Michael Uadiale is the Managing Partner at SMEED CPA, where he helps entrepreneurs reduce taxes and pursue financial freedom through proactive planning. A seasoned CPA and master tax advisor with more than 20 years of experience, Michael specializes in serving home health and social service providers, healthcare professionals, real estate investors, and technology service businesses. He is known for translating complex tax rules into actionable strategies for wealth building, asset protection, and generational planning.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [02:05] How an unexpected six-figure tax bill inspired Michael Uadiale’s approach to serving business owners
- [10:37] The “tax jail” created by high marginal tax rates and insufficient planning
- [12:19] Why proactive tax planning differs fundamentally from annual tax preparation
- [16:17] How AI and more sophisticated clients are pushing CPA firms toward advisory services
- [17:51] The DECIDE framework for tax savings, wealth growth, legacy protection, and generational planning
- [21:41] How the BOND rule determines whether a cash outflow may qualify as a business expense
- [24:17] Why tax credits can be considerably more valuable than deductions
- [37:00] How virtual service, electronic documents, mobile tools, and technology support SMEED CPA’s clients
In this episode…
Tax planning can be one of the most powerful yet underutilized tools for helping entrepreneurs convert business income into long-term wealth. Rather than treating taxes as a once-a-year compliance task, business owners can align entity structure, deductions, credits, investments, and documentation with a clear financial vision. How can proactive tax strategy help entrepreneurs reach financial freedom sooner?
According to Michael Uadiale, a tax and wealth-building strategist, entrepreneurs can accelerate financial freedom by defining a specific end goal, measuring the gap from their current position, and reinvesting legally created tax savings. He frames the tax code as a set of incentives rather than a punishment and encourages owners to ask, “How can I deduct this?” instead of, “Can I deduct this?” His DECIDE and BOND frameworks help clients evaluate deductions, entity structures, credits, income shifting, deferral, documentation, and legacy planning. The process requires year-round education, disciplined implementation, and collaboration among tax, legal, insurance, and financial professionals.
On this episode of the Top Business Leaders Show, Chad Franzen welcomes Michael Uadiale, Managing Partner at SMEED CPA, for a conversation about using proactive tax strategy to build financial freedom. Michael explains “tax jail,” the difference between preparation and planning, the DECIDE and BOND frameworks, credits and deferral, year-round advisory meetings, client fit, virtual service, and the value of mentorship.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Chad Franzen on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- Email the team at Rise25: support@rise25.com
- Michael Uadiale on LinkedIn
- SMEED CPA
- DECIDE framework
- Tax-Free Wealth Book by Tom Wheelwright
- Tom Wheelwright
- Robert Kiyosaki on Instagram
Quotable Moments
- “Financial freedom means having the option to do what you want, when you want, without money being a deciding factor.”
- “Our tomorrow is a function of what we choose to do today and the marginal things we do every day.”
- “Tax planning is not changing your taxes; it is changing your facts to align well with the tax code.”
- “Income is earned, but wealth is engineered, and engineering tax savings is both a skill and an art.”
- “Investing and wealth making is a team sport, and every adviser’s guidance should align with the client’s goals.”
Action Steps
- Define your financial freedom destination: Document your current assets, liabilities, and cash flow, then describe the specific “Point Z” you want to reach.
- Replace annual-only tax preparation with year-round planning: Meet with a qualified tax adviser at least quarterly to review decisions before opportunities expire.
- Apply the BOND rule to potential business expenses: Confirm the business purpose, ordinary nature, necessity, and documentation for every expense you plan to deduct.
- Reinvest tax savings into wealth-building assets: Treat every legally saved tax dollar as capital that can generate additional income and shorten your financial freedom timeline.
- Build a coordinated advisory team: Align your CPA, attorney, insurance professional, and financial adviser around the same tax, investment, protection, and legacy goals.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:04
Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 Media, we feature top founders, executives, and business leaders from all over the world.
Chad Franzen: 00:20
Hi, Chad Franzen here, co-host of the Top Business Leaders Show, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help B2B businesses reach more clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships and get ROI through done-for-you podcasts. If you have a B2B business and want to build great relationships, there’s no better way to do it than to profile the people and companies you admire on your podcast. To learn more, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com.
Michael Uadiale, am I pronouncing your name right? Michael.
Michael Uadiale: 00:53
You did. You got it.
Chad Franzen: 00:55
Nice, nice.
Michael Uadiale: 00:56
I was waiting for that.
Chad Franzen: 00:58
My guest is Michael Uadiale, a seasoned CPA and master tax advisor with over 25 years of industry experience, including 18 years running SMEED CPA. As the founder of a seven-figure-revenue firm with 15 employees, he has developed a proven system that helps entrepreneurs achieve financial freedom within 5 to 7 years through strategic tax planning and wealth-building. His expertise has helped clients save over $15 million in taxes over the past seven years, with an average tax savings of $31,426 per client annually. He is also a successful entrepreneur who has founded six other businesses, including investments and innovative telehealth software. Hey, Michael, thanks so much for joining me today.
How are you?
Michael Uadiale: 01:43
It’s my pleasure, Chad. Thank you for having me on your show.
Chad Franzen: 01:46
Yeah, it’s great to talk to you. Hey, as I mentioned, you’ve spent more than 25 years working in accounting and tax, nearly two decades leading your own firm. How did your early experiences in accounting shape your decision to start building and, you know, continue to build SMEED CPA?
Michael Uadiale: 02:05
Thank you for that question. I think my experience personally really, really informed my choice of how to run our practice. As you can tell from my accent, I’m not originally born in the United States. And, when I came out here about 28 years ago, I worked in a high-tech company, got a bunch of stock options, and had no clue what all that meant for taxes. I just passed my CPA test.
I had not gotten my CPA license, or somebody told me it was CCPA, so as to be able to figure out your taxes. Well, I took their advice and I did hire a CPA. The whole idea was, hey, help me reduce my taxes legally and ethically, because I knew I was getting a whole boatload of money from my stock options. Right. Well, he, I got a big bill from him, but nothing was done.
All right. The long and short of it was when my taxes were filed, I owed some very significant amounts of money, close to $100,000 in taxes. Right. That really set me off thinking. So when I was ready to get out of corporate America, I said to myself, I do not want any other person to be able to experience that bad taste that I got in my mind.
So when we started our CPA practice, we were hyper-focused on ensuring that business owners only pay what they need to pay. Okay. So that’s been my driving force. And when people talk about me having run Smith for the last almost 20 years, it will be 20 years next year. It’s just gone so fast because I just enjoy continuing to do that over and over and over again.
Yeah. So that’s been my personal story. And that’s what drives me.
Chad Franzen: 04:03
Very nice., a central theme of your work has been helping entrepreneurs use tax planning and wealth building strategies to maybe gain a little bit greater control over their financial futures. What to you does financial freedom mean, and why do you believe some entrepreneurs can reach it within 5 to 7 years?
Michael Uadiale: 04:23
Financial freedom is different for everybody. So the first thing, let’s kind of get the right framework of what financial freedom is, right?Many times when I use that language, I’m very quick to let my audience understand financial freedom does not mean you are retiring and going fishing for the rest of your life. Financial freedom only means to me, you give yourself the option to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, how you choose to do it, with whom you choose to do it, and not have to allow money to be a factor, right? So you could be in your 30s, you could be in your 40s, and you can be financially free, but still very active in the marketplace.
However, you can afford to take one week, one month, three months off, and your financial income building is not compromised by the fact that you are not in the game. Okay. I have a client from 2022. He’s been out of the United States. He’s traveling all over the world.
The young man is not even 45 yet. Right. His business continues to grow. He’s. He retired?
No. Is he financially free? Absolutely. When he came to me in 2020, he was very clear. He said, look, I want to be in a position where I am able to generate $50,000 every month from my real estate portfolio.
And so as he was making money from his cash cow, his cash cow being his commercial cleaning business, he was building his real estate portfolio. All right. So from 2022, he was able to hit what he wanted to hit. The commercial business of cleaning is still running. He has business managers running that enterprise, but he’s literally living off his real estate portfolio.
He’s traveling all over the world. He told me he wants to be able to go through, I think, 40 or 50 countries before he comes back to the US. So that is financial freedom. It just means you have the option, the option of being able to say, I’m taking one week off. I’m taking one month off.
Right.., not to kind of put my personal stuff there. I’ve been out of work in the last four weeks, right? Because I just did some medical procedure.
Right? I wasn’t stressed about me not being on my desk. Okay.. I wasn’t, because all of the enterprises are running independently of me.
That’s the word freedom there. Okay, so that’s what financial freedom means. Now to talk about, okay, how do we achieve that and help people be able to shrink that runway between where you are today and where you want to get to? Right. It’s a clear financial vision.
Unfortunately, in America, many of us, maybe up to 85% of people, spend more time and energy planning for a two week vacation than planning what their financial freedom is going to be. Okay. Because the reality is, our tomorrow is a function of what we choose to do today. Every of our tomorrows is an aggregation of all of the marginal things we are doing daily. So if people are very intentional as to say, here’s the goal I want to get to, there is clarity between knowing this is where you are today.
Point A, and if this is your goal point Z, you can see what the gap is. What our practice is really excellent at doing is we make our clients. We force them. In most cases. Unfortunately, we force them to give us that vision map financially.
It’s easy for us to extract from them where they are today because it’s all about assets and liabilities. And what’s your cash flow? We can do that any day because that’s what we are. Accountants, right? But I have no clue what the heck are you trying to get to?
When do you want to get there? So when you come in as a client, we want you to give us that point Z. And so once we know where that point Z is, then our game plan is to say we know how you make money. We know how you spend money. The idea now is to be able to really use the tax profile, to really shrink that gap, because anybody who knows how to do great tax planning legally, ethically and morally- what you are doing is you free yourself from the tax jail by at least 18 years.
So that’s how we do it. Yeah. Because think about it, for most high-income earners who are making a boatload of money and are not very intentional in their tax planning, do you know what they’re doing? They literally give maybe close to three, four hours of each of their working days to the tax guy. And the unfortunate thing is the tax man is not asking you for this money.
Okay? Really. Most people have just come to think, oh, this is how it has to be. It’s the cost of doing business. Now, the tax code is just a whole incentive to make you behave the way the government wants you to behave, to make you invest in the industries and the areas the government is trying to make private citizens push capital into.
So all of those are the totality of what we bring to bear. And so we free up client cash flow, allow them to be disciplined, and continue to reinvest those tax savings. So if it’s supposed to take you 12, 15 years to get to your point of financial freedom, yes, you can shrink 5 to 7 years of that very easily in 3 to 4 years. That’s I mean, there’s nothing magical about it. It’s just that we’ve gotten disciplined on doing what we do with our clients.
[continue to page 2]
Chad Franzen: 10:31
You mentioned the phrase tax jail. What does that mean?
Michael Uadiale: 10:37
What that means is, so I’m going to give you a typical example of somebody in California. If you are making anywhere like 300,000 adjusted gross income, right. And you are a resident of California, your marginal tax on the federal side could be as much as 37%. Right. And then from the state of California, 9.94.
So all put together at a point or after a particular point, for every one more dollar you’re making or earning, almost $0.47 of that is going into taxes. Okay. When you translate that into time, for most of us, we are going to be working from maybe the age of 18 to 60 or 65. When you aggregate the amount of the time that the average person puts into the marketplace and see that of that proportion of time, 37% of it goes to the tax guy. If you are not planning, that is a tax jail that people put themselves into.
. Hey, when you plan, when you plan, you free yourself from that jail.
Chad Franzen: 11:58
So there’s a big difference then between, you know, a lot of business owners, probably the years probably over, and they probably send their tax information to their accountant. And then there’s tax preparation. The accountant prepares the taxes and you pay them. But there’s also tax planning, which is what you’re advocating. Kind of elaborate on the difference between the two.
Michael Uadiale: 12:19
Well, Chad, I think you just really I mean, whoever is listening to this episode, right? They should earmark your question. Unfortunately, because I see this every day, I will say at least 60% of most business owners still praise the way you just explained, which is they have this avoidance hate relationship with taxes. And so they don’t think about it. They don’t want to discuss taxes until it’s close to April 15th.
And when that’s your approach, you are already playing a losing game. What I found out in almost 20 years, the ultra wealthy are very intentional with taxes. Every decision they are going to make, they want to first of all ask themselves, how do I optimize this decision from a tax perspective? And so they are constantly talking to their tax advisors. Okay.
Tax planning really it’s you not changing your taxes, but changing your facts to align well with the tax code. In a way, when I say change your facts, I’m not talking about lying. I can give you a simple example, right? I’m putting on a shirt. This shirt has some inscription right here.
That is the name of my company. It changes this from a non-deductible wear to a uniform. If I want to deduct this. And so typically when clients are working with our practice, we don’t come to us asking us, can I deduct anything? The question really needs to be how can I deduct?
It’s two. It’s a very different framework because like I said, the tax code is a set of incentives. Most business people think the government is out to get them through taxes. That’s not true. I preach that that’s not the essence of taxation.
I’m privileged to have seen taxation all over the world. The United States tax code is such a great thing, and I wish people will embrace it and see it as a roadmap to their financial success, because what the government has done is say, if you want to get all of these benefits, here are the things you need to do to get those benefits right. But because most people have this love-hate relationship, they have this framework of thinking taxes are bad. It’s just the government taking money out of my pocket and all that kind of stuff. They don’t talk to an accountant.
I tell anybody who cares to listen. If you are a business owner and you are not having very serious interactive meetings at the very minimum once every quarter with a tax advisor, not a tax preparer. I mean, we live in a world of AI, okay? Tax returns are going to be free in the next two or three years. Nobody’s going to be paying for it.
I don’t care how complex it is. That’s easy to do. Anybody can take data and feed it into a tax software and give you a tax return. What you need is a tax advisor, a strategist who is able to take your today’s data, understand where you’re trying to get to for tomorrow, and be able to now align those two things using the tax code the government has put in place. That’s why for us, it has to be legal.
It has to be ethical. It has to be moral so that when you get there, you are sleeping. We’re not afraid of an audit letter from the IRS.
Chad Franzen: 15:56
Would you say that,, has it been your observation that a lot of your counterparts in the accounting profession offer that kind of tax advice, or do they just focus on, you know, what’s happened in the past? And we’re going to prepare your taxes for,, you know, your past taxes rather than kind of giving you forward looking advisory work.
Michael Uadiale: 16:17
I would say in the last two years, to be honest,, there has been an increase in many accountants understanding the need to become more Proactive instead of being reactive. Okay. And the reason for that is clients are getting more savvy. Okay. I mean, I’m glad it’s a great thing to see that many clients are getting more sophisticated in understanding the guy who is preparing your tax return is not necessarily saving you dollars in taxes.
All right. So most entrepreneurs who are high performing entrepreneurs are very critical in selecting who they should be working with. And I think that’s forcing many in our profession to understand it’s no longer about tax return filing, like I said. I mean, with the advent of AI, it’s a changed world. Okay.
Any CPA practice whose main source of income is filing tax returns between January to April, they will be toast in the next 2 or 3 years. They will have no business. Wow.
Chad Franzen: 17:33
Wow. So you are, SMEED CPA has something called a decide framework. It’s kind of like a six-part framework that examines deductions and entity type and other things. Tell me a little bit about that and how it helps create or to evaluate a client’s tax position.
Michael Uadiale: 17:51
Yeah, thank you for that. So, I love acronyms, so most of the things I do, I try to figure out how to put it in a simple way. That one makes it easy to translate my knowledge to; it also makes it easy for my clients who are not tax accountants to be able to understand, hey, it’s a journey and this is how this journey is going to go. Okay, they decide the framework pretty much is one we try to.
The first thing is to discover. We try to first of all discover what your financial profile is, right. We’re trying to understand what I talked about earlier. Where are you today? Where are you trying to get to?
Once we get that, the next thing is the E, where we are engineering the tax structures. Okay. Because now we understand where your happy place is that you’re trying to get to. You know what? Income is earned, but wealth is engineered.
So engineering tax savings is a skill and an art that you have to develop. So the E stands for engineering. And then once we’ve been able to engineer that, we really train you on the C, which is helping you take the savings. The C stands for capture. We capture the growth and get you to begin to really turbo charge that growth through velocity.
If you make $10,000 today by way of a savings, you put that $10,000, it makes you $2,000. Next time around, you are investing 12, not ten. So that C stands for capture. And then the next phase is when I integrate, because as you begin to go up the ladder and you begin to make more money, then your. There are complexities.
So we, the I, stand for integration. We integrate some very advanced structures., because at a point where you begin to make a whole lot of money, it’s important to begin to plan for the successive generations coming after you. So advanced strategies come into place that I integrate. And then we help you defend against what we call tax erosion.
Because when you make a whole lot of money, when you are dying, which is something that will happen to everybody, the government is waiting. But there are legal ways to minimize how much the government can get from all of the legacy you’ve built in your lifetime, before it passes on to your beneficiaries. And then the E stands for empowering the next generation. So typically,, many of our clients, again, like you said, I’ve been in it now for 20 years. A lot of my clients have reached that point where they’re thinking about legacy.
And so one of the things we really do is to empower that next generation that is coming after them. Okay. We really teach them the need not to wait because sometimes, unfortunately, you find it’s at the time people are at their deathbed or they have died, that their families even know what their net worth is. And if that next generation is not really trained on how to manage what the patriarch or the matriarch has built, it’s going to be gone by the next generation. So we bring that next generation along so that they can also get to the place where they continue what their parents have done.
So that’s our decision is the DEC I’d it’s a structure. We’re very intentional. There are milestones in all of those steps, but again, it’s something we have found is successful for people who focus.
Chad Franzen: 21:32
So,, decide is, is an acronym DEC I’d I know there’s something else called a bond rule BOND. Oh yeah.
Michael Uadiale: 21:41
That’s that’s so fundamental. The, the, the bond is the bond is really inside of what you would call in the e stage of engineering. Right? And again, like I said, I love acronyms because what bond does is help you as a taxpayer really know very simplistically whether or not a particular cash outflow can be a deductible business expense or not. And so that bond stands for, hey, is this a business expense?
Okay, that’s what the B stands for. The O means it’s ordinary. Meaning Is it something that is typical in the line of business that you are? Alright, that’s what the O ordinary stands for. The N stands for.
Is it a necessary thing?Is it necessary for me, for example, to fly a private jet on a trip from here to. Okay. And then this which is big is documentation, right? Because the Internal Revenue Service cares about the paper trail.
Show me the money by the paper trail. If you’re telling me you spent $200 on a business meal that had you, your spouse and your kids, and you are saying, that’s a business deduction. The IRS needs to understand and know that, yeah, this is a business deduction. You’re not just going to tell them, yeah, we spent $200. There needs to be a receipt.
That receipt needs to have a place. It needs to have a price or the amount spent. It needs to have another P for the purpose of spending that money. So the BOND really is one of the most fundamental things we teach our clients. You got to understand that because otherwise you keep coming back to us and saying, oh, can I deduct this?
Can I deduct this? You can figure that out. If you truly understand how to use BOND.. Is it a business expense?
Is it ordinary? Because what may be ordinary in your line of business may not necessarily be ordinary in my line of business. Right. Every business is different. So what Tom Jones is doing is different from what Sally is doing.
So those are the things that we really make our business owners understand from the very get go.
Chad Franzen: 24:06
So you have tax deductions and then something else that can reduce what someone owes would be a tax credit. What do entrepreneurs frequently misunderstand about the difference between the two?
Michael Uadiale: 24:17
You are just hitting the right A credit is a very powerful thing. So think about it this way, right? I typically say to my audience, a credit is like four times more powerful than a deduction. Okay. And I’m just going to give you a very simple example.
If I spend $100 on a meal with a business associate, and I deduct that as an expense, you are going to find that typically I may be deducting 50% of that $100. And if your tax rate is, let’s just say 20% for ease of math, that $100 have saved you $10 in taxes. Now, if you flip it and it’s a credit that you get in, what a credit does is a credit literally reduces your taxes dollar for dollar. Literally. What a credit is doing for you is the government is paying your taxes for you by reason of one tax rule or the other.
Okay, so that’s why on a very simplistic level, I say to any listener, a credit is four times more powerful than a deduction, right? And there are thousands of credit. It depends on the line of business that you are in. So it’s so important that any accountant that you are working with truly understand your line of business as to be able to look for any applicable credit in that line of business and ensure that the taxpayer is really leveraging and taking advantage of those credit. Okay.
, I mean, there are simple credits like, okay, work opportunity, tax credit. What is it? That’s pretty much saying the government is saying, well, because you’ve hired some people who are in a category of the demographics, maybe they are just coming into the workforce for the first time, or maybe they are people that are being rehabilitated into the society. If you do it the right way, you get anywhere from 2400 to 9600 as a tax credit for hiring somebody you’re going to hire anyway, right? But the government is saying, I’m giving you a credit because you’re helping us take off the street.
Unemployed people. Okay. That credit is not just, oh, it is like, hey, I’m giving you 9600. What’s better than that? Yeah.
So there are just lots and lots of credit. I mean, we work with a lot of,, business owners in the intelligence and developmental disability space. And then there are lots of credits when they modify the homes that their clients have to live in. The government gives them credit for that. But if you are here as the tax advisor, you don’t know that.
You just treat that as a deductible expense, which is like professional malpractice.
Chad Franzen: 27:26
I’ve heard that there’s some tax strategies out there that,, that don’t necessarily eliminate a tax obligation, but they allow business owners to retain and invest capital for a longer period of time, like deferring the tax obligation. When can that be more valuable than simply trying to reduce the current year bill?
Michael Uadiale: 27:43
Oh, timing. Is everything okay? I give you when I was breaking down our DEC, I’d e I gave you our working framework of that.. That same decide for our clients.
The D is deduct the is entity structure. The C is the credit and conversion. The I is the income shifting and then the days the fairer and the is elimination. What are you talking about? Is the last day the fairer.
So timing matters. Okay., there will be times where you look at a situation. What may be best is to defer the taxes., I’ll give you a typical example.
Let’s just say I’m working right now with a minor baseball league athlete. Okay. He’s just 18 years. Okay. But this young man is, he’s going to be making, I think, about 3 million in the next three years or so while he’s in college.
All right. There is no guarantee that he’s going to get to the Major League. All right. But he’s likely to be in a situation where between our next three years, he could easily make close to $10 million. All right.
He is better served deferring whatever he can defer to later years, where if for whatever reason, he never makes it to the major league, his income may not be as high. Alright, in those years as compared to now. Alright, so instead of that 3 million being hit with 37% marginal tax bracket, now he can begin to defer those things to a point where at least even if it’s a 10 to 15% spread, he does. It’s a significant amount of money. And so that’s why things like 1031 exchange is very popular and important for a real estate investor, right?
Because what are you doing? You’re just kicking the ball down the road. You’re kicking the ball down the road. Now that’s why we have what we call by borrow and die. What does that mean?
You buy an a, a real estate property today for $200,000, he gets to get equity. Three, four years later, it’s worth 400. You borrow out of that same equity, you now buy another property, and then you continue to do a 1031. So you could start with a $200,000 property. By the time that person is dying, he or she has a property worth 10 million.
But guess what? When that person dies, his beneficiary pays zero because of how the estate tax laws work. So deferral is one of the very important game time. Money and timing is important. $10 today is worth a whole lot more than $10 even in one year from today.
So that’s part of the toolkit we use.
Chad Franzen: 30:52
I know a lot of people, probably myself included, I meet with my accountant, maybe like once a year, every year in late March. I know you, you guys at SMEED advisory, your, your advisory process includes several meetings throughout the year. How does that how does that kind of help a client’s financial results compared with, you know, what I just described?
Michael Uadiale: 31:10
You know what we tell our clients before they come on that this is a consultative and educational process., it may sound harsh, but I say to clients, I can’t care about your money more than you., and I say that upfront because some people make the mistake of thinking because they paid us a boatload of money, all the work is now on us to do. That’s not accurate. I’ll teach you and coach you on what needs to be done.
But there are things that you, as a taxpayer, has to do so that we can document the tax savings we’re trying to get out of those strategies. Okay. So when we have all these meetings with our clients, it’s not because we want to have the meetings. The meetings are so critical and so needful. Because if I’m going to say to you, Chad, I need you to use a strategy.
Let me just give you a very simple strategy. All right. You got a minor child that is 12 or 7 or eight years old, and you have something as simple as an S corp. We want you to employ your minor child in the business. The documentation is important.
Implementing the strategy means you, the taxpayer, understanding what the strategy is, how to implement it correctly, and how to document the implementation. So if you are ever audited, you are not running around afraid of panicking when that IRS letter comes because anybody can be audited. Okay, so it’s so important for us that our client be very engaged. If, if you are not going to be willing to make that time to attend those meetings all through the year, we definitely will not be a good fit for that taxpayer. Yeah.
So on the average, there’s no way any of our client will have anything less than six meetings in a year with us. At least now we have lots of clients. We’re meeting with them every month because their portfolio demands that. Okay. And sometimes this meeting is not just only with us.
Sometimes we call a collaborative meeting with their attorney, with their insurance broker, with their financial advisor, because this is investing and wealth making is a team sport. So we are not trying to be the only advisors on the table. We want to be sure that all the advice that our client is getting from all other specialized advisors, they are properly aligned with what we are doing and what the client wants. So these things are very important. It’s your money.
You should care more about it.
Chad Franzen: 33:50
Have you have you run across business owners who may be hesitant to pay for these kind of advisory services without understanding the potential financial return?, do you do you have to determine maybe whether a client is the right fit for you, and how do you kind of educate them about that?
Michael Uadiale: 34:05
Well, yeah, we, we come across that very often., and again, we are not a car salesman. Right. We are not a car dealership where, you know, how you go into a car dealership and the salesman is trying to make a sale., you may have a budget for a Toyota, and then the person is trying to sell you into buying a Lexus, right?
That’s not who we are, what we are, because it’s so important that,, we be the right fit., we do our very best to make sure we, we, I wouldn’t use the word screen. We check the client from the point of are they truly aligned? Like I said, a client has to be an engaging client. Meaning when we get into this, the process is serious.
We’re going to do an onboarding call. We’re going to assign you one CPA as your client relationship manager, and we’re going to start asking you a whole bunch of questions and stuff like that. Now we do our best to kind of check the personality type before we bring in a client. Now, for example, for a client to become a client, we send them a link to a form to complete. It’s supposed to take only more than 10 to 13 minutes to complete that form.
If you never return that form completed before that meeting, we definitely won’t be able to take you in as a client because you just indicated that you are so busy. What’s very important to you, which you say is important to you? You don’t want to do the work. Okay. We don’t want to drive flying blind.
So yeah, we do have that. And then we also do have people who, who get a shock from whatever they think the fee is. And I say, look, if you’re going to be evaluating your decision from a point of how much you’re going to be paying, Then we are not the right fit. It’s our feet going to be way more than what some clients are already used to. The answer is absolutely yes.
But we have a moral obligation and we tell that to our clients. If if we are not sure, we are not sure that we are able to bring you value over and above our fixed fee. We would not take you in as a client because we don’t need that experience is not going to be a good one no matter what we do. So those are some of the things that we use to evaluate whether we are the right fit and the way I frame it or we frame it, is we are not the right fit for you. It’s not about you.
It’s about us. We want the experience to be a great one.,
Chad Franzen: 36:45
I know that SMEED CPA presents itself as a technology-driven firm that gives clients online access to financial information and tax documents. How has technology kind of changed the way SMEED CPA serves entrepreneurs?
Michael Uadiale: 37:00
Significantly, in a lot of ways, I can tell you, since 2020, when the Covid year started, we have intentionally and deliberately remained virtual. What that means, even though we still have three brick and mortar offices, including myself, there are only, I think, two people that go to any of those brick and mortar locations among our team members, right? All our clients, they are served virtually. So people who come to us, they are not coming to us because we are in their neck of the woods. They come to us because of what the value is that they are going to get from us.
And so it’s also very important to us that the client must be technologically savvy, right? Because you’re not going to walk into our physical office with a stack of papers. That’s not going to happen. Any documents you’re going to send to us, it has to be uploaded. Any meeting we’re going to have is going to be done by way of Zoom.
Everything you need to sign, they are going to be signed electronically., we have our document collaboration system, which is an app. So using your mobile phone, you can get 80% of your interaction done with our firm. All of our team members are scattered all over the United States. We are not gathering in any one location.
We are really very big. I mean, we just launched an app. It’s called track. It’s meant for people who are real estate professionals to be able to track their hours to qualify for that very coveted real estate professional designation that is always very audited by the Internal Revenue Service. So that should give you an indication of how much investment we really put into our technology.
It’s really the bedrock of what we do and how we do what we do. So when we have that first onboarding meeting, when a client comes in, we really walk you through our technology stack and we will take the time. If you are struggling with it, we will take the time to onboard them on how to use this technology. Yeah.
Chad Franzen: 39:16
I have one more question for you. But first, just tell me how people can find out more about if people are interested in learning more about SMEED CPA, how can they do it?
Michael Uadiale: 39:24
It’s easy. I just give them an email address, which is taxes at CPA. That’s the easiest way taxes@smeedcpa.com, our marketing director monitors that email address. Most times people will shoot information there.
Yeah, we get a lot of that., we heard you on the podcast. We are interested in working with you. And if we get such an email, we send what we call an asset map link to that prospect, which I said it’s taking only 10-15 minutes to complete. When somebody completes that, we look at the information in there and then,, they go ahead and schedule that person to meet.
And most of the times, either me or our marketing director, sometimes he joins me on those calls. So it’s the email: taxes@smeedcpa.com, taxes@smeedcpa.com.
Chad Franzen: 40:23
Okay, great. Hey, last question for you. You know, you’ve been working, you’ve been doing this for over 20 years. Have you during this, during this time, have you had like a mentor that you’ve really looked up to and taught you a lot or have you learned from experience?
Michael Uadiale: 40:37
I have a mentor, actually. I have two mentors. Okay, that’s a great question, Chad, and I appreciate you asking that question. I think because it’s so important that everyone should understand that no matter the level of attainment you have, there are going to be masters, there are going to be strategies that are above you, and you got to have that spirit and desire to constantly want to be learning.
And that’s why in our practice, we invest a lot of money in our training of our team. So my principle mentor is Tom Wheelwright. Okay. Tom Wheelwright is the author of the best-selling book known as Tax Free Wealth. Okay.
I am not ashamed to advertise him to whoever wants to, because I credit him with fundamentally changing the way I look at the tax code. Okay. Tom really taught me to understand some of the things I have told you today, which is, look, the tax code is a set of incentives. Don’t look at it as the government wanting to take money out of your hand.
Look at it from. The government has put things there which. Sometimes people use that word loopholes. They are not loopholes. They are things that are codified.
The tax code was not written by the poor. It was lobbied for by the rich, and they encoded it into tax laws. But you know what? Even though they were put in for rich people, even the poor guy can use the same rules. Okay, so the rules are fair.
So Tom is my major mentor at Tom Wheelwright. He’s the author. Like I said, tax free weight. That’s a book any business person should read. Okay.
Because when you read that book, it’s going to change how you see taxes. Whether or not you are a tax accountant, I promise you that. Okay, so Tom, I credit him with that.. He spat on my crust 8 or 10 years ago, and it has changed my relationship. It has given me the privilege of opportunity to be on stage, not just with him, but with people like Robert Kiyosaki because he is Robert Kiyosaki, CPA, right?
I’ve got the opportunity and benefit of sharing a stage with people like that. So yeah, so I credit a lot of my good success to him.
Chad Franzen: 43:13
Awesome. Very nice. Well, thank you for sharing that. Hey, Michael, it’s been great to talk to you. Very interesting, very informative.
Thank you so much.
Michael Uadiale: 43:20
My pleasure. Chad, thank you so much for having me, and have a very great, great time.
Chad Franzen: 43:25
I appreciate it. So long, everybody.
Outro: 43:26
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