They're great at complimenting you. They're so good to be around, but they're not good at any details. And so if they don't have the right people behind them, It is so dangerous and they're just so compelling because they're like, hey, why don't you take my ridiculous luxury car for a drive?

And you're like, dude, that's so nice of you. And then, hey, why don't you want to fly private with us? Oh, this is amazing. And then you find out that that was all raised capital that was supposed to go into investment deals and, you know, it wasn't real. And how many stories do we hear all the time nationally about people that raised a bunch of funds, lost it all, and these were people that couldn't afford to be in those deals and now they're desolate and they're hopeless and all that kind of stuff. That's the thing. Why is it that every rapper wants to be a baller and every baller wants to be a rapper? It's the same thing. Why does every entrepreneur want to be an investor to the point that they— Or put everything they know about their entrepreneurship, because that's the thing they most intimately understand is their business. But now they're investing in things they know very little about with no influence or control. And it's like taking that good money from the business, siphoning it off and putting it into things that are broken promises. And those broken promises destroy marriages.

They destroy families and it's like, I'm, I just want to be an advocate for that. Uh, not doing that because, you know, part of why I want to be ridiculously successful is because I want my kids to have a great network. I didn't have a great network. I came from a coal mining town.

Right.

So I learned from people that sounded good, but weren't real and sold me stuff that they couldn't fulfill on and all that kind of stuff. I learned that during, you know, my early years, because I didn't have great attorneys to protect me in my early years. Now, if I bring it to my attorney, he's going to tell me all the things that I can't see and the things I need to look for and ways to navigate the deal because I've got a network of people. I've got people that I can go to and say, what do you think about this? That might sniff it out. And so many people are missing that, but that there's that belonging that the entrepreneur wants because sometimes it's a lonely road.

It is.

So, they invest just to be in the kill kids club and that investment just goes away. They've got 10 different small investments that add up to one large investment and they can't be in all the meetings, they don't know what's going on in those boardrooms, and then they find out, man, I could really hire right now, but I got all my money tied up in things I don't understand.

Yeah, there's so much there that you talked about regarding entrepreneurs being such a lonely road. It's an exceptionally lonely road. It just, it is what it is. And you're going to run into that environment where you're like, hey, I want to go do A, B, C, D, and E, but I'm so alone. Maybe there's an easier way to do this because most entrepreneurs are burnt out because they're trying to do everything. And by that, they're doing absolutely nothing. And you talked about your health failing as well. So going into this environment of locking in on what's proven and surrounding yourself with people that'll get in your face and don't want to be your friend has been really interesting for me. Hiring people that are not there to be nice to me has been really, really valuable. When I hired my first lawyer, I was sitting down, I was like, how do I pick my lawyer? What do I do? They're like, pick the person you're terrified of. I was like, okay. And that's how I hired my first lawyer. I picked the guy that I was absolutely scared of. And everyone that I've employed for me that are on my law team, I'm terrified of them.

them because I'm like, good, at least you're on my team because go for it. Go get that and stay out of my way. And I just give them everything and have that transparency because I'm smart enough to get out of my own way. Not because it was some gift that I got, but because the first time I lost $1 million, I was sitting down with my mentor at the time and he sat with me. He goes, what's going on? I was like, I just lost $1 million. He said, oh, wait till you lose 10. I'm like, what? He goes, dude, we all lose a million. He goes, and you'll get to the point where you lose 10. And I'm like, wait, what? Because that's the cost of the game. And it goes against what social media talks about where there's this, when you call this hustle porn where you get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and have 17 meetings, work out 17 more times and wait, oh wait, at 6 o'clock you got to do it all over again. It just, it doesn't work and it's not effective long-term because people are looking for shortcuts instead of strategies.

They're looking for shortcuts instead of the exact way to do it long-term that you just have to dig in. And I like what you said before, like, hey, you've written, you know, 10+ books. That's great. And as an author, we both know that we put our best in there because there's just this, you know, imposter complex that we have or the inferiority complex that we have put it in there.. But that's going to take time. And if you want to shortcut it, you need to be able to sit down and talk actually to the person. So when you're doing this and you're sitting down, can you tell me a story with some of your clients that they sat down and they just were completely blindsided by something that they didn't even know? Because again, maybe they were great accountants or great peptide guides or whatever it is, but they were just absolutely blindsided over here. But it's like, "Jesus, I just completely lost." Yeah.

I'll tell you one that we caught in time last year.

Okay.

We just had a client that bought a dream home and they were about to move in and I was like, and our tax strategist was like, whoa, wait, wait. Like, could you wait till January? I was like, yeah, why? He's like, 'cause if we make this a short-term rental between now and January, you're going to get hundreds of thousands of dollars through cost segregation. And he was about to move in, canceled the movers. Decided, great, I'll stay in my house. And, you know, that was a huge deal. I've had people where it was too late where they called me, hey, I'm selling my business. Like, how can we save tax? And I had someone that just sold their business for $9 million and they're like, how do we save tax? And I was like, well, we can, I wouldn't recommend most of the ways to do it because you've already sold it. It's capital gains and here's what we would have done beforehand. And that's so common where people, call us when it's really late in the game. Like I want to talk to someone 2 years before they think about selling to prepare that.

And I just think that 75% of people that sell their business regret selling it.

Mm-hmm.

You know, 75%, because it's what they know. It's their relationships that they have. It's their skill sets, but it's a seductive story. Sell your business and then what? You sell it, then what? Like you now become an investor. Where are you going to invest? And the phone's not going to ring for you to be doing things because the business is sold and you might not like how they run that business, especially if you sell it to private equity, you might really hate how it goes. So, you know, I kind of believe in like retire into business, not from it. So I just create the impact.

Right. So I've sold quite a few businesses and I'm of the mindset of there are certain reasons to sell and there's certain reasons not to sell. If you have no other tangible skills and you don't know where the next lily pad is that you're going to jump to, don't sell the business. Don't, just don't sell it. If you're at the point where you'd rather, you know, take an early exit from life than stay in that business, sell it. Walk out. You're done. You've hit it. And, and most of the time people who, you know, run into it and we're selling businesses, it's not because you don't like the business. It's that because the business itself is eating you alive because the employees, the first business I ever sold, I sold because I just couldn't stand the employees anymore. I was like, I'm done. I'm like, I just can't. I've rebuilt this infrastructure. I wasn't a good leader at the time. I had no idea about decentralized command. I had no idea how to build a culture. I was like, I can't. And it was absolutely killing me. And the day after I sold it, my phone didn't ring.

No one reached out, none of my employees, because it was built into the contract. I was just an abandoned island and I love it. Now, I gave the exact plan on what to do to the guy who sold it for 5 times more 9 years later. And, mazel tov to him. I just couldn't do it. But be, so we, you know, there are times to sell a business. Just like there, I think there's times to sit down and plan this stuff out.

But not just for a romantic story, but because it wasn't the right business for you anymore or isn't the right business for you.

Right.

And, and you have a plan, you know what you're doing next.

Well, I think that's the difference. So when people hire you, it's because they want that plan 2 years from now. It's, it's kind of like saying, hey, I just got in a car accident. Should I put my seatbelt on? Yeah, that would have been a great idea a mile back down the road, but now you, let's talk about your hospital bills because it's just, that's where you are. So when people come into that and they want to do that, what do they bring to you? Do they just bring transparency? Do they bring their accountant? Do they bring their team? What are the things they need to have? Do they, you know, is it an in-person thing? How do they do that?

So this is our steps. We do a discovery session first. We don't ask them to send anything in. We're just asking them questions. Where— how are they on financial confidence? What kind of entity have they set up? What keeps them up at night? What's their loan structure like? Are they paying too much in tax or how much are they paying? And, you know, who's on the financial team? So we just get a good landscape. Then we do a report of findings. The report of findings with general advice gives ranges of here's the tax savings, here's the asset protection, here's the holes. And then they could join our program at that point. At the baseline. Okay. And then when they're in the baseline, we can do the full analysis because they've now paid us. We've now got all their documents and we can say, if you want a done-for-you program, it'll be this much more per month. If you just want us to coach you, to tell you what to do and bring in the network, they just stay where they are, which is really inexpensive. But, you know, basically if they want us to file the taxes, do the tax strategy with, for them, they want us to set up the corporations and You know, all the asset protection.

There's— once we've got all the documents, we can quote what that is, and then we just keep moving forward. They get 2 calls a month with a results facilitator, which means they're not paying $600 an hour for an attorney or $500 an hour for a CPA. We're gathering, we're analyzing, and then we're making it as efficient as possible for those things to get implemented. Because a lot of CPAs could be good if they weren't meeting with clients all the time. A lot of attorneys could do better if they weren't constantly explaining the same thing over and over. We keep them in their expertise and then we handle the navigation. And, that's what really transforms having a coordinated effort and a comprehensive team. Yeah, because if you're a billionaire, you just hire your own team.

Yeah.

But, that's a very expensive venture to have your own team, to have your own financial team that only works for you. So, there's not many true family offices which are just for one family working nowhere else. That's become billionaire's playground. But, you have multifamily offices where they take on 100 clients and it's all the same team working for all those clients. So we've been more like, how do we have a virtual family office where not everybody's in the same building, not a, not such a high price point to help these people out. And when they get to that point where they need the private capital help, we can refer them to a multifamily office that we partnered with to get that extra analysis. Even our investment advisor gives people access to deals they normally wouldn't have the capital to get into because of kind of having the number of clients that we bring in. But my goal is to get them to grow their business and improve their lifestyle before investing in things they know nothing about. Like, let's do the priorities. Let's save the money. Let's have a better life because just investing in things to hope that they go up doesn't always end up that well for people.

That's called gambling. That's not called investing.

They call it investing, but we know it's gambling.

It's gambling. So, when you're talking about scaling someone's business because you're like, "Hey, we want your business to get bigger and better and stronger and faster." What is your firm doing to that one, or what have you seen that have actually created those results, both either with your clients or yourself?

So first we want to analyze, is it a marketing issue? Is it a sales issue? Is it a retention issue? Is it a team issue that they just are either missing pieces of the team or they have the wrong person on the team that's starting to create a lot of turmoil? How good is the feedback that the feedback loop, how much data do they have? What's the, you know, where are they least consistent in? And then, once we identify that, then we're like, is it a hire? And is it having the right hire? Like, I just worked with my group last week on key hiring process and how they can find A-teamers and how they might spend more for them, but it's worth the extra money. And the way to, you know, where do you find them at? How do you interview to figure that out on the business side? You know, and then, I mean, it's interesting because even some of the time, we're just helping them with their health. Like, we have tons of longevity people. Because that's what it is, is the mindset and the health of the founder is part of the problem, or they're just not sure on certain pieces.

So now what we're looking at is like, how can we use better data, which AI is a little bit more efficient at gathering that internal data so they can make better decisions and know what to address next. And, you know, a lot, a lot of this really comes down to the very first place that we go is people. The second place is the processes. And, and a lot of, you know, like a lot of these small service businesses just have employees that are negative, employees that they hired out of convenience. They're inexpensive to pay, but expensive to keep. Right?

Yep.

And then that's where really game-changing results start to happen. And then again, then second would be marketing, sales, fulfillment, and how long is the fulfillment from there? And then just starting to get more visibility on what's the numbers say, you know, because a lot of the businesses we work with just don't know their numbers very well. They just, they're just working. They're just, they're just, working harder, they're just, you know, doing their best, but they're not looking at it actually before it hits the bottom line. We want to see the trends. And yeah, I've got great people on that category. We're helping our clients all the time just integrate basic AI. They're just not integrating certain efficiencies that are very easy to tap into because it's intimidating for them. The nice thing is my team's pretty young on the coaching side, but, you know, a lot of my coaches have owned and sold businesses. You know, so they, even though they might be in their 30s, they've already exited, they've already bought, they've already been through that process. And a lot of them have been with me since my first company. And so they've got 20 years of experience doing this kind of stuff, but we're still in the recruitment of like, how do we help people on the business side?

Because we really start with personal financials first.

Mm-hmm.

It's the low-hanging fruit. It's easy. Business financials are a little bit more subjective at times, right? Certain margins, certain industries. That kind of stuff. So, you know, we go where we know we can create the momentum.

So when it comes to hiring the A-players, because this is just a problem across the board, we were talking about this before we even started recording, where do you recommend people go to go track these people down and find more of the A-players and really hunt those individuals down and create that— there's just grand slams.

I tell them first, go to your key relationships and ask the key relationships, who do you know that's amazing at X, Y, and Z? You don't say I'm hiring. You go, who do you know that's like the best at AI? Who do you know that's best at technology? Who do you know that's like a rockstar assistant? I want to get to know them. I want to understand how they operate because they probably have other people that are like them or most A-teamers are already hired. You have to recruit them away.

Right. It was funny because we were talking about, a very specific thing that you're hiring for right now and you're scaling. And I was like, oh, I've got a guy, I'll connect you to this guy and then I'll connect to this resource so you can have this. You're like, oh yeah, I'm already talking to that resource. So you'll find it's a very small world.

We live states apart and we know, and look how small that world is. Good point.

Yeah. We got exactly to the same person with the same group. Like this is the best in the world. If you're gonna go do this, if you're gonna spend the money, hire these people and you'll know that you're in the right room with the right people. When you hit that, when you're like, oh, we're referring to the same thing, we're checking out the same thing, these are the same people. And again, we're states and states apart. So I think, you know, you talk about your network being your net worth, you talk about digging in on that. When someone's looking into building their network and having that environment where they can come in, how do you build that network? How do you bring those individuals together that think like you think and connect like you do?

Look, I, in my 20s, I didn't have a network other than my college buddies. And I definitely brought them into the business naively because I just, you know, didn't know any better. It was kind of fun, but it wasn't the most effective thing to do. So, I just started joining masterminds. I joined, you know, Wizard Academy in Austin, Texas, Maverick with Yanik Silver, Strategic Coach with Darren Sullivan, Mastermind Talks with Jason. I just started getting in these curated rooms because now all of a sudden you have all these great people and, you know, you're even in like WhatsApp groups with them, or you get like a Rolodex of like everybody's contact information so you could reach out to them when you're looking for something. So that's, that's kind of the key is you could kind of buy your way in. That's the best shortcut, you know?

Yeah, I wish there was another shortcut around that. The only one that I've ever found that worked is just getting in the room. It's a pay-to-play environment. And then once you get in there, and I found that the money isn't so much for the mastermind, it became a filter. To separate gen pop.

Seriously?

Yes. That's all it was. And then you're in those rooms and there's, I wish there was a better way to do it. And the mastermind that you're paying $5K for will have very different quality people than the one that you're paying $50K to $150K for. I'm just sorry. It's a filter. There's a reason I fly first class. It's not just for the comfort. The amount of business that I've got coming out of a first class flight and the connections that I've had has fundamentally changed my financial wellbeing every single time. So you gotta pay to get in that room. If people want to get in the room with you, if people want to connect with you and spend more time with you, because I could literally sit down and talk to you for days. I love talking to you. There are other people who want access to you and the knowledge that you have and the expertise because not only are you helping people scale, you're giving them their lives back. And it's something that I love about you. Like here, I'm going to give you the answer so I can help you out. And I'm authentically going to help you out.

Here's the proven way that I've done it for a very long time. If someone wants to track you down and get ahold of you, What's the best way to reach you and connect with you?

They can go to garrettgundersen.com, jump into the newsletter. I mean, that's like 5 minutes a week to transform your finances and life. You know, if you, if you're on social media, Garrett B. Gunderson, just DM me. Name me one of my books. If it's, if you put on Mask for Money Unmasked, we'll hook you up. Or Rockefeller for Rockefeller, we'll hook you up. Or, you know, Cows for Killing Sacred Cows. Like, we'll just, we'll just give you the audiobook. That's a great way to really get to know me and get to know the work and, you know, just listen to it while you're walking around or, you know, just look at YouTube, Garrett Gunderson TV, youtube.com/GarrettGundersonTV. So, websites or socials are kind of the best ways in today's world. And then, you know, any of my books I think are really helpful to get a good understanding of what we do, who we are, and how we can help. And then, there's applications into our multiplier program at my website, Garrett Gunderson. You know, as we've talked about a lot of the— You go, "Man, I want to implement those tax strategies." Well, That's through Multiplier.

If you want to get into a discovery session, you apply through Multiplier, and that's the best way to do it.

Man, thanks for coming on and giving so freely. The stuff that you give away on our— it's just ridiculous how much value it is, and I hope people got a lot of value out of this one.

Thanks, man.

It was a lot of fun. Innovation rewards the curious and punishes the complacent. Stop waiting for the future. Start building for it. While your competition is protecting the past, you could be creating what's next. Remember, if your ideas never leave the drawing board, they might just be imagination pretending to be innovation.