- Duration: 15 min
- Platform: zoom
- Attendees: Dylan H., Michael Houck
- Source: Read.ai 01J8NC5558GJS7ZGJVYT7RN406 (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01J8NC5558GJS7ZGJVYT7RN406)
Transcript
[Michael Houck]: Dylan, what’s up, man? [Dylan H.]: Hey, how’s it going? [Michael Houck]: Good. [Dylan H.]: Right on where you calling from I think I saw it was New York. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’m in New York. [Dylan H.]: Way cool. [Michael Houck]: What about you at all? [Dylan H.]: I’m in Salt Lake out in Utah. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I was just there last week actually. [Dylan H.]: Let’s go just kicking it or what were you doing? [Michael Houck]: I had a couple days in between a summit in SF and a summit in Montana and I figured check out Salt Lake for a little bit, and then have the fun drive up to Whitefish. [Dylan H.]: Way cool. Did you like it? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I’ve been before. I came for more Park City. I guess I came for Sundance a couple years ago, but this time I stayed right in downtown Salt Lake. It was a lot of fun. [Dylan H.]: Way cool. That’s awesome. Yeah, I love Utah. [Michael Houck]: Are you in the city or down closer to like Lehigh or Provo or that area? [Dylan H.]: Yeah, so I lived in Lehigh. For a year. Right now I’m in Saratoga Springs, which is just, you know, 15 minutes west of Lehigh. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nice. [Dylan H.]: I’m not like in the heart of Salt Lake. I’m like 30 minutes south. [Michael Houck]: I’ve heard Lehigh is where a lot of the startup stuff is happening. Oh yeah. [Dylan H.]: Yeah. There’s a bunch of, yeah, just like you said, startups and tech companies kind of through Utah County right there through Provo and Lehigh. I’ll have to look. [Michael Houck]: I’ll take my way down a little further south next time I come out. [Dylan H.]: Yeah, you should. Utah County is awesome. It’s great. I love Utah. I’m a big fan. Or New York, but we’ll get there. [Michael Houck]: No, no, no. New York, you might be missing some great food, but everything’s expensive, and it’s getting a little more dirty. So Utah is a nice place. [Dylan H.]: Right on. Well, yeah, man. Typically, how these calls go is you tell me a little bit more about what you got going on. Obviously, I saw you kind of have a holding company LLC informally, just kind of collecting different revenue streams through that. But if you want to just give me a little more detail, usually when someone books with us, there is some sort of tax or accounting pain. So if that’s true, let me know. And then I’ll tell you how we help clients and kind of just see if we’re a good fit to work together or not. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Yeah. Nothing too crazy on our side. Basically, as you said, it’s sort of an informal holding company. I think probably first half of next year, I’ll actually break it out into separate LLCs underneath the parent company. But the revenue streams are, we have a SaaS product, we have consulting work, agency work that I do, we have a ghost rating agency, and then we also have like a media brand that we have a couple of different assets underneath, like a podcast, a newsletter, and a case study product that we do. So four separate revenue streams there. Doing about 800 to 900K projected for this year. Last year was a little less than half of that. So we’ve doubled. We expect to kind of keep growing at similar rate going forward. And I am based in New York. The company is incorporated in Delaware. It’s a single member LLC. I’m the only owner, 100%. And then, our actual business address is in Austin. And so why I reached out was basically because we had a bookkeeper that we were working with at the beginning of the year. They just weren’t super on top of their stuff. And so we stopped working with them. And then they had introduced us to a tax person who prepped our stuff back in March, but we ended up filing an extension. And, you know, over the last month or two, I’ve sort of been emailing that guy, been like, all right, you know, we’re coming up on October 15th. Like, let’s touch base and haven’t heard back once. So I hope he’s okay. But I’m not really sure what happened there. So both for my business and then for mine and my wife’s sort of joint personal filing, we just need to sort of get that done for this year. And then as we head into next year, we’ll be looking to build sort of a longer term relationship. Right now I have, we’ve used QuickBooks before and we have 2023 kind of all done in QuickBooks. But when I took it back over at the end of Q1, I set up like a pretty robust automated Google sheet that just pulls in from Stripe and Mercury and various sources and I track and categorize everything in there every month. So for 2024, that’s what we’re doing. And I’ll probably do that through the end of the year. But then as we come up to next year, you know, maybe it makes sense to offload that and go back to QuickBooks or something like that. [Dylan H.]: Yeah, that makes sense. So basically, you’re not looking for like any of the bookkeeping or CFO type of stuff right now, it’s more so you’re You just want to get these two returns filed and then maybe looking for a more ongoing service starting in January or is there, are you wanting to start that now or? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty much what I’m thinking. Like I have this time sensitive thing that I’m like, let’s just get this taken care of And then as we go into 2025, I’ll be thinking, all right, what does the business look like in 2025? Do I want to keep doing this? Probably not. We’ll evaluate that then. [Dylan H.]: Yeah. Um, and you said for 2020, three that the books are all completely done and reconciled and clean, it just literally needs to be filed. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s super simple. I just don’t know if there’s like other steps that I don’t know what to do or whatever. So I figured it’s better to work with someone to sort of take that across the finish line. But yeah, I mean, we calculate everything’s done in the books, everything’s reconciled. And then we also calculated sort of like what we expected the amount to be. So I think a lot, if not all of the work has really been done, we just need to across the finish line. [Dylan H.]: Okay. And then for your personal returns, did, did you say you were married? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Dylan H.]: Does like, is there any other income sources coming in? Like, is there like, is she doing something you guys have rental properties? Is there crypto and stocks? [Michael Houck]: At one point I was, I was pretty heavy in crypto these days, not so much, but no, my wife works. She is in enterprise sales at a SAS company. Right. Cool. So she changed jobs this year, but last year she was the same employer for the whole year. So she’d have the W-2 from that. She has some of her investments that she’d want to include obviously, but that’s pretty much it. Our personal finances are pretty simple. I keep everything in my business at this point. [Dylan H.]: And you guys have all the documents ready to go as far as the W-2s and all the other stuff? And the investments and whatnot. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ve already compiled it for when we sort of projected what it would be back in March and April, so we’re ready to go. [Dylan H.]: And then, oh, what was I gonna ask? It slipped me. [Dylan H.]: And then you are currently living in New York, so the entity return a Delaware return because it’s in Delaware and then you need your state return is in New York. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I think so. The entity we incorporated in Delaware, it’s based in Texas. Like that’s where we have our sort of mailing business address. [Dylan H.]: But for sure, there’s I mean, the Delaware and Austin, there’s potential that there’s returns there, but there’s definitely a return in New York. Because you both reside in New York. [Michael Houck]: Yes, we both reside in New York and Brooklyn. [Dylan H.]: Yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. So I’m what I’m thinking. So typically, just so you’re aware, so 99% of our engagements are like an ongoing thing where we’re handling the bookkeeping, some CFO level reporting, and then quarterly tax planning and tax returns, which we obviously have that arm built out to do the taxes. We just typically wrap that up into a retainer. So what I would like to do is just talk to my tax partner to get an accurate dollar. I just don’t want to throw a dollar amount out there and be way over or way under. So what I’m thinking is I’ll shoot him a text and then I can even just email you back really quick with a quote for the one single member LLC tax return and then your guys’ personal return and get you a quote for that. Cool. [Michael Houck]: One thought that I just had as you were saying that was, I realized that since we had set everything up for the business, basically up till the end of Q1, we probably don’t have that set up for the Q2 quarterly or the Q3 quarterly, or obviously then for the go forward Q4 quarterly. So it might make sense for us to do that as part of this, or maybe just get on a quarterly sort of cadence for that going forward. [Dylan H.]: As far as you mean like your estimated payments? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. [Dylan H.]: Yeah, I would definitely say just, I mean, if you have all of the data in a sheet and you haven’t made any estimated payments, October 1st, it might make sense to put something in there just so when you file for 2024 taxes, you’re not getting hammered all at once and having to write a huge check because that sucks. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. That’s what happened to us last year. Um, and it, it, it did suck. I think between the personal and the business, uh, I ended up paying like almost 50 K all at once, which was shitty, painful. So you don’t want to get in that situation again, for sure. [Dylan H.]: Absolutely. Yeah. So I’ll shoot him that text and get back to you. Like I said, I just New York, there’s definitely some complexities there. Um, so like I said, I don’t want to under overshoot. I want to get you an accurate quote. So I’ll message him and then I’ll email you back right away. Um, then if you decide you want to go through us, which I think would be awesome, basically next steps is we’ll send you kind of a link to a portal where you can upload all those documents and then we’ll get started on it from there. [Michael Houck]: Okay. That sounds great to me. Um, I’ll keep an eye out for that. I think on my end, looking to make it a decision by the end of the week, uh, cause I know we’re coming up on, on these, these deadlines and I don’t want you guys to be stressed. We’re moving forward. So, um, so yeah, just send over what you got and I’ll take a look and I’ll follow up by the end of the week. [Dylan H.]: Cool. Sounds good. Yeah. I’ll definitely have that too here pretty quick. [Michael Houck]: Cool. Thanks.