Winning in Retirement

Small Business Founders

• Akers Financial Group

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Brian Akers and Alex Monk discuss the challenges and strategies for small business founders on their radio podcast. They emphasize the importance of planning, delegation, and balancing personal and professional life. Brian shares his experience of starting a business 35 years ago and the significance of having a well-structured business plan. They highlight the need for founders to treat their businesses as professional entities, including having separate business bank accounts and proper tax structuring. The conversation also touches on the value of financial advisors in guiding business owners and the importance of exit planning for future financial security.

Unknown:

The following is a pre recorded show, welcome to winning in retirement with your host, Brian AKERS, Certified Financial Planner, professional and founder of AKERS Financial Group, now helping you win in your retirement. Here's Brian AKERS, welcome

BRIAN AKERS:

to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS, president and founder of AKERS Financial Group, and we welcome you to our radio podcast. You can always go to our website, at AKERS financial group.com check out our radio podcast, podcast tab right there. You can listen through the website or at any podcast, any available podcast area that you have. Today, we have a special guest, not really, I think I'm special. You are special. And the specialness is Alex monk. Alex monk, Certified Financial Planner, practitioner from AKERS Financial Group. He's here today to talk about one of our favorite subjects. Good morning, Alex. Morning. Brian, glad to be here. I'm glad you're glad to be here. I know we love small business owners, and so we want to create a show. We're calling it small business

Alex Monk:

founders, entrepreneurs, that's, that's a big word. Yeah, we do numbers, so we don't try to spell those type of words. Say that big word again, entrepreneur, I can't say it more than three times, so let's just move on.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah. So the neat thing is this, the show is this small business founders, and what happens is, when you, when you start a business, and you really get it grounded, and you have a foundation is ready to roll and doing well and growing, you become that founder. And sometimes you don't think yourself as a founder until you're more well established. But a founder is someone who's battled, gave everything they had to have a small business, and now the small business is rooted and established and truly founded and ready to soar. So today's show is going to be about good things, bad things, things to think about what to do, encouraging all kinds of things.

Alex Monk:

Like Ask the Expert, the founder that I'm talking to you like you're one of the ones that have made it so like this is a great show for you.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, it's exciting for me, because AKERS Financial Group has been around almost 20 years. I started my first company 35 years ago, and then working that through my career, I believe advisors are small business owners, because we take care of clients no matter where we are when it comes to advisors, because you got to really work with the client and connect with the client, and so much so that you can't really sit back and wait like a corporate employee might own certain things,

Alex Monk:

no like, and you have to be able to take the call whenever. And you know, small business owners understand that there's no set schedule. There's like, if this needs to happen, then today. That's my

BRIAN AKERS:

job, correct, though. So when we're talking about small business founders, let's just understand that it's scary to start. I mean the day, the day that you say I'm all in, the day that you like, for me, I decided to go all in, and what all in meant was quitting a job. It also meant that I got a phone call from my father in law asking me, What are you doing? Because I was only married a couple months when I had the first but I had built a financial plan and written it down, and I had all the ideas written down what, what to do and how to do it.

Alex Monk:

I think you're rare in that, like you're very focused in this business, like all in business,

BRIAN AKERS:

and I've been focused on that. And that's, I think, one of the keys of being a founder, becoming a founder, and not just a small hustle. Oh, I'll try that, or do that, is planning. So my successful clients that have gone from idea to full business to large business and selling them and all kinds of things around the area. Those people are excited, and we talk, and then they go and do the work. They do the business plan, the five the five year pro forma. We build a team of accountants, insurance agents, and we put this all together, get lawyers build it up, so that we can get the company rolling, and so that they can go do what they love, and then what we do as advisors, we're part of that team. We're part of that group that helps them achieve their goals by being a sounding board, somebody that implements their thoughts. And then we also help them balance their life. That is something that's extremely important.

Alex Monk:

Yes, so like in our business, there's the time value of money, right? Present Value, all these complicated calculations. But I can't tell you what a you know, how do you value your own time? And I think for business owners, that's where they start to get into that muddied water, and a lot of times you're really good at doing your business, so we want to make sure that our side, or the financial side, is set up so that you can grow you can roll ahead and not be bogged down by stuff that might not make you comfortable,

BRIAN AKERS:

because what happens is you are. Developing a skill, or maybe your whole life, you've developed a skill that you know you're good at, and there comes a point of, are you person that's going to work for somebody, or do you need to work for yourself? Is this something that you have you can't, I can't do double negatives, but you can't not do it. You know. You can't like it. Can't. Basically, if someone tells you know that you don't even hear it, you just keep going. It's like, if you didn't do it, it wouldn't be you. It's that's sort of the drive that founders have.

Alex Monk:

Yeah, it's like, you can't see and for no other there's no other thing for me, like, I can't untie my life from what I do, right? And I love that, but I'm rare.

BRIAN AKERS:

I find it harder for founders to retire than maybe even starting their business, because of the fact of the business is who they are. But many founders have found a wonderful time the last few years of exit plan. The magic word called multiple the magic word called, hey, I'd like to buy, not me, but we, somebody would like to buy your business. And then you listen to it for the first time, and then all sudden, wow, I might do this. That's a big number, right? And so the idea of small business founders becomes medium business, large business. You never know where it's going to go. Now, building that plan is a key, key piece to start. Now, a lot of times people want to get rich quick or get rich easy. We're here to tell you, small business is not easy. It's not quick. It won't be fast, it won't be anything like that and terrifying. There will be moments when you sort of say, What am I doing? There'll be moments when you have no support from banks or anybody else that want to invest in you. They'll invest in you after you're successful. They can't wait then. But when you're when you're rare, you're just getting started. There is issues to get started that you really got to be ready for. And I believe the first thing you got to think about is plan. What is your plan? Yeah, do you have an idea? Would your does the math work? Mean, your concept doesn't math work. What are you going to do? Was it going to cost you how much cash you had to burn through to be able to survive? What kind of situation can you? Can you borrow if you need to, how much time? Where do you what's your burn your burn rate is what we call it. Burn rate is how much cash, how much cash and debt can you do you have to before you have to make that first dollar type, yeah? Or, like,

Alex Monk:

when you have to start selling stuff, or, How long are you viable? Where are you going to take money from if you need it? Yep. So, because you're betting on yourself, and I think that's one of the best investments that you can make.

BRIAN AKERS:

For some people, it's wonderful. There are some people who shouldn't do it, right? But it's

Alex Monk:

like a small cap or a risky stock stock, right? It's a startup. And if you sit down with somebody like us that have seen some of these things, talk it out like, it gets a little bit easier knowing some of the stuff you don't know.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well. The hard part is some some people have small businesses they've done really well, and they know one thing, and then they don't really understand, or want to understand, that if we had a partner or team advisors come alongside, they're not there to hurt you or hinder you, there to add value, add fuel to your fire, to help you go from where you are to where you need to be. And that is planning added into your your thoughts and what you want to do. We want you to do what is best. So you're making the money. Let somebody else count what you're doing. You make the money. Let's see what's the best tax strategy. You make the money. Let's get the lawyers to sign up, get contracts and everything in line.

Alex Monk:

And there's value to that. Like, Oh, absolutely. I know you might have to pay us, but I tell people all the time, if I don't more than deliver what you pay me, then I'm not doing my job, and you need to fire me.

BRIAN AKERS:

We have to add value, period. We have to add so much value you don't even notice our

Alex Monk:

costs. I have to cover that up and then some if

BRIAN AKERS:

all they're worried about is our costs and they don't see any value, that's not a good idea, and that's not what we want with anybody?

Alex Monk:

No, because if that's what we're fighting over, then we're losing the big picture, right? Because I want you to make as much money as you can. That helps both of us,

BRIAN AKERS:

all right? So I'm not sure if you're driving where you're at right now listening to the show, and you're thinking, Oh, small business owner, that's not me. The mindset is a really good thing. I believe that small business owners, they know it's all relies on them. I think our show called winning in retirement, we teach you and try to make sure you understand that it's all up to you when it comes to making this making your money last a lifetime, making sure you have the money for your retirement, we can't trust you. Can't counter company or other things become

Alex Monk:

a small business when you retire. Oh, yeah, because gotta live off once you create it, yeah, you have to make sure it lasts. So that's that mindset, and a lot of people get scared at retirement. Well, imagine doing that at 20 with nothing. So. All that's, yeah, for me, that's the scary thing. It was

BRIAN AKERS:

scary. It was scary for small businesses, you get all excited, and then there's that day you quit that job, and you, you get started, and then there's about two or three months in, and then you look at yourself, and you go, Oh, my this really, am I really ready to go all in? And then you there's a moment when you figure out what all in means, and all in is almost thinking about it. 24/7, when you think of something, you got to write it down. When you go in to do stuff, there is no time limit. You might not be home at five. You might be home at 930. 10pm, 12. It

Alex Monk:

doesn't really matter where you are, though you're never going to turn that off? Like,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, oh, there comes a time when you learn how to do it and how to balance it, and how to balance the life of it, but the small business has to have that running start. It just doesn't open up first day and it's a winner, and everything's great. No, it

Alex Monk:

won't be easy, because you're gonna hit different bottlenecks along the way. As you grow, as you add employees, you

BRIAN AKERS:

add, I call them brick walls because you run into a brick wall and like, oh man, okay to get past a brick wall, I gotta go over it or through it. I need to have more staff, more people. I have to decide rules, which direction am I going, or is that wall a sign that I really need to make a right hand turn and pick something else. So my advice is this, understand who you are. Understand if you're a small business founder, financial advisors are here to support you, help you reach every goal that you have, help you from growing that business to when you might even want to exit. Ultimately, financial advisors truly are there to help you through all of these things. The hardest part that I've seen for all my small business owners, is is basically breathing enough, taking enough moments in time to think, to think about what they want, the why behind what they're doing with the business, the why behind the money, all of that. So at AKERS Financial Group, we are local, we're independent. We don't report to a big company on Wall Street. We report to you. We do have offices in Lutherville and farstow. We meet clients all around the area, all around the mid Atlantic region, clients all around the country and even a few around the world. It's so easy to begin winning in retirement. Just give us a call and schedule your free meeting with one of our team of advisors call 833 when retire. That's 830 3w, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule a free in person meeting. Go to akersfant group.com or call us at 833-946-7384. To start planning for your retirement. Now. You made it. What's next? We'll talk about this when we return.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded Show. Welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS. Welcome

BRIAN AKERS:

back to winning in retirement. I am Brian AKERS. Here with me today is Alex monk. We are financial advisors, Certified Financial Planner practitioners from AKERS Financial Group. Welcome you to our second quarter of our show. Show is called small business founders. We love working with our small business owners and helping them at whatever stage they are in, or if even they've gotten to the stage of it's time to exit and fully begin winning in retirement. The exciting part is being the advisor and helping them along the way,

Alex Monk:

yeah, and seeing just like, the things that people can do when they are in their right space or zone, like, it's incredible,

BRIAN AKERS:

right? So this second quarter is you made it. What's next? We'll talk about that when we return, right? Well, we returned, and we're talking about you made it. What's next? Making it, let's, let's define making it like the first year. What is making it feel like a first year? I gotta tell stories. Can I tell a story? Yeah, tell me the story. All right. So there's the word beginning to make it. That means you have a good month. And then you go to the meat the meat farm, you buy enough meat to put in your freezer so you feed your family for two or three months. In case you don't make any money the next two or three months,

Alex Monk:

I have a very large, deep freeze in my garage, right? So I

BRIAN AKERS:

feel like that's a version of beginning to make it when you can refill your coffers in the freezer. Was something I did. I made sure there was meat in the freezer so that I had this fundamental piece of me saying, all right, at least we're going to eat by putting everything else into this. But there's something in the freezer. So that was good,

Alex Monk:

yeah, and it's finding those, like, those stress points, like, when I had my first kid, you know, you're seeing all these people and they're coming over and they're like, Oh, how much time off do you have? And I'm like, Well, we'll see how hungry I get, yeah, right. Like, we're okay for another week or two. But that. Part of the plan. All

BRIAN AKERS:

right, so I went to Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech, I was finance major in one of our projects. It was financial planning. Was a course in my financial plan, I wrote down lots of things about planning. One of it was starting my own company. One was a wedding date. There's all kinds of stuff in that plan, but I enjoy the fact that I did the plan. And that plan was starting that business. When I had my talk with my father in law, I mentioned last quarter where he called and said, Brian, what are you doing? I said, it's time, that was my answer,

Alex Monk:

well, and it's time, it sounds like a pipe dream, right? Because he worked for a

BRIAN AKERS:

company his whole life, correct? And, and, and he talked about opening his own garage zone shop, you know, things like that, but I wanted to do it, and I it was time. I didn't have kids and we had a cat, we didn't have a dog to feed, and it was, it was my wife. My wife did a wonderful job of making enough money for us to survive. Why I gave 100% of what I made back into the company for years,

Alex Monk:

for years, years and years like and I've only been here for 15 years. So just to see how it's grown since then, and like, all the different things you have to go through, like, from just watching you, like, I think this is the show that everybody with a small business should be listening to. Like, yeah,

BRIAN AKERS:

well, I get excited for small business owners. I love our meetings. I love like, trying to teach them about business setup and finances and understanding what the accountants saying. Sometimes I'll go with a business owner to account and to interpret what the accountant said, because the accountants are putting their head against the wall, because the business owner is is might be a good they speak different languages. One guy might be a master electrician. He can do He can do anything. The hard part is the books. He doesn't understand what's on the piece of paper. He feels like he's making money, but doesn't know for sure. He thinks he's made it, but not, not doesn't know for sure, but what's next, and my next is this, as we're making it, we need to do some fundamental financial planning. The basics anybody does when it comes to financial planning is Bill your coffers up, build some personal savings, business savings, get some money set aside. Make sure you have a good accountant to help us make sure doing things the right way. I believe, if you want to be in business long term, do it the right way. All

Alex Monk:

right. Brian, so I'm gonna ask you a question. I'm around the business owner is like, okay, these guys are on the radio, like, what is your role? Like? Explain to me what your financial advisor. Role is for a business. He's like, I'm cranking away. I'm on a job, driving to a job on a Saturday. What are you going to do to deliver value?

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, my thing is this, you drive to the job on Saturday, you work. Let me take whatever your dreams and goals are. You tell me what they are. Let's make them happen in a financial planning way. You don't have to do the work. Let me do the work for you. What I mean by that? Let's say the first thing is this, you have nothing saved for your retirement. You don't know where to start. You're worried about starting a 401, K plan for your all your employees, because they're not gonna participate. And you have some money to put away, but not a lot. And so I tell you, Hey, let's do a Roth IRA. Let's do an IRA backdoor IRA, because you're showing too much income. But we can slide money out, out to an IRA and back to a raw let's get started with 16,000 a year. Can you afford that? Then we start

Alex Monk:

there. How to Invest you help like so you're going to take all that off their plate, but that's going to take some trust, right? So,

BRIAN AKERS:

and then we implement it with your office manager, HR, person. We guide them. We do the simple plan. We do the Maryland savings plan. We try to get the employees. So then the employer says, Hey, I'm offering employee benefits now, but, but all he's doing is said, you do it, Brian, your company, go come in and do that for me. So the basic starts that way. The thing is that when you think about the owner, and you meet with the owner, I enjoy that part in that they are focused, and when they're doing extremely well, they're not thinking about the other things. A lot of times, they don't have wills, they don't have a Buy Sell agreement. They don't have life insurance, in case something horrible happened, they usually start at their family. They they want things. They want the nice truck. They want up the car. They like to have a vacation home, a boat, you know something that's that, that things spend their money on, but it's all things that tie into success. When I have to say to them, well, we have to have a balance here. We need to make sure we're throwing money to your future, because you don't want to do this forever. So we gotta have some money ready for that.

Alex Monk:

And then, you know, they invest in them their future selves, which is sometimes a tough concept for the business owner, I find, oh, well, so I'm not worried about my future self, right? My business is fine. I'll sell it. Or look what I did, like I created it from nothing, which I get that mentality like you, you took the risk,

BRIAN AKERS:

but it's all fun until you want to give it to your kid, and you know they're not going to pay you, and then all of a sudden, you tell me that you're trying to fight, you're trying to find them, find the money to retire on, and you never save money. One of the fundamental things I see is this, also on a business has five years, seven years of growing, no income, but they don't do any financial planning during that. Then also, they have a lot of money. They bumped into the 30% brackets. It's too late. Also, they want to start. And this, it is too late. Eight to do some of the really cool earlier on stuff. Yeah, but the earlier we start, we can get some money, tax free, get it Roth and get it going. Rothify it.

Alex Monk:

There's awesome stuff you can do. Like, I love one of your stories when you went into business and you had one of your worst years ever. You're like, I'm gonna convert everything to Ross. And I did. What a great idea. Like, that's perfect,

BRIAN AKERS:

especially if you have a major investment, you get a major negative. Then you can do that with the tax law and the permanent tax law under OB, 123, 3b, and an, a, o, but you actually get the idea to write things off. The tax brackets are more permanent. Now there's a lot of options inside the tax laws that give us opportunity,

Alex Monk:

especially for a business owner out there, and this is the time, like, under this tax code, if you haven't, like, you've made it now, but if you haven't made it official, like, are you an l like, what's your tax structure? What's your business structure? Do you know the answer to that? Oh, you even have a separate bank account?

BRIAN AKERS:

Oh, that's a very important piece, because we see people, they'll say, Is this a business or a hobby? One way to tell is, hey, where does the money go to? Oh, it goes on my personal checking Well, I don't believe you're a business yet, you need to have a business checking account, put the money in there and get the money separated. So then we can then have almost like a wall between the two. Then we can talk about your business structure and really what you want to do tax wise.

Alex Monk:

And it for me, like I've seen people that have been self employed, like their whole lives, and they go to the to retire, and like you said, how do you uncouple all those things? Because the wall was short or the lines were blurred, so they're like personal expenses, you know? Well,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, well that that might be like a mom and pop type business, where they start out the ones hustling hard and the other one's sort of keeping score a little bit, and they're just, they take whatever they need out of the bucket, and there's no mix. And so it becomes tax time. It's a mess. Then they saw this. Forget it. We'll skip taxes this year. So we've had that where we had to go back and bring our accounting company in and we fixed those kind of things. I believe business owners are creators. They're creating money, they're creating wealth, and they're building building value for themselves, for their clients, for their employees. Over time, the idea is to create wealth for themself and to build it over time. It has to begin with a proper structure in their in their corporation, their LLC, whatever setup they want to try to go with, with based on an accountants advice for tax advantage, you by separating it having an accountant in the team, you then can have decisions on healthcare, decision on retirement, when to add benefits, and then, once you got benefits, what to offer, how to retain certain people, not other people, how to make sure you're benefiting the employees you want long term, and then you grow with it. And then there's all there's always a brick wall, always the next decision. If someone is a solo company, and it's definitely a consultant only, we have a bunch of these, and we do solo for one case. There's a lot of great ideas. Solo for 1k you can put a lot of money,

Alex Monk:

a lot of money, and it's like, relatively simple. It's these kind of it's

BRIAN AKERS:

so simple to call it solo. The simple they get, they call it simple. It's simple is actually not simple. It's harder than, yeah, I think the Solo is simpler than the simple, yeah, I do too, which is, yeah, we're talking about simple. Ira solo, I solo 401, KS, all of these things have to actually be done before the end of the year. If you're trying to do post year retirement planning, the only option is something called a SEP self employed pension, where you can only take 25% of your net profit. You can find your IRAs, things like that after it, but during the years when you got to fund the qualified plans, and then there's ideas of non qualified plans. There's so many ideas we got to talk about. We love it when people go all in in their business, but I need you to go all in in your finances and have help. Don't believe that you're going to be an expert at everything. We want you to be successful at what you do. We would love to be the one being the advisor, guiding you on the other side, right? Coaching? Yeah, and the coaching part is truly coaching in that you are the professional, just like a coach and a baseball team or football team, you're the professional. We're going to watch and we're going to tweak, and we're going to tweak because we've been there. We know what we're looking for. We know how do we know where you're going? Even if you might not know where you're going,

Alex Monk:

it's like a deal. Professional Golfers like these guys are insane athletes. They're freaks, right? Yeah, they still have a caddy. Of course, I know they have a business coach

BRIAN AKERS:

gives them all the data they need to make every shot perfect. But without that caddy, they would be second guessing themselves, and they'd have to spend a lot of time on the details, logistics and slow down their progression to be super and that's our goal, right? Absolutely, because we want you to retire. That retirement is going to be when you get your time back as a small business owner. That could be an exit that. Could be a sale. That could be a slow sale, a slow withdrawal, as you give it to not give it, but slowly sell to people that you know and work with. Now let us help you. Let us, let us talk with you about how to make sure that you win in your retirement years. So go ahead and give us a call at 833 win retire. That's 830 3w, I N, R e, t i r e, and we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule your free in person meeting. Go to AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833-946-7384, to start planning for your retirement. Now, are you really treating your business as a business? We'll talk about this when we return.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded show, welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS,

BRIAN AKERS:

indeed. Welcome back to winning in retirement. I am Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group. I'm a certified financial planner practitioner, and here with me today, Certified Financial Planner, practitioner. Alex monk, welcome to the second half,

Alex Monk:

Brian. You're one of my favorite entrepreneurs, and I didn't know you couldn't say that word, so I'm gonna try to draw it out of you today. You want me to say that the word, I do not I like that. People listen to this show, so you keep that again. You say,

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, that's a big word there, and it's, I love the word founder. Founder works well. That's what we call this show small business founders. We're trying to coach you along and understanding that we feel your pain. We want you to understand that there is a bright future for you, that hard work will come through, that hard work will matter. You will reach your goals, but you have to do some of the things you don't want to do, and some of that you can actually delegate. You can delegate to advisors, financial advisors who know what you're what you're talking about. It's not just running a report or running a little graph. It's talking about what's going on, looking at your tax returns, talking to whoever you have on your team so far,

Alex Monk:

and seeing like, just letting people know what your options are, because they really, they change a whole lot. When you become a small business owner like you can do so many different things, and it's really what you're trying to do, and figuring out what you want it to be in the end. So it's, there's no there's nothing pre printed that tells you small business? Oh

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, I got so much stuff I want to say, let me start with this. It's a when you're when you've done well enough where one day you say it's a business. Now, if you're the one doing the hustle and the work and the project and like, let's say you're a carpenter. You're the one doing all the work on the job. There comes a point where you have to decide what's going on here. I love doing the work, but I need to get work so sudden, you're working nights and weekends, getting the work so you can work all week, and then what's happening is the follow up on getting the work and getting them paid, and what matters money wise, you realize I can start to hire people who can do the work for me,

Alex Monk:

but you have to hit that. I'm so busy and I'm having enough success that I'm willing to take the risk to add in another person

BRIAN AKERS:

and son. That's sometimes when businesses fail is right, when they can't balance it, they can't build properly, they're not getting paid for the work they did because they didn't treat it as a business where they have contracts and they basically confirm estimates with the with internet and texting and all these apps and the ability to communicate through QuickBooks, all kinds of billing. There's a lot of ways for small businesses to be to jump into it and be very professional from day one, which is wonderful, yeah. And as they get up and rolling and they're building the cash, building the money, the problem would be is, it's not fun paying taxes, but when the business is a business, the way you structured a business will dictate how you pay your taxes, right? Some of the mistakes I've seen is some people say, Oh, I'm not paying tax, so they don't want to show income, so they might buy another large truck at the end of the year, and all sudden, they show zero income, which gives them zero paid in Social Security, which gives them, when they're older, zero Social Security.

Alex Monk:

Now they want to buy a house that they don't have all the cash for, and the bank says, Sure, just give me three years of tax returns. And now it says you have nothing.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, well, we had a couple of these where they go so far in and they had taken so many deductions that there really isn't any any flow that's showing up through a tax return. And so they're paying zero taxes during those phases. Then later on, they're at the highest brackets. There's no lifetime of tax calculation. I really didn't want to get too deep into this. But the idea is this, treating your business as a business is something you need to do. That means you should schedule time as the owner of a small business to think about the business, plan the business, do the business. If you're doing all the work and all the business, you need to plan. Yeah. The second piece of advice that I think is great for small business owners is, when you're planning your business plan your personal life, put a schedule out there. Of in three months, my family's going away, it's scheduled. It's paid for, because I can tell you, as a small business owner, you're always going to have more work than you can ever dream, and you're always going to have a reason not to go on that trip. Always Not, not going to have time, unless you make time for the balance of life. And the reason, oh, good, that's the reason why you're working right, right well. And

Alex Monk:

if you burn out and don't hit the reset or take the time to make sure you're putting your energy in the right place. Like you said, think about the business. Be intentional, right? You're not running at full speed. Yeah, you're probably 60, 70% of what you could

BRIAN AKERS:

be. Oh, me, is wear out, and when you wear out, that's a sign that maybe you need to slow down a little bit. Sometimes, when we're too busy, that means we're might be selling things too cheaply. It also might mean we are doing things we don't enjoy to do. And so in business, you got to structure and restructure what your product line is, whatever you're doing, what kind of work you take. There's so much this is one

Alex Monk:

of my flag I talked about this for hours like and just rabbit hole over everything that comes to our mind.

BRIAN AKERS:

But the fun thing is, when the when the business owner that's on fire comes in to talk to you, right? And I have friends of mine that, ever since I was younger, we've talked, they've built some great businesses, and it's like sort of in a lifetime with them building their businesses, because that's been my same lifetime, right? And so we're all at this phase, and the phase is, what's next, what's Exit Planning? What? How do you get this ready? And then I tried my best to explain fundamentals of planning. The what's neat is some of my younger guys that we started together 30 years ago, we're doing multi million dollar retirement accounts because they did a little bit and we invested it, we let it grow. That's a wonderful problem, right? Then, thing is like, well, I can live off of that. I can live off the business. It's like, we have lots of choices. What do you want to do? He goes, Well, let me figure that out. I said, Well, let's get everything and if everything ready, and everything ready to me for a business owner is keeping the business or not, if you want to sell it to whom, who's the next person to take over? Let's figure these things out. Let's bring attorneys and accountants and get it, get it the right way. It's exciting to do this, but when you make your business a business, it can do a lot for you,

Alex Monk:

right? And it's an asset. You want to know how to use that asset that you have. I think what you said earlier is these people, the small business owners, they are hyper alert on taxes, because your employees, they get a paycheck, and I don't know what they all look at, but it's either what's in their bank account, maybe, yeah, whatever hits the bank that pay. So that number versus what you send out during payroll as the employer to taxes. It's grossly different.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, and so when you're paying the tax as a business owner, you start paying attention, right? Because you're doing a quarterly payment, you're doing that, oh, I got 24 hours to get a payment in, or whatever level you are with employees, you have a certain due date and forms that all get to be filled out.

Alex Monk:

And then did you, as the business owner, make sure you worried about your taxes?

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, because if, like, I have flow throughs. And so flow throughs hit that bottom line. And so there's a I tried, tried to make sure I got it right. And you know, of course, I like planning right, so I do like to make it work out close I can. But generally, these are all part making a business. A business is understanding your taxes a little bit, or at least having people that do it the right way for you teach you what to look for, so you can know that you're doing well

Alex Monk:

the options right? Like you have all these options, right? We've done all of them, and we can show you how they work, and then you decide what's the best fit for you. Like we, we're not here to make those decisions for you. We want you to know what your options are, the different ways you can do it, and then how you get there. Because at the end of the day, my goal isn't the people's business, it's the people,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, helping them reach their goals, right, right? And that's, that's a very important thing i i was, we're telling about this positive side of business, the sad part in small businesses, most of them fail, and most of them fail. One of the one of the things I saw a person fail was an electrician who would work night and day, and he would never Bill someone. He never knew about the inventory in his truck. Never knew, and then all sudden, he was mad at his wife and everything because she wasn't billing, but there was no communication from him to her about what the billing should be. And so I tried having a few hours meeting of communication, getting someone, an accountant, in to help us, help them understand how to Bill. And the hardest part is they never figured out how to. Communicate, and so they had to shut down the business to go work for someone else. I think we're I think we're an incredible economy when it comes to trades and incredible amount of opportunity out there for people who want to take that risk, who want to do a business, I like them to do it right. Have have insurance, have Liability Insurance, LLC, have it set up, maybe S corp, or some version. Get started, you know, get yourself to a place where it's a business that's ready to roll, and then get going and do it right? It's that

Alex Monk:

foundation, right? That founders part. It's not something you found and lost and found. It's something you built. It's the foundation to your business. And having that framework, it not only protects the business, but it protects you and your family too, because you can get yourself in a mess,

BRIAN AKERS:

Oh, absolutely, very quickly, and you get by, getting overextended by, oh, I need this. So you charge it and I'll send you. Run out that credit card, you get another credit card, you mortgage your house, whatever it's taken to get you there. There's lots of thoughts that go through people's minds that, oh, I need to do a one. I need to do this to make more money. And the problem is, they might have a fundamental problem that they're not charging enough, or they're not billing, they're not taking a retainer of money. It might be how they're doing the business. On the money side, they some people love the work so much they almost do it for free. Or they are

Alex Monk:

not comfortable asking for their value. That's a very difficult thing to do.

BRIAN AKERS:

Oh, yeah, if you ever ask somebody you hire, what do you want? What's the pay? I think whatever you want to

Alex Monk:

pay me. Well, they teach it at attorney school where you get that? JD, I think a whole year that is asking for money. Yeah, how to bill

BRIAN AKERS:

every six minutes? Yeah. So we're talking about make it a business. We're trying to do is give you the motivation, the ideas to have an advisor, have a team of people help you treat it like a business, so that you go from, you know, doing well, to doing extremely well, and knowing that yeah, and knowing that you're okay today and the future now your family's Okay, and it's a wonderful place to be, but it's work. None of it's easy, but it can be done, and with help, we try to make it easier on we had one guy pull his truck up every two weeks brought checks. Remember that for

Alex Monk:

years, right? And so that guy, yeah, now retired the beach, but he mails the checks in. Absolutely.

BRIAN AKERS:

That was a wonderful story. I'm sorry we had to cut things off so quickly, but that story is a wonderful story of a person would drive to our office to bring checks every two weeks because he was ready. He wanted to get to retirement someday, and he knew if he didn't put that money forward, he would never have it there. And so Alex and I know early in your career, we just you met with him whenever he popped in, and got things ready. And then now he's retired to beaches, beautiful story that's winning in retirement. Winning in retirement, what you do is you give us a call at AKERS Financial Group to set up a free meeting to talk about how to help you as a small business founder or a person working for some executive somewhere else or working somewhere you know, all kinds of jobs out there once. What do you do next? Well, give us a call at 833, when retire, schedule your free in person meeting with one of our team of advisors, and we look forward to meeting you. What is more important to you? Money or time? Let's talk about that. When we return,

Unknown:

you're listening to a pre recorded Show. Welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again, here's Brian AKERS,

BRIAN AKERS:

welcome back to winning in retirement. Welcome to the fourth quarter of winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS, and here with me today is Alex monk. We're both certified financial planner practitioners from AKERS Financial Group, AKERS Financial Group, we have our website. It just happens to be AKERS financial group.com you go there. You check out our radio podcast, you check out our company right on the web, right there, right on the line, right on and you can actually go there, scroll down a little bit, and request your free meeting to talk with one of our team of advisors at any time you like, so we can sit down and go over your situation. Today's show has been called small business founders, where we're talking about small business owners and things they need to think about. I guess we should have called this make your business a business show of the founders. We're excited for you entrepreneurs. I'm excited for the founders, the ones that are doing well and working hard. Let's keep some of that money for yourself. So it's like freedom, right? Yeah, we're talking about this fourth quarter is about freedom. This fourth quarter's topic is, what's more important to you, money or time? And that's all about freedom, right?

Alex Monk:

Well, yeah, and that's tough, right? Because, if somebody, it's like Jeff Bezos saying, you know, money's not important to me, like, that's like, tough, you know, maybe. He's a little jaded, but at a certain point, a successful business owner is going to be like, what are things that I can't get back, that money doesn't get and time is really that thing for me. I mean, I think that's where you start to delegate. You have to put an expense to that time you get back, like in salaries, or, you know, whatever it might be that you're spending, to get some of your time back as a business owner. But time is the one thing that is limited for everyone.

BRIAN AKERS:

We don't get more of it, of time, right? We can't buy more of it. You can't extend your life. You can't add more hours to the day. There's only so much,

Alex Monk:

but you can use your money to free up some of your time,

BRIAN AKERS:

yes. And so you could call that buying time or buying the freedom for your time, right? And so what happens is, when you start businesses and you're hustling, working hard, you you don't really value the time, because you're just trying to make some money. And as you make money and you reach your goals and do certain things, there's this balance of, do I want to commit more of my time to make money, or do I want my time for something else? And that's part of the reason that you start to delegate, you start to hire, you start to have other people do things you might refine your business every five to 10 years, which I think you got to do anyway. If

Alex Monk:

you're growing after five years, at any growth rate, you've doubled, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, I think, I think any business, restaurants, some small business owners, anything every 10 years is a whole new thing. It's a whole redo. It's a whole reset. And you got to rethink the next 10 years, and you got to be ready to make big changes to compete and be at the highest level that next five to 10

Alex Monk:

years, right? Because if you're not planning to be where you want to, like, I tell people when I first meet them, like, figure out what you want at the end and we can reverse engineer it. I can't tell you what you want the end result to be, so that that's the hardest part, right? And our job is to show people what options they have and make sure they're doing it right, so that at the end of the day, they have the ability to say, financially, I'm okay, or today, I need to work for that. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I have to skip this. I

BRIAN AKERS:

was trying to explain it to someone the other day, and this is going to sound terrible, but so let's say you go to Disney World. Now, is it money or time that's valuable? Now, if you want to go to Disney World and ride all the rides in one day, Disney figured it out that people who want to do it all in one day, it's a question of how much money do you want to pay for that? And so they give you the opportunity to pay extra to be able to ride all the rides in one day. And so if you're worried about time, you don't need to have seven days there. You can maybe have four or five and hit most things. But the hard part is they pay, they charge for it, for the extra

Alex Monk:

Right? Like you're, you're not getting time for free, like, if you want to go, I don't know, away for the weekend, but your grass isn't cut, yep, then somebody's got to cut the grass, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

I want to coach basketball as my hobby, as my thing that I do for people. I enjoy it, and so for many years, I had to hire someone very early in my career to answer the phone when I wanted to be coaching, so I could have a balance, and then we could work from there. And then, as I build out the business over the years, and all the different ways the time value of money is very good when it comes to investing. What's also very good and comes to running your business. If you think about your high value time, where, where is like Brian's most valuable in his company, or where you might be in your company? Where are you most valuable? Where do you or where are you able to add the most value you value? You need to do that if you can hire someone to make sure everything runs smoothly in your office, someone to run the book, someone to run like, simple things, you know, like,

Alex Monk:

none of it's going to be perfect. Like, employees, like, I mean, I've been with you for a while. I've seen tons of different people come and go, right? There's

BRIAN AKERS:

great employees that you love to keep forever, as long as it's a good tie in. And then there's ones that need to learn how to become great employees. And now there's me, well, then there's ones that became great employees after a few talks,

Alex Monk:

I would say, like, for me, time is the thing. And I've been in this, like, an insanely good scenario where I get to watch you, so it's it's been really good to see, like, all the growing pains and things from a business perspective, and the way that you deliver that to your clients is, like, one of the best things I've ever seen. And I'll never do anything different because of that.

BRIAN AKERS:

I think are you talking about? Yeah, the way

Alex Monk:

I treat clients, ways treat clients, and the way you treat your business, yeah? Well, because the plan like you don't do like you are the way you are at all times. And for me, that's important, like, it's a what you mean, you mean, what you say, right? It's

BRIAN AKERS:

not a sale. It's not a I'm trying to get you to buy. One thing I want a relationship is what that's me. I want a relationship. That relationship means I want to be your advisor. And my company is built to be your advisor. The people we hire, we go through this trying to get them to where they want to be the advisor. And we love when you call. We love to take care of you. We love to help. The hardest part is, Do you want an advisor. And I think business owners, a lot of times, we get going so fast we don't want an advisor, because you don't have time for advisor. And the real and the reality is it's the opposite. You need the advisor to have time, right? So I believe that relationships is what drives and if you do well, the most valuable thing to me is my employee and client. That's an asset, right? If my client keeps coming back, that is a steady flow of work. If you just sell and move on, I don't get it. I don't understand

Alex Monk:

it. Why, especially when you sell something to somebody that's like permanent,

BRIAN AKERS:

I believe financial planning is permanent. It's for today and tomorrow, and then tomorrow, we'll have a company here to help you work on that, because

Alex Monk:

your life's going to change, and you will still have needs financially, if they're just going to change, you

BRIAN AKERS:

know? And it changes every 510, years. Like a small business, you have to keep changing with the times, the ages. We don't stay perfectly healthy forever. We don't go at high speed forever. We don't have the same same goals each day. Things change. Financial Planning has to change with it. Your investment portfolio has to change with it. We need to sometimes look where you're going and help you get there and understand the risk so that you don't take too much risk where you can't get where you need to be. And that's a fun thing and a hard thing for some

Alex Monk:

people, and it's the decisions are tough. So I had a meeting with this, this guy the other day, and his wife, and she runs, like, the office the booking and he does, like, the major plumbing stuff, right? And they're crushing it now, but she's like, I'm gonna go back and get a job. And I said, Well, what does he do? Like you, like you may not be doing that work, but you are the reason he's able to do that work. Yeah? So identifying that for them, they were just like. They left that meeting. They were like, I maybe I'm not. Yeah, take that job. Who are you gonna hire?

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, I have a new client of she runs her business, and she has to stay late, so he got a job to work early, and then they have one kid, and so they're able to juggle the kid that way. They're able to see each other too sometimes, of course, but this phase of life worked very well with the ability for the small business owner to take to spend more time in the business, while the one that had that more consistent jobs as an income could stick there and got went to work earlier. So that was a good blended compromise, if we're a small business owner for the logistics of day to day,

Alex Monk:

and the big thing is the support, right? Like, we can't do any of this by ourselves. Like, if you're trying to do it all by yourself, then you're either not doing it all right,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, you can't do everything by yourself. And I love delegating. I enjoy having staff and people helping me and being part of a team to make it work. I love calling it teams of advisors, because i i We all work together. I love teaching and training and coaching, my my players, you know, like my team, my advisors, my para planners, our admin staff, and getting them to see that vision of what we do for our people, for our clients. And then I want the clients to then understand, hey, they do care for us. We will listen to some of the things we're gonna we're gonna give Brian a hard time or his advisor a hard time about what's the right thing for them,

Alex Monk:

yeah, but, like, that's fine. That's normal, right? We have discussions over what's the right answer, yeah, because that's ultimately, at the end of the day, it's your choice, what you do with your money. I just want you to feel comfortable and make sure it's the right thing. You paid at least amount of taxes,

BRIAN AKERS:

all right, the hardest thing I got to close the show on is this, as a founder, there comes a day when you go to a speech, and the speech is about what to do, and when you finally get rid of the founder, and I found myself in one of those speeches two years ago, and I'm listening, and they basically going over the founder has their way of doing things, and they don't want any other way. And I agree with that, because it worked that years ago, because it works now. The hard part is, as a founder, when you're delegating and giving executive function to other people, they got to get it, and they got to be great at it. And that's that's some of the hardest things to do, but it's worth it for anybody that's um, at that phase in your business to try to seek that out. I. All right, so we've had a show about small business founders. I want you to understand we love helping our small businesses. We love helping that founder achieve their goals for them and their family. We talk legacy and winning in retirement, all these concepts. Some days I feel like we're always talking about employee benefits, but I wanted to have one show about we do this for a lot more different setups than just someone that's working on the regular job every day, you know.

Alex Monk:

And we also help get your employees benefits if you need help with that too. So that's

BRIAN AKERS:

what we covered today, and we look forward to meeting with you. We want you to win you in your retirement by taking advantage of the opportunity to begin planning with us at AKERS Financial Group to schedule your free meeting with one of our team of advisors. Go to our website at AKERS financial group.com scroll to the schedule meeting section and let us know you'd like to schedule your free meeting right there. That's AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833 when retired. That's 830 3w. I N, R e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule your free in person meeting with one of our team of advisors. Start planning for your retirement now. Go to AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833-946-7384, thank you for listening. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group, and we want you to be winning in retirement.

Unknown:

You've been listening to winning in retirement with your host, Brian AKERS of AKERS Financial Group. AKERS Financial Group offers securities through our kidios Capital an SIPC and FINRA member firm, advisory services are provided through archidios wealth. AKERS Financial Group and arcadios do not share any common ownership. Neither arcadios nor AKERS Financial Group provides tax or legal advice. Advice given on winning in retirement is general in nature, and one should seek further advice from their financial advisor, broker, attorney andor tax accountant before investing, be sure to read each prospectus carefully to understand all the risks associated with each investment. Examples and scenarios shared are meant to be for illustrative purposes only past performance is not indicative of future results.