Million Dollar Producer Show
The Million Dollar Producer Show™ interviews highly successful financial professionals, thought leaders and organizations in the financial services and life insurance industries. This podcast is here to help answer the key question: “What are the insider secrets to stand out in a noisy marketplace and consistently attract and convert high value clients?” To get answers each week, subscribe to the Million Dollar Producer Show.
Million Dollar Producer Show
064:Turning Sunshine into Savings: Solar Tax Credits and Investment Strategies with Jesse Raynes
In this podcast episode, I welcome Jesse Raynes, managing partner of Inception Financial, to discuss the often misunderstood world of solar tax credits.
This episode provides valuable insights into an often-overlooked tax strategy, showcasing Jesse's innovative approach to helping clients reduce their tax liability using solar tax credits. It also highlights how financial advisors and CPAs can leverage this strategy to add value for their clients while addressing the growing demand for renewable energy solutions.
Jesse's Journey: From Actor to Solar Energy Expert
- Career Transitions: Jesse's eclectic background includes professional acting, managing high-end nightclubs and restaurants, and eventually entering the solar industry in 2008.
- SolarCity and Tesla Experience: Jesse spent several years at SolarCity, later acquired by Tesla, where he played a key role in growing the sales team from 14 to 1,000 professionals.
- Founding Inception Financial: After leaving Tesla, Jesse founded Inception Financial, driven by his personal experience in reducing his own tax liability using solar tax credits.
Solar Tax Credits: A Misunderstood Tax Strategy
- Understanding the Basics: Jesse explains that solar tax credits involve owning solar systems as a business through an LLC, generating both tax credits and depreciation benefits.
- Comparing to Other Strategies: He contrasts solar tax credits with real estate investments and 401(k) contributions, highlighting the unique advantages of this approach.
- Benefits for Clients: The strategy allows clients to redirect money that would otherwise go to the IRS into owning income-producing assets, while also reducing their tax liability.
Collaborating with Financial Advisors and CPAs
- Attractive Features: He discusses why family offices, wealth managers, and CPAs find this strategy appealing, including its codified nature and potential for client differentiation.
- Misconceptions Addressed: Jesse clarifies common misconceptions, such as the strategy being limited to personal home use or being part of a fund structure.
- Risk Mitigation: He explains how Inception Financial has structured their business to minimize risk for clients, even in the unlikely event of the company's dissolution.
Key Takeaways and Future Outlook
- Bipartisan Support: Jesse highlights the long-standing bipartisan support for solar tax credits, dating back to 1978, and their importance in addressing energy needs.
- Encouraging Exploration: He emphasizes the value of learning about this strategy, even for those who may ultimately decide not to pursue it.
- Personal Passion: Jesse shares his enthusiasm for his current role, combining his background in solar energy with the satisfaction of helping families save money.
About our Guest: Jesse Raynes, managing partner of Inception Financial.
You can learn more about his work at: https://www.inception.financial/about-us/
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
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Million Dollar Producer Show. My name is Paul G McManus. Today, my guest is Jesse Raines. Jesse is the managing partner of Inception Financial, where he helps clients reduce their tax liability using solar tax credits. Welcome to the show. Appreciate you having me. It was good meeting you. I believe it was in June. We were both at the Elite Growth in San Diego. How was that event for you? Was it productive?
Speaker 2:It was very productive and it was nice to meet so many people that I had been speaking to via Zoom or on phone calls but actually see them in person and develop a greater sense of rapport, and I also found that many of the other presentations by other sponsors was very unique and interesting to learn about what's going on out there in the financial services world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely I enjoyed it. It's always nice to have a reason to get out to San Diego. That was fun, but I found it to be a very productive conference as well. I'm excited to talk to you today and we're gonna be talking about solar credits and preparing for today's session. I was looking at your LinkedIn. I'm curious. It looks like you have a background in working for both SolarCity and Tesla, which are, of course, two Elon Musk affiliated companies. Now, personally, I know he's controversial for a lot of people. I'm a fan of his, but I've also read his books and I've heard that he can be difficult to work for. But so, anything that you're comfortable sharing with us, and just your background in general, I'd love to hear what's your professional background, how did you get to where you are today, and if you want to tie anything about those companies, that would be great as well.
Speaker 2:Sure yeah, there are a few items there to tackle, so I'll start first my background very eclectic background actually. I started out as a professional actor in my younger days. That's what brought me out to Los Angeles. I had a very nice career for many years and then was looking for something a little bit more stable, shall we say, and I'd moved back to New York City where I got involved in running some very high-end nightclubs and restaurants. That taught me a lot about process and entrepreneurship, of course. And then I came back to California and that's when I got into the solar industry, and this was in 2008. So very early days I was recruited to go work for SolarCity.
Speaker 2:As you mentioned, elon Musk had put up the seed capital and his two cousins ran that company. I reported to his cousin, lyndon when I first started. He was the CEO and it was a phenomenal experience. It was building out a business. When I started I had 14 sales professionals reporting to me from Santa Barbara down to San Diego, out to Palm Springs, and during my tenure there I got my sales team up to a thousand sales professional covering the entire Western seaboard, including Hawaii. So massive growth, massive scale the things that I got to learn, obviously, seeing a company grow like that and be involved in instrumentally in the training programs, the recruiting programs, all of our software that we used for quoting purposes, all the best practices we use to create an exceptional client experience. I was heavily involved in all of that and, of course, working under an Elon Musk company at the time he's not the Elon that we know today. Right, this is back in 2008.
Speaker 2:And people knew that there was this crazy guy who was creating some type of cool car that maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to drive around, and I can tell you he was as intense then as he is today and he's just driven by something different than most people possess.
Speaker 2:I think his brain is working so incredibly fast and thinking such complex ways that it must be these are my words must be frustrating to work with other people who are probably 10, 15 paces behind him all the time and having to catch people up. And also, I think that he's driven by a profound sense of protecting humanity. I really I don't know this personally about him. It's just conjecture on my part, but I do believe that is driving force and he approaches every day with an extreme sense. At least this is the culture. We had an extreme sense of urgency every day to grow, to get better, to improve and to just move more volume and really get more solar panels up on rooftops, get more electric vehicles on the road and obviously we know about his mission to go extra planetary. I think that these are things that you don't take lightly and require massive focus and a lot of long hours.
Speaker 1:I recently read his, the biography of him, and I've actually read a couple because I'm just fascinated by him and just everything that you're saying jives with what I've heard, and so very interesting. I'd love to go down the whole rabbit hole but I know we have limited time, but that's a very interesting background that you have. So, if I heard you correctly, you started out as an actor, moved into running nightclubs and then you got into SolarCity. Were you also part of Tesla, or were those companies just joined? Or what was your role at Tesla, if any?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they were sister companies always. And then SolarCity went public in 2012. So that was pretty transformational for me to see a company go from a private company to a publicly traded company and the compliance and things that change corporately when that happens. And then we were prepping a few years later to do the merger. So I got to learn what it's like for two publicly traded companies, especially at that size, to officially merge, and it was shortly after the merger, so that happened around 16, going into 17. So I did hang around for about six months and Tesla just simply acquired SolarCity and it became Tesla Energy and it's the Tesla Energy that's there today. A lot of the people that I work with are still at that company and a lot of the installation crews are still working now at Tesla. It's just a different name on the letterhead, if you will. But shortly after that, the merger, I did leave and then founded my company that I'm at now Inception Financial.
Speaker 1:Fantastic, yeah. So tell me what led you to found Inception Financial. I'm very impressed by your background. As you said, it's eclectic, but it seems like you have so many amazing insights and experience from just what you observed and witnessed. And so what was the passion of motivation behind starting Inception Financial?
Speaker 2:Really, it started with solving my own tax. I had a pretty big exit from Tesla.
Speaker 2:It's always a good place to start. It is yeah, no, I mean my wife. I'm very fortunate.
Speaker 2:My time at SolarCity and Tesla was transformational, professionally and financially, and, having exited Tesla with a lot of Tesla stock, I needed a means to cut my own tax liability, and my wife is, fortunately, a high income earner she's an executive at Netflix, and so between the two of us, we were just paying like a crazy amount of taxes, and so I was looking at ways I could do this for myself, and I connected with my now managing partner and I've known him for 16 plus years and he's like hey, knucklehead, you should be buying solar projects, you should be getting credits and depreciation and using this for you and your wife. And it was a real aha moment because I had done this for years with these large institutional banks. Everything that we do has been documented and the structure in place by counterparties like Morgan Stanley, us Bank of America, amazon, google, netflix, apple, the likes and I hired a leading tax counsel and CPA firms and got very comfortable with me and my wife doing it, realized it's very simple and no different than what these banks were doing, except I could take these credits and the depreciation and I could use it to offset all of my own personal income at the household, and so that's how it started. And then, being the solar expert in my community, I'm surrounded by a lot of high net worth entertainment executives et cetera, and they wanted to learn how they could do it for themselves. So I guided them through that and it was at that time my managing partner and I. He'd basically come to me and said we have a white space here and nobody is educating retail clients that they can even do this. They don't even know it exists, that's been around for 50 years and how simple it is and it takes a lot of time.
Speaker 2:I'm talking I'm sure people listening right now are all in financial services working with retail clients, and we know that takes a lot of time, a lot of educational components to it and just getting people comfortable Time we had. We weren't chasing a big exit. We weren't trying to chase a multiple. We weren't trying to grow fast. We were creating a business that we're passionate about, that was going to generate nice income for us and something that we really enjoy. So now we've been doing this going in our fifth year and we've got over 120 clients that we have helped, I'm happy to say, almost all of our clients repeat the strategy year over year and we have literally helped our clients save millions of dollars in taxes, literally helped our clients save millions of dollars in taxes. And now I think, with our track record of almost half a decade, it gives people a lot of comfort to know this is real, because it sounds esoteric to start, but it's actually extraordinarily simple.
Speaker 1:I'm interested as a just as a consumer, right. I'm looking at my tax bill and what I owe and I don't like it. I don't know a lot about solar tax credits other than the name. Really Talk to me like I don't know anything, which I don't. And just what is a solar tax credit? Who is it for? What do you need to qualify? How does it work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So what we do is we help our clients, we sell them, essentially solar systems that are sitting on residential rooftops all across the United States. So this is not about getting solar for your house, although you can do that. This is about owning solar systems as a business call it a little side business through an LLC, and through the ownership of those assets you generate tax credits and also depreciation, and it's that simple. Those are the underlying tax benefits that you can use to help offset all of your income sources.
Speaker 2:So, regardless of who purchases a solar system, everyone, including individuals, is entitled to a minimum of 30% tax credit. So if the solar system costs $30,000, well, 30% tax credit would yield you $9,000 in credits, and those credits are a dollar per dollar credit. So if you owed $9,000, effectively it would eliminate that $9,000 payment. That's the credit. And then there's depreciation, and most of your listeners and viewers are going to know what depreciation is. Just like buying a jet or buying a piece of capital equipment heavy equipment, maybe leasing it out, as some people do real estate, et cetera. You can generate depreciation, while solar systems they qualify for bonus depreciations or accelerated depreciation at the state, so you're always able to depreciate the asset within five years okay, using the maker's formula and it's those two benefits that you are able to generate, which gives you a credit of what you would pay, and the depreciation lowers all of your other forms of income and saves you money in your taxes that way. So it's just really those two benefits and it's simply owning the asset.
Speaker 2:Now, of course, when you own this asset, you have a contractual obligation with the property owner where the solar system's installed, and the obligation is that you're going to deliver power to that property owner. Most of your viewers and listeners probably don't have much experience in doing that, and that's where we come in. So Inception Financial not only sells the assets directly to our clients' LLCs, but we also sign a technical services agreement and that ensures that we will make sure that all of that power is being delivered to the property owners. If there's any type of warranty item, we take care of that Items. With the property owners, we do that as well. So think of us as also a property manager. But instead of it being a real estate asset, it's simply a solar asset. What our clients are buying is not brick and mortar, it's just an asset that's on top of a brick and mortar asset. They own that asset. We ensure it delivers the power and our clients benefit from both the tax benefits and then the predictable income that is associated with selling that electricity.
Speaker 1:So what I've heard and I'm following you for the most part when you buy it one, you get an immediate tax deduction I believe I heard you say about 30%. You also get depreciation over a five-year period on the asset. But then the third piece, it sounds, is that now it's actually an income-producing asset. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:That's correct. So there are various financing structures in solar. Most of them are all done through what's called a power purchase agreement. So, paul, your house, okay, you may want to have solar, but you may not want to buy that solar system. So instead you would go with a company that would own the solar system but then would sell you the electricity. And they do that through a power purchase agreement. It's what utility companies have been using to buy their power from independent power plants for the last 100 years, and at SolarCity we took that concept and brought it down to the residential level and allowed all of the property owners to buy electricity from us at a reduced rate. And what we did there is we bundled up all of these assets and we sold them off to Morgan Stanley and Bank of America and all these other corporations on their balance sheet. So we service the customer, but then these banks took advantage of the tax credits. Here at Inception Financial, we're doing the same exact thing, except instead of it going to Morgan Stanley, we are selling it to retail clients, and then we are helping facilitate the delivery of that electricity.
Speaker 2:There's two forms of power purchase agreements. The first is one in which you would pay every single month for the power that is being delivered by that solar system that's installed in your rooftop. Pretty simple right? Just like how you're paying power to the utility provider today. The other form is you could prepay for all 20 years of your electricity payments from that solar system up front in one lump sum. Now you're probably sitting here going. Why on earth would I do that? Because you get a really large discount and you lock in your price for life.
Speaker 2:So think of it, about buying oil for your home if you live in a cold weather climate, and it's almost like buying an option on that oil. So you've locked it in but you prepay for it. So for the rest of the next 20 years, that's your cost. A lot of property owners actually have the cash to do, and it is one of the smartest, most economical and most savvy way to get electricity not just solar electricity, but any form of electricity, because it's always going to be the least expensive. And with our strategy, that's what these property owners are doing. They're paying for all 20 years of those electricity payments up front.
Speaker 2:That income goes to our clients who end up owning that asset. And what our clients do is they turn right around and they use that upfront income to pay for the majority of the installation costs and then the balance that's left over, they just pay using dollars that would have otherwise gone to the IRS. So we're not competing with investable dollars. We're not competing with someone selling Apple stock or going into their savings. We're taking dollars that are otherwise uninvestable, that are going to the IRS, and saying you have a better option, use those dollars to purchase these assets. You'll get a dollar for dollar credit. So, speaking broadly, you will not owe that money to the IRS because they'll give you a credit. And then, on top of that, you're going to generate depreciation, which is going to lower all of your forms of income, whether it's W2 or business income, or stocks and bonds. What have you? So I know I said a lot there, but broadly speaking, that's how the structure works.
Speaker 1:Broadly speaking, how would you compare that to, say, investing in real estate? It sounds like it has a lot of similar properties to it. I guess one thing is that my guess and I could be wrong is that people that want to do this are they more driven by the idea of solar and wanting to support it, or is it just strictly numbers investments, tax savings or a combination?
Speaker 2:Typically the latter. Most everyone is making a decision based on economic value. I think the feel-good attributes of producing clean electricity may be a value add. Everyone is doing this because it makes great economic sense.
Speaker 2:The fundamental difference between a real estate investment and this is with real estate you have to come up with the cash, so you have to either go into your savings, you have to divest another investment and use that money now to reinvest in real estate. Here we're just simply taking the dollars you're giving to the IRS. Let me use a W-2 employee like my wife as an example. We changed her withholdings, so there's very little taxes coming out of her paycheck. So you can imagine that next paycheck we got was much larger. We had all this surplus of cash and we took that surplus and we used it to buy our solar systems.
Speaker 2:And then I used to pay my taxes quarterly and I stopped doing that and I took that same money that I was earmarked to pay those quarterlies and instead bought my solar assets with it. So for our household there's been no impact to our cash flow. We're simply redirecting the same dollars that are going to the IRS. I can't do that with a real estate investment because if I did that at the end of the year, I'd owe the IRS a massive bill here, because I bought my assets that are solar and they generate a credit. The credit absolves me of that payment that I was otherwise supposed to make.
Speaker 2:So now I'm break even. I'm good. I still wrote a check, but instead of giving to the IRS, I used it to buy assets, and now I also have the benefit of all of this depreciation, which is creating an operating loss in my LLC, and I take that loss and I use that to offset my business income and my wife's W-2 income. And therein lies the difference between any other strategy is that real estate can be a tax efficient investment. It's still an investment with investable dollars. This is a strategy taking non investable dollars and using them to buy an asset that delivers intrinsic value.
Speaker 1:Let's take it the other way. For someone that, how would you compare this, broadly speaking, to someone, say, putting money into a 401k or some other tax-deferred vehicle like that?
Speaker 2:So that obviously, in my opinion, is one of the smartest things that you can do, because you can take the money that you would otherwise be paying taxes on, put into a 401k that reduces your overall gross income.
Speaker 2:And now you pay less in taxes and that can grow for you and you're only going to pay taxes when you take it out. Love that strategy and that's why our strategy is a compliment to that, because there's only a certain amount you can do under that. And there's also defined benefits plans and cash balance plans right, those are other smart things that I do, but I'm capped at my amount. At the end of the day, I still have to pay taxes, and the money that I'm talking about that my wife and I use it's after all of these other things that you've mentioned, including investing in real estate and oil and gas and these other things. We still have a tax bill, so it's that tax bill that we are shaving off and using that money to buy the asset. So it's a great compliment to all these other things that your viewers and listeners may be utilizing already.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Thank you for that explanation. That was very helpful for me as the non-financial advisor. That was very helpful probably, and hopefully it was useful to our listeners as well, who are mostly financial advisors and CPAs, and so I'd love to pivot from there. And so how do you work with or collaborate with financial advisors or CPAs on opportunities for their clients to take advantage of solar tax credits? Who's a good process look like, et cetera?
Speaker 2:Yeah, great question. So we work with family offices, wealth managers and CPAs routinely. In fact, the bulk of our business is coming from those types of relationships that we currently have in place. When I started the business, I was reaching out to people close to my network individuals and getting referrals, but now the business has grown where we spend very little time reaching out to just retail clients. Most of our time is spent talking to CPAs, wealth managers and family offices, and the reason that these organizations like working with us is twofold.
Speaker 2:First, most people are looking for a tax strategy that is highly codified, well-documented and risk adverse and I've seen a lot of other similar tax strategies out there, and they come with their set of challenges, and this is the strategy that I feel the most comfortable all the ones I've ever seen, because it's been battle tested for 50 years. This is not new. It's new to a lot of your listeners, but it's not new to the IRS. This has been codified since 1978, and we know depreciation has been around for a heck of a long time as well. It's because of the codified nature of this strategy that I think so many of these organizations CPAs, family offices, et cetera like working with us because it's very clear what the code says and how you can do this and there's not much ambiguity to the structure. The other reason I think they like working with us is because very few people know about this and this is a tool in their handbag where they can have differentiation against the competition. They can use this to maybe recruit in a higher net worth family than they may have been with their current tools they have today. And then, of course, because this is a strategy that our clients do year over year, most of those families are going to stay with that advisor, with that office, because they know they can rely on this strategy.
Speaker 2:It's not like you can just make a few phone calls and substitute Inception Financial with somebody else, because, crazy as this is going to sound, just as crazy as it was when I moved back to California in 2008 and gotten a solar, people are like you can make a living at that. This is just. We're on the right side of time here. There's not really any other company doing it at scale. Our secret sauce is in one thing our relationships with the contractors who want to do business with us and use our financial product in the household.
Speaker 2:The code's there. It's been around for a long time. There's lots of other financing companies out there that do it. Most are in a fund. This is not a fund. This is not a security.
Speaker 2:And so because we've been able to focus just on retail clients and we have this deep network of contractors, that is where we really shine, because we can scale this as high as we need to go and because it's residential, it's smaller solar systems. Some of our clients might need 10 assets a year. Some of our clients might need a thousand, when we can help everybody in between. So it's for these reasons that it's predictable, it's scalable, it's repeatable. And, lastly, I'll say we make it uber simple for our advisors to do business with us, because at the end of the year we gift wrap the reporting package to the CPAs Really simple to file. All of our forms are pre-filled out for them. So the most amount of brain damage we go through with our partners is this. It's how does this esoteric thing work? Is it legitimate with the tax code? Once we get to the learning phase, everything's through DocuSign and everything happens through our customer portal and it's very easy to do business with us.
Speaker 1:Does it matter if there's a Democrat or a Republican in office? Does that create any headwinds, typically when it comes to the tax credits and other things, or is it pretty stable either way?
Speaker 2:I would say let's look at history and say that this tax credit has been in place since 1978. So it's withstood every administration since Nixon. This is a type of credit that has bipartisan support we've seen, predominantly because it's energy and I don't care personally speaking. I think we all could agree that whether it's fracking or oil or gas or nuclear or coal or solar or wind, we need all forms of energy sources right now, because some could say we have an energy crisis in our nation and with the advent of AI, it's only going to create more demand, not less demand. And so when you look at congressional endorsement for credits and things of that nature, it's usually around the infrastructure of our nation and I think at the bedrock of that infrastructure is energy. So it's for those reasons that we feel supremely comfortable that the credit will be in place Right now. It's codified out to 2032. And we don't have much history of the Congress unwinding things like that. So I think we're pretty solid.
Speaker 1:Is there any misconceptions that we haven't talked about, that either the consumer or the financial advisor has when it comes to this that you've come across, or what are those common misconceptions that we haven't yet spoken about?
Speaker 2:One big misconception is that this is for your house, so I always like to remind people it's not. Another misconception is that it's a fund. Always like to remind people it's not. Another misconception is that it's a fund. This is not a fund and that's what makes it so elegant, so that you can buy a few systems and I can buy my systems, but they're independent, right, we don't commingle funds and that's what allows each of our clients to utilize this strategy against both active and passive income. And there's very few strategies out there to offset that active income and this is one of those, because of the inherent structure, that are using it not being a fund. There's lots of other solar structures out there. They're much more complicated, like the ones that banks do. They require managing capital accounts and doing deficit restoration obligations and lots of crazy stuff. So a lot of people, when they first hear about investing solar, their minds go there, because that's what most people know. Very few people know about the simple asset purchase and owning these assets through an LLC on their own.
Speaker 1:And I just love how you broke down the contrast to, say, real estate and then also the contrast to the 401k, because I think those are two assets that your average consumer can wrap their heads around and just see how this is similar and different from both of those. I think that was very helpful, for myself at least, to better understand it. Is there any question that I haven't asked you about it that you think is worth discussing?
Speaker 2:I would just say that the one question people may ask is this all sounds great, it sounds a little too good to be true. And I would just say that the one question people may ask is this all sounds great, it sounds a little too good to be true. And I would say you're not wrong for thinking that way. It's just you don't know about this because you're not in the industry. But we can get, and I'm confident every single CPA that our clients work with sufficiently comfortable that the structure is sound. Whether or not there's commercial risk that they're willing to take is another matter, and I think the largest commercial risk that someone might be thinking they're taking is great. I love all this, I'd love to do it.
Speaker 2:But what happens if Inception Financial goes out of business and so we actually, through our technical services agreement, outsource all of that work to the large companies that do this for the big banks agreement, outsource all of that work to the large companies that do this for the big banks, and there's dozens of companies that offer this service, and we do it as a pass-through expense predominantly because if we were able to go out of business, we'd make enough money and we just decide to close up shop.
Speaker 2:First of all, our agreements don't allow us to do that. We are obligated to find them a replacement. The good news is, even if we took off tomorrow and didn't answer the phones, our clients could simply go direct to the subcontractors that we've hired, because they're household names and the cost that we're charging is just a pass-through expense. So they'd be paying the same thing, essentially, just writing the check to a different organization instead of Inception Financial. And we set it up that way specifically to give our clients comfort to say you're not just relying on Inception Financial, but you've got backups and you've got dozens of companies that can be your property manager for your solar systems in that unlikely event that we weren't here. So we've really tried to think through every angle to make sure that all of our clients feel comfortable, that the structure is sound and that their investment is as risk adjusted as it possibly can be.
Speaker 1:You find that it's typically more the financial advisor or the CPA or someone else that brings these client opportunities to you.
Speaker 2:I would say it's usually the financial advisors. We do have some healthy relationships with some CPAs and it's interesting. I think a lot of CPAs and this is their job is to be extremely risk adverse, and I think that they need to be. Even maybe some characterize some as being overly risk adverse Because, at the end of the day, the CPA is just going to inherit headaches if it goes south and they're concerned about an audit Speaking of which we don't have any history of any of our clients and anyone we know that's been doing this ever being audited. But that is an issue that CPAs think about because it's more work for them.
Speaker 2:However, I will tell you that the top leading CPAs that we work with they lean into this strategy heavily and I think that speaks to the highly codified nature and the fact that they feel very comfortable that they know that audits can happen randomly and for something like this, I think they would see it as very routine, that they have a strong enough fact pattern. They have all the things they need because it is so codified that they're just simply not worried about it and they move a lot of their clients into the structure and I've really learned that it's helped me choose the CPA I'm working with, by the way, because I understand they're willing to take the risk because they know the code so well, and I think some of the other CPAs they just don't understand the code. Ergo, they're not willing to take that because they just don't understand it.
Speaker 1:What are the chances of Elon Musk doing a favorable tweet for you and getting 20?
Speaker 2:million views, probably slim to none. I think that if I were going to ask a favor from Elon, I'm not sure it would be for my biz, because biz is doing really well. I think he would probably be like how do I get on to one of the SpaceX capsules or something really cool like that, right Play my cards in that capacity. There you go Very cool.
Speaker 1:I found this conversation for myself to be very informative. I personally work with a lot of advisors and CPAs and specialists like yourself and it's always interesting to deep dive because you know you can hear just solar tax credits. Okay, I understand those three words. What is it? I have no idea. It goes back to the misconceptions, right? I guess I need to put a solar thing on my roof. I don't know.
Speaker 1:So I think, so I think that was very helpful for myself and, by extension, I hope our listeners had a chance to wrap their heads around this and how this might be a strategy that may make sense for them to bring to their clients. For someone that's listening and wants to reach out and say a financial advisor, CPA or the like, and wants to reach out and learn more about you or contact you, what is the best way for them to do so?
Speaker 2:We reached at Jesse. That's J-E-S-E at inceptionfinancial. Nothing on the end of that, it's just Jesse at inceptionfinancial.
Speaker 1:Like people always assume that they have to add the ending right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's com or net on there, no, or you can go to our website, which is inceptionfinancial. And I would just close and like to say that I would suggest everyone really lean in on this. There's no downside in getting the information. I've never had a single person ever tell me that it wasn't a great use of their time. Now, not 100% of people decide to move forward for various reasons, but every single person has told me how much they benefited and valued the information. So I would suggest lean in. There's a lot to learn, but once you get it, it's very simple and I think it's a very compelling opportunity for a lot of people.
Speaker 1:My final question and this goes back to your eclectic background as an actor, nightclub owner and all these different things that we talked about which career do you enjoy the most, or did you enjoy the most, and why?
Speaker 2:Everyone's gonna hate me for saying this because they're gonna it's so predictable and they're gonna think it's self serving. But it is the truth and I the business I'm in now is the business that I am the most passionate and most excited about, and I'll caveat that real quickly. I know a lot of celebrities. I live in Los Angeles, so they're around and they're just people like you and me and they just happen to be doing the thing they love and they have notoriety because they happen to be on TV. But that comes with its own host of challenges and it's not that I necessarily feel bad for them per se, but I definitely see how much of a struggle it is and I feel grateful that I was able to find my way to financial freedom and other means where I can maintain my anonymity.
Speaker 2:I will say this I did go to graduate school for three years where it was just all about the work. I went to get my master of fine arts in acting, and that was just a three-year sabbatical, if you will at an amazing program with amazing professors, and that was three years where I really just got to do the work for fun and just my pure enjoyment. And I would say those are three of the greatest years of my life, but I'm very happy that I chose not to make it my profession. But I look forward to doing it just for fun again and I'm getting ready to do something like that, probably in the next couple years. But genuinely, this is where I wanted to be, leveraging all my experience from SolarCity and Tesla and now being on the financing side and also, I gotta tell you like helping lots of families save money. There's a lot of pure enjoyment in that.
Speaker 1:I can relate, because it's oftentimes it's not like a single path that leads you. It's taking advantage of all the things that you've done over the past and merging them into something that you can tap into all of them in different capacities, I think oftentimes creates the most fulfillment. Thank you for being a guest today on the Million Dollar Producer Show. Looking forward to sharing this with our audience.
Speaker 2:Thanks again for having me. It's been a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. Bye for now, thank you.