045: Revolutionizing Tax Advisory: Jackie Meyer's Journey from CPA to Tech Innovator

In this episode, I welcome Jackie Meyer, the President and Founder of TaxPlanIQ. Jackie shares her transformative journey from running a CPA firm to revolutionizing tax planning through her innovative software platform. This episode offers invaluable insights for financial advisors and accountants looking to enhance their services and client satisfaction.

We also talk about our upcoming attendance at the Elite Growth Academy in San Diego and explore Jackie's expertise in tax advisory services, highlighting their benefits for both financial advisors and accountants.

Jackie Meyer's Professional Evolution

• From CPA to Innovator: Jackie shares her journey from managing her CPA firm to focusing on tax advisory services. This shift not only tripled her firm's revenue but also significantly reduced her working hours. It showcases the transformative impact of concentrating on tax planning.
• TaxPlanIQ: Inspired by her success and the onset of COVID-19, she launched TaxPlanIQ, a comprehensive SaaS platform aimed at streamlining tax advisory services. This platform reflects her vision of making tax planning both accessible and influential for financial professionals.

TaxPlanIQ: Revolutionizing Tax Advisory

• Software Capabilities: TaxPlanIQ offers an all-in-one solution that simplifies the proposal, planning, and implementation of tax strategies. Key features include a tax strategy library, educational materials, and an innovative pricing tool that uses AI to transform the delivery and pricing of tax advisory services.
• AI Integration: She highlights the significance of AI within TaxPlanIQ, especially an AI bot capable of analyzing tax returns and suggesting strategies. This functionality makes tax advisory accessible to advisors of varying tax knowledge, allowing them to provide complex advice.

Jackie Meyer's Vision for the Future

• Championing Tax Advisory: Jackie strongly believes in the future of tax advisory for both financial advisors and accountants. She envisions a field that leverages AI and strategic thinking to provide unmatched value to clients.
• A Personal Journey into Publishing: Beyond her professional success, she is authoring a book focused on achieving balance and inner peace amidst success. This upcoming work is a testament to her personal growth and underscores the significance of mental and physical well-being in conjunction with professional achievements.

About our Guest: Jackie Meyer President - Tax Plan IQ

You can learn more about her work at:

https://www.jackiemeyercpa.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackiemeyercpa/


About Your Host:  Paul G. McManus is an accomplished author and expert in helping financial professionals grow their businesses. With over eight years of experience working exclusively with financial professionals, Paul has helped his clients generate tens of millions of dollars in fees and commissions.

Claim your free audiobook copy at: www.theshortbookformula.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:32

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Million Dollar Producer Show. I'm your host, paul G McManus, and today I have with me Jackie Meyer. Jackie is the president and founder of TaxPlanek. We're going to be speaking at the Elite Growth Academy in San Diego in June. This is the first time that we've actually met, or at least on Zoom. I'm excited to dive into this conversation with Jackie. She has some really cool things going on that are very applicable to both financial advisors as well as to accountants. So welcome, jackie, to the show. Thank you so much. As we get started, jackie, tell me a little bit more about just who you are, your professional background and how you got to where you are today.

Speaker 2: 1:13

Sure, I am what I call a recovering CPA. I had my own CPA firm for 12 years that I was very blessed to be able to sell, which a lot of accountants don't get to see that kind of future. But I had transformed my firm kind of halfway in to leading with tax advisory services, and it not only transformed my life, it transformed my family's life. It tripled our revenue. It equally decreased the time that I spent in my practice and my clients were thrilled with the work. I was able to reinvigorate passion and purpose through it, and so, after that happened, I went on this path to help other accountants and advisors incorporate tax advisory into their offerings, and so I did some coaching and consulting. And then COVID hit and I decided to go all out and create a SaaS software. So now I have a whole platform called TaxFunIQ where we are managing the end to end results, and we have some pretty cool stuff going on there for sure.

Speaker 1: 2:13

That's awesome. So, before we get into the software, which I know is really cool and it really takes advantage of some cutting edge artificial intelligence, which I know I'm excited about, just to my own business and just what's happening in the world today, from your perspective, what is the number one challenge account in CPAs, and maybe the financial advisors that work with them or collaborate with them, when it comes to being able to successfully offer tax advisory services?

Speaker 2: 2:43

What I see is that a lot of them are offering tax advisory services but they don't recognize them as such, and we all know the saying if you're going to do something, you got to really go all in. If you're going to have whatever, it doesn't turn out well. So a lot of times when the financial advisor account or meeting with a client, they might spew out some strategy ideas and think, oh, I did such a good job, and then the client is like super confused because they have no idea how to implement those strategies. The advisor doesn't have the time to help them implement because they're not charging for it, and so really the whole thing needs to be flipped on its head when it comes to the way that tax advisory is offered. If you lead with tax planning and you value price around that tax planning engagement, your client satisfaction scores will skyrocket.

Speaker 2: 3:33

Hopefully you love what you're doing, right. You get to do your passion and purpose by doing advisory work and you get the revenue and the time back that you've probably been sinking a lot into over the many years. I actually was just speaking to an accountant that identified over half a million dollars in one year of missed revenue from like three calls and answers they were giving to clients, and that's profound, I mean, it's insane. So that's what we're trying to do is just bridge that gap, educate people around how they can price it, how they can sell it, how they can implement and how they can have really happy clients from it.

Speaker 1: 4:12

Just want to go back and underscore what you said, which is, in this industry as well as other industries, right, it's that you have some very smart people who know a lot of things, but at the end of the day, if the incentives aren't aligned to actually you can give advice, it's hey, you should go do this, right, but if you don't actually provide the implementation for it, the chances are that the vice will never be acted upon because the client really doesn't know what to do Exactly. Just my understanding of the world and kind of the difference is that traditional CPAs accountants they know a lot of things but really they're tied up and busy and a lot of what's the word A lot of?

Speaker 1: 4:49

I can't think of a word, my new chef, my new chef, tax work and they get over compliance. Yeah, compliance is what I got, thank you, compliance working to get overwhelmed, and so they're doing their job, but the incentives just aren't there. Typically to say, hey, let's go above and beyond to really dive deep because the incentives aren't there, and then let's get a little bit deeper in terms of what the software does specifically to really allow the CPA or the accountant to be able to offer advisory services and to get, I would say, properly paid or valued for the expertise that they bring to the table as well as the implementation. How does your software change that dynamic in a way that benefits everybody? That makes a happier CPA. It makes a happier client or end user. If there's an advisor in the mix, working with the CPA, that brings the value that they have to the table.

Speaker 2: 5:48

It's a full end-to-end solution for all the steps that you need to accomplish to streamline From proposing the value-priced work from the beginning. It does that. It has a full presentation, full tax plan report to assign tasks, implement all the strategies that are involved. But one of the coolest things well, I guess there are a lot of cool things because I'm a founder, but we have a tax strategy library where we've compiled over a hundred of the most heavy-hitting strategies, whether alternative investments or that financial advisors are more keen to, or more traditional tax planning opportunities. We have templates on how to do it. We have checklists. We tell you exactly the steps to walk through to implement that.

Speaker 2: 6:34

Whether you're already extremely experienced or brand new, we provide that. And then so many educational resources. Every week we meet and help you walk through the plans. Every month we provide CPE around tax topics. The whole education side, I think, is just really fabulous. We also have what I call the ROI method of tax advisory, where we're taking the AI, cpas, value pricing tool kit that they recommend I've put my own spin on it where you can show the tangible tax savings or bringing to the table for the client and putting that with other intangibles like the complexity of the work and how urgent it is and things like that. We have a pricing tool that actually suggests how to price that engagement based on all of those factors. It really solves a lot of the problems that people say that, why they don't get into that work.

Speaker 1: 7:28

Yeah, Just before we started recording, you said something that I want to touch upon, which is, fundamentally, most CPAs don't like to sell. Just from what I'm learning from you is that the tool that you do it has that level of detail and can price things out, so that you don't have to make a pitch. You can quantify very simply on a piece of paper, so to speak, and say hey look, this is the potential savings, this is the work that's going to be done, this is the savings and this is the cost. Yeah, it's correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like it sells itself.

Speaker 2: 7:59

Yes, it sells itself. It's pretty amazing. It still can overwhelm accountants because they're so scared of the sell. So we're re-envisioning the product and the future between financial advisors and accountants. We're excited because we're working with Anton and John Cutten and all of them to re-envision how can we bring both sides of that equation into tax pun, iq and then really focus on their strengths, because financial advisors are great at selling and accountants are great at the technical side of things. So we have some pretty cool stuff that's coming up. I think we're going to have a big announcement at the conference around it, so it's exciting.

Speaker 1: 8:38

You can share it right now, just from the advisor standpoints. If an advisor is watching this, and maybe specifically someone who's going to be attending the upcoming conference, what's the key thing that you'll again? I understand that they're given launched, yet what's the key message? Or what's the key thing that you hope an advisor that attends the conference walks away from your speech or getting to know you and what you have to offer.

Speaker 2: 9:04

I really feel strongly that tax advisory is the future of both the financial advisory profession and the tax profession. It solves so many problems that we're having the fact that AI we do have to recognize it is going to come in and take over a lot of those baseline calculations and functions for us, and so we have to put higher level thinking to the table and really bring those bigger value items to the client. And so I would say if there's one thing you get out of my discussion or our chat here, it's give tax advisory a chance and see what can be done, because there's some tremendous results there.

Speaker 1: 9:43

One of the things that I'm curious about is that I know a lot of the advisors will be attending the conference and either they already have existing relationships with CPAs or they're looking to build relationships with more CPAs or new CP. What would having a tool like what you provide allow them to do that? Maybe currently is a little bit more difficult in terms of building those CPA partnerships.

Speaker 2: 10:06

If you've ever worked with an accountant or a financial advisor, you probably have worked with someone that scribbled like all this junk on a piece of paper, like all these cool ideas that you could do. It's so overwhelming. This product is really just supposed to be one place to collaborate between what shrinks the financial advisor can bring to the table with some of their financial strategies and their selling opportunities, with what the accountant can bring to the table from the technical and implementation side, and so it's really like a dream partnership come true. Instead of competing with one another which no one likes and I see all the tweets people can play the accountants complaining about financial advisor complaining about countants we're bringing everyone together in beautiful harmony, which is always nice right.

Speaker 1: 10:50

As well as the client right, Because now we're benefiting from the expertise of both parties, as well as the virtual family office, if that's in play.

Speaker 2: 10:58

For sure.

Speaker 1: 10:58

Do you have any examples or stories of any clients that you've worked with that are already seeing the results or benefits of this? That can help.

Speaker 2: 11:05

Yeah, I've coached hundreds of accounts now since about 2018. And there have been some pretty significant stories. I could talk all day about revenue figures but, honestly, the one that really stands out to me is a particular accounting firm owner that was so burnout and so stressed. She was trying so hard and she could not have a second child and her doctor was telling her you need to stop working, it's too much for you Everything and so I helped her transform towards tax advisory. She ended up tripling her revenue from around 300 K gross to 900 K a year within just a couple of years. She was able to get her time down from 60 hour work weeks to 35 hour work weeks and guess what? She got to have that baby and I got to hold that baby. That's a really impactful thing when you can help people from their mental and physical health, on top of all the things that we can do from the financial perspective as well.

Speaker 1: 12:07

And just getting to know you a little bit. I know you were talking about your, I think, in the process of writing a book.

Speaker 2: 12:13

I am.

Speaker 1: 12:13

And I think really gets to the heart of I'll let you describe it, but from my understanding of what you said balancing that success. You always think that at the next level, life's going to be good, life's going to get easier, life's going to be this and that and the other, but I think there's a really conscious decisions and choices that you have to make to create the life that you want. What's your book about and who's it for? And what's it about?

Speaker 2: 12:35

That makes me think of that little say Mo Money, mo Problems.

Speaker 2: 12:39

I'm just going to say that in my life because in what it's statistically proven, the listeners probably know this better than me but the more money you make, the more expenses you take on, the more debt you tend to take on and the more stress you tend to take on, and so I found kind of being a serial entrepreneur at this point in my life. I've had success, I've grown three million dollar companies, but I still don't feel like I have that full inner peace, and so I'm a work in progress. I know a lot of tips and techniques that can help people bring down their stress levels, and I admit I'll be the first one to admit I don't have all the answers, but I do have a lot of good ones, and so I'm going to pull it all together to where to convince people. Look, I know we're all looking for happiness, but really I think maybe we're looking for peace, like inner peace in the work that we do, having passion and purpose, and so it's really exciting to do that.

Speaker 1: 13:35

It sounds you've done this by example, right? We all listen or many of us listen to books and get tips, and oftentimes there's a thing that I know I should be doing, but maybe I'm not doing it. And just if I can circle back to your story that I that you shared earlier about, I think you said double or tripling your revenue and reducing the hours and you do this for clients as well. But I guess maybe when you did this for yourself, was there like any breakthrough or what allowed you to go from where you were to where you maybe were when you sold your business? What was like that breakthrough, that nugget that someone can do?

Speaker 2: 14:06

Yeah, okay. So this comes back to what we were talking about earlier before the recording. Really, like what? Yeah, what does define someone that's successful or not successful? And to me, at the end of the day, it's just about moving forward, making decisions, and some of them are going to fail drastically. Robert Kiyosaki has that saying. I'm probably going to butcher it, but it's failures fail, but winners fail until they succeed, because we all fail, and even if we're not showing everybody, that idea was like the worst idea ever. But that's what you have to do. You have to just keep moving forward. And I had that realization by working with a business coach which is why I recommend that so wholeheartedly to everybody else is I was overthinking everything, I was in like analysis, paralysis, and I wasn't moving forward with anything. And so you're wasting months, if not years, stressing about what could be, instead of just trying it and going for it and then seeing what can be done and pivoting when you need to.

Speaker 1: 15:11

So for an advisor watching this, and they've been thinking about developing CPA relationships and they know it's a good idea and they also know it takes time and commitment and all these other things. So they're overthinking it perhaps. I don't know any advice or suggestions you have a background in CPA, your serial entrepreneur, you have this cool solution. So for someone that's like on the fence, I want to do it. How can people nudge them to take action?

Speaker 2: 15:36

You got to do it. I've been doing this so long that I know I'm still very passionate about it, but I used to try to beat people over the head with it. You have to do this and I realized they have to come to their own realization and conclusion. But I would just say just go for it. Pick one client. By the way, I didn't mention one of the coolest things our software does, which I should have. We have this whole feature and AI bot that will scan the client's 1040 for you, read it, analyze and propose the tax strategies, and so if the financial advisor is like, how am I ever going to get into the tax advisory? I don't know anything about it, jane. Our bot will do it for you, and then you can just go research those particular strategies, get the education behind it and go from there, and so we're really removing any barrier that you could possibly have to be successful with this.

Speaker 1: 16:28

And so let's pivot a little bit and get into AI. So we were just talking and I love AI I started dabbling in it, I think in 2022. And I was looking for my own solution in terms of my services and how I can fast track them. I think in 2022, we still look too early. Right, people had some stuff, but it wasn't great.

Speaker 1: 16:47

But I would say, and I think you'll agree with this, it was March of 2023, very specific, I know this March of 2023 when ChatGPT which is the name a lot of people have come to know they released what's called their GPT4 model, so one of what was GPT-3 to GPT-4, and I knew in March that was a game changer in terms of what I do in terms of marketing and different services. Since then, it's been almost a year now. I think it's amazing right now, but we're still in the infancy stage. I like to use the analogy that with the internet, we're literally still in dial-up, and so the future is broadband in the next few years. Tell us just about how you've come into AI and how you built that into your SaaS company and the services. I think you alluded to one of the features just now, but just tell us your overall thoughts about that.

Speaker 2: 17:36

I love AI, I love natural language processing, which is this particular aspect of it. I completely agree. March was like the changing point when I realized, after testing it, I've always been an early adopter. So I hop in and you have this realization oh my gosh, all of these things that I thought a computer should be able to do for the last 10 years has finally come to fruition. It should have been this smart this whole time, but I don't know why, because I'm not a programmer. I don't know why we got to this point now, but hey, I'm excited about it.

Speaker 2: 18:09

So it's taking the work, the development work we've been able to do in our product this last year would have cost probably millions of dollars. We did it in tens of thousands of dollars, so you can imagine how that's going to impact the world when it comes to new software products, a lot of different new offerings and of course, it's like the best writing assistant you could ever have. It helps with all of that really well and it's a lot of fun. I actually really enjoy just interacting with it.

Speaker 1: 18:39

There's some interesting products that I've seen, where I haven't bought them yet, just where it almost it externalizes the AI to like where you can have a conversation with it almost. But yeah, so there's a lot of stuff coming down the pipe. It'll be an interesting future. So, along those lines, I think you're up before a friend of what you do and you're building AI into this. Here we are in 2024. From whether it's an advisor standpoint or CPA or both, how do you see this evolving? What are the trends that an advisor or CPA needs to move? Jump on board now. I don't want to say before it's too late, but before they start feeling like they've been left behind.

Speaker 2: 19:20

I really think we probably have about, and this constantly changes, but at the moment today I feel like we have about a year before. We have people being like whoa. This is I'm significantly behind from what other people are doing Every day. I'm sure you see the news there's 10 new AI products coming out. I'm constantly looking at the new products I want to see. I want to use the best of the best. I want to be the most efficient. What they're doing is taking things from 10 hours down to 30 minutes or one hour. If you apply that to any profession, that's going to cause a drastic difference in people, especially with short staffed industries, if you're not jumping on the AI train. I remember the president of the AI CPA, who runs all the CPAs, said the accounting firm that will be left behind by AI is the one that doesn't use it. That pretty much hits the nail on the head.

Speaker 1: 20:19

For someone who I don't want to say is old school, but maybe just hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid yet, and maybe they're concerned about a human needs to review this or a human needs to do this, or maybe they're just scared. What is the encouragement you'd give someone who's either scared of AI or just maybe is not there yet?

Speaker 2: 20:36

Yeah, gosh, that's hard for me, because I've even been looking at the second brain apps lately, where I'm trying to transcribe and record everything I do so that it can help me summarize my day or figure out what my new innovations would be for that day, or article topics that I might want to talk about because I see so much potential in it.

Speaker 2: 20:58

And I could see someone on the opposite end of the scale like that's a privacy violation, like I would never do that. But I don't care, I don't think that's a high. I think people will be okay if they stick with other people that don't want to use AI right, there's going to be but certain people that just continue to resist it completely and they might be able to manage that relationship for maybe the next five to 10 years, but there's going to be a certain point where we don't even know that AI is in 99% of the products out there and it's going to infiltrate everything. Right, and then you won't be able to dispute it. I think it's important to just go give it a try. You can cost $25 a month to use GPT-4. Like, just go pay $25, interact with GPT-4, see what it can do, and then maybe it'll help change your mind.

Speaker 1: 21:52

Yeah, I 100% agree with that. It's definitely 10X and this isn't like an exaggeration, it's 10X my productivity.

Speaker 2: 21:58

That's awesome.

Speaker 1: 21:59

As well as my team's productivity, and so I'm all about having them take advantage of AI. So, for someone who's listening to this podcast, what's the best place for them to reach out to you? Learn more about you?

Speaker 2: 22:10

Jackie CPA is my website J-A-C-K-I-EC-P-A, and you can see the software, my consulting, offering stuff like that. And then I'm pretty much all my social handles are Jackie Meier, c-p-a-m-e-y-e-r, and I try to stay pretty active online. If you are an accountant or I guess even for financial advisors, I do run a pretty nice Facebook group called Accounting From Influencers. We've got about just under 10,000 people there, and so if you want to continue the discussion, that would be a great place to go to. Perfect.

Speaker 1: 22:44

And is that Facebook group open to advisors as well as CPS?

Speaker 2: 22:47

Yeah, it's like anyone that's influencing the space, and so if financial advisors are interested in tax advisory or interested in working with accountants, I think it's a great place for them to come as well.

Speaker 1: 22:57

Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. I learned a lot and I am excited to hear your speech and to learn a little bit more about the software.

Speaker 2: 23:05

Thank you so much.