Today my guest is Nick Boscia. Nick is also known as The Balanced CPA, which we’ll be talking about today. He is co-owner of Boscia & Boscia, the ironically named Boscia & Boscia. He owns this with his brother, actually used to be his father. We’ll talk about the second generation taking over a firm. Nick is a good friend of mine. We met a couple of years ago at Scaling New Heights, and I’ve always been impressed to see what he’s doing. So Nick, can’t wait to get into it. Welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks, I’m excited to be here, thanks for the introduction. If you want me to get right into it, I could just kind of tell you a little bit about me.

Nope, it’s my show, I’ll do this.

I figured you’d say something like that.

So I didn’t tell you ahead of time, but we have two goals of the show. One is we’re going to educate the accounting profession on something pertinent to them, and two, we have to laugh. So that was my getting the laugh in right away. Plus, for some reason, I always give you a hard time. Sorry about that. 

That’s alright, I expected nothing less. 

So, but yeah, let’s do jump into it. Because I did obviously a quick intro there. And so one of the things that, and you are wearing The Balanced CPA hoodie right now, rumor has it, I have a Balanced CPA T-shirt coming my way, is that it? 

Yep. Once you get home, they’ll be getting mailed out to you, so just get home eventually.

Yeah, well, I appreciate it. And I like the whole Balanced CPA, you know, just the, I mean, it’s simplistic, but it’s like, this is cool, the way you came up with that. So let’s talk about that. How did that come about? How did you decide this is going to be what I’m known as, The Balanced CPA?

Yeah, so I love this story, which you know. I’m really good friends with Dawn Brolin and her daughter, Emily Brolin, and we were actually at Scaling New Heights last year, and Dawn is obviously like an awesome speaker, everyone knows. I’m like, “Oh, I want to be like you. I’m like, it’s so cool, but like, you have the Designated Motivator. Like, what am I going to be?” Constantly, for a while leading up to this, we’re trying to think of some name that would have a nice ring because like, no one really cares about your last name and things like that. So on the plane home, and that’s all I could think about, I couldn’t relax. I was like, I need to think about something that’ll have a good ring, and the Balanced CPA just came to me. And I just, the second I thought of it, I absolutely loved it. Yeah. Cause I do promote balance. So I think that’s something I’m excited to get into and what the Balanced CPA is all about. But it started really because Dawn and Emily Brolin and Christine, my fiancé, we were brainstorming, but they definitely inspired it.

Alright, so now, before we get into the whole background of that and the family business and all that, now I’ve realized I need a name. We need to work on this, we need to brainstorm, we need a session. 

You’re the Unique CPA. 

But the way I look at it, I am not. My guests are the Unique CPAs. That’s the whole premise of the show, everybody’s got a unique way of doing things in a different and better way often. So, alright, well, we’ll work on that offline. In fact, I just sent a group of people a message, and you were on it. Are we having a happy hour at two today?

I’m in.

If we’re doing that, that’s part of the agenda. We need to come up with Randy’s logo name. I actually do have a… Why? I am going on tangents immediately here today. I did work with a marketing person, actually a graphic designer, on coming up with a logo for my speaking. And one thing we came up with was “Beyond Boundaries.” Just because I think we often put boundaries in our way, sometimes we don’t even realize they’re boundaries, and we ignore them and we just pound our head against that boundary because we’ve always pounded our head against that boundary. And I think you’re the same way: We want to figure out ways that we don’t have to keep pounding our head against that boundary. So I think I like it at this point, but we’ll see. We’re going to work on that one.

I like that, but also one of the big things I talk about is setting boundaries when it comes to your clients. So, keeping it in line is important. I get you want to go beyond the boundaries of your own life, but you want to set boundaries with other people.

Yes. That’s a good call. I like that because I agree with you on that. Alright, so let’s get into the whole Boscia & Boscia story, because it is an interesting story. Your dad, and I’ll let you give the background, but I know he had a firm for a long time. You and your brother went in the firm, and I’m guessing there were some challenges, maybe modernizing the firm along the way. So why don’t you go into that whole story? Obviously, what we’re going to want to do is show people that there’s a better way you can make changes, I think, as part of this story. So yeah, let’s talk about that.

Yeah. So my dad started our firm in 1975 and the building that I’m in right now, he bought in 1980. For a frame of reference, I was born in 1989, so this building was here for nine years before I was even born, just to give a frame of reference. My older brother was born in 1986, so he’s three years older than me. But I went to Penn State, got my master’s, went to PwC, got my CPA license, and my brother joined with my dad right after college, and he was big into networking and bringing in business and marketing, so the business started growing. I didn’t think I would join the firm, and they convinced me to join, and it was such an awesome experience. In the beginning, it was a little bit painful. I went from PwC to this small family firm that was literally just the three of us at the time. We had really outdated processes, but I didn’t really know any better at the time. I thought, “Oh, my dad always, we had a great lifestyle growing up. We had money and things like that.” So I’m like, “Alright, he knows what he’s doing.” 

But then, as the years went on, I’m like, “Why are we writing up bank statements manually and manually keying into the bookkeeping software?” But I didn’t think about those things because, especially when it’s your dad, you just think they know it all. I think that’s a common thing with kids and their parents. They think they know everything. And then when you have kids someday, you probably realize you don’t know anything and your kids look up to you like that. And then as I started meeting other accountants in the industry and kind of picking their brains and learning from others, I realized our systems were not where they should be. Other people were doing things in a better way. It was definitely a slow progression because I had to learn everything, and then we grew the firm, we were constantly getting more clients, which was awesome, so we were making more money every year, but now I was more stressed. We were just working more hours and getting more clients. We were raising fees nominally, not making a big difference. So we were just working a lot. And I love—my passion is travel. That’s one thing that the Balanced CPA talks about: finding the things that you love. Because sometimes when people hear about my travel, they get stressed out. I go on 10 vacations a year, and everyone’s like, “I would never want to do that,” and I’m not telling people to do that. But back then, I was not taking any vacation. It was just not possible. 

So we started making things better by being smarter with our client choices and raising fees, but nothing monumental until our dad retired in 2018, and then once he retired, I joined the ADP Accounting Advisory Board, and that was life-changing because I met a lot of other accountants who were basically where I wanted to be. I was like, “Oh my god, you guys are doing all these things with automation and technology,” I met Dawn Brolin, she’s talking about her tech stack, and I’m like, what are these tools? So it’s pretty crazy. That was 2018. We implemented SmartVault and other technologies along the way, and that’s what really made our business boom. So from an educational standpoint, our firm’s success was backed by growing our team as well, which I didn’t mention, but we hired our first full-time employee in 2018, who wasn’t family, blood-related. So that was a big thing. Now we have a team of seven, me, my brother, and five employees. Growing the team and implementing technology really changed everything at our firm. It’s been an awesome journey.

Nice. Let’s talk about technology, because this is one area where I think too often people ignore. Obviously, you know, your dad did for years, but there was a different era when he started in accounting. When did he actually leave the firm?

In 2018.

2018. Yeah, so I guess by 2018, technology was pretty well out there from that standpoint. So I think it’s often overlooked because I think it’s often what you said at the beginning: “We’re just getting more clients, we’re working so much, we don’t have time to look at the technology, so we’re just going to ignore it at this point. Maybe down the road we’ll look at it.” I don’t think people realize, you know, take that little bit of time today and get this to the point where it’s going to be an assistant to you, aiding you. Did you have a struggle with that, I guess, with your dad and your brother, or just internally when you started to make changes and get more technology involved in the practice?

Yeah. It was definitely tough with my dad. His line was, “I’ve been doing this for 40 years. We’re not changing anything.” So no matter how good my idea was, it was just an absolute no. No technology, we’re not paying for that software. So to me, that was the only time I ever felt like I was truly suffering in my firm. They say suffering is when you have no control over something, and I couldn’t change anything. So then once he was out of the picture, I had to influence my brother and explain to him why we had to make changes. My brother is a lot easier going. He was a little bit more old school. He’d say, “Oh yeah, things are working,” but I could say, “Hey, why don’t we try this?” and he’d be like, okay, but I would have to do everything. I’d implement the tech and show the results, but it was worth it. That was just that transition year. Now, if I just say, “Joe, we’re going to do this,” he’s like, “Yep, whatever you want to do.” He’s not super gung ho about it, but he’s open to letting me make the change. That’s been the most important thing for me.

So when you started doing this then, was it baby steps? I mean, was there one thing, you mentioned SmartVault. Did you start with that and then progress? Do you want to kind of give us that journey a little bit?

Yeah. So like, people often ask what the biggest change for our firm was, the most important piece of technology. I say SmartVault because it was the first real piece of technology we implemented, and it was very easy because we use Lucert. SmartVault has an integration that builds out the folder structure, automatically uploads your tax returns—it was a very easy first step. It allowed us to basically double our client base over a short period of time. Because we would have such an issue onboarding new clients—at the time, we had 700 clients, now we have like 1,800 clients. We could have never scaled without that tool. That was the first tool. It wasn’t hard to implement. It was hard to get clients onboarded. “Oh, I still want to bring the paper in. I still want to email it unsecured,” which no one should do, but they still send the W-2, they still send their prior returns in an email that’s unencrypted, and obviously, there’s tons of identity theft, but people just don’t understand. So SmartVault is good for our firm because we’re like, we have to offer a way for them to get us documents in a secure manner. So that was huge.

Oh, and then COVID happened. It was kind of like perfect timing in the sense from a technology standpoint, ’cause now clients were afraid to come in. That first year, no one used SmartVault, maybe 20%, the second year, 90% used it. That was so huge for our future growth. Then we just did things like electronic 8879s through Lacerte. We were always, a very cost-conscious mindset; my dad’s like, “Do everything yourself. Don’t pay for things you don’t need.” So we started being open to paying for this service and realizing how much time it saves. It was the psychological shift everyone has to go through. There’s a lot of people out there who are way more willing to spend on technology than our firm, which I think is awesome, but you do have to be cost-conscious. You can’t just have every product.

Yeah! There is one question I want to ask, but we’ll do that later. Just continue that journey because right now, you’ve had 700 clients, you’ve integrated SmartVault, made it easier, saved time, which is the important thing, we’re saving time. We’re not having people come in and pick up their return and drop off their files and want to sign the return because now you’re using Lacerte signature and all that. We’re starting to get a lot more efficient just with two little simple changes that occurred. So let’s continue down that path.

One thing I always like to talk about is when something is a win-win. It’s a win for your client, it’s a win for the firm, and it’s a win for the team. When I say the firm, I’m thinking like revenues for us, but the team, life gets easier. SmartVault gets implemented, now the clients could have access to their tax return 24/7. Before then, we would get emails all year. Client: “I need a tax return.” Now, if we’re not at the office, first thing on Monday, we would have to send them out their tax return. Now that is completely eliminated. It just made life easier. We used to have paper folders, so now we would spend time just looking alphabetically to find the folder, and if someone put it in the wrong spot, now you’re wasting ten minutes looking for a folder. It’s crazy. When I talk about it, I can’t believe that really happened.

You’re actually talking about my firm that I sold in 2006, so yeah, go ahead.

It’s just crazy. So then if you fast forward, we started doing things like we had an old model of like, if you’re a client, call with questions and we would give advisory for free, if you were just a client doing your taxes here. Then as our client base grew, we would get phone calls off the hook. So I implemented Calendly, just to book an electronic calendar tool—I absolutely love it. First, I had the free version and then I paid for the paid version. Now all of my appointments are paid. If someone wants to book time for an advisory call, they have to pay for the appointment. I know a lot of people are talking about how, “Ooh, don’t do hourly billing” and this and that, but we used to do it for free. So it’s still a step up. Everyone’s going through their journey and everyone’s at a different point in the journey. That’s just where I am now, that people are paying for the appointment, but it bought me back so much time. Now when clients book the appointment and pay for it, I know they’re valuing what I offer them. Where before, clients would just call and expect you to answer on a dime. I also don’t answer the phone without an appointment. If someone calls, it goes to voicemail, they have to email me. 

Then it became more like procedural of how to operate the firm because with a lot of clients, if you don’t set the standards, “this is how we want our clients to interact with us,” they just do what is best for them, which is not a scalable model, which I’ve learned later than I wanted to. I’m definitely hammering down on our processes this year more. So then another amazing tool that we implemented last year, so I jumped ahead, we did a lot, but mostly procedural, but then last year we implemented Anchor as our billing software. The product is awesome, it’s very easy to use, but also, we changed our processes that we billed upfront for the first time in, not this tax season, last tax season. We sent out the invoices on January 15th for the first time, and billed upfront, in 45 years. We’ve always billed when we were complete. 

Of all the changes, this is my favorite change. The most frustrating thing for me is I’m painting a picture, it’s April 1st, and I’ve been cranking for months, doing tax returns, sending people their stuff, and then you send that one return and the client goes, “Why’d my fee go up $50?” I’m like, I’m explaining, “Oh, well, this is new” or “we’re raising our fees.” I didn’t really want to have those conversations in April when I’m burnt out. I’m tired. It was super frustrating, and I try to always take responsibility for everything that’s happening. That was my fault that I’m billing at the end. So naturally, the clients, that’s when they’re going to ask the question. We changed it to January 15th and that was the best thing ever. Now people are paying in advance. I think 50% of our clients, ’cause most of our clients have been here for longer than I’ve been alive. So maybe not at this point, maybe 40 years, I’m 35. Some actually, maybe 40 years. It’s pretty crazy, but they’re even getting on board with the system. Maybe 50% of our clients paid right away when we sent it. “Oh yeah, we’re definitely working with you.” It’s almost like, it makes you feel good, like these clients value us and they trust us and they want to work with us. Certain clients are like, “Oh, I’m going to pay when I come in.” That was fine. 

But now this year, even better, we billed in November, because I still had to answer all those questions about bills. ’Did things change?’ So we sent out the invoices November 15th. So now, I got to take all of that administrative time out of tax season. It’s been unbelievable. That’s been just such a huge change.  And Anchor is so easy to use. And once the clients have the agreement signed, if someone has something new, I could go into the agreement, send a one off bill, client has a new—because this is always the reason why accountants don’t want to bill up front. They’re like, what if something changes? And last year was the first year that we did the bill upfront, and every client who had something new, you had a new business, you had a new Schedule C, rental, whatever, I never had one client complain about the increased fee. I feel like clients are understanding if something major is new, I would say, “Hey, that’s, I don’t know, an extra $300.” It’s like, “Oh yeah, sure. Send the invoice”—one click send, one click approve. Done. Before that, without an automated billing system, we would just do it for free, because it wasn’t worth going and making the bill, sending the bill out, waiting for them to collect, we would just do everything for free, which obviously is not a good model, but now that 

It’s a common model though, unfortunately, but yes.

Yeah, so like, oh my god, now, and that’s like, there’s just so many good, and that’s why I just love the technology. Once you build it out, like, was it a ton of work in the beginning? Yeah, it was a ton of work, but I knew that once I got it going, it’s like this thing that just grows, and now it’s just like set in place, and now it’s super easy, but the first year was very hard. It was hard just to get clients to use it. The tool was easy, but getting clients on board. 

Yeah, well, there’s two things. The firm’s not always willing to implement, but then it’s the client buying into it, and I agree with that. Let’s talk about this, because everything you’ve done has been time-saving. I mean, you’ve really saved a lot of time, or you’ve at least balanced—ooh, “The Balanced CPA”—you’ve balanced out the year a little bit more by, like you say, the November billing rather than the January billing. So you’ve done things that way. But overall, you’ve saved time with each client. I’m certain of that. Because what happens too often in our profession is people are like, “Oh, I spend less time, that means I have to charge less.” I guarantee you that’s not how you looked at it. But so how do you work on pricing then? Did you have to fight any mindsets of, “Oh, we’re more efficient, so we can charge less,” or was that just a given? We’re not going to have to worry about that.

We definitely never thought that we have to reduce our pricing, because now we’re paying for the technology, whatever fees, and I’m thinking, our firm versus a firm who’s not making the changes, they have to spend more time, but that’s also their choice. They’re still giving the same—assuming we’re doing the same quality work, they’re giving the same product that we’re giving, but just because we’re doing it more efficiently doesn’t mean I should be discounted, I’m still giving you what you need. If anything, it allowed us to start going to accounting conferences. When I come to Bridging the Gap and I talk to other people and I’m telling them my pricing, they’re like, “You’re too cheap.” Networking has been a huge thing on us getting our prices up. The one year before Anchor, we like, we upped their prices a lot. We had a huge revenue increase. But then the next year we stayed the same because clients left. But it was a necessary evil, because now our team actually, we had a better tax season, with less clients, making the same. So we did do that big chunk increase, but we never felt, like, we figured the value we give to the client. When I price a new client, it’s based on the complexity of the return and what they’re looking for. Some people need advisory services, if it’s just compliance, it’ll be lower, but it’s a value. They have the rental property, the Schedule C, I always factor in, like, they’re going to need questions almost all the time.

So you’re just pricing based on looking at, if it’s a new client, let’s look at last year’s tax return, and I give you a price on that based on what I see you had in the past. Is that, I mean, the basic model?

Yeah, it’s the basic model. I’ve been doing it so much and I don’t know if other accountants out there are feeling this way, but we’re getting so many new clients because a lot of people are retiring and there’s a huge demand for our service. That’s why, you know, I wrote that article, like, we need more accountants in our industry because we need to serve so many people. So we’re getting so many clients, so I am able to raise the fees and give them a more efficient service. I’m always responsive, so I feel like those are the value adds I give to the client. I’m always accessible, but within a window, nine to five, not, you know.

Yeah, that’s good. I was going to say, cause that’s the thing. People talk about this concierge service or whatever. And I go like, “Well, does that mean you’re on all the time?” No, I don’t want to be on 24/7 dealing with clients. It’s good to hear that’s not the model you have. Setting boundaries, we talked about that a little bit before we went on, setting boundaries is important. And you just said, 700 clients when you started and now it’s 1,800 or whatever the number is, you just mentioned a lot of business out there and not enough accountants. What is the marketing model? How are you getting this new business?

So a lot are from just referrals, word of mouth, because our clients have a really good experience. We’ll send them an email after we finish their taxes, be like, “Hey, leave us a review on Google.” So we have 600 plus five-star reviews on Google. So every year we’re getting people in just from Googling us. “You have 600 plus five-star reviews and the next accountant has five.” So we try to think of unique ways to set us apart. That’s a nice one. Also being part of the accounting industry, coming to your conference and networking with other accountants. A lot of other accountants’ models are like, “I’m not taking 1040 only clients.’ I’m like, I do. So we have a lot of accountants who refer us to them. Websites we use get emails from clients because otherwise, they just say go somewhere. They’d rather send them to someone they could trust. I always make sure I’m giving a great service to any referral. That’s been really helpful. 

We do a lot of social media stuff. You go to the Boscia PC page on Instagram, we have it. Our marketing team posts fun videos. It makes it like professional videos and fun videos. People get to know us a little bit. A lot of firms, if you do everything virtually through email, you might never even see your accountant. People see we have a personality, I like to travel. My brother loves cars. People feel like they know us. Sometimes clients come in and they’re like, “Oh my God, how was your trip here? How was your trip there?” It’s funny because people do follow you through those means.

That’s nice. Making it personal. I’m a big fan of that with the people you work with, the people you know in the industry, the people you work for, all that. I think it’s important to get them to know people on a personal level. Let’s veer for a second, because there are a couple of things we technically could start wrapping up now, but there are things that intrigue me. It was the three of you when you first went in, your dad, your brother, and now there are five additional employees. I’ve experienced it personally and I’ve seen at times where working for family members as bosses is not always the best because it’s just a weird dichotomy there. How do you guys make it work, where you’re out there and making sure people are not like, “Okay, well, it’s the Boscias, they’re not going to listen to us. We’re just the serfs here doing the work.” I mean, there has to be intentionality around making sure that everybody’s having a comfortable experience in the firm.

Yeah, so it’s not like we figured this out right off the bat because for a while we never had team meetings for like the first couple of years. Everyone just came to work and that was kind of it. Now we do. Implementing team meetings took some time because we never had them, we’d have a monthly team meeting and sometimes we’d skip it. But we’re at the point now every week on Tuesday at 10, we have a team meeting. Everyone goes over what they’re working on, any issues they’re having, things that are going good, things that are going bad. One thing I actually love that I implemented, I tell the team we have a list of our, we call it the “five worst clients list.” I want the team to tell us the five worst clients they deal with. Obviously there’s not, now it’s getting less and less, but a year or two ago, we had a lot of clients who were difficult to deal with for whatever, various reasons. But sometimes, letting the team know you’re listening to them, I want my team to have a good experience here. So it’s like, “Hey Nick, this client, every time they call, they’re rude to me on the phone,” or whatnot, I’m like, “I want them on the list because then we’re firing that client.” When you do that, your team knows I have my team’s back first. We can’t get all the client work done without the team, so they come first and then the clients come second. Some people are like, they should both be on tier, but it’s hard. You can’t serve everyone if your team isn’t happy.

I completely agree with you. I think that’s one of the most important things. Just wanted to get that in there because I figured that would be your answer. You just backed up the things I say all the time. So this is cool, thank you for that. See, someone else believes what I believe. And then, just because when you were talking about it, the procedures you come in and communicating those to the whole team—do you have the standard operating procedures written out? How do you make sure everybody’s on board with the systems you have put in place?

Yeah, that leads me into the last tool that we implemented like a year and a half ago, two years ago maybe, Financial Cents is our workflow management. Before that, we didn’t have a tool. We did things on Excel and in our heads. It works like, if I was to talk to a new accountant starting his own firm, I would say, have a workflow management tool. They’d be like, why? I do everything anyway. Just to document your procedures. It’s a lot harder to document it 10 years in, and now we have to put all that in. So building Financial Sense was the hardest implementation, but it’s so important to do because now you have to document all of your procedures. That’s how I know what I’m doing, what’s getting done, and who has to work on what. Because as your team grows, how do you know who’s working on what? I went and worked in Florida for the first time and did remote work for three weeks back in November, and it was the first time I ever did that, and I was able to see what everyone was working on—I was like, this is awesome. If you don’t have a workflow management tool, you’re just basically a slave to your job because you know what has to get done, and your team doesn’t. 

Right. I think that’s important. The theme here or the moral of the story is, don’t be afraid to make changes that make you more efficient. Changes that really, like you said, is a win-win-win for everybody. So these changes then have created the ability for you to have this more balanced life. So let’s get into that a little because some people will take, “Hey, I’m more efficient, so now I can work 80 hours a week and get more done and make more money,” and in reality, what you’ve done is taken this to get more time, I assume, isn’t the way you’d say it. Let’s talk about that balance. What does the Balanced CPA mean to you in that life?

The Balanced CPA is kind of what people probably infer as having a balanced life and I’m a CPA, obviously. But because people think accountants typically don’t have good lives, they work too much and they don’t enjoy it, and they’re burnt out, I want to break that mold and that misconception. It’s funny. Even my dad, as you said, we’re becoming more efficient, so I could take 10 vacations a year—not in tax season, I’m okay with that, but I take 10 vacations a year. When I talk to my dad, he’s like, “Oh, you’re lazy.” I’m like, “We’re just so much more efficient.” He’s like, “Yeah, if you don’t go on vacation, think how many more clients you could do.” And that’s where people lose, I feel like people should have a set amount of money they want to make, set the goal. Every single person, if you talk to anyone with their financial goal, it’s like, when I was 20, I’m making up numbers, it was $100,000. Now they’re 35, they’re making $500,000. But now when they’re 35, their goal is to make a million. So their goal keeps changing, so they’re never where they want to be. That’s a problem. You have to be like, “Alright, I’m good with what I make,” or maybe I want to make 10% [more] per year, whatever. A lot of people just focus on the money and they burn themselves out. You could actually work smarter, not harder, and make more. I’m excited to come during tax season and make our procedures better, make sure the team’s doing a great job training, and now if I could have a good company culture in tax season, I think I made it. Even the team loves being here in tax season, to me, that’s something I’m proud of. And then I could go on vacation to Japan this upcoming May. I’m excited.

That’s one of the places that we’ve talked about going that we haven’t. We’ve been to a lot of places, but Japan is one that I think is going to be on the list in the next few years. We’ll see. Anything you want to add to this before we pivot?

Yeah, I guess the one other thing I didn’t mention with the Balanced CPA is, that I don’t think it’s talked about a lot in the accounting industry, which is really business-minded, is your health. I know you talk about mental health a lot, but I think that health should be both mental and physical. I have my walking pad during tax season, so I have my walking pad right here, I’ll raise this desk up and I’ll walk during the day because I know I’m busy, but I try to move as much as I can or go to the gym when I can. Diet, eating healthy because your energy really plays a big role. If you are exercising and eating healthy, you’re going to feel better. Almost no one’s going to say, yeah, when I ate McDonald’s and didn’t get sleep and do this and do that, you know you feel lower energy, so how could you perform at a higher level on your day-to-day? Then that leads into your emotional health because you could be working out too much and now you’re burnt out. You’re like, “I’m not getting sleep. I’m feeling stressed or depressed,” you have to always, and that’s where balance comes in. When I talk about it, I feel like I’m talking about so many things, it’s overwhelming, but it’s not. You have to just balance. Last week I had to take off from the gym because I was a little bit burnt out, and that’s okay. It’s not about being super strict, it’s about balancing.

Yep, I agree. I work out all the time, but we’re on a two-month trip right now, and I don’t have a gym where I’m staying, and for the last five years, six days it was raining, so our exercise has been hiking. For the last six days, I think it was six days in between hikes. I finally got one yesterday. I was just craving that exercise, craving that hike because I feel so much more energy, like you said when you do that. Great tip as well. The one thing is that people are like, “I’m so busy, I don’t have time,” and they get overwhelmed with, “Well, I can’t start exercising every day.” Just make teeny little baby step changes, go for a 10-minute walk twice a week, then it builds up to 15 minutes, twice a day. You said, eating the fries or whatever, if you’re doing that every day during tax season because you’re ordering from whatever delivery service, well, one day a week instead of the burger and fries, make it a salad with grilled chicken on it or something like that. Then just make little changes and you’ll see a big difference over time. So great advice, Nick. I knew you would have great advice.

Thank you.

And I know what at least one of your answers is going to be: Two final questions. All this stuff, all this, we talked about the work and how you’ve modernized the firm and technology to make it more efficient. So when you’re not thinking about taxes, which I’m guessing there’s a lot of time you’re not, what are the things you enjoy doing? What are your outside of work passions?

As I mentioned, I definitely love traveling, so I do spend a lot of my time planning trips, like when I go home, I like to research different hotels or flights. I’m always getting deals. As you know, I’m like a credit card guru type of guy. I always get crazy deals to be in cool hotels. That gets me exciteed. I love when I’m staying in a hotel that’s $9,000 and I paid points that were worth $3,000 and things like that, I get excited. That’s just me. Then obviously, I enjoy exercising. I like playing sports when I can, like pickleball or basketball or whatever. I don’t play as much as I want because not a lot of people play, but then my one thing I absolutely love in the summer, I have a jet ski. I love going out on the water, going on my jet ski. That’s one of my favorite things.

Well, I’m a hoops player, I mean, forever. Man, I love basketball, but the next time I see you will be two and a half months post knee replacement. So we won’t be playing basketball next time I see you, but maybe a year after that, we can at least go shoot a little bit somewhere. We’ll find a conference we’re at and we’ll find a hoop, and we’ll shoot some hoops. Then lastly, if people want to find out more about Boscia & Boscia, or The Balanced CPA, or you personally, or what you’re doing, where would they look?

My Instagram is TheBalancedCPA, so you can follow me there, DM me. A lot of times I post social media content and encourage people to ask me questions. Really, my goal is I want to help people. I’ll say, this is the thing I’m doing that, but if anything intrigues anyone, I want to help them. That’s on my Instagram, TheBalancedCPA. Professionally, it’s on LinkedIn where I’m putting a lot of my content and like things I’m doing, whether speaking engagements, webinars. On my LinkedIn, just Nick Boscia. Then our business website is BosciaPC.com. If you will find me anywhere, you could basically find me everywhere. Once you find one of my channels, everything’s there to find me. But I do encourage people to reach out because I love when I hear from somebody like, “Oh, that really helped me,” because that inspires me to do more. I always tell Dawn Brolin and all the other people who inspired me how it made a difference because then that’s going to make them want to keep making a difference. So hopefully I do the same for people.

You mentioned Dawn. You didn’t mention me. I’m a little hurt.

Well, you’re right—you’re right—you’re right here!

I’m kidding. I appreciate it. I know you’ve been in a lot of my sessions in the past, and I always appreciate you being there, so thank you. 

And I think that’s a wrap! It’s been fun. I really appreciate you being here. The things you’re doing I think are cool and amazing and something that everybody can learn from. So thank you, Nick.

Thank you.