Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#115 - Tax Made Simple: Vivify’s Mission to Empower Advisors and Clients
What if you could transform the tax service industry? In this episode, Logan Holman and Claire Gallant, co-founders of Vivify, share their journey from a chance meeting in Cincinnati to building a company that simplifies taxes for everyday taxpayers. Combining Logan's CPA expertise with Claire's wealth advisory background, they identified a gap for W-2 employees and 1099 contractors facing tax challenges.
Vivify specializes in working with the fee-only financial planning community and their clients, offering flat-fee, client-centered services like personalized tax scorecards, withholding assistance, and secure portals with video walkthroughs. By collaborating closely with wealth advisors and addressing the limitations of traditional tax software, Vivify is making tax season more efficient and effective for everyone involved. Tune in to learn how they’re reshaping personal finance and empowering taxpayers nationwide.
Social:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/loganholman/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairegallant/
https://www.usevivify.com/
Music in this episode was obtained from Bensound.
How's it going? Everyone, welcome back. This is the Only Fee Only podcast and, as always, we appreciate you being here. Hope you're having a great week and make it a great week.
Speaker 1:Today we are talking to Logan Holman and Claire Galop from Vivify. They are two people that are absolutely awesome that created their own tax firm to help the everyday taxpayer. We actually got to meet them in person at XYPN Live and I got the chance to talk to them before, but we just love what they're doing, so we wanted to have them on the podcast to share with everyone about how they're helping people that are everyday workers in America. Right, a lot of firms wanna work with the people that own real estate or the business owners or the complex tax situations, and they said you know what? We wanna work with W-2 employees and people that are 1099 and have more simple tax considerations, and there's a huge market out there, and so they are working with clients and financial advisors all over the country to make this happen. So, without further ado, we're going to let them explain what they do. Here is Claire and Logan on the Only Fee Only podcast.
Speaker 2:How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travello, I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles, and today we are so excited to have Claire and Logan on, both co-founders of Vivify. I'm really excited to have them share their journey and how they're helping financial advisors. So, claire and Logan, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you for having us. We're excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we just met recently at XY Planning Network Live and, for those who don't know who you are, you want to give a quick overview of who you are and how you're helping financial advisors.
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, yeah, I mean Brock is probably, maybe the reason, definitely the reason that we went to XYPN. So you guys already are like so helpful to us. So thanks for the invite as well.
Speaker 1:You bet.
Speaker 3:So my name is Logan and I'm with Claire. We co-founded Vivify over a year and a half ago and we founded it with the idea that there's a lot of CPAs who want to help either the really complex individual tax returns or they only accept business clients, and we see that there's such a need for everyone else. So we are here. Serving the everyday taxpayer is what we call it. I come from a very traditional CPA firm background and I won't speak for Claire, but she actually served as she was running a RIA office for quite some time. So she also brings in kind of new perspective to our practice and speaks really well to financial time. So she also brings in kind of new perspective to our practice and speaks really well to financial planners.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the advantage of being at an RIA, right? Yeah, for sure. So so I mean, when you guys came together, like, how'd you guys meet? First of all, let's start there. How do you guys know each other? Obviously, you decided to be business partners, so you have to like each other enough to do that. Um, but how did you guys meet? First of all, let's start there. How do you guys know each other? Obviously, you decided to be business partners, so you have to like each other enough to do that. But how did you guys meet? And then, how did this idea kind of come about originally?
Speaker 4:We met back in 2017 through a leadership program with the Chamber of Commerce in Cincinnati. It was called Cincy Next and at the time that we met, I don't would you have ever thought we would start a company together.
Speaker 3:No, we just meshed really well. So obviously the point of the program was like business development, learn more about the city, professional development. But Claire and I were like in the corner, like divulging our deepest secrets to each other and we're like, yeah, we're like meant to be friends and good people. We both like have financial backgrounds and we just stayed in contact and then we both quit our jobs and Claire's like Logan, let's start a company and I'm like that sounds not like something I'm going to do but she convinced me.
Speaker 3:Sounds not like something I'm going to do, but she convinced me I'm super glad that she did so.
Speaker 1:Claire spearheaded it. She was like we're doing it, and then you had to pull some teeth a little bit, Claire. Is that what happened there?
Speaker 4:Logan said okay, I'll do this, but I'll own 10% of it. You can own the other 90%. And I said no deal, 50-50 or we're not doing it.
Speaker 3:She was such a good advocate for me. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:She made you advocate for yourself. I love it. See, that's already off to a good start. She did not take the additional 40% that she potentially could have, so that's even better. So how'd the idea come up? You were at an RIA, claire, so talk to us about, like, what were you seeing and where did you think there'd be potential in this? Right, because what and what also made you kind of want to leave that world and get into this, because that's a completely different. I mean, you're in the financial sector, right, but what made you want to do that? But what made you want to do that?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So back when I was leading the wealth advisory firm, I trained under someone named Brad Felix, who was very interested in no-code automation, and I fell in love with automation. At the time I found out I was pregnant with my second child, which was a total game changer. I was four months postpartum with my first baby.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 4:So I kind of had this. I remember a lot of curse, holy shit moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you can say that it's okay.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I left the wealth advisory firm. In the meantime I was still so curious. I was a CPA, so I was so curious about how I might be able to apply the same automation and no code to the CPA space, which was traditionally so outdated.
Speaker 4:I knew that Logan was also interested in serving the same types of clients, which is what she described, what we describe as that everyday taxpayer. And so that's when I approached her with the idea of how can we create a business model that can serve that everyday taxpayer, because traditionally most CPA firms can't, because it's not cost effective. They are still time consuming, clients still takes a lot of effort and work to serve them. But when you're in an old school CPA firm and your clients have to bring in a lot of effort and work to serve them, but when you're in an old school CPA firm and your clients have to bring in a stack of paper documents for all of their tax work, that's not efficient enough to be able to serve that type of client. So we've been doing a lot of experimentation since then.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we met in 2017 and, like throughout the years when you stayed in contact, claire, would you know if one of her financial advising clients needed CPA help? She's like Logan. I just wish I could send them to you Like I trust you, you're smart, I know you would be great with them, but you know my the firm I was at the minimum was like $2,000 and we were really serving more of the high net worth individual privately held companies and, yeah, our firm, quite frankly, was like I don't want that W-2 return or I don't want that social security return, like that just wasn't in the business model and I in that space was.
Speaker 3:It was a very stereotypical accountant thing of me, I guess I was like oh, like, oh, well, like this is the way it has to be and this is awful. I don't like it so claire with um. She's always been entrepreneurial. She's like, well, let's just make it better. And I'm like whoa. She's like, yeah, why not like you?
Speaker 3:know, tax code. Like that's the hardest part she's. I am so confident we can build an efficient process and. I was like okay, you run with that, I'll run with this tax knowledge and we were both confident that you know, with our connections that we could build a successful you know network of folks that needed this. It was just the process of building it and she thought that was fun, which is wild to me.
Speaker 2:Very cool. So what is the offering? I know that there's the relationship with the RIAs. So at the end of the day, like is the relationship? It's referral based or is there a consulting kind of method where they're white labeling? You guys Like, how is Vivify meeting that market need?
Speaker 4:Mm-hmm. Our primary product is, of course, tax preparation, and so we do a flat fee of $399, $399 for federal, state and one local tax return for a client. Beyond that, we have some add-on services, so like withholding assistance if someone needs help with their W-4, or making estimated tax payments throughout the year, or we have something called a tax score card, which will review their tax return and try to find areas where they could be taking advantage of other credits and deductions to lower their tax obligation throughout the year. So the way that we work with wealth advisors in that process is that they will refer clients to us, we will receive the acknowledgement and acceptance for us to speak directly to the wealth advisor from the client. So then at that point we can go directly to the wealth advisor to say hey, do you have any tax forms for this client? What type of financial planning things did you do throughout the year so that we can make sure we are accounting for them correctly and the tax return?
Speaker 3:Claire also enlightened me that when her time as a financial planner, she's like there's CPAs who just want to answer my emails and we will answer the emails from financial advisors. If it's something that you know, $399 isn't hard to tell. That like that's not going to include 10 consulting hours, right? We have a per hour billing rate that if a client needs, you know, outside of return preparation, some more analysis whether that's just us talking to the client or if it involves a financial planner, we can do that. So financial planners I mean they can ask us questions throughout the year about withholding or estimates and, honestly, claire and I prefer having a financial advisor with our clients because financial advisors usually know so much more about the client.
Speaker 3:And sometimes clients are more excited about talking to their financial advisor because they view that as like oh, you're making me money Claire and Logan are just making me pay money for taxes. Yeah, and if we can make the client enjoy tax season more by diverting some of our questions to their financial advisor, it just makes the whole process easier for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no doubt People ask the question all the time, right, like, why don't I just go with turbo tax? It's like because don't you want people that you can come back to every single year, that are going to know your situation, that are ingrained with who your financial planner is, that has a holistic view? Right, like people at turbo tax, they're probably not going to hop on a phone call, they're probably not going to know your situation as well as your own financial advisor. So it's a really cool, just like plug and play solution for people that are just like working a job right, I would say most people, probably W2 for the most part, not a lot of write-offs going on and like that's who you guys are going for. So you're looking for financial planners to work with that are predominantly working with those types of people. It sounds like.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we've also a lot of times when people get to the income level of where they can't directly contribute to a Roth IRA and their financial planners are helping them do backdoor Roths or converting a traditional IRA to Roth. That isn't something that TurboTax or even many times H&R Block advisors aren't going to intuitively help with that. Because if you just plug in the tax forms the way they're delivered to you, it actually is going to show up wrong in the software. And if you don't know that it actually is going to show up wrong in the software and if you don't know that, the clients are going to end up actually paying more tax than they need to. We've seen that a lot already in our first season. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And a new season coming upon. So with that, like, what's the service calendar look like for these clients? Like, let's say, you're an advisor, okay, you have clients. You know, tax season, of course, is in April, right, you're extending and things like that. Of course things can be different, but like, what's the service offering look like? I mean, you talked a little bit about automation and quarterly estimates for taxes and things like that Like, like, what's the service look like?
Speaker 4:Can you hear? My baby crying in the background Nope, okay, good, she doesn't want to take a nap. No, you're good, okay. So service offering the first thing that new clients will do is I'm actually very excited about this they go through what's called video ask as an intake process. It's a video of Logan and I talking them through our intake procedures and answering a lot of common questions.
Speaker 4:It also helps to direct them to the right service and then, after they do that, they'll open up a client portal. It's very secure, of course, and they'll upload a prior year tax return, also, where they give us acknowledgement that we can work directly with their wealth advisor. From there, they will be released an electronic questionnaire where they'll be able to answer questions. These questions will roll forward from year to year, so they won't have to answer their child's social security number every single year. Thankfully, they'll also be able to electronically upload any of their supporting tax forms, or they can scan any type of paper tax forms into PDF and store them on their client portal. From there, we'll complete their tax returns, send everything back to them for a review. From there, we'll complete their tax returns, send everything back to them for a review, and we'll use Loom as a video service to walk through their tax return to say, hey, look at this line, this is where you received your RMD. On this other line, we account for any charitable donations that you've made.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we don't like when you know I wouldn't like it either. Oh look, we just got this 70 page PDF from Vivify. They want me to sign it, but I really no idea.
Speaker 2:No idea what's going on what?
Speaker 3:does this line even mean? And just like, four or five minutes of tax education is more than most people get you know, annually.
Speaker 3:They don't like thinking about it. So we have had so much positive feedback about the videos and then, if we have that consent from them to work their financial advisor, we're sending the advisor their tax return and that same video that we're sending the client. We're sending it to the advisor just so they you know the client doesn't have to play telephone and be like they mentioned something about this RMD. I don't know what that means, but so they're going to get that same information. And then, peter, you mentioned extensions, the types of returns that we work with. They actually don't need to be extended because all of those types of tax forms are prepared, you know, in February or March. So our practice is actually not extending. There were a couple of situations last year. You know, if someone dies or there's, you know, sickness we have the capability of extending returns, and we can.
Speaker 3:But we, you know, are setting up our business, wanting to do the majority of it in the springtime because, yeah, we don't want to be tied to our desk the whole time.
Speaker 2:I love it.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean what a, what a cool value.
Speaker 1:Go ahead, Brock who's going Pete, we do this at least once a podcast. At least once a podcast. No, I really liked that because it's like, if you did, if they didn't already know that you're providing value, right, they can literally see a video of how you're providing value. And I think that's so useful because, like, even as a business owner, like when I'm looking at the tax returns, like okay, what am I really looking at? Like what do I owe? But I also do want to know how we got there Right. And like I want to know that you did your due diligence. You're, you're letting me know like, hey, here's what we did in this line, line by line. And like I'm going to be honest with you, if you send me a 70 page document, I'm not going through the. I'm just not, I'm not, I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 1:And so the fact that you guys do that, you just like enable the client, enable the advisor, all feel like you're all on the same page and you're making that a part of your process, on top of the fact that you guys had a tech forward approach and having the portal, which we also utilize, and obviously you guys are like, how much easier does that seriously make everyone's lives. Having a portal, having a place that everybody can see something. So that's as far as like advisors that you're working with. Is there like a kind of like an advisor wants to get to know you guys and what you're doing? Is there like an intro call, like what does that look like? To see if they're the right fit or if you guys are the right fit for them?
Speaker 4:We have a page on our website that's labeled for advisors and through that page it's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You got it right.
Speaker 4:You built it. We try to be as literal as possible here. Here we go, we do taxes. I love it, and on that page it walks through our process of working with advisors, answers a lot of common questions. The advisors can also sign up to be a part of our partnership list, which will essentially put them on our newsletter listing and then also give them a link to schedule an intro meeting a 15 minute intro meeting with us Very cool.
Speaker 1:Did you have something I know you're going to ask me?
Speaker 3:The newsletter that we it's not going to be, you know, inundating, overwhelming. It's once a month, from September to January, and it's all just about, you know, like, leading up to tax season, common mistakes that we've seen or any, you know, internal updates from us like hey, here's our latest offering. They're the first people to you know hear of any new updates of Vivify. Another thing that we're excited to help advisors for is we realized that we have such a niche, right, like we're not helping people with business income, even if they receive a K-1, like we're not helping them, but we want to help as many people as possible, even if we're not helping them in the terms of doing their tax return.
Speaker 3:So something else that my wonderful business partner created is where it's called the accounting services directory and it's basically we're putting our accountant contacts, cpas, bookkeepers into this directory that we're sharing with anyone that needs or wants it. So if we can't help a client, at least you have this long list of other possible solutions and you can. You can you can filter it by like okay, who like works with doctors, who works with equity compensation? And we really want to continue to grow that because, because you know, cpas are dwindling, unfortunately, like most of the CPAs, 70% of CPAs are over or at retirement age, so it's only going to continue to get harder to find appropriate ones for your clients. So we just want to be a resource and help in that space.
Speaker 3:So, if they're on our partnership list too, they'd be able to get that space. So if they're on our partnership list too, they'd be able to um get that directory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's just something about you guys too, is it's like you're taking the abundance mentality route instead of the like mine, no, mine Like. It's like you know. It's like we know what lane we want to be in, we know what we're good at, we know where we're trying to stay and you know what if we're not the right fit. Here's a whole phone book of people that are directory of people that you can go find. So good job, great idea on that. Um, pete, did you have one more question? I know that you were.
Speaker 3:I knew we don't have an insurance directory because we're just like peter and brock. That's right. Do that when you did.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:We'll work with anybody, all right, so um no, I was just gonna ask any other um, like golden nuggets or something else you wanted the advisor community to know about you guys, or vivify you should follow us on instagram because we think that we're funny great yes our handle is at use.
Speaker 3:Vivify u-s-e v-V-I-V-I-F-Y. Oh, claire tell them why we're called Vivify.
Speaker 4:Ooh. Yes, so we wanted our name and everything that represents us to go directly in the face of all the traditional CPA firms which you can think of as traditionally named old white man CPA last name. Yes, so we went with the name Vivify, which means to bring life or give life to something, and so we really wanted Vivify to stand as this kind of light.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a new, energized alternative to stiff accounting. We want it to be able to feel comfortable with us. We want them to feel capable of asking us questions, asking us for resources and, yeah, vivify.
Speaker 1:Vivify, it's a great name. It's a great name.
Speaker 4:When people confuse it with vilify. Have you heard?
Speaker 2:that one. That's awesome.
Speaker 3:We should have done that for halloween we're not vilifying, we're vivifying.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. Well, hey, always great to talk to you guys. We did it again. So much for coming on.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate it. Um so for everyone um, we're gonna link your guys' website, the Instagram, all your guys' handles. But thank you so so much for coming on. Can't wait to see your growth.
Speaker 3:Thank you, thank you, guys, so much for inviting us and introducing us to XYPN.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you bet you guys have a good day.
Speaker 3:Bye.