Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: I'm Joe Siegel, founder and CEO of Aspire Legal Solutions and my Land Trustee, the largest and fastest growing land trust company in Florida. Our passion is helping people aspire to a better life. One of the many ways we do that is by helping them remain anonymous when it comes to their real estate holdings as they build their wealth.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: But it also extends to everyone else.
[00:00:20] Speaker A: We touch each day. We're fortunate to work with some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the country who share our mission of aspiring to a better life. And we hope others will benefit from hearing their journeys, tips, strategies and tactics to get there.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of trust this I'm here today with Asad Ahmad of Fitbiz CPAs. Ahmad is with Fitbiz CPAs and a great CPA firm here in central Florida. So we're going to talk today about how he got into that business and his journey of building that business. Because every business is a business and you've got to build it. Build your teams, build your processes, get your people in place, get your structure in place. And Assad has definitely done that. So with that Asad, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, what you guys do and how long you've been in business, how you got where you are and your journey.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Joe, thank you so much for this introduction.
Yes, we are a boutique real estate specialized CPA firm. A little bit about myself. I'm a CPA. I used to work for Deloitte and Pricewaterhouse, big four accounting firms and their international tax department. Got a lot of great experience working in tax. But about, you know, when I was probably around 23 or 24, I really got interested in real estate. Not interested in real estate investing. That's where I started looking around forums online on Reddit biggerpockets, which is a big real estate forum. And I saw that the presence for cpas and accountants and tax planning strategies was really missing. There were a few cpas and accountants here and there, but a CK firm specialized and dedicated to investors and realtors was something that I really felt the need to include on a forum like biggerpockets or as literally a resource, a YouTube resource for investors.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: About a few years ago, COVID hit.
[00:02:28] Speaker C: In 2020 and I was in my job at Deloitte. That's what I really went deep into, real estate investing. The rates were super low and I actually ended up, me and my brother bought a few properties in the Davenport area of central Florida. We started doing short term rentals, Airbnbs, and we really became interested in the strategies and the tax deductions and the tax write offs behind real estate and how we can help reduce your taxes, but also give you a long term wealth plan for your future. So, for example, when you do short term rentals, you have certain strategies that can help you reduce your net income. And once we started doing more research and we started getting into that whole real estate world, we just went deeper and deeper and deeper. I quit my job in 2020 and then restarted the firm.
I started the firm with a director of Italian. I brought him in as a partner early on. He had over 30 years of experience working on partnership taxes, escort taxes. Eventually, we grew the team. We started building a bookkeeping and tax planning team.
And currently, I am the sole owner of the firm. I run the firm. I bought out my partner in 2021. And right now, our biggest clients are in Chicago. Our biggest client is a multifamily commercial real estate firm out of Chicago, Cushman Mayfield, their entire Chicago office. We do their 1099s corps. And if you have a lot of big multifamily investment firms, brokerages, real estate investors as our client.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Now, you said you brought in this director of accounting, so you were sort of setting the vision for the company they were running the day to day. How have you replaced them? Did you, when you bought them out, did they leave or did you replace them?
[00:04:32] Speaker C: They wanted to take a step back because they couldn't. They weren't really good at the business development and the sales piece, and they wanted to be more on the accounting and the tax strategy, tax planning piece, behind the scenes, pretty much like a bean counter, as the stereotype goes. But you need somebody to do the sales, the business development, to grow the firm. And that's where I came in, and I decided to go full in on that side of things. And then we hired a team. We were always hiring new staff, accountants, managers, planning experts. Yeah, so that's. Yeah.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. I've learned one thing. You got to get your operations strong and in place.
If your operations aren't strong, you can be out there selling and cultivating those big relationships and the small relationships. But if your operations aren't able to handle the business as it comes in, it's tough. And it's, it's really easy to build the marketing side to get the, to get the business coming in the door. It's a little bit tougher to build that sales side of converting those leads into customers. But that operations is what takes so long to train, hire, recruit, bring up, and there's two ways. I mean, you either buy talent or you train talent. And training talent is much cheaper, but longer term, to get them and train them up and do that.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Exactly. And I have over ten years of experience. But my director, accounting an, I'll be a director of tax, they have over 40 years. Wow. And they know they've seen a lot more than slowly, like, so they. So instead of doing the latter, meaning hiring and training long term, we opted out for, hey, let's just pay them the salary that they're. That they need at help. Let's just bring in the sales or the revenues.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:06:31] Speaker C: And expenses will take care of itself.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: That's what I found you. I hire. I buy the talent at the top levels and let them bring in, let them build the teams under them and cultivate them and bring them up the next level so that as the business matures, it does get cheaper and easier and faster to cultivate the talent from within rather than have a go buy new talent every time you need something or someone to do that. How hard was it? I mean, Deloitte, that's. That's some golden handcuffs.
[00:07:07] Speaker C: That is golden handcuffs. Everybody wants to work at the big four. I kind of drank Kool Aid when I was in college, got my accounting degree, got the CPA, and I was like, hey, listen, I'm gonna work for big four, become a partner one day, and go on that route. Kind of like when you're at a law firm, you better get a big law psychological partner.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:07:25] Speaker C: But I soon found out that that was not my right.
Hashings lay and where my.
Where my peace of mind was. So my peace of mind is really around being an entrepreneur, being an attendant, being controlled by destiny. And that's why I became an entrepreneur, so that I had more control over my life.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: And now all this happened around COVID.
[00:07:53] Speaker C: Do you think that had anything to.
[00:07:55] Speaker B: Do with that push to say, yeah. Now, this time it did.
[00:08:00] Speaker C: It definitely did. We were working long hours at Deloitte at these, you know, in the audit room or the tax room where you. You've got all this paperwork and all these files. And I remember. I remember those nights where not. Not only just before COVID and when COVID was happening, but at home. We were. We had no work life balance. So even though we were at home, we were working from 08:00 a.m. In the morning to 1011 12:00 a.m. At time. And it just kind of hit me one day that, hey, if I put in this time into running our own CPA firm where what great things we could accomplish doing that versus being a cognitive machine at a big four firm at like the loyal price warehouse.
That's immediate best took the plunge, wanted to entrepreneurship route and never look back.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: That's, that's usually, I think it's e myth revisited that talks about that. That's the entrepreneurial seizure that you go through of, oh, I can do this on my own. I don't, I don't need to be doing this for someone else. I think we, anybody who does this that you had the seizure during COVID well, and going back, thinking back when you were starting the business, what is something that most people think, hey, this is really important that I get this done or that I do this every day or whatever that, that you figured out. We can skip that. We can, we don't need it.
[00:09:30] Speaker C: The biggest piece of advice that I give anybody is to build relationships. Networking is key. Network is your net worth. And I ignored that earlier, really, because I thought, hey, I was a little bit younger, two years older than I am now, and I had this bravado about me that, hey, I can go do sales, do the cold calling, do the door knocking, build a great firm. But that's not always the case because type of clients, the type of clients you get from those strategies going to be different from the type of clients you'll get from word of mouth, from referrals, from networking in organizations like real estate investor associations or networking and other business networking organizations, which I learned later on about. But that was my biggest hurdle was where do I start? And I wish I had done the networking earlier on.
[00:10:37] Speaker B: You know, there's, I call it paid networking, where you join, like, groups that go, they're, they're internal networking groups of, hey, I'll only, you'll be the only CPA in this group, and we'll only send all our CPA work to you, or you're our only lawyer, your only realtor, whatever.
And I've been asked to be in those so many times over the years. What, what I've learned for myself is, but if I don't enjoy that, it's going to come off as inauthentic.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: And, and so what do you do to find groups that, for that networking opportunity for you that, that fits with you? What, what have you found works for you in that regard?
[00:11:19] Speaker C: So our team is bulletproof, but they don't do a lot of sales. They don't networking. They don't, don't go out there and build relationships. I really love building relationships with different people, different businesses. What really worked for us was being part of real estate investor association groups. So we're part of the Orlando CFRI, the Central Florida Real Estate Investor association, the Tampa Bay Real Estate Investor Association, TBRIA. We're part of the Miami Dade Real Estate Investors Association, Jackson, the Jacksonville Real Estate Investor association. So these associations are really where we get 90% of our clients.
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:11:57] Speaker C: 90% refinance. Our investors, whether they're short term, long term landlords, wholesaling, whatever it is, it's through these associations. And we go there, we do networking, we do speaking, we do a lot of trade shows, and that is where we find our sweet spot with clients.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Well, and probably because you were real or you are a real estate investor, you still do real estate investing yourself?
[00:12:21] Speaker C: I still do, I do short term rentals. My director has short term rentals. Our, one of our managers, he's got a long term rental himself. So because we understand the tax benefits, we're utilizing those in our daily lives, in our personal lives.
The goal is obviously to grow the portfolio and get into bigger deals. This year, we're looking at a multifamily syndication, me and my director, and hopefully we'll hit the plunge.
[00:12:52] Speaker B: Good luck with that. Those are, that's big. Those are really big. Those are really big.
What is something in your daily routine? What's a habit that you have developed that you think has helped propel you forward in business?
[00:13:07] Speaker C: I think the biggest habit that I've developed is discipline.
Being in this industry, those also narrows, especially being in the accounting industry. There are fire drills, there's emergencies.
You really have to learn to be stoic at all times, regardless of what is going on around you. So the world could be brought in down, but people rely on people like us, the CPAs, the attorneys, the firefighters, the doctors, the lawyers, to really have a steady mind and to not be too emotional. So learning to control my emotions, which is really key, and being stoic and having that ability to kind of just calm down, think about things and not react or overreact or, you know, have, be steady like a rock. That's what I've learned to cultivate over the past few years in business, because early on I was very erratic.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:09] Speaker C: Of business and entrepreneurship.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: Right.
[00:14:12] Speaker C: You know, ups and downs, ups and downs. But I think the biggest habit is just buckling down, understanding that you have a team. We will get it done, we'll take care of it, and moving on.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Now, I heard you use what I consider to be a term of art when it comes to life, not, not just stoic, you throw it out there twice. So have you studied stoicism? Do you believe that the real, it's like, only worry about what you can control, not what you have no control over. Is that what you're talking about then?
[00:14:46] Speaker C: That's what I'm talking about.
[00:14:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:47] Speaker C: I have studied Marcus Aurelius meditations. It's my favorite book.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:14:52] Speaker C: I've been reading some books from, some sales books as well, from Jim Rohn and Tony Robbins.
The master is Marcus Aurelius.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. He started it all. He started it all. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, I think, and I always, I studied it more from a more modern neurology, neurological viewpoint, bio neurology of, you got your, your prefrontal cortex of your brain, you've got your amygdala, and it's sort of like you've got your emotions, fight or flight, and, and you've got to learn when that lizard brain, that fight or flight is kicking in. In business, from day to day.
[00:15:36] Speaker C: Yes.
And in business, there is. You're going to have some great moments, and you're going to have lots of great moments. The key is to always remember your ground. Your ground. It's called rounding right? When you go out there in the sun and we walk on the, on the ground barefoot, it's the same feeling that you have to make sure you're not overreacting, not getting too emotional, or not under reacting either. You have that sort of level of stress. But managing that stress, not capitulating to it, not getting into it, is what's super important. And I learned that. I've learned breathing techniques, meditation, which I've incorporated in my life, that's really helped me.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: This is, I think, the 7th or 8th Masters series video I've done with entrepreneurs.
Every single person that I've talked to in this series talks about meditation in some form or fashion. And whether it's one guy, he, every morning he wakes up before he opens his eyes, he prays, and he says, that's his form of meditation. He's praying.
Different people have different ways of meditating, but every single one of them meditate. And what do you think meditation has done for you to help you succeed in business?
[00:17:10] Speaker C: I think meditation is an artist. It takes practice.
I do a lot of chakra meditation, so I need to be in a room with guided chakra music playing in the background, because that helps me because I have add. Like every other entrepreneur, I can't stay still with no sound in the back and just, you know, do the pose, yoga pose. I need some music. I need some interactiveness, and that's what I play. I play chakra music, chakra meditation. And it really helps me release my root chakra, because that's the part of my body or my soul, which is the most blocked at times. So the root chakra meditation is phenomenal. I do it for 15 minutes every morning.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: 15 minutes?
[00:18:03] Speaker C: 15 minutes. And with the furley, get it done.
I found it not work out then. Okay, gotta do that now.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Are you working out, too?
[00:18:10] Speaker C: I'm working out, too. I'm working out every morning. Tax season, it gets crazy. So I try to work out whenever I can. But 30 minutes of sweat, whether it's outside, running, walking, calisthenics, going to gym, lifting basketball, whatever it is, I get my bleed minutes out.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Well, that's one thing I want to point out to everybody here, too. We are five days away. You from April 15, when we're recording this, and I have a CPA sitting here talking calmly with me and not melting into a nervous breakdown. So that says a lot, I think, right there. For that habit of meditation, what's something that you believed five years ago that you had to unlearn to take that next step, to get past it?
[00:19:02] Speaker C: Five years ago, I used to think that the way to progress in life is by being. Being a rule follower, following rules. Now this. This seems really weird and strange coming from a CPA that, you know, that who, we wrote the rules. We're always anal about the rules. It's black and white. You can't. There's no shades of gray. But five years ago, I used to think, hey, I gotta, you know, get a college degree, go to a job, work the 95, do the office politics, get ahead, become a manager, then become a senior manager, then become a director, then become a partner, then hopefully get a retirement, and then hopefully I'll have some fun.
[00:19:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: That mentality is no more. No more. I don't believe in that. I believe that life is all about breaking the rules. Number one, as an entrepreneur, right? So as a CPA, I would have never imagined in college that I would be doing sales and marketing as a CPA, that I would be schmoozing, as they say, with individuals and investors and networking events, that I would be working on business development and business strategy and growth and invoicing my clients on time.
[00:20:25] Speaker B: Right?
[00:20:26] Speaker C: Like, all these things, little things.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Little things.
[00:20:29] Speaker C: Little things that I would be.
I would be doing things outside the box.
I didn't think that could happen.
But now everything I do has to be outside the box. It can't be in the box.
[00:20:47] Speaker B: Right.
[00:20:47] Speaker C: It's got to think differently. Right? Okay. We're planning to go to an event. What if we went to a different event? What if we tried sponsoring this organization? Or what if we did this? What if we did that? Different possibilities. Just thinking outside the blocks like an artist would.
That is the key to life.
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Well, and I think professionals, especially cpas, doctors, lawyers, we are on a trajectory. You start before kindergarten, and then, well, I've got to graduate from elementary school, junior high, middle school, high school, college, post college, and now. Yeah, like you said, partner, managing partner, director, junior partner, associates. This. All these other things.
What I've picked up is, after a while, all you're really doing in all of that. But they don't. They don't put it to you like this through your life. What you're really doing is you're competing against yourself.
And ultimately, the true champions, the Tom Brady's world. People like that are competing against themselves to see if they can just be better than they were. They're not really paying much attention to the competition, because after a while, if you're truly excelling, you don't have competition. You're not trying to be the valedictorian of your class anymore.
[00:22:10] Speaker C: You're not. Right?
[00:22:12] Speaker B: And. And that's the thing. I think a lot of professionals really struggle with that. You know, what do I do now? Okay. I've. I've gotten to this point now what do I do? And it's tough. It's.
[00:22:25] Speaker C: It's tough. Exactly. Yeah. So even in the worst moments of business, I remind myself that, hey, I'm not working for anybody else. Right. This is.
I'm the guy in charge, right. If I need to take a break, I can take a break. If I need to work. 24, 725, eight. I can do that.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Yeah. Right.
[00:22:46] Speaker C: So that is the empowering feeling of being in that position.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: And that's what I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs, too. I mean, I was in a group of lawyers a couple weeks ago up in Atlanta, and we were sitting around, and the coach, he said, hey, who here, if tomorrow you could sell your firm, walk away, but you had to stay and continue working for the firm, but now you're working for someone, but they'll pay you twice as much as you were making a year before you sold your firm, would you stay? How many raise their hands? Nobody.
[00:23:27] Speaker C: I'm not surprised at that. I'm not surprised at that because I wouldn't either if somebody bought a CPA firm.
I'm done. I'll watch this. I'm going to an island. I'm going to Hawaii, I'm going to Costa Rica. I don't want to deal with the farm anymore. This is for life. When I decided to do this, I didn't do this for ten years or 15 years.
And I want to build the relationships that last a lifetime.
[00:23:52] Speaker B: It really does become your personality. I mean, everything about, and that's the thing. A lot of friends we have are like, you never stop working. Even when you're on vacation, you're still working. And I'm add as well, very, very severely add. And I think some of the best visionaries of their businesses are add because we're always getting ideas.
[00:24:18] Speaker C: It's all those ideas. It's implementation. Implementation. And the details are what kind of bite me sometimes. The details, the devils and the details. But the big picture, the idea person, the vision, you can't go forward without it.
[00:24:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: You can't do anything right. Right. That's why they have jobs for accountants, because they're detailed. That's what they're, that's for. This is not for everybody.
[00:24:44] Speaker B: Entrepreneurship.
[00:24:45] Speaker C: It's not. I tell that to people straight up. Are you willing to go through the pain, the struggles, the time, the patience? Right. That's one thing I should have learned early on. You gotta have patience. It's not gonna happen overnight. It's not gonna happen in one years or two years. Three, four. Five years minimum.
[00:25:05] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, five. Five years. Absolutely.
[00:25:07] Speaker C: Minimum. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:25:08] Speaker B: No, it's five years is, and I've talked about this before in my newsletter. There's this, you know, this. Every entrepreneur thinks, oh, I'm on a curve, and it's just going to go straight, you know, straight line up. Every day is going to be 1% better. Every single day. But it's really not, it's more of a curve where you just sort of bounce along the bottom for a very long time.
[00:25:26] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:27] Speaker B: And then eventually, all of a sudden, yes, you have this ride, but. But you have this, this curve and this straight line. And I always call this the zone of disappointment here. And this is where everybody quits because they're like, oh, we're just not getting anywhere. We're not getting anywhere. But I've learned, I mean, I built one business, sold it, now I'm building another business.
I learned from the last one that it's so easy, just go, well, forget it, move on, quit, and let's try something else. But you've got to get through that zone of disappointment and understand, yeah, you've got to give things time. And when you have add ADHD, you've got to surround yourself, too, with the detailed people who will implement otherwise. A vision without a plan, an implementation, is just a dream. And you've got to, you've got to have surround yourself with people who are like, no, no, no. I drive it forward and I'm going to get it done.
[00:26:19] Speaker C: You got to be the visionary. You got to live, eat, breathe the vision.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:26:24] Speaker C: You can't be in the technical details. You have to be the one to be a leader. That's the key. Be a leader. CEO, not a coo.
[00:26:38] Speaker B: Right. Exactly. Exactly. No, I see my position as visionary is managing and getting large relationships, big relationships. I deal with attracting talent and helping develop the talent, but also just setting the vision of the strategy of the company, where we're going to go and then I go, you know, and I'm constantly coming with ideas. And my integrator, my director of operations, is always going, okay, but what, what are we not going to do? Because we can't do it all at once. And that's, that's what a good visionary needs with them is a good person who's going to go, we can do this. We can't do that.
[00:27:19] Speaker C: And that's where we have fights as well with our minute arctic within our operations team because I'm so focused on the sales monthly, quarterly goal. Okay, guys, we've got to do deals. We've got to meet these people. We got to get it done. And when we get the deals closed, then the operations staff comes back and is like, hmm, how are we going to do this? How are you going to do that? As we're like, okay, we have the power to do it, got to get it done. And we bring in somebody, we hire a manager or expert to get the job done. That's the key.
[00:27:51] Speaker B: Exactly. You hire, you buy back your time. Hire someone. Hire the person who knows how to do it. I'm not going to learn how to do it. Hire somebody who already knows how to do it. That's the big one. Not who know how. That's a big one.
[00:28:04] Speaker C: Knowledge, technical knowledge, all the time.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: How do you handle. I struggle with, I want to scale. I want to move fast. I want to grow fast. I want to do everything fast, fast, fast, fast, fast. And how do you handle people? Not necessarily people who work for you or with you, friends, family, acquaintances, other people just out there who are like, yeah, you're crazy. This is stupid.
[00:28:28] Speaker C: You know, I had some family members like that. I remember early on when I wanted to start my own firm, I had this cute little flyer printed out and, you know, it was me, my director, and then I had Finbiz, the logo on it, and we had, you know, you know, services showed it to one of my family members. I'm not going to say their name on camera today, I'm not going to call them out, but they know who they are.
They took the flyer and then they just looked at it and they laughed at it, and they just, you know, put it in the trash can in front of me. And that really motivated me. So I'm like, I motivate. I love being pushed to the wall due to the limit where, where I know all these circumstances are against me, right. Things are working out and that's where I shot. That's right. That's what I love, because it's, it ignites a spiritual, a very passionate fire inside of me. So my soul, right. Just want to go out there and proof somebody wrong or prove to myself that, hey, these people are doubting us. We're gonna show them they're not, they don't regret this. So to your question, yes, we had a lot of family members, some family members who doubted me. Friends. I lost a lot of friends. As you know, an entrepreneur friend of mine told me that the road is very lonely. Right. It's not, it's not, you know, a lot of friends, because, I mean, you can't hang out with people who wanna, you know, just go, go to the bars or, you know, have a night out and, you know, on a Friday night when you gotta go and set up your sales goals, or you gotta set up your marketing and you kinda do your invoicing, or you gotta, you know, take care of the client emails. You can't do that. So it's, this is 24/7 kind of a job, and anybody who thinks that this is a four hour workweek or a 40 or a 40 a month workweek, they're wrong. This is 25. 25 eight is all the time.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: No, there's a quadrants of business ownership.
[00:30:42] Speaker C: Yes, there are. Yeah, I do agree with that. Eventually we will probably be in that quadrant where we're not as many hours putting in. Right. We're not working 70 hours a week, probably working maybe 20.
It's just when you are five years in or ten years in, you gotta just grind, grind, grind that I never looked on.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think a lot of that's the problem, that's that zone of disappointment again. People think, oh, I will go out on my own, I'll work for myself. And I go, well, instead of having one boss, one manager, whatever, you now have hundreds. They're called customers. They're called clients. You have hundreds and hundreds of people who are your bosses.
[00:31:25] Speaker C: You're scared, you know, April 15 coming up like scary movie five.
[00:31:30] Speaker B: But, but it's the truth. I mean, and, but you, you know, you learn how to manage that and you still feel like, and it goes back to that. So stoicism, it's, at least you are controlling and you can focus on what you can control again.
[00:31:45] Speaker C: Right, exactly. You, you control your destiny.
You can hire acquired clients as well if somebody's being a big pain in the butt. And even though we've done everything we can for them and for a lot of them savings, they still aren't happy. Well, it's something that we don't work with. People who don't want to aren't a great fit. That's when you have a test. We have a survey on our website that you answer these questions. We may or may not be a good fit for you. We're not going to just take your money. If you're a w two, you're thinking about real estate investing, you're not there yet. We're not just going to sell you a 3500 package or a $2,500 package for tax planning. And that's just not, it wouldn't be prudent or ethical.
[00:32:28] Speaker B: Right. It's been fair to them or to you. And, and you're just not going to stay in business long if you, if you get that reputation.
[00:32:35] Speaker C: Exactly. We focus on people who are investors, who are current investors.
You know, they've been in the game 1015 years. They're experienced and that's where we can help them. And they have a capital, like, tax issue. Tax problem. Nailed.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: We're wrapping up today. We talked about the people who are the naysayers. Our mission is to help people aspire to a better life. So I always end every episode with asking my guest, who is someone who helped you aspire to a better life and helped you get where you are today?
[00:33:10] Speaker C: Wow, that's a great question, Joe. I'm going to say a couple of people.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: That's fine. It can be more than one.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: I'm going to say, like, dad really pushed me. He, he never really put any boundaries on what I could do lightly achieve. He always said, hey, if you think you can be successful at it, go and do it right. He always, he was an entrepreneur as well. He's retired now, but he always pushed me towards entrepreneurship, business and that route. And then I had a mentor, you know, I had an old mentor that I knew from a public speaking organization that I was part of. And he was an entrepreneur himself. And he always pushed that, hey, think outside the box. Even though I was an accountant, I was always in the box.
He said, go out there, release yourself and reach your potential. And that's, and this was really COVID. So I think that's where the seizure happens.
[00:34:11] Speaker B: I think that's the big thing. The transformation during COVID was so great. I mean, yes, it was horrible. It was a horrible event.
But I think it really pushed an entire generation to a different level that they never, and I see it with a lot of people who are in professions like law and accounting and doctors who it's, yes, we have these rules, and we shall play by these rules at all times. And I've always played by these rules. Well, now there are no rules because everything we thought has changed, everything's changed overnight.
[00:34:44] Speaker C: So why not? Why not these professions who are all this black and white, right? We're always a certain way. Why can't this change? Because the government, the COVID rules, everything changed.
[00:34:53] Speaker B: Everything. Everything went crazy. Well, I want to thank you for coming on today. It's been great getting to know you in the master series. We're also going to talk to you over in tactics and strategies, but it's been great getting to hear your journey. And again, Fitbiz CpAs Saad Ahmad. Anytime you guys need somebody, give them a call. Thanks a bunch.
[00:35:16] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:35:17] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this edition of trust this. If you got something out of it, please press like and subscribe and give us a five star review to help us reach others who can benefit from this series. Until next time, keep aspiring to a better life.
