Mastering Business Financials with Sara Lavdas: Insights from a CFO

This is Wake Up to Wealth, a podcast dedicated to helping you change the way you think about wealth.

And now, here's your host, Brandon Brittingham.

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All right, everybody, we are back for another episode of Wake Up to Wealth and cannot thank you guys enough for continually supporting our show.

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We're going to continue to get really, really smart people on the show, way smarter than me every episode, which leads me to my next guest, which actually happens to be my CFO.

Hopefully she doesn't yell at me during this podcast, but definitely one of the smartest financial minds, even though she pretends that she doesn't have one

that I've ever met.

And that's Sarah Lavdis, who happens to be the watcher of all the money for all the things that we do.

Thank you for being along with us today.

You're welcome.

So

give people just a

two-minute background of, you know, before you were with us, some of the stuff that you did.

Sure.

So I am a certified public accountant, CPA.

I started doing that about 20 years ago.

Started in DC,

Northern Virginia,

and worked on at that time, the largest real estate transaction in the United States.

Which was how much?

4 billion, I think.

And so did that and then then realized I'm not a great city dweller.

I like people in small groups, not large ones.

And so I moved over to the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

I worked with another public accounting firm for about 10 years, which is where I met you

and Rich.

And, you know, after a while, I was on the partner track, but I decided I'd kind of like to take a step into the private side.

um still mostly real estate is my my game um so you guys were a perfect fit for me um and we've been together for five years yeah five years yeah

so um

you know one of the things you know from coaching a lot of business owners and you know just learning this myself um

you know just if you wouldn't mind touch on like how many people are just like not getting good advice or not handling the back office correctly and just like how important that is to run a business because it is it is rampant yeah i mean people,

most of the time, entrepreneurial types have a kind of brain that's geared more towards sales and not necessarily organization.

Yeah.

So they have a great idea, they might have a great product, they might provide a great service, and they're focused on doing that.

And they should be focused on doing that if they want to be profitable.

So oftentimes they come behind what they've done to try to figure out, oh, what did I do?

Now how can I organize it?

So it's really hard for those people to realize they need to organize it from the jump.

So if you can get a partner to partner with you from the beginning of your career to say, hey, you've got these great business ideas.

Let me come behind you and make sure that it's all coming together in a profitable manner.

Otherwise, you're just running blind.

So just trying to figure out how to make sure you can allocate that in your budget from the jump.

Someone who can be the organizational bones of your structure.

Yeah.

And so

like another thing, too, is I think that one of the biggest misnomers or, or just what people don't understand is like having your shit together versus not having your shit together and having your shit together and getting good advice, you have

a great ability to lessen your burden

on taxes.

or even avoid taxes through a number of different

things, cost segregation, corporate structure, things of of that nature.

If you wouldn't mind, just kind of two things.

Talk a little bit about cost segregation, because we believe in that.

And then also kind of what you talked about the other day when you talked to my group, if you wouldn't mind, touch kind of on a little bit of kind of corporate structure of how you can kind of structure your businesses to kind of from liability and also tax liability.

Sure.

So one of the biggest things that I started using early in my career was cost segregations.

And

initially, we were only getting, you know, 50 cents on the dollar for a cost segregation because it was only 50 cent, 50% was allowed to be taken off in the first year.

But it would be really profitable for someone who's, you know, buying a commercial property with the larger amounts.

But as the, you know, as the economy grew and tax.

writers understood that like that is something that's great for the economy is to allow people to write off these larger property purchases because it moves things along.

They brought in 100% bonus appreciation.

They brought in 179, Section 179 and made more assets available for those

write-offs.

And so the cost segs are just phenomenal now and you can use them on smaller purchases.

So initially for our group, we used them on a large multifamily $7 million

transaction and it was great.

But in the last, you know, five years, six years, we've been using them on almost anything that we buy and place and service.

So even $100,000 rental property, it's worth it to put the time in to do the cost seg.

If you're planning on holding the asset for more than a few years, mostly like up to five years, it's usually you get your worth out of that.

Let me ask you a question really quick.

If someone's listening to this and they don't know what a cost segregation is, what is it?

It's basically where you pay an engineer to walk a property and tell you what are the individual pieces that make up that property.

so from the jump you need something that says hey this is what the building is worth and this is what the land is worth and usually you can use either a professional to appraise or you can sometimes use the tax records themselves to get that determination but then someone else comes in and says okay so of this building how much is the roof what are the windows worth

and really what you're looking for is to try to break it down into something that it has a less depreciable life.

So instead of depreciating depreciating over 27 and a half years, which is what the entire building would have to depreciate over,

you break it down into five-year property, which then you can write off in the current year.

Currently, you can only get, sometimes you can only get 60% for that write-off.

If it falls under Section 179, you can still get 100%, but there is tax codes coming through that's bumping that back up to 100% for

so this is not tax advice and no one's holding you to this, but if someone's listening to this, just a rough example, if we bought a $350,000 residential rental and we did a cost sag, just generality, no one's holding you to this, what, what do you think that ends up being as, as rough numbers of a tax savings?

So a lot of people will say, first of all, you got to break it down to the land.

And that's usually at least 20% off the top is not depreciable at all.

Right.

But then you take the rest of that 80% and you can usually write off at least 20% in the current year if the bonus jumps back up to 100%.

So you could get 20%.

So again, you know, I don't do math on the spot, but.

Yeah.

So let's say, let's, for easy math, let's say that we said the land was 50.

So now we're at 300.

So 20%,

we could say roughly $60,000 write-off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's about the math.

Yeah.

That's about the math.

And then if you're quote unquote real estate professional, that $60,000 loss, correct me if I'm wrong, goes against your active income.

Yes.

Yes.

In a very simplistic version of how that happens.

Yes, it can go against your active income.

And most of the time, if you're a real estate professional, you'll be able to write it off in the current year.

If you aren't, cost segs can still be valuable to you.

It just means that you'll probably push that loss further down the line when you can take it when you actually have income to offset.

Got it.

So if you're out there and you're in real estate, and if you have ever been in the room with me or you've ever coached with me, you know that I stress that you should be buying real estate at a minimum to try to offset some of the income that you have because you're not, you got to pay it anyway to the IRS.

So why not put it in an asset that can help you actually generate wealth over the long term?

So

another thing, one of the things that you've done for us is you've structured our kind of corporate structure in a way that gives us less liability, number one, and then kind of less tax liability.

I don't need you to go into crazy detail of everything, but if you could give just our listeners kind of a high level of of what that looks like sure so um the main vehicle that we use for our operations not our rental properties not to own the actual properties but our operations where you earn commissions from your real estate transactions where you um buy and sell active inventory of real estate new homes flipped homes we use s corporations to do that um and basically what that is doing it's allowing you to set aside a piece of your return as more of an investment return as opposed to straight up ordinary income.

And so it allows you to shield a portion of that income from

self-employment taxes or payroll taxes is what it ends up being structured as.

So that's our number one vehicle for shielding ourselves from unnecessary tax.

It's not avoiding, it's just basically you're placing a value on an investment return that if you don't structure your business correctly, you don't get to really make that segregation.

Got it.

And so that

gives us

a decent break on potentially taxes we would normally pay.

Correct.

It just it makes it so that you're, you're basically making a top level amount that you can subject yourself to these payroll taxes.

And then the rest can be more of an investment return.

So it just shields you from.

And then that's usually about 15.3%.

Yeah.

So it is a, it can be a substantial savings

when once you hit a certain rate of return on what you're making.

Got it.

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So another thing is when I talk to a lot of people and I tell them that they got to get their their house in order financially as far as the back office.

A lot of people just don't, they just don't understand it.

They don't understand it at all.

So let's just say they go and

they go to an accountant or CPA or whatever, and then they're starting to get their financials in real time.

If you could just say two, three things, your average business owner,

just call it real estate to make it simple.

What do they need to understand in their P ⁇ L?

What do they need to be looking at?

Mostly they,

a lot of business owners have their hands around what they would call cash flow, but that's not necessarily what your income is.

I mean, a lot of business owners, they don't totally understand how debt works, how it can work for you or against you.

So this is something a CPA can advise you on.

They can help you figure out, hey,

should I put this in an LLC?

Should I put it in?

multiple level LLC, sort of like our structure set up.

So you can potentially bring in outside investors at any given point.

There's just, there's so many things that a CPA can say, hey, you know, these are the, this is a simple way to do a couple of things

in your business to make it a lot more organized.

And they usually, what, one of the greatest,

I don't know what you would call it.

They're basically reminders.

So so they annoy, they are there to annoy the shit out of you.

Like, like if you aren't doing something, it's usually, you know, they need to, you need to provide them with something.

And if you aren't providing them with something, they annoy you and annoy you until you give it to them.

But if you don't have that person to annoy you about organizing like yourself, then you won't do it.

And you won't realize what, what your actual income statement looks like because you're not, you're not pulling it together.

You're not organizing it.

Yeah.

So what do you think

is like, you know, is it, is it?

I mean, this is stuff that some people don't even get or understand, but if you're advising a business owner, like, should they go to figure out your customer acquisition cost,

you know, looking at your balance sheet, understanding what your true cash flow is, like, what do you think are the one to two things?

And maybe this goes back to your CPA days of what most business owners don't understand that they really need to understand to run a business at a high level.

Really, it's more of like the category, categorization of what they're doing.

So oftentimes, you know,

they just won't understand from a financial perspective what something means.

And that's not to say that they're not smart or educated in any manner.

It's just that they don't, they can't deep dive into what their financials look like.

Yeah.

So if you can't, if you don't have that knowledge, then you have to ask someone else.

What do you think?

What do you think is an example of that?

What would you see?

What do you think was probably one of the most common ones that you think people didn't get or understand when you're in the CPA world?

Well, a lot of times people really don't even understand what an asset or a liability is.

So like, you know, you go to buy a vehicle or lease a vehicle.

Should you lease it?

Should you buy it?

Like even something as simple as that analysis,

someone, a financial person can help you do a lot easier.

You know what I mean?

It's not just, hey, oh, my monthly payment's going to be $1,000.

Well, cool.

Well, what happens at the end of that lease?

Or what happens when you go to sell that?

asset.

It's a, it's, it's a, I mean, it's just the basic financial concepts that a lot of business owners struggle to get their hands around because they're, they're a lot better at other things.

Right.

Selling shit and

not having the back end buttoned up.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Um, so another thing too is

like one of the things that I kind of learned was having your financials in real time, right?

And I think you can speak to this from the CPA world.

But I'd love for you to touch on that of most people are looking at their financials in past tense.

They're not looking at it in real time.

Right.

And so, so, I mean, technology has gone a huge way of allowing you to do it in real time without spending a ton of money or even a ton of time.

Like there's a lot of, you know, online-based banking, online-based bookkeeping.

You can hire a fractional CFO, which is a lot, you know.

might fit your business needs a lot better and your budget.

So there's so many options out there now that there didn't used to be.

But the key is giving someone else access to something that you normally would not want them to have, right?

So that's the, that's why you pay financial experts more than normal is because most of the time they're extremely trustworthy people.

Do you still need to look at your own stuff?

Absolutely.

But if you're getting that monthly update, you're looking at it in real time.

They're inside your books already on a daily basis.

They're categorizing things for you.

They're,

you know, calling out, hey, did you mean to double your budget on this advertising item?

Yep.

Instead of waiting, you know, a month later to look at it or six months, then you can't change the contract that you didn't know you even signed up for.

You can't make decisions in real time because you're looking at data past tense.

Right, exactly.

So it's someone who's looking.

And I mean, I haven't gone out and done a ton of research on this, but I mean, as you know, you love AI and I know there's stuff out there for, you know, looking at financials in this way.

So again, I think it's getting cheaper and cheaper to have someone looking looking at your books, even if it's an AI generated product that can at least spot those fluctuations that you just don't have time to do yourself.

How important is it for somebody

to look at their P ⁇ L and like really dissect it like we do every month?

Extremely important.

I mean, it's so easy to sign up for things nowadays and not know that you're spending.

I mean, I know I'm the only person that would probably care about $8 a month, but it adds up.

And if we

it's like, literally, there's some times that you sign up for contracts and that's for the rest of your life unless you can figure out, you know, unless you even know it's there.

So it's extremely important to look.

I mean, we've found things where people have invoiced us incorrectly and they have your credit card.

So they just swipe it.

You know what I mean?

So if you're not looking at it timely, there's a chance that these, you know, these.

folks will not give your money back because everything's based on a time when you have a contract.

Yeah.

And another thing that if you guys are listening to this, that I would give you advice at is it's kind of one of the things that I do, which, I mean, I fucking hate this shit, but it's part of the game is

like looking at where are we spending money and why?

And does this justify, does the money just that we're spending justify the actual outcome or the ROI?

Now, there's some things that you spend money on that you need to operate from your business that's not necessarily income generating generating thing, but it supports it.

But there's been many, many times when, you know, I mean, we do this a lot.

I mean, we do this consistently.

We look at our financials consistently and we say, this doesn't make sense or this doesn't make sense or this doesn't make sense.

Or at one time it might have been a luxury and the market changed, the whatever changed.

But I just don't think a lot of people do that.

Yeah.

I mean, and I think part of that is like, you know, we look at it monthly, but also we deep dive.

at least every six months.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Just to say, hey, has our trajectory changed on what we're looking to do?

Right.

That one thing that we talked about, oh, yeah, no, we definitely need that six months ago.

Do we still definitely need that today?

And it changes, you know, all the time.

So looking at the monthly, at least on a surface level is essential.

And deep diving, you know, minimum of every six months is, it will help you with your business.

So you've, you saw this from the CPA world.

You know, it's just, it's still, and if you're listening to this, I'm going to give you shit.

There's a lot of you that are listening to this that will not do anything with the advice that we're giving you right now

because it's stressful.

I mean, there's fear, there's anxiety, there's all kinds of things tied to it.

But what I will tell you guys is the peace of mind that you will get of knowing all this stuff in real time, where you can make an actual, legitimate, real decision based on data, not how we do as visionaries, which is based on feeling and how we're feeling at the time.

But why do you think it is that there's so many people, because you saw it in the CPA world too, that just don't ever get this shit right.

They don't ever figure it out.

Well, it's, it's the thing that you don't like to do.

I mean, it's, it's just like, you know, going to the gym.

Like we talk about that all the time, but like

it's better if you have someone who says, hey, are you meeting me at the gym?

Or hey, I've hired this trainer.

I'm spending this money.

I have to go.

Do you know what I mean?

A CPA is.

is the same concept.

Like it's the friction in your business that you do not want to.

You don't want to look in that direction.

You don't want to do it.

So you have to have a partner that forces you to do it.

And, you know, you get through it.

And then once you get to a point where you're like, oh, this isn't that hard because you're just doing it in smaller increments, once you get the initial push over, the initial, you know, hey, look at my full set of books, make sure everything looks right.

Once you're through that initial push, then it gets a lot easier, especially if you're doing it on a monthly basis.

That's why a lot of people, a lot of businesses only have that relationship with their CPA once a year.

And that makes it harder because you're looking backwards for the whole year.

You're trying to remember what happened in January, a year before, and maybe it's September a year later.

And it's just, it makes it impossible.

Yeah.

You don't remember and you don't know.

Another thing, you know, as it relates to all this is,

you know, there's

like, there's, there's so much misinformation.

Like, how would you say to someone, which by the way, if you guys are listening to this, we can introduce you to accruity.

That's a relationship that we believe in.

But if someone is in a market and like, they don't know what to do, who do I hire?

How do I hire?

Like, what the hell do I do?

Well, a lot of, a lot of that, your best advice can usually come from, you know, your competitors will probably know where to go.

Your, your peers will know where to go.

I mean, you can do a Google search and find a great accountant, but.

The thing is, is now it's not limited to your local area.

Like accruity can

work with anyone.

Yeah.

A lot of my peers who I went through public accounting with, they work for firms that, you know, do national work all over.

And so it's, it's easier to find.

The, the key with narrowing down who you want to hire, it will probably be a price point.

Do you know what I mean?

Like figuring out if you want to go.

A lot of times CPA firms are now just based on packaging.

So, you know, if you want the monthly interaction, this is how much it costs.

If you want a quarterly interaction, it's a little bit less.

So maybe you just, you know, dip into it and and say, hey, let's start with the quarter,

get it within our budget,

and then we can start looking at it monthly after that

once you know that you're getting your money's worth, which you normally always do.

Hey, what's up, everybody?

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yeah so here's another thing that i want to tell you guys real world advice so one of the things that we've started to do is look at um companies to invest in and invest in companies and i will tell you guys from real world experience the first thing we're going to do the first thing i'm going to do is get their financials and send it to sarah um

and i will tell you guys there's a couple times when i can't get financials right?

Can't even get them because they don't exist.

Or when we do get them,

they paint a picture that is not real.

And it may not be, it's not that they're being dishonest.

They just don't know.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, the last few that we've looked at, it's a function of them not understanding whether an asset is part of their business or not.

Like, are they selling us their.

personal house?

Like, they're not, they're not totally sure.

So, um, I mean, it's, that's where you really have to like, you have to do it from the jump.

You've got to look at everything and say, if I'm trying to sell this business, how do I structure it so that I can actually have an outside person come in and look at everything I want them to see without, you know, without it being an issue with everything you own being titled in the business.

So that's where I was going is, right, for a lot of business owners.

Part of the dream is, I want to exit this company at some point or I want to sell it or whatever.

And what I will tell you is you're going to get absolutely crushed on your valuation or you might not even get a valuation because somebody says you don't have a real business if you don't have legitimate real-time financials and not just today like you're gonna a lot of people are gonna look at you're trailing 12 you're trailing 24 you're trailing 36 months um because they they want to know where you've been and where you're going but if you don't have legitimate accurate accurate financials that make sense you're gonna have a hard time getting outside money getting anybody investing in your company growing or shit even borrowing money if you need debt to grow, but you damn sure ain't going to sell your company.

And if you do, if someone's willing to buy it because they see the, they see the upside, but they know that they're going to deal with a mess, they're going to whack you on your value.

Yeah, that's exactly, you know, if you don't have accurate financials and you're trying to ever exit a situation, you, you will not be able to.

No one will buy it if they're, you know, if they know what they're doing, they won't buy your business.

Yeah.

So

number one, you guys can't hire her.

So, we're not going to give you any of her information on how to get in touch with her.

Plus, she doesn't want to talk to any of you guys anyway.

She's an introvert.

She doesn't want to talk to people.

So, it was good that I convinced her to come on here today.

But, uh, I'm going to do this a little bit different.

We kind of end, we kind of do the show, the ending the same way every time.

But, um, this one I'm going to do a little bit different.

Like, what would you give people?

So,

for a lot of people that listen to this, like, this is overwhelming, right?

Like, this is overwhelming for them to think about, especially if they're the visionary.

Like give them, hey, here's two or three pieces of advice just to get your shit together.

You need to go do.

I mean, the first thing you can do is

print out your bank statement for your business.

Like, do you have a business account or are you running everything through your personal accounts?

That's, you know what I mean?

You got to set, you got to.

I wish we didn't touch on that, but, but that's a good point.

Like it should be completely separate.

You should not be running your personal life out of your business.

Yeah.

That's, I mean, happens all the time.

But I mean, just print out your bank statements and say, hey, if I gave these to someone else, would they understand what's happening in my business?

And if they did,

you're already doing pretty well because you could usually give your bank account access to

a trusted financial advisor and they can go through and be like, hey, this looks like what's happening.

And you guys can talk about your picture.

That's your first step.

You know what I mean?

And if it's a disaster, then you got to change what you're doing to figure out, you know what I mean?

Like you got to get the personal out of there.

You've got to make sure you've got, um, you know, recurring expenses that make sense.

You know, you made a good point that I didn't think of touching on, but I want to touch on it since you brought it up because there's a lot of people in here that are operators that do this.

So we looked at a company not that long ago to invest in and the owner was running about half a million dollars of personal expenses through it a year.

And I got in and I'm like, well, hey, you know, here we have an issue with this and here's why.

And he didn't understand it.

And I said, okay, so cool.

If we come in and we invest in your company, are you going to pay yourself less?

And it's like, well, that's not real because, you know, I was paying myself.

It's in damn expense of your business.

That's how anyone's going to look at it.

So you can't, that half a million dollars made your business half a million dollars less profitable.

Right.

And so a lot of people don't look at it because they look at it as one.

It's the same to them because it's them, but it's their business.

They don't separate, so to speak, church and state.

I'm glad you mentioned that because i've looked at p l so many times when they're like well you know but 300 000 of it i'm paying myself it's an expense yeah it's it's an expense especially if you're if you're not structured as like we use as corporations so you can clearly see hey that was a wage i was paying myself to right to perform what i'm doing for the business and then everything else is some sort of return of capital it's easier to segregate but if you're just running everything through your business it's just it's not it's not a good uh it's not a good policy.

That's for sure.

All right.

That was a good piece of advice.

What's another one?

Oh, Lord.

Um,

I don't know.

I feel like I've talked about all of them.

Just figure like,

you know, figure someone is, their shit's a mess, right?

I don't know what to do.

Yeah, I hear what you're saying, Rain and Sarah, but I just don't know what to do.

All right.

I got the first one.

Separate church and state on the bank account.

What do I do?

What, what should my second step be?

I mean, it's easy enough to reach out and ask for hey how much does it cost for me to walk in and talk to you you know what i mean like walk in and talk to go find a professional

it could just be some sort of bookkeeper or something someone that you can develop a relationship with that you would trust um and if you can like i can't tell you exactly where to find those people but they're out there for sure um

and you know set up that first appointment and say hey what do i need to bring to you and then they'll let you know you know what what you need to bring and that's just getting everything together that you think has to do with your business your credit card a auto payment you know what i mean a rent uh rent income any of that um just getting everything together and placing it in front in front of someone who has the the eyeballs trained to look at all of that and make a clear picture that is that's a great first step yep and then um a third one i'll answer this for you

is

you gotta you you need to and listen all the information that you ever needed is out there now you need to understand the basics of how to read a profit and loss statement how to read your balance sheet um before we even get into the intricacies of cost of goods sold you know any of that kind of stuff simple things you need to understand you need to have a balance sheet you need to have a profit and loss statement you need to understand how to read themselves for yourself as an owner and if you don't understand that you need to do the research to figure that out because that's all that's where it all starts but you cannot run a business effectively without doing this stuff and having your back office.

You can't turn a blind eye to this without having it buttoned up.

So if you guys don't go do this, you're not running a business.

And a lot of times when I coach with somebody and they don't have this together, you know, and I'll say, well, how much money did you make last year?

And they'll say, well, I can't tell you how much money I got in the bank.

And it's, dude, yeah, no.

That's not the answer.

That's not the answer.

Yeah, that's not the answer.

Yeah.

And, you know, you're going to have sticker shock when you go to look for someone to help you, but it's not going to be.

You have to.

It's what you pay for what you get.

So

you have to.

I mean, you, you don't have a choice.

It's a cost of doing business and it's an it's an investment in your peace, number one, because you're going to get your peace of mind.

And then we didn't talk about this

today.

I won't go deep on this, but the other thing.

that you got to worry about is the IRS could show up one day.

And if you don't have your shit together, that could be painful.

It's, it's painful whether you have your shit together or not.

Yeah.

If you don't, then it's going to, it will be extremely hard for you.

Um, and you'll have to pay someone to do it.

And it'll probably cost three times as much as it is.

Because you don't have it together.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Well, we gave you your financial lesson today.

And hopefully you guys got an immense amount of value out of this.

But as basic as some of this sounds, some of you guys are running a business and not even operating at a basic enough level on the financials.

And you have to to graduate to,

you know, junior varsity and then varsity, and then you want to go play in the league.

If you don't understand this or figure this out, you need to because you can't get there without it.

And if you guys need an introduction into accruity, reach out to me.

I'll do it.

And Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today.

We really appreciate your advice and help today.

No problem.

All right, guys, I appreciate you as always.

Appreciate you tapping in and listening.

And as always, we'll keep bringing on way smarter guests than me so we can help you guys every day wake up to wealth.

Appreciate you guys.

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