Today our guest is Anthony Venette. Anthony is at DeJoy Company in Rochester, New York, where he provides business evaluation and advisory services to corporate and individual clients. He has expertise in consulting clients through gift and estate planning and succession planning, which is probably where we’re going to start today. But before we get there, Anthony, welcome to The Unique CPA.

Thanks for having me on, Randy. Really happy to be here. 

Yeah, I’m excited because I’ve said it often on this podcast, but I get to learn a lot. I think I’m going to learn a lot today, so I’m excited about that. But before we jump into it, I teased we were going to talk a little succession planning, probably some trust and estates and all this wrapped up together. But before we get into that, why don’t you give us a little background on who Anthony is. 

Yeah, I think the story of my career kind of tells honestly where I’m at today and what I’m focused on. So yeah, I started my career at PwC here in Rochester in the tax group. I did that for two years and I was a square peg in a round hole. It was not for me. I couldn’t get my head around it and it just didn’t feel right. So I kind of went out in the market and explored and said, hey, what else can I do with my license? I didn’t want to be an auditor, I didn’t think I wanted to do bookkeeping, and I worked so hard for the CPA license, I thought, well, shoot, what do I do now? 

Fortunately, I found an independent valuation firm, and I was like, oh, that’s interesting. You know, I didn’t know I really had career path opportunities in there. I’d been exposed to valuation in some college courses. Loved it, but I didn’t want to be an equity analyst. I didn’t know there were other career paths. Apparently, there are lots of them. So I was able to find success there. I was there for five years and then I kind of had the point where I was just looking for the next step in my career. I did a brief stint in FP&A for a large international manufacturer before I came over here and joined DeJoy. I didn’t think when I left PwC that years later, I would end up back in public accounting, but here I am. I’m really enjoying it. We’re a mid-sized, full-service firm and I run our business valuation and advisory practice here.

Nice. So full circle, started in public, left like a lot of people have been doing, but you made it back. You made your way back. You’re a success story. Nice. 

I’m one of the boomerangs, yeah. 

That’s cool. I like to hear those kinds of stories and see that there is this variety of opportunities for people—just because you’re a CPA doesn’t mean you’re sitting doing tax and auditing everything all day long, so that’s a nice thing to share for sure.

Yeah, I think it’s an important story to tell for, you know, I was saying students, right, that would be listening in. Any time I speak in a college, I always talk about like there’s a variety of opportunities out of this, but also young professionals, right? Kind of figuring out, okay, you know, I got my first job and I’ve been here a year, but I’m not really sure what I want to do long term, right? To just open their eyes and say, there’s a lot of opportunities you can do with this. This is a very special license. There’s lots of things you can do to help people.

Alright, we need to have you come speak at our conference where we talk about how great this profession is, so nice. 

Alright, so we teased, or we did tease the fact, we’re going to talk a little bit about what you do, but succession planning being one. And I want to kind of set the stage with, you know, this is obviously an extremely important area. It’s, you know, every one of our clients at some point in time probably has a succession, as long as they stay in business, I assume, but they have this opportunity, whether it’s the family member, whether it’s a sale, maybe it’s private, whether it’s private equity or whatever, the succession planning for business owners is important. Now, us as a profession, we kind of just said it, we’re busy, you know, doing tax and audit and other things, and not every firm out there has a you. They all have an Anthony on there that, you know, they can just pick up the intercom and say, Anthony, help me with this! So let’s talk about succession planning because if we don’t have that internal resource, you know, let’s educate the profession on what it is, when they need to start looking at it, and why look at it, and there’s a thousand questions. I’m just going to let you run with it.

Yeah, agreed. And I think that’s the first kind of question is, what is it? What is succession planning? So the way I define it would be a comprehensive strategy that addresses both continuity of ownership and continuity of management inside of a company, like that’s specifically what we’re focused on, right, and that relates, in this case, primarily to our small to mid-sized privately held companies. That’s where this conversation really needs to happen. And in my mind, it’s inclusive of exit planning, right? They’re not two separate things—they’re kind of all falling under the succession planning group. And then why? Why is it important, right? You know, obviously we have clients that either are dealing with it or should be dealing with it. That’s probably where most of them fall is a should be dealing with it but aren’t category. 

But, you know, we have a 68 trillion wealth transfer happening over the next decade. Right? Huge. Massive. A big percentage of that is in privately held businesses. So, now we sit at this nexus point between generations where we kind of serve a very important role in that process, or we need to serve an important role in that process as a professional. So CPAs, we’re professional truth tellers. That’s what we are. And a lot of times, we’re now, you know, my firm has done it, too. We’re the DeJoy Co. CPAs and Advisors, right? And a lot of that “and Advisors” tagged on. We can say that, but what does that mean? In my opinion, an advisor is a professional storyteller. So we’re truth tellers and we’re storytellers, right? So we play that advisory role. We’re helping clients kind of write and tell that story for themselves. 

So we’re focused on seeking holistic solutions, kind of in line with our client’s goals, business and personal, to meet the various needs. That could be everything from our after-tax proceeds from the transaction to maintaining stable management inside of the company, right? We’re not going to over-leverage it, right? We’re not going to, you know, improperly onboard a successor management team, right? We’re going to get those things right. There’s a lot that goes on. There’s a lot of pieces flying around. That’s why it helps to be, in my opinion, a CPA firm where we have multidisciplinary folks here who can help with that or coordinate together to help with that. I think a lot of times these conversations either don’t happen or they happen with a lawyer, which is great and important—a lawyer is very important for this process. And one of the first things I ask a client is, do you have a good lawyer? Maybe it happens with a business broker, or maybe it happens with an investment advisor, right? I think those are all good, but I think the CPA needs to be part of that process too, to help fill in the gaps to get things where they need to be, have these conversations and things people might not be thinking about, like tax consequences. Often gets put off the table when we’re talking about a business broker who gets paid on a percentage of the gross sale. Well, that’s great, but what does it actually net down to a client?

Yep, and then, so you said it already, the succession planning. So, one of the planning is that, hey, you know, what are the net proceeds, not the gross proceeds, but when does planning start? I mean, when you start a business, should you start succession planning immediately, or is it when you get to be a certain age as an owner or is it at a certain revenue level or certain needs? Is there an ultimate place where everybody needs to start this?

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of ways to answer that question. I think the simplest one is today, it probably needs to be happening. If we have business owners who are over the age of 40, right, I think we should be talking about it. I don’t think we need to talk about it with a, you know, 25-year-old business owner, but it’s something we need to be talking about with anyone who’s up there and thinking about long-term what their goals are. That should be happening with our 70, 80-year-old business owner clients who are still out there, right? It should be happening then, but we’re so much more successful when we have that conversation earlier. I personally love a 10-year horizon to that exit point. Give me 5 years minimum. We can help, if it’s shorter than that, right, but we get limited in the opportunities that we can really capitalize on, we’ve shortened that time horizon to either a succession or exit event. I think it’s very key overall to have that long runway.

Now, from that standpoint, isn’t there, when you talk longer term, and I’m no expert, again, you’re educating me today, which I love, but isn’t there even just entity types that make sense? I mean, you can structure stock in a certain way that if you hold it for so long, those are the type of planning issues that you can deal with the longer time frame you have?

Yeah, correct. I mean, so that’s when we start thinking about, okay, well, what are all the issues involved? And this is where I think conversations typically break down as it gets overwhelming. They go, oh, geez, there’s a hundred different ways we could do this. Let’s just not do any of it, right? And that’s what I hear a lot of the time. So our focus is on getting that first conversation put in place, first conversation in motion, put some basic goals in place. So my first conversation is always very personal. I just want to hear about your goals. I really don’t care about your business. That’s not what’s driving this conversation. That can be a later factor that we need to deal with, but right now we need to see your goals, personal and business-wise. What are your goals for that? What do you want your legacy to be, right? What do you want your end event to be? Focus on those issues. 

So to me, we incorporate those goals of our client that we’re listening to there. We’re incorporating our own personal experiences, professionally doing this and seeing a lot of ways it’s gone and hasn’t gone, ways it’s gone well and hasn’t gone well, right? All the different opportunities there in my first exit away from that, you know, initial meeting is coming up with a rough North Star for where we want to be. I can describe that situation to the client saying, this is where you want to be, right? At least in this rough area. Here’s where you are today, right? And then we draw maybe three or four paths to get there. Oh, maybe this type of sale works or maybe structuring it this way would make sense. But a lot of that is really listening on the front end and then just echoing back what I’ve heard from the client and then my professional experience and what I could see being there. 

And that conversation might be, your exit event isn’t realistic. What you’re drawing up, what you want in retirement, that’s not a realistic number. So let’s start backtracking to something realistic. Or they want it all, right? I want a huge exit event, like I’m getting paid by a PE firm at 12x EBITDA, but also I want my small mom-and-pop name on the front of it and that’s my brand name, that’s my family name, I care a lot about that. You can’t necessarily have both, right? So being realistic in that and giving that feedback and then continuing that conversation, I personally come to this as a business valuation specialist because that’s where the conversation tends to break down. We have these initial talks and then we go, okay, what’s it worth, and crickets. And then the whole thing drops out. 

So my goal there is to just inject enough information to keep this thing moving, right, which doesn’t have to be a full-blown valuation. It’s not where it should be. Can we get a ballpark figure? When can we work off of that? And it’s also important to understand that there’s a range of values here, right? You think of values, I think my clients think of values as this black box that I go there, you know, I sacrifice a goat, I come back three days later and the value is sitting there, right? That’s what they think happens. But really, it’s a much more dynamic process than that, and also very driven by our outcome, like what’s our goal, right? So if we’re talking a trust and estate issue, or we’re talking about an exit to a competitor, an exit to PE or an ESOP, right, every one of those has a different color to it and a different answer. So those all need to be incorporated in the overall conversation, able to keep it moving.

So then part of what you do then, because what you just said, the valuation and the magic box that you just pulled out of, I assume the earlier you can get in, the more you can affect that too, is that part of the planning? You can do things, if we know that we are two years out or three years out, we can do things to increase the EBITDA, if that’s what it’s going to be based on, is that part of this process?

Yeah, so there’s two big drivers in that runway. I mean, obviously there’s some pragmatic drivers that it’s going to take us 60 days to paper up this. Okay, whatever, that’s not a big deal, right? The longer timeline, we’re focused on two things. A would be what you just hinted at. Okay. What’s my valuation today? What do I want it to be? And how do we get there? So I do a lot of consulting on that as well as saying, here’s where you stand today. A lot of times with startups, here’s where you are today. Here’s where you want to be. Here are the dials we can crank to get there. 

The other one is trust and estate issues. I mean, huge consequences here. Certainly, the most important thing to note here would be the exemption change coming up at the end of next year, end of 2025, technically January 1st, 2026. Our exemption is cutting in half. So, as a quick explainer for anyone who’s focused on estate tax issues all the time, the federal U.S. gift and estate tax is calculated based on your gross gifts made during your lifetime, plus your estate, less an exemption amount, which is currently about $14 million for a single individual, $27, $28 million for a married couple, functionally, times your tax rate of 40%, right? So, okay, you might sit here and say, well, I don’t have a lot of clients that have more than $14 million. Okay. Well, that’s cutting in half in about a year. So that’s a $7 million figure. Now, a lot of small businesses might be pressing over that. We have to consider it’s not just the business, right? It’s the value of your house, right? It’s your retirement accounts. It’s all these different things. Or maybe, hey, they don’t have a big estate, but they’ve been making large gifts every year. Well, that’s reduced our exemption amount, or maybe we’re even paying gift tax on that. So now we need to start thinking about those issues as well. And it’s important to always focus on income tax, right? And I think that conversation does get left off of there. I think that gift and estate conversation can get neglected sometimes in a way that does a disservice to business owners.

Yep Alright, so there’s a lot obviously going into this. I mean, you are educating me, I really appreciate it, but man, there’s a lot, and like you say, in general, when people hear so much, they just start shutting down. So let’s talk about a successful engagement. How has this gone for you, or maybe even give us an example of one that you’re proud of, the steps that you went through and what the outcome was.

I would love if I had a typical engagement, that would make my life a lot simpler. I don’t think I have a typical engagement, at least I haven’t met one yet. I think my successful engagement,, which is really “engagements” because we’re talking about that long look—I had a client that was a very successful business. Probably a hundred million dollars in revenue. They were a wholesale distributor. They started working with us early, right? When they knew they wanted to succeed, they kind of had that long look in mind. We were doing valuations on a buy-sell agreement. We advised them on a buy-sell agreement and then did valuations on a buy-sell agreement for five plus, maybe almost 10 years before they had one of the owners sadly pass away in an unexpected fashion, which normally to a business is a huge hit, right? You know, we don’t have a confluence of management or something, or we don’t really have a plan for ownership, and like I alluded to earlier, maybe an estate tax issue. We dodged all of that. He passed away in January; I think by April, we were basically done with everything. We already had management kind of lined up to come in. We had a regular evaluation done, so nobody was surprised by any numbers. Everyone saw the numbers and went, yeah, that was basically what it was last year, plus or minus how we performed this year. So everyone was aware of it. We’d had these conversations, right? We’d had these morbid conversations of, okay, who’s going to succeed if somebody’s not here, right? So we managed to wrap up the transition of ownership, we wrapped up the estate, all that in three months, on a hundred million dollar company. I mean, this isn’t, you know, some small thing where we can just round it off and say, ah, it’s close enough, right? This is a real taxable estate. This is a real big transaction. 

But because we’ve been working on it so long together, and everyone is so familiar with it, you know, I always kind of preach, you know, regularity and authenticity to these processes, and especially when it comes to buy-sell agreements, to me, it’s just number one thing is authenticity. If we have a buy-sell agreement in place, we gotta be active with it, we gotta be talking about it. We have to be hitting our board meetings, we have to be taking notes, we have to be getting our appraisals done, we have to get them updated. Those are the things that make it successful long term. We might not see the value in the moment, but I can tell you when it plays out in the end, it is a huge difference maker. There are some ones I’ve come into where we come in late in the game, somebody died, right, and now we need to start talking about succession. It’s a very different conversation.

Yep. So this was set up well for an unfortunate event, but you were able to get through that transaction smoothly because the planning was there.

Yes.

When we’re looking at succession planning then, in general, there’s different paths of succession planning, I mean, it can be the family’s taking over, it can be we’re going to become an ESOP, I assume. It can be we got private equity coming in, we’re going to sell to whoever, a competitor or someone else. Does the planning obviously change with each of those? Is there a consistency and some that you have to then change based on the desired outcome?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, that’s such a significant factor in the overall process. Really anything past that first conversation needs to start skewing towards one or two of those results, maybe identify a few. So that first conversation, we’re talking about goals. Typically out of that, I can hear the things I need to hear to say, here’s, you know, if we divide it between five or six different exit opportunities, here’s two or three that kind of make sense. Or maybe it’s even one. I mean, that might be the real answer if they say, “after I heard all that, it sounds like this is the one that makes sense.” And usually I say that and the client goes, “Oh yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. That tracks what I was thinking,” and maybe they can’t articulate it that way. But that’s our job to help them kind of tell that story. So typically that’s a takeaway from the first conversation to say, this is where you want to get. This is where you are. Here’s a realistic path to get there. 

So I kind of divided it up to be internal or external, right? So our internals would be, that could be family or non-family. So, obviously family, we typically would be looking at a gift or maybe even a mix of gift and sale. That’s a nice approach I’ve taken. That can allow us to actually maximize opportunities from an income tax and gift and estate tax perspective. So there are some benefits there. And then if we’re talking non-family, right, we’re typically talking transaction, but maybe it’s a transaction between, you know, I have young up-and-comers, the guy around my business is ready to take over. Or who’s been in the business the last 10 years and now they’re kind of ready to step in that role. Let’s get them ready for that. And that can involve an equity transaction, it can also involve, you know, a specific plan to transition actual management tasks over.

Internal sales too. We have the ESOP, that you mentioned, that’s a huge one. It can be very beneficial for the right company. So we need to characterize that. And in ESOP itself, I mean, you can make a career just out of ESOP transactions. The word ESOP alone implies a hundred different opportunities under there. So having to talk to someone who’s been experienced in setting up ESOPs and running ESOPs, seeing what works and doesn’t is important there. I’m fortunate I’ve had some experience in my career that I can commentate on that as a broker for clients or guide them to where the person can.

And then obviously we have our external sales, right, so that can be sales to PE, right, that’s a factor we’ve seen across the board, we’ve seen in our own profession. We have sales to competitors, right, we have a couple options there. That itself has its own set of requirements and rules when you want to start thinking about. We want to start thinking about diligence, we want to start thinking about those issues down the road. All that can take in, continuous to our trust in the estate planning too. Another thing to not ignore is that the external style doesn’t shut off our idea of making a gift, right? We can kind of do both of those together in a way to optimize, but yeah, there’s a lot of balls flying around, focused on keeping the conversation moving forward. Stasis is the worst thing we can be. If we’re static, we’re not where we need to be, we just gotta be moving at least one direction.

And how about the teams involved with these? Are they changing from each one? I mean, you, I would assume that you as the succession planner are the quarterback of this team, but then you’re also getting involved, well, a lawyer, you already said that, you’re also getting involved, depends on the situation of who else is, you know, what the exit strategy ends up being, but what is a normal team member or how many team members do you normally see in a situation like this?

Yeah, so the roles I want filled, right, so that quarterback role is an important one and I do often find myself falling into that, kind of just as, A, I do a lot of this, but B, I understand enough of everything that I can do my part well. I understand enough when to pick up the phone and call somebody who is a specialist in here, but we want the quarterback, right, we want an appraiser, which I can play both those roles. We want our tax CPA, right? So for me, I work with some clients internally, but I work with external CPAs too on projects where they have their own tax advisor, they’re good, they’re confident in them, and I can just play my role as an appraiser. Sometimes I pull in my own tax folks as needed for that. We want to talk to our lawyer, so let’s get the right attorney engaged.  And that depends on the situation too. The external sale versus the internal sale, that’s a different attorney type, so being focused on that. If there’s trust and estate issues, that could be a different attorney, right? So depending on the outcome of that first conversation, that could be, even though it’s an attorney, it could be three different people.

So that’s a really important part about having this early conversation, getting the right players involved. So we have our attorney, our investment advisor should I think, be a part of that too, from a few perspectives. But one of them is gonna be income tax issues. Do we wanna look at tax loss harvesting? Should be thinking about that, right? What other income tax issues do we need to be thinking about? You know, what other investment possibilities are there? Thinking about that.

To me, those are the general ones. Maybe life insurance comes into play too. We might wanna think about that. Those are the general pieces I focus on putting in. If we need extra ones, we can kind of come up with those on the fly, but that should get us through.

But it’s important to have the quarterback that is going to help them through this.

It’s important to have the team, yes, and it’s important to have the quarterback, right? Because even just assembling the team, if nobody’s tasked with the specific guidance that I’m going to get this going, and I’m going to keep it going, then it’s going to fall in between all of you. So, we’re all going to have our hands outstretched and it’s going to fall right between all of them. So having somebody who’s designated to say, okay, I’m going to ping this person, I’m going to push on this person, I’m going to keep this project moving. To me, it’s just so important, otherwise things just don’t get done.

Alright. So before we wrap this up, because I know I’m missing parts, I’m sure there’s more involved here, why don’t I just hand it over to you, and what are the important parts that maybe I didn’t touch on, or the questions I didn’t ask that you might want to make sure we address today?

Yeah, if anyone thought this conversation was already too short, let’s add a little more to it. So, I think an important topic, and this kind of needs to happen contiguous with some of these and simultaneous to these strategies: talk about estate tax optimization. That’s a term I use for it. So, that’s focused on optimizing ourselves through that estate tax process, right? And the gift tax process as well. So, what I’m focused on there is identifying clients—obviously, we have an estate tax exposure, potential exposure—we want to start focusing on these now, which applies to a lot of small business owners today. You know, there I’m focused on gifting. I like the idea of a gift versus an estate problem because on the gift problem, right, that’s the only difference between the two is that we control the timing of that. That’s very important from the perspective that we can focus on gifting appreciating assets. So if we’re thinking about our estate tax exemption moves 2-3 percent every year, right? To the extent that I’m running a business that’s appreciating faster than that, I logically would like to get pieces of it earlier to minimize that exposure on the backend, right? That’s a basic strategy right there.

Also minority discounts, right? That’s an important topic that I think people might be tangentially aware of, but maybe not fully aware of the power of them. So a minority discount, instead of saying, Hey, I own a hundred percent of this business, I pass away. I get, you know, tax on the entire value of that. Instead, I could strategically, and this is what helps to have a timeline, I could gift off minority pieces. So, I gift off 1%, 10%, 20 percent blocks. I can take advantage of minority discounts there, which can be 30 percent to 40%, and these are significant. So, if we’re talking about an overall estate tax bill, we could end up avoiding it completely just by the idea of gifting appreciating assets and gifting minority discount, minority interest, which we can take advantage of discounts on—that alone could avoid the estate tax issue altogether, right? And we use the same exemption we had either way. We just moved it over in a more efficient manner. And that, like I said earlier, is simultaneous to internal and/or external exit events. 

I think the other big issue is some recent court cases. I think I want to highlight those. Us accountants who are a lot of times focused on what we’re doing today and maybe don’t have our heads up. Let’s be aware of those. Regarding buy-sell agreements, Conley vs. United States is a really important one. If anyone’s not totally familiar with that, I can give a basic background. The resulting outcome was really poor, unfortunately, for the taxpayer—they got double dinged. They had some disallowance of deductions, along with a big capital gains tax that was not ideal for anyone. So, it’s important that we’re focused on there, really being authentic and in execution of buy-sell agreements, right? You know, it involved some life insurance issues too, which there’s a million ways you can structure life insurance in a buy-sell agreement, but, there’s only a few ways you can do it right, so really make sure you’re doing your homework there, working with the right folks on that. I’m always happy to talk to you more about that.

And if we’re talking “more” about something, I think Moore vs. United States is an important one. To me, I think it’s like, I don’t know, probably the most significant thing we’re looking at as a profession, and also the most undiscussed issue we’re talking about. So, Moore vs. United States, for anyone also not familiar with that, Moore is challenging the mandatory repatriation tax as part of our 2017 tax reform, formerly known as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Basically, the taxpayer is challenging his bill saying it’s unconstitutional based on the 16th Amendment and the wording of that. Also, some other important court cases that come up through that history regarding recognition of income versus realization, basically saying that realization would be required to recognize income. So, that’s a really important issue. It’s not as significant in the Moore case. I think it’s about a $17,000 tax bill, which is not the dollar driver. I think the issue would be setting up future taxes, right? So, I think we’ve seen at least now in three or four green books from the Biden administration, the idea of a wealth tax, which was a completely novel idea, you know, a couple of years ago, it was considered crazy when it came on the campaign trail in 2016. Now it’s gained a lot of mainstream backing. 

So, definitely something to focus on over the future. And something we need to be aware of is that the implications of Moore for a wealth tax is significant and will probably lay the groundwork for taxation in the United States for the next hundred years. It’s as consequential as would be the most consequential event since, I mean, certainly since 2017 but maybe since 1986. So, I think it’s huge and something we should all be paying attention to.

Well, I know I learned about two minutes about Moore before we got on this. So, it looks like I need to do a little more digging and see what’s going on in that case because I saw it was a, you know, people were talking about how significant this case is. Obviously, it’s a pending case, we don’t know an outcome yet, but that’s something that we might have to do a whole podcast on just that to see what the potential of outcomes are there.

Let me know, I’ll talk to you here.

Alright, we might do that. Alright, well I think this is all great information today. The important thing of all this is just identifying when, why, how, you know, we need to start doing the succession planning because, as I said when we started, we don’t all have an Anthony on staff and so, you know, getting at least the knowledge out there that this is an important aspect, and it’s not something to be ignored and kicked down the road, it’s something we should be looking at, as you said, today for our clients.

Before we wrap up, Anthony, a couple final questions: And I didn’t warn you ahead of time, and I think I probably say this every podcast, but I’m a big proponent of, you know, people are more than their job, and so we like to talk about what your outside-of-work passions are, and what you enjoy doing when you’re not helping with succession, estate, gift planning, and all that.

Yeah, that’s always a fair question. It’s funny. I try to listen to more, you know, professionally focused podcasts sometimes, but I don’t especially find myself having time—I love to unplug mentally and it’s hard for me sometimes. So I think I’ve been focused on, yeah, I’ve got two little ones at home, so chasing them around tends to take most of my time for this weekend.

Nice.

And that was really our driver there and we had a lot of fun. It’s fun to see little kids—my daughter, she’s two and a half and Friday night, I put her down to bed and she’s just getting, you know, she stays up later and later when she’s supposed to be sleeping and she starts calling for me like an hour after I put her down to bed and I go up there and I’m like, what’s going on? What do you want? And she starts giving me this, you know, Little Tony Robbins speech about how I can do whatever I want when I grow up. She goes, Daddy, growing up’s not something to be sad about. It’s something to be happy about. You can do whatever you want to do when you grow up. What do you want to do when you grow up? To which I’m like, well, Daddy’s already kind of grown and I’m kind of already in it. And I was like, Daddy’s an accountant. And she’s like, oh, like The Count on Sesame Street. That’s great. You can do that! Or you could be Elmo, or you can be Cookie Monster, or you could be Oscar. I don’t even care if you live in a trash can. You can be Oscar. And it was very funny to get a little motivational speech from a two and a half year-old who was an hour past her bedtime. And then she felt like that conversation couldn’t wait until the next day that it needed to happen, you know, that night while she was still up, while it was fresh in her head.

But it’s fun to see that and fun to watch them kind of grow. It gives a reality check, I think, on everything. It’s easy to be very focused on what we’re doing in the minutiae sometimes of that, in the micro, but also to take a step back and look at the macro. You know, it’s easy to sit here and count the things that didn’t go exactly how I wanted today, but maybe the broad strokes are better than I could have imagined, right? So finding appreciation in that is always my focus. Not saying I’m always successful with it. I’m probably more unsuccessful than I am successful with it, but constantly focused on that.

Well, that’s important. Anybody listening to the show knows that I’m a big proponent of positive mental health and anything we can do to help that. So, the fact that you mentioned you like to mentally unplug from work, I think everybody should do that. So I’m glad to hear that and enjoy the time with the kids. Our kids are 30 and 28 now and we still enjoy the time with the kids, which is so nice.

And they still give you speeches about what you can do when you grow up?

They probably do. They probably, more so they give me speeches on, you know, what the Chicago Bears need to do in this offseason. So I get a lot of that, although I just dated this episode, I’m not sure when it’s coming out, but we’ll see. So that’s what we’ve got going. Well, Anthony, again, last question. If people want to hear more about what you’re doing or connect with you or see anything that you’re, you know, I know you’re writing articles and that, where would they look and reach out to you?

Yeah, you can go to my website. For my firm, it’s TeamDeJoy.com. I’m also very active on LinkedIn, regularly posting on there and engaging with stuff relative to my profession, but the profession overall. I think it’s important to be a voice in the sphere for CPAs and accountants. That’s why I appreciate you, and we have a lot of other great people speaking on here. I’m trying to contribute the best thought leadership I can in that regard, whether that’s practice management, professional management, obviously, such as we talked about today, but some of those other issues too. You can email me directly or we include my email in the description, but I have a monthly newsletter, if anyone’s interested in subscribing to that, I typically just give my thoughts on what I’ve seen over the last month, something I’m dealing with in my profession, and then try and link to some thought leadership that I put together recently. Just trying to keep people aware of things, keep conversations going. It’s easy to get bogged down in what we’re doing day to day, but it’s important to have these bigger conversations overall because I think we serve a very important role in society. I like the title, The Unique CPA, because that’s what we all are, and it’s important that we do serve that role. It’s important that we talk about succession planning for our clients, but also for ourselves and our professions. Because it’s an important role we serve and an important role we need to serve for generations. Let’s do what we can to set people up for long-term success in our society overall.

Nice. I agree completely.