Everything Liz, Jaci, and Sarah Wanted to Know About Tax

[Music] hello everyone welcome to the 21 hats podcast I'm your host Lauren Feldman this week we brought in a tax expert Julianne row of CRI simple numbers to explain everything Liz picarazzi Jackie Russo and Sarah seagull ever wanted to know about tax but weren't sure whom to ask for example should owners run their own compensation through payroll well maybe maybe not we quickly learned that the answer for Sarah is different from the answer for Liz which is why a lot of owners get this one wrong among the other issues we cover isn't it easier for owners to pay themselves through payroll so they don't have to worry about paying quarterly estimates can the owner take a draw to cover her own income tax payment if the owner isn't running her own compensation through payroll how much can she contribute to her 401K is it even a good idea for owners to tie up their money in a retirement account what's the best way for an internal book keeper and an external CPA to work together and also why did Liz Jackie and Sarah ask me to bring in a tax expert who is a woman I kind of knew the answer to that one but I decided to ask anyway even in Good Times owning and running a business can be a lonely Pursuit our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone and facing challenges in fact that's the whole idea behind the 21 hats Community engaging with other owners to get the kinds of insights only another owner can offer if you're interested in learning more step one is to sign up for a free trial of the Morning Report which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners so you don't have to go looking for it step two is to get on our slack Channel where you can ask questions get Bender recommendations and tap the wisdom of a very impressive crowd just search for the 21 hats Morning Report to sign up for a free trial joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Liz picarazzi CEO of City bin which makes trash enclosures and package bins and is based in Brooklyn New York Jackie Russo CEO of brand Russo a marketing agency based in Lafayette Louisiana and Sarah seagull CEO of seagull Communications a public relations firm based in San Francisco plus of course our tax expert Julianne row of CRI simple numbers the episode is titled everything Liz Jackie and Sarah wanted to know about tax welcome Liz Jackie Sarah and especially our special guest Julianne row as uh the three of you regulars know we are here because we were recording a podcast a few weeks ago and we were discussing a very good question that Sarah raised about how to decide whether to take compensation as a draw or as salary and we quickly realized that none of us was entirely confident ID in our knowledge of the tax code for some reason so we agreed to reconvene when I was able to arrange for an expert to join us and that of course is Julianne so welcome thank you for being here Julianne thank you so much I'm looking forward to talking with everybody today well let's get started Sarah can you tell us what you were thinking about and what brought this issue up yeah so um thanks for kind of bringing in expertise here because um yeah my knowledge of tax code not so good um so toward the end of the year um every year like um I look at my numbers and I like to keep money in my accounts because I have this you know constant fear that I won't be able to make payroll um I think that that's just ingrained in who I am but the end of the year my um bookkeeper was asking me about whether or not um uh I would be taking um money to bonus myself right and I'm used to bonusing my my employees and this and that and I what I ended up doing is I I bonus myself through payroll because I just for my own benefit of being able to pay the taxes in through my payroll was more desirable for so I wouldn't have to think about it um and owe the government money but could I have just done it through a draw instead um and I didn't really know what I was supposed to do um if I did it correctly or if if there's a benefit uh of doing it through payroll or just a draw in general I would love insights on best practices okay so at this point we got into the weeds a little bit so I'm going to summarize what you need to know the first thing you need to know to answer Sarah's question is that her corporate structure is an LLC or limited liability company because llc's are pass through entities Sarah pays taxes on all of her earnings whether she takes them out as compensation or whether she leaves them in the business that means that when she ran her own bonus payment through payroll she subjected it to an unnecessary additional round of Taxation she could and should have just pocketed the bonus without paying additional taxes as we'll get into later the situation is a little different for Liz her corporate structure is a sub chapter S which is also a pass through entity but with an important distinction it requires owners to pay themselves a fair market salary and to pay that salary through payroll where the usual payroll taxes are deducted that said Liz can supplement her fair market salary with bonus draws that should not go through payroll Liz just like Sarah can take those draws without paying additional taxes because she's already paid them on all of her pass through income it's worth noting that the reason the IRS requires sub chapter S owners to pay themselves fair market salaries is to prevent them from from avoiding paying payroll taxes on their own compensation that means the goal for an owner with an es Corp is to try to keep their salary as low as possible to minimize those payroll taxes but high enough to satisfy the IRS that it's a fair market value salary all right so now back to Sarah and her question about whether she should run her bonus through payroll okay so if I take a draw you're saying that that's not taxed correct let me ask a question to use Sarah's example she asked if she took a draw if uh that meant she didn't have to pay taxes on it and you said yes uh that's right she does not but it's actually she's already paid taxes on it she doesn't have to pay taxes twice she's paid taxes on it because she pays taxes on all of her income as a pass through so she can take that draw not pay additional taxes on it she is done with that distribution because at the time the income is earned and it's reported on the tax return then the income tax the self-employment tax is all calculated and paid in at that point so then when you have the cash available to take out and to take that distribution then that's just you writing yourself a check there's no additional income tax or self-employment tax on that okay but if I were to do that through my payroll system and I put it in the column on my payroll system as a bonus does it do the same thing does it recognize that if you show it through your payroll system and you call it a bonus it will take out Social Security taxes Medicare taxes and the the federal and state withholdings so she will be paying twice uh unnecessarily yes what about my employees like if I give them a $5,000 bonus should I be writing them a physical check or should I be doing it through like payroll no the bonus to employees should go through payroll okay that is compensation to them and it needs to run through the system have the appropriate taxes taken out it's you as the owner that's a little bit different and if you are a single member LLC reporting all of the income on your personal return then you technically don't qualify to even be on payroll so you would not get a W2 because again all of the income is flowing through to you personally and then you just take those distributions as you can okay can I ask another question sure we were acquired by another company for a couple of years and then I bought myself back that other company had a policy of trying to reduce all of their revenue by the end of the year so they would stop at the end of the year with a zero I'm not comfortable with doing that necessarily but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that Sarah what do you mean by reduce all of their revenue to zero at the end of the year so like if they say they they had a really great year and they had $100,000 in Revenue right where they have extra not Revenue um in profit they made $100,000 after they paid everything off and they have $100,000 sitting in their account that is just gravy right and so you know they would pay out bonuses with that and then and don't quote me on this I feel like they would pay out the ownership and then by the end of the year ownership the account was zero and then on January 1st ownership would add back into the coffers to make first payroll before retainers came back in so according to the government there was no profit is that bad from a business perspective that's probably not the best thing to do again because you're you know you're you're taking all of those resources away that you need to run your business and then you have to make that Capital contribution back in I suspect what was happening is that you also have a type of tax entity called a C corporation and that's what all the publicly traded companies are so what happens if you are a C corporation there's double taxation so you earn the money inside the company the company pays income tax but then you have to get that money out of the company and when you write the check to get the money out it's either salary or a dividend and the dividend is not deductible but the salary or the bonus would be so a lot of times what we see with SE corporations is they do that very thing they're trying to minimize that internal tax if you will that first level of tax by bonusing out the excess to the um employees and to the owners and so that brings their tax liability to a zero for the company but then of course now they've gotten rid of all their core Capital that they needed to run the business so now then you have to turn back around and put a capital contribution back in on January 1st and then you start the process over again and that is something that's very common the type of business that we typically have seen that in over the years would be medical practices the doctors would do that and again they were trying to they were trying to take that double taxation structure and try to make it a single level taxation um by doing that and that's the thing when I talked about with the S corporation you only pay tax one time and so that's kind of the beauty of having that S corporation to not have to play the games if you will to control the taxes in that manner I want to give Jackie and Liz a chance to ask questions but before we leave this I want to clear up one thing if I understand correctly it sounds like Sarah might have been paying taxes that she didn't need to pay if she has in fact been operating as a pass through and also running her own compensation through payroll I guess first is there a way to get that money back and she uh reclaim that from the government um and uh two what what would you suggest going forward if she wants to maintain a process of paying herself regularly and not just waiting to see if there's money left at the end of the uh month or or salary period should I take myself off payroll also as a single member LLC you should not be on the payroll because you're already paying income tax on everything that you earn plus you're paying self-employment tax so you don't want to double up on the payroll side because when you get a payroll check you're having the Social Security and Medicare taxes withheld at roughly 7.65% and then you as the employer match that the self-employment is the combination of those two so you would want to stop going forward um in doing that um now you do want to be paid on a regular basis but you can just do a distribution to the equivalent of what you've been doing for you know if you do a bi-weekly or a monthly paycheck then you can just do that as a draw and not do any taxes coming out of that you know you still need to monitor what the company's doing and make sure that you have the appropriate taxes paid in and and you know I'm not going to argue with you having withholding is an easy way to do it and not have to think about qu L estimates but when you have these type of business structures that's just kind of the process that you have to get into on a quarterly basis to make those um estimated payments and one thing that we do is we monitor as we're updating a model every month there's a a section that's for an income tax calculation so each month when you're closing your books there would be a calculation a very quick calculation that you could go through to say I've earned x amount and I need to set aside y to pay the taxes and we have our clients many of them have a separate tax account so every month they just transfer money into that savings account and then they pay it in as those orderly estimates become due so it it's always having that right in front of you so you know that yeah I got I've got to pay these taxes and you got the money setting there and again that's the number one thing from cash flow in a business business you must pay your taxes so you've you've set that money aside it's out of sight out of mind and it's there to pay the taxes when they become due can she get back the money that she overpaid you can amend the payroll tax returns and um amend your personal returns I guess when I step back at the end of the day maybe it's not worth doing that because again trying to think through how the pieces are going to work here part of your sole proprietorship or your single member LLC you have taken a deduction for your salary against your total income so you've reduced the amount that's subject to income tax and that self-employment tax so yes you could get back a little bit if we undid everything if you will but going back to correct it it may be more trouble than it's worth it's not so difficult to amend income tax returns but payroll tax returns cause a whole another area because it's the monthly payroll tax returns it's your W2 um some state withholding it's just a lot of things that you know at the end of the day yes you have paid a little bit too much it probably isn't as bad as initially we we might have made it sound Jackie and Liz do you do draws regularly or do you have payroll that you're part of let me jump in here again with a reminder Liz's corporate structure is a sub chapter S which requires owners to pay themselves a fair market salary through payroll where the usual payroll taxes are deducted that said liis Can supplement her compensation with a draw and in that case Liz just like Sarah can take the draw without paying additional taxes because she's already paid them as pass through income back to the conversation so I do payroll I'm an escort I didn't really pay myself for quite a few years so then once we became profitable um I was able to pay myself um but you know figuring out still even though if you're paying yourself well and you have profit at the end of the year what do you do with that like that's sort of a new thing for me in the last two or three years I never had enough profit to have to think about that too much but you know we really kind of determined that the only way we would know for sure if we were profitable business was to pay ourselves market rate and I've been told that over the years and I always kind of said well when I get to the point when I can pay myself a market rate I will but until then okay shut up all you people who say that I'm not really profitable unless I take a market salary so um that's that's definitely how we do it you're paying taxes on everything but you're also running your own compensation through payroll is that right yes I am and um you know one thing that I learned was um whoever creates the tax pays the tax so I've had years in the past where if I had profit I was like oh my God I haven't been paying myself enough and I owe this in tax how in the world am I going to pay this well you know you can take a distribution to pay your taxes and I also thought well maybe that would be taxed again because it's going out from the business to me personally learned from them recently that that's not the case but um you know getting the business to pay my personal taxes that are generated from the business it's a pretty new discovery for me and it makes me feel a lot better going in you know to end of years again right and that's one of the things that we always try if if you think about different buckets as you earn money so all of these the escorp the partnership the single member LLC those are all what we call a pass through or a flow through entity again you have a legal structure that's earning the revenue and earning the profit but it flows through to your personal return and you individually write the check but that doesn't mean that you have to take resources from other places to pay the taxes if your business generates x amount of the tax liability we want a a tax distribution to occur from that entity if you have a salary from your business then in theory you should be doing enough withholding on that salary to cover the taxes if you have Investments you know that maybe the money's coming from there obviously it doesn't have to that's not a legal requirement but it is a very good way to line up where the tax implication is coming from and taking the funds from that particular resource to pay the taxes so do you think Liz is doing it correctly or should she stop running her own pay through payroll this is actually doing it correctly she's the example of the S corporation where we talked about setting a reasonable salary a market rate salary um and it has to go through payroll the thing that would happen for an S corporation is that if you do not run your salary through payroll then that raises the red flag to the IRS to say I'm taking distributions but I don't have any payroll and that's the thing that they really don't like to see and we we we would never recommend that because you should be paid for what you do in the company and then you earn a rate of return on the profits and the value that you generate in your business I don't even remember why we decided that we were going to be an LLC like that was so long ago but like is there a time when you're like I just I hate it going into my personal taxes I I I just hate it it stresses me out it's you know is there a point at that you decide as an owner that you're going to be a a C Corp does that take it out of your personal taxes because it sounds like es Corp goes through personal as well it does um C Corps are those things that we rarely recommend again because they're double taxed you pay tax at the entity level and then you pay the tax to get it out of there so like I said the only two ways to get it out would be pay yourself salary and that's taxable on your personal return or you pay a dividend dividend income is taxable on your personal return so what happens with the c corporations forever and ever they had a graduated rate the top rate ultimately became uh 34% Federal let's say you earned $100,000 of profit these AR quite the exact numbers but for math purposes if you had a 34% tax rate then you paid $34,000 of corporate income tax so then that leaves what $66,000 of available cash for you to try to get out so you can touch it and use it personally well when you do that if you pay salary whatever your individual tax bracket is you're going to pay tax again on that 66,000 plus payroll taxes of another potentially 7.65% and then if you said okay I don't want to do a salary or a bonus I just want to do to a dividend well in that case you could be at either a 15 or a 20% tax rate on that dividend so now that $100,000 you've lost a lot of it it's been a very high tax rate so with the 20 17 Tax Act they ended up reducing the C Corp rate to 21% so you know that sounds good we had a lot of clients that said hey I I want I want to be a C Corp and it's like well no you probably don't because all they have to do is with the stroke of a pen they can raise that corporate rate to whatever they want it to be they can raise it back up I mean I doubt it would go much lower but all it is is a negotiation of a rate the structure and how C corporations work are going to stay the same so we very much discourage our clients from being CC corporations again there's there's always a few exceptions to that but primarily from a tax perspective it's better to be one of those flowthrough entities LLC es Corp or just really a sole proprietor okay Jackie how is this hitting you where do you stand at all this I'm taking notes like a crazy person um so we had uh a CPA for many many many years come to find out there were a number of things that were not being done in our best interest that has cost us a lot of money our new CPA is digging us out of some holes and getting some things amended and fixing some stuff and if I could Su for Mal practice I would have that's how bad it's been can you give us a hint as to what was wrong well I I don't know that I'm going to use all the technical terminology so Julianne can correct me as I go but here are a few highlights they said hey there's a thing you can do where because you work out of your home office x amount time you can declare X percentage of your mortgage Julian does that sound like a real thing a home office yes y okay and so I'm like okay that sounds great new CPA says yes but they did it to the tune of $80,000 my goodness see Julian's face did you watch your face you should have seen my new CPA they were like so there's a whole Amendment there depends on where you live Jackie 80 80,000 for a home office office in New York City is not a lot right right right so in Lafayette Louisiana where the average home um I'm gonna say 5,000 square feet four bedrooms on a half an acre land is $250,000 I'm moving I KN I knew that would get you Sarah I knew San Francisco oh my God you can't get any you can't get a toilet for $250,000 I want to hear how Jackie's paying herself um Okay so as you know in the original podcast when we all realized we didn't know what we were talking about and we waited for Julianne to join us one of the things that I said was I had done math that is automatically y'all should just tune out anything that follows after that because about to be some that follows I had done some math and decided I was paying myself too much and I felt like IID found this sweet spot where it was a fair and Equitable salary but I wasn't overpaying into Social Security taxes and all that stuff and so I had done some and Chang my payroll and so then I messaged my CPA which they love when I do the thing and then tell them what I did they love that so much and they were like that's cute right idea wrong answer this is what your math should have actually shown you and I have since adjusted to that um and so yeah now I pay myself way less than I used to but it is a fair salary especially for my market and I'm saving a ton of money in payroll taxes and so um one of the things I'm going to be asking them is if payroll tax is 28% and the tax that I pay on profit is 30% that's kind of the same thing so does it really make that big a difference typically we're not seeing a a huge um difference because the income tax is going to be the same no matter what so that that's a given so it just comes down to the the payroll tax and typically for what most of you are are doing you're going to need to be above the Social Security maximum amount and right off hand I don't have that number 160ish 165 is so if you're over that magic limit that changes every year in that 160ish range then you've already paid the maximum 6.2 you're not going to pay that again so now you're really only looking at the Medicare portion which is 1.45 for that's collected from the employee and then another 1.45 that you match so you're really looking at a 2.9% but they have added a few years ago what's called an additional Medicare tax and that once you're over um 200,000 in salary then they start taking out an additional amount for that so in its Point 9% so it gets the total from the 2.9 and it makes it a total 3.8% so really you're talking about an additional 3.8% on that difference where we see where that difference really can come into being is that the difference between being a limited liability company and LLC and an S corporation that's really the place where you can see a difference whether you make that election or not um because if you're an LLC you're paying that we'll just say that additional 3.8% on every dollar you're earning above that $200,000 so if you're an S corporation and you can say my salaries 160 and that's reasonable that's fair market rate then profit over and above that number you're saving 3.8% so again many times it doesn't really make much difference at all but other times depending on the profitability of your company it can definitely um add up and probably really doesn't bring that much additional administrative burden into it because to get to that level of profitability you probably already have employees already processing payroll I have a question so because I've been paying myself through payroll so I'm looking at my pay stub right now you know and it takes out federal Medicare Social Security California SDI and state and then my healthc care benefits like anything above and beyond the base that my company pays is subsidized and then there's HSA and then there's a employer sponsored 401K would I want to continue to pay myself just enough to cover some of those things because those are pre-tax dollars right well there are limitations on when you can participate in an HSA if you're an owner of the business so the fact that you're on payroll might be causing some issues with some of those other benefits you're not supposed to be entitled to those from your 401k what you would do there is you look at the type of plan that covers your employees but it also covers you as a self-employed person so what it allows you to do on the 401K side is that your contribution is now based on the profitability of your business as opposed to just what you're paying yourself salary so it could allow you to put more money actually into the plan than the way you're currently doing that well this is made me feel like I've done a lot of things wrong thank you for that sorry I'm sorry no Sarah I'm actually very surprised that your accountant wouldn't have told you no we asked my accountant okay so I have a CFO who's my bookkeeper guy and he reached out to my tax accountant and said is there a difference in whether or not she should take a a a draw or put do it through payroll and they said there's no difference we might need another firm well I yeah that's why I'm like trying to find that email well I will say that it has been pretty common over the years and as we brought in new clients we get to see a little bit more because we see clients from all over the country we're sitting in Huntsville Alabama but we have maybe five clients in Huntsville everybody else is spread out throughout the country so we see a lot of preparation and this is one of the things that we see pretty frequently owners of llc's whether they be single member or multi-member many times they are on payroll and they should not be so it's one of those things that we try to get them off and again the reason comes back to kind of what you were saying initially it's easier that way you've got employees their payroll runs through there yours runs through withholdings come out you don't have to worry about quarterly estimates so it it just kind of becomes that thing that's a little easier I don't I would argue maybe it's not easier truthfully but I mean I don't care what easy I don't want to pay the government more than my fair share like I just don't and like this I'm pissed off right now well the good news I think is that Julian said you probably weren't paying that much more I'm a small business any Mount is a lot fair enough fair enough and certainly one of the things I mean I'm happy to have a a call with you and kind of look at look at the details and give you an idea kind of where are you staying your services have been sold you have been sold good I have a question Julia what do you think is the best division of responsibilities between an outside CFO or agency like yours and an inside whether they actually sit inside your building or whatever bookkeeper how should that be you know how do they divide and conquer many times you do need that inhouse day-to-day bookkeeper or maybe not every single SLE day but a good bit at the time and so it makes sense for you to have that person because you also they may be tasked to do other non-accounting type things but the thing that's always been very helpful for our business owners is that we do a lot of what we call a monthin close and what that's doing is it's taking the financial information the balance sheet the profit and loss and it's tying that down is letting us do the bank reconciliations every month we're reconciling the credit cards and so those are places where you can see fraud pretty pretty frequently and so that gives that outside look at those types of things so that there's somebody coming behind that's not sitting in the office every day and so if something looks out of line then we can ask those questions and then we're doing a tie down making sure that all the loan balances if you have debt agree to what the bank says taking that balance sheet again making sure the cash is right do we have all the accounts receivable booked have we added any new fixed assets for the month um so just looking at that taking a quick look through your profit and loss and saying you know I it looks like you purchased um I don't know a copy or four $5,000 we need to put that on the balance sheet making sure that that meals are handled correctly making sure that if there's something that you've provided we'll say that year in bonus Sarah that you talked about giving to employees making sure that that has been run through payroll and that you know it's included on the W2 so that's kind of where we've seen a real benefit to our clients is having just from that one touch a month having somebody else look and then many times that also prevents the person who may think about fraud to know that somebody else is looking and they're looking on a consistent basis with most small businesses you know sometimes you think you're ready for a CFO but you really don't need a CFO every single day of the month you may need them one day a month you may need them two days a month you might need them one day a quarter and that's kind of where the simple numbers on the a piece of what the Consulting team is doing is though even though they're meeting typically on a monthly and and or sometimes quarterly basis they still can kind of act in that role so that you're getting that CFO information without paying the cost of having somebody on staff full-time that really isn't needed just want to make sure that we can get in a question 401K um any sort of retirement savings and how that goes into your tax planning one of the things that you will hear Greg Crabtree my partner talk about from the business owner's perspective he's not always real keen on the 401K and the retirement plans because you're putting in your money and it's being trapped in there basically until you retire and so if you're growing your business and you need capital then it's okay to use those extra dollars to invest in your business because at the end of the day you will more than likely get a much better return on your business than you will ever get in the market in a retirement plan and again that that doesn't apply necessarily to the rank and file but as the business owner it is something to think about also at your death that money becomes taxed to your beneficiary if you've got money in a brokerage account or in your business and you sell it your beneficiaries and these are all general terms will get what's called a step up in basis for the value of your business and they won't pay income tax on that stepup if you hand that 401k balance to your beneficiaries they're going to pay income tax on every dime of it so it's things to look about for the future it's how what resources you have available and how you use those and again you you definitely want to save for the future that that's we're not saying not to do that but you may not want to do it via necessarily retirement plan you may just want to invest in a brokerage account things can be invested in Gross Securities where it's not kicking off um current income Yeah couple of follow-ups on that so with the employee for 1K you know deciding whether to match it or not I have been advised that you should start out not matching it to be able to kind of get it started and be able to see you don't want to set the expectation that it's going to be matched if you're facing some volatility so like for me I'm a manufacture I have pretty incredible volatility right now with my tariff situation but I also don't want to seem like I'm not generous because everybody knows that the employer has the ability to match so how do you advise when you're rolling out of 401k to to employees yes yes so one of the things that we've always kind of thought about from a retirement plan is that you want to reward those employees who are willing to defer their own money I kind of look at it if you're not willing to defer your own money then maybe I'm not as willing to give you part of that so again there's different circumstances and that that's it's not that cut and dried but we do see some plans that they just automatically do 3% it's a safe harbor you don't have to put in a dime of your money and you still get 3% of a company contribution and so we've kind of done that as a way to reward our employees but then we've also looked at it from again if you're not willing then maybe maybe I don't want to contribute as much every employee population if you will is a little bit different but we have had many that the employer would put in the company contribution at the end of the year and the very next day as soon as that money posted to their account they went and got the withdrawal even though it cost them the income tax and the 10% penalty they just wanted the money the retirement it made no difference to them that you know 15 years from now they weren't going to have anything to retire on they just don't think in that regard um so it does very much depend on what your labor force looks like and and how much they appreciate that I think you know before you Implement those types of things take a survey of what your team says you know are you interested in this how much do you think you might contribute would you contribute more if we contribute more just kind of see what what's out there and what they think that they they might want to do as a way to handle that I got another follow-up question so if we did the 401K and a third of the employees opted in and the others didn't or like let's say it's a quarter is there that Thresh hold that you need to meet is that something that would hurt my ability to even have a 401k if I don't have enough employees participating in making their own contributions it depends on the provisions of the plan and there several years ago they implemented some plans that are called Safe Harbor retirement plans and those you still do have some minor testing that has to occur but typically if you have adopted those you're not looking for a certain percentage to to participate but the kicker of those is that they're requiring you to match a little bit higher percentage or to do a flat percentage that everybody gets whether they defer or not I guess the slap on your hand for years ago because the owners really didn't want to put in for the rank and file and so they implemented these types of rules to prevent you from doing that that's what those testing rules were about so now they've said if you're willing to be a little more generous to the rank and file then you know we'll let you um have these types of provisions and it doesn't matter what the rest do you you can do the Max and and things like that I have a question when we had that original session uh Jackie Liz and Sarah and we agreed that I would try to bring in some outside expertise one of you made a request I forgot who it was but one of you suggested if possible could you try to find an expert who happens to be a woman I think you all agreed with the suggestion was made why what were you thinking I didn't make the original request but I agreed because sometimes and Lauren it's like Lauren and the ladies it's not you but sometimes some men talk down to women and so some it's it is you know Taylor Swift has some thoughts she can share if you'd like to know more um and so did the Barbie movie and so sometimes it's nice to talk to somebody who speaks the same language we speak let me just say this I think there are a lot of men who would have been equally interested in hearing this conversation and would have had just as many questions to ask and and that's why why I'm asking but were you starting to say something Sarah I don't know my mother was a corporate tax accountant she died a long time ago women and numbers like I just I trust I don't know like um and I think that you know Jackie has a point about man's planning um and you know whether or not it's done with intent it's sometimes my husband even does it sometimes and I'm like you know like yeah I don't want to hear that I just think that um also women don't get necessarily the opportunities that some men get so I think highlighting a female professional is a priority to me and I I I try to do that when I hire people I'm a female owned and operated business and I feel like that's my responsibility and and my passion to to support other women who are doing interesting things with their profession so when I have the chance to hire somebody or work with somebody who is female I'm going to take it not that I won't you know consider a a male candidate as well I didn't make the request to have like a woman here but now that I'm reflecting on it I think it was a good thing because Jackie Sarah and myself all had I have to say they were somewhat Elementary questions and if Julianne were a man it could very easily come off as mansplaining because there's three women that are receiving the advice and the and um so maybe for me a little bit was a perception of I don't want to seem like a woman that doesn't know her numbers and need to have a man explain it to me again it's it's probably not a truth but it is a perception and and so I'm really glad Julianne that you're a woman well thank you I appreciate that my thanks to Jackie Russo to Liz picarazzi to Sarah seagull and especially uh to Julianne row appreciate you're taking this time uh to help us [Music] out one thing before you go everything we do at 21 hats is created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to help us all learn together if you get something out of listening to these podcast episodes consider joining the conversation you can do that by joining the 21 hats sounding board a slack Channel where you can tap the wisdom of a very smart crowd or by becoming a founding member and joining our monthly Zoom Forum where you can be part of conversations much like the ones we have on the podcast you can sign up for both by subscribing to the morning report if you have any questions you can email me at Lauren 21h hats.com and if you get something out of this podcast or out of the morning report please tell a friend tell an enemy tell every business owner you know your word of mouth owner to owner will always be the most effective way to build this community for all of us thank you it means a lot this episode was produced by another entrepreneur Jess ston founder of blank word Productions thanks for listening everyone [Music]