The Due Diligence Project™ Podcast

020: Tax Strategy Secrets: The Due Diligence Project's State of the Union 2025

• The Due Diligence Project™ Podcast

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Episode Summary: In this March 2025 "State of the Union" address, Due Diligence Project founder Alex Sonkin joins host Paul G McManus to discuss the growth and achievements of their tax professional community. They explore how their network of 847 independent CPA firms collaborates to vet tax strategies for ultra-high-net-worth clients, delivering significant tax savings while maintaining compliance.

Key Topics Covered:

  • Community Growth: How the DDP has built a nationwide network of experienced tax professionals who collectively review strategies
  • Member Success Stories: The financial gains reported by member CPAs, with some generating 7-figure additional fees
  • Investment Projects: Their involvement in film financing for movies featuring Sylvester Stallone and Mark Wahlberg
  • Charitable Impact: How tax savings have funded the Mitchell Thorpe Foundation, providing medical care for 200 families with sick children
  • AI and Tax Planning: Why human expertise still outperforms artificial intelligence in complex tax strategy development
  • Tax System Perspectives: Their views on IRS practices and media representation of tax strategies
  • Upcoming Events: Preview of the Due Diligence Project Summit on May 7, 2025

Featured Quotes: "For the last 30, 40 years, the computer geeks have ruled the world... The tax geeks are helping business owners eliminate costs, become more efficient, eliminate unnecessary tax, and then save that money to create more jobs." - Alex Sonkin

"We're a community of accountants. These are risk-averse people. We are not here to break laws. We're here to stay within the black and white lines." - Alex Sonkin

Resources Mentioned:

This episode highlights the achievements of the Due Diligence Project community over the past year and provides insights into how their collective approach to tax strategy vetting continues to benefit wealthy clients and their communities.


Speaker 1:

Want to know how elite tax advisors win the due diligence game to satisfy ultra high net worth clients who expect the very best. Welcome to the Due Diligence Project Podcast, where you get a chance to learn from the elite CPAs, virtual family office professionals and tax specialists who are doing just that. We'll uncover their insider secrets on how they are dominating their competition, vetting new ideas and supercharging their due diligence process to deliver extraordinary results. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience with top tax professionals across the country, please welcome your host, alex Sunkin.

Speaker 2:

Please welcome your host, alex Sunkin. I wanted to take a moment and do this due diligence project state of the union address with you, just to share with our entire global community and those of you who are following our community, who are kind of on the fence about joining the due diligence project or not, what's been happening inside the Due Diligence Project, how our community has grown, how independent members in our community have absolutely set records the specialists, the resources on our platform, including you. Everyone is setting records in terms of revenues, net income, just the positioning of their firms in their marketplaces, where they've not just become leaders, they're just dominating their leadership position, separating themselves further from their competition, where they look back and they can't even see where their competition is. So we're really excited to report just some progress and records that we're setting, based on goals that we set many years ago.

Speaker 3:

And, for context, as we're recording this, it's March 2025. And so, state of the Union, if we were to look back on the year 2024, and you mentioned a number of different areas which one would you like to dive in first?

Speaker 2:

We've grown our community first. We've grown our community. We've had as many as 847 firms participate in our due diligence project summit. That means 847 independent CPA firms representing every single market across the country. These are all CPAs or EAs who have at least 10,000, many of which have over 50,000 hours of experience in audit and tax court. So they're introducing their favorite resources tax attorneys, specialists across every area of tax planning to our community, and every independent member is vetting out each strategy, ranking, rating each strategy, and so what we have is cumulative, a lot of data points.

Speaker 2:

It's nice to show a strategy to one CPA, one attorney, but it's better to show them to six 700 independent CPAs and attorneys who have at least 50,000 hours of experience in audit and tax court, so they can ask meaningful questions, get meaningful answers and then ultimately dial into the tax code and go. Is this something that can be defended in audit? Is it going to go to audit? What's the audit risk If it goes to audit? Is it going to go to tax court? Do we want to implement a strategy? Is there enough return on this strategy where the risk of audit makes sense?

Speaker 2:

All of these calculations, essentially, are done by CPAs and the cumulative structure. We're able to rank and rate every kind of idea, every strategy out there, whether it's cost mitigation or tax mitigation, and then have a portfolio of strategies that are super sexy, that our CPAs vet out and then deliver to their best clients and deliver massive value to their clients, which the typical CPA, the average CPA they haven't even seen 95% of these strategies because they're so inundated with producing tax returns, financial statements, they have no idea how many pages are in the tax code. The tax code is constantly changing. They are involved in various CPA associations but none of these associations are going deep and wide into finding all these different tax strategies and really completing the due diligence on each strategy, following the 10 pillars of extraordinary due diligence, to really find out is this thing really going to stand up to an audit or not?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, now you said something tax strategies.

Speaker 2:

and super sexy, those are not typically two phrases that I hear together.

Speaker 2:

So like super sexy. We're a community of tax, so let's just put it this way. For the last 30, 40 years, the tax, the computer geeks, have ruled the world the Microsofts, the Facebooks, the technology, the Elon Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Bill Gates of the world. They have used leverage technology to create incredible value and really deliver value all around the world, leverage the planet and create net worths in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The tax geeks on the other side are helping these business owners some of which are not worth hundreds of billions of dollars, they're just worth millions of dollars or hundreds of millions or tens of millions to eliminate costs, become more efficient, eliminate unnecessary tax and then save that money and then create more jobs. Become more efficient, eliminate unnecessary tax and then save that money and then create more jobs, create more charitable benefactors, make a difference in their communities. And so these tax geeks are looking at this tax code.

Speaker 2:

The tax code is how many pages? No one knows. Is it a million, is it 2 million? Is it a half a million? Is it a quarter million? I'm telling you, you can go to the biggest CPA firms in the country. They have no clue how many pages are in the tax code. No one knows. If no one knows how many pages there are, how are they doing tax planning? The only way we know how to do the tax planning is by having a very the largest community of tax geeks. Take this elephant and eat it one bite at a time as a community, and as a community, we rip apart every strategy, put it back together, rip it up like engineers, pick it apart, put it back together. Take it apart, put it back together. Is this, are any parts of this strategy going to violate any sections of the tax code, of which there are an infinite number of pages? So as a community, we look at this and go is there anything? The IRS is going to look at this and look at the tax code and see if there's a problem. One, two, three, 10 CPAs may miss something. 600 CPAs are probably not going to miss something, and so we count on having the largest independent peer review community to eliminate that risk and create the value. That being said, no one is doing what we're doing. We have no competition.

Speaker 2:

People talk about due diligence, but they don't actually do it. They do it as best they can, but they're limited by time and resources, by how many phone calls can they make, how many answers to questions can they get? And so they have enough time to get maybe three, four data points. That's not enough to complete due diligence on a lot of this stuff, because a lot of information that's coming about various strategies is misinformation or bad information coming from salespeople, coming from mainstream media that is basically trying to. Unfortunately, we live in a time where mainstream media the Doge report just proved that mainstream media may or may not be telling us the truth about certain things. They may or may not be funded by interest groups that have a position.

Speaker 3:

You mean by our tax dollars.

Speaker 2:

So this is all public information now. But the thing is inside the due diligence project, when an article comes out from Bloomberg, fortune or Forbes, we need to look at that article and when they talk about tax, we go and see who wrote this article. Does that person have any experience? Oh, they're an author for a publication with zero experience in audit, with zero experience in finance. With zero, I mean they got a phone call from somebody. So we have to take all this into account, show these ideas to the experts and literally bring in the top attorneys, top tax experts, top specialists in the country and then really go to the sources of where this information is coming from and when there's a question, we're handling these situations. So someone needs to be the authority on due diligence in the realm of tax planning and the due diligence project. Just simply by building the largest independent peer review community of tax geeks, we've become that place. What does that mean? What does that mean to your listeners? What it means is CPAs who have plugged into our system have been setting records in terms of delivering value to their millionaire, multimillionaire, centimillionaire, billionaire. Even clients who are making $300,000 a year are able to save significant tax dollars and use those tax savings for retirement or charitable contributions to create jobs, to make a difference in their communities. And so, as a community of tax geeks, we're delivering more and more value every year and the business owners that are benefiting from it are benefiting their communities, and so America is becoming a better place as a result of what we're doing. We now.

Speaker 2:

Last year we had over 40 CPAs that earned at least $100,000 in additional fees from bringing value through the due diligence project. We had multiple members generate over seven figures in fees. We had a CPA generate over $2 million in fees. We have multiple, many CPAs generating over $300,000, over $500,000 in additional fees beyond what they're earning in their practices. So their practices are growing because they're delivering incredible value to their biggest clients. Those big clients are referring bigger clients to those firms. They're able to charge fees based on the value that they're delivering because it's a value-based structure. So when they deliver value in the form of cost savings and tax savings, it's justified that they can charge slightly higher fee. So they're generating more fees from their clients. They're generating more fees from the due diligence project.

Speaker 2:

Their lives are changing. Their business owners' lives are changing because now they're delivering strategies and cost savings and tax savings that are making a significant difference in the lives of those business owners. Some of these business owners are coming in with a million dollar tax bill and they're leaving paying only $150,000 of tax. They're saving 85% of their tax bill in the process, or more. This is significant stuff, so we're really, really excited about seeing that.

Speaker 2:

The other thing we're seeing is we're seeing CPA firms transform their businesses and become leaders in their communities and start to partner with family offices with multiple billionaires in that family office. How does that CPA firm get that relationship? Because they position themselves as members of the due diligence project. They point to the fact that they have access to due diligence that none of their competitors have access to. They point to the value that they can contribute to these family offices that are handling billionaires, multimillionaires, multimillionaires, and their CPA partners, their tax planning partners, have no clue what the due diligence project members are even talking about, because they've never seen these strategies before, because they've just been producing tax returns, financial statements and delivering value based on the strategies that they've learned over the last 30, 40 years, but they have no idea how many pages are in the tax code.

Speaker 2:

They have no idea how many strategies are in the tax code. They don't have no idea how many strategies in the tax code. So we're really excited to just share the growth of our tax geek community and we believe it's really time for the tax geek to take a role in our economy and take a much more prevalent role, similar to the role that the computer geeks have taken over the last 30, 40 years, and we need to honor the tax geeks have taken over the last 34 years. And we need to honor the tax geeks because all you got to do, paul I don't know if you've ever done this go Google the tax code, the US tax code, and just start reading it and you'll gain a very special appreciation of what your CPA or your tax advisor has to deal with to figure out what's good, what's better, what's best, because this is written in a way.

Speaker 3:

So I'm going to challenge this Now. Bear with me. A couple of years ago I'd be like absolutely. But now I can't just throw it into AI and say tell me the page count, tell me the 10 things I need to know. How is AI impacting what you do?

Speaker 2:

It's a great question. So the Due Diligence Project is the leader in our space. We've actually been embedded in multiple software systems, the leading software systems that use AI, that help CPAs design tax strategies, and so the reason the due diligence project has been sought out and partnered by these software companies who are using AI is because, at the end of the day, someone needs to program that AI, someone needs to set those rules, needs to program that AI, someone needs to set those rules. And the top CPAs in the country, the top tax geeks in the country, are still ahead of AI in this space by quite a lot, because there's so many rules in the tax code that no one has yet programmed AI to really go through this. So sometimes you'll actually a lot of our members use the CPAs in our network are using AI and a lot of people are trying to use AI and they show us hey, I put this in the chat GPT, here's what gave me and we can see the chat GPT still way behind, way behind what we're doing, because it has a lot of the basic concepts, but some of the stuff is so molecular. Eventually AI is going to catch up, okay, I don't doubt it. I just still think we're a few years ahead. I don't know how many years ahead we are, but there's just still a lot of creativity in the tax code.

Speaker 2:

There's a lot of things in the tax code that are incomplete, where strategies can be built on top of these incompletions and until Congress passes new laws which is very difficult to do what the IRS has been doing, instead of lobbying Congress to pass laws to close some of these open-ended opportunities in the tax code, is they just actually contact Fortune, forbes, bloomberg and have them write articles that scare the public from doing these strategies, without actually changing the law. So, even though the strategies are fully legal to do, they're going to have a Bloomberg write an article saying this is a very scary strategy, don't do it. You're going to go to jail, even though you can't go to jail because it's legal, completely legal to do the strategy based on the laws and the tax code Found out. So you have basically mainstream media lying to the public. And who's finding this out? We're looking at this thing going. Here's what the law says. Here's what this article says. This article completely violates what's in the actual tax code. It's wild.

Speaker 3:

It is wild and I have to get political at all. It's like we're finding out that through Doge, that these government agencies are paying the media for essentially propaganda. This hasn't come out that I'm aware of, but I wouldn't be surprised if we find out that the IRS is paying Bloomberg and a lot of other companies to plant their story.

Speaker 2:

Paul, you're part of the book that's out there called the Due Diligence Project. In the Due Diligence Project book are 10 pillars of extraordinary due diligence. How many times have you heard me do the 10 pillars presentation that we've recorded? And in the 10 pillars there's a reason why there's 10 pillars for extraordinary due diligence because we're human beings. We are not perfect. We have personal motivations. We want to make more money for ourselves. We sometimes have conflicts.

Speaker 2:

What's the right thing to do? The easiest thing to do is just to not do any due diligence and say you did the due diligence. Hey, I did the due diligence. This is a bad program or this is good to come to decide something's good. It's a lot of information. You have to sift through a lot of information. So sometimes you'll call an attorney and be like hey, hey, what do you think about this strategy? And they'll be like, no, this strategy is really bad. It's really risky. You shouldn't do this. You're going to go to jail and everyone's going to get shot in jail. Don't do it. Wow, that's scary. Let's not do this. I just spoke to this attorney. What's behind that? Oh, the attorney's trying to sell us something else because he's got a mortgage and he's got a kid at Harvard and they've got bills to pay, so he's motivated to make more money, and so he doesn't want me to sell a competing program, he wants me to sell his program. Does that make any sense? Of course it makes sense.

Speaker 3:

It doesn't. And just to your point earlier, what the due diligence project community comes out with is hundreds of independent experts are vetting these things, and you've said this many times, or I've heard you say it many times before it's just that due diligence, literally, that allows for the best ideas to come to the top, whereas in this example of the attorney, what's he basing it on? Well, either his self-interest or the fact that he's completely unknowledgeable about these things.

Speaker 2:

Well, and I think from the IRS's perspective it's like they've been given a mandate Go collect. It's like police officers Go give as many tickets as you can. It's the end of the month.

Speaker 2:

You have to get your numbers to this point Someone's going one mile over the speed limit, just give them a ticket. You have to get your numbers to this point. Someone's going one mile over the speed limit, just give them a ticket. We got to get our numbers up.

Speaker 2:

So the IRS has given a mandate Go get this many tax dollars, because we're $36 trillion in debt, and just go get the money. That's not what they're supposed to be doing. You know what I mean. They're supposed to be helping, so at some point they crossed the line to serving the American public, to let's go get the money, and we need to raise as much money as possible and if that means breaking the rules, we're going to operate like a normal. We're going to cut corners and do all these things, but they're doing it with our dollars, against the American people, and they've lost their way.

Speaker 2:

So, without getting political, it is what it is. That's why due diligence at the end of the day, that's why the court system exists. That's why we want to. You know, if a strategy goes to tax court, you know we're seeing the IRS lose 12-0 in court because they violated laws. That's how aggressive they've been in raising money that they're like we're going to violate laws set forth by Congress against the American people to raise the money that we need to raise. So something's been lost. Regardless of that, it makes due diligence even more important, because if that strategy goes to tax court, a judge is going to go here's what it says in the tax code and what you're doing, irs, is wrong and what the taxpayer is doing is correct. So the law is still the law and that's why due diligence is really important.

Speaker 2:

And having the largest independent peer review community of tax geeks, which is really, you know, the IRS has a bunch of people that are tax geeks. Are they better than our community? That's in the private sector? Because we have former IRS agents in our community as well. People spent 30 years as an IRS agent. They're in the private sector. They've joined the due diligence project. We're all looking at the same code. We're all looking at the same laws. We just want to find what's the truth, what's good, what's better, what's best, and we all want to follow the law.

Speaker 3:

I'm going to shift gears for a second. So again we're here March 2025. We've just had a presidential election. Up until now, there was the idea that the Trump tax cuts would expire. Now it's like maybe, maybe not. There's talk about, or not just talk, but I think they're actually downsizing or the IRS to some degree. There's root talk I don't know how serious it is about potentially getting rid of the IRS. I mean, that's probably still a little bit far-fetched. But just kind of, if you were to look into your crystal ball and just kind of look at the future, what are some of your predictions about, or theories about, what's going to happen in the near future, in 2020?

Speaker 2:

Well, you know, part of our network, part of what we do, is we have people that are in the lobby groups. We have people inside the government and I've had the privilege of being able to contact some of our members, are building their own lobby groups and working with Congress. Some of our specialists have been part of lobby groups and working with Congress. Some of our specialists have been part of lobby groups for various strategies, working with Congress, and so we want to really know what the future holds. We don't know at this point, but here's the various scenarios.

Speaker 2:

On one side, what Doge and Trump and Musk are doing is just exposing everything. So they're exposing everything, and then the question is are they actually going to be able to do anything about it? Are they actually going to be able to fire these people, replace these people, cut these costs? We don't know. We don't know Now. So the one scenario is they're exposing all this, which is going to create a natural conflict in our country country, because now the truth is out. All of this waste, corruption is out in the open. What are we going to do about it? If they don't do anything about it, that could create a lot of conflict in the future and more fighting, and I have no idea how this can get resolved.

Speaker 2:

The other scenario is they just start firing all these people and they replace all these people in the government and they actually cut these costs, which could lead to a little bit of an economic downturn. That's a lot of money that is no longer going into the economy from the public sector and that means there's going to be a little transition, potentially just a financial recession as a function of that. But the bottom line is the fact that the waste and the fraud has been exposed is a huge thing. Is it going to be positive or negative? I don't know. It looks like it's positive for some people. For some people, it's very, very negative.

Speaker 2:

If you lost your income from this, that's very negative. If you feel like our country is going to become more efficient as a result of this, it's going to be positive. We don't know what the future holds. We just have to be prepared for all of the different possibilities and we just hope and pray that the country becomes more efficient and put it in a better place and we can rebuild our middle class and we can start to produce things again that were outsourced to being produced in all these other countries. Produce them in America, so that our middle class can actually have that life and be able to afford whatever they need to afford without being at the top, in the top 1%, which is kind of where the economy has been going for the last 20, 30 years.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I think pretty much to buy a you're in San Diego. I think to buy a decent place in San Diego, you probably, you pretty much need to be in the top 1% to be able to, and that's that's the thing is.

Speaker 2:

If you have manufacturing, if you have manufacturing in our country, the managers, the senior managers, all of the even people working the manufacturing lines should make enough money to be able to afford a home anywhere in our country. And that's the way it was working back in the 50s and 1950s, 1960s, when manufacturing was done here in America. So I think that's the idea, that's the dream. When you outsource manufacturing, you're creating leverage, where the owners are here, the manufacturing's in Mexico, china, somewhere else. So you have all these workers out there, you have the owners over here, there's an arbitrage and only the very, very few are making money, and everyone else and all the money's flowing in these other countries and the middle class is being created somewhere else. That makes no sense if you're really trying to grow an economy that benefits America, where we want that middle class to be here, and that means the manufacturing has to be here.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, what else so for the State of the Union? What other topics are top of mind for you at this point?

Speaker 2:

Let's just talk about some success stories. One of the strategies we have is a really cool film deal. It's a four to one film structure. We were able to finance five movies last year.

Speaker 3:

Okay.

Speaker 2:

Which ones Alarum with Sylvester Stallone, light Risk with Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, and you know that's really cool. So those of you you know those are some of the big names. We did Rust with Alec Baldwin last year. Unfortunately there was a mishap on set so that movie is not out yet. But what's cool is my family and I watched Flight Risk with Mark Wahlberg. Turned out to be a pretty good movie and it's like, hey, our community of CPAs funded this movie, like we're all movie producers.

Speaker 3:

So was there any?

Speaker 2:

cameo with you in it. No, we're not in the movie. But the cool thing, our CPAs blew out to the con film festival. Okay, A number of them are invited to go out this May, and so every May a number of our CPAs fly out to the Cannes Film Festival in France and go to the parties, go to the yacht parties and actually participate and see in the bartering and the buying and selling of the movies that are happening on the back end in these global meetings. And so, to make tax planning sexy, it's like our CPAs are now getting in the film production.

Speaker 3:

I was going to say that's a concrete example of where you think tax funding not sexy, and then suddenly it's like, oh, that's actually kind of cool.

Speaker 2:

Right, and that's the thing is. All of a sudden, someone who's got a huge tax bill is talking about funding a movie with Mark Wahlberg in it. And now they own a movie with Mark Wahlberg, right, you know, instead of paying a half million dollars of tax, they've saved hundreds of thousands of dollars and they own equity in a movie. Yeah, that's awesome, right? Or they could just write a check to the government, lose money, never see that money again, have no equity in the movie, still watch Flight Risk, enjoy it, not enjoy it, but not have any ownership in it. And that's less sexy, we would say.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, again trying not to be political, but after you see all the things that our government's been spending money on through what Doge is reporting, it's like those are not the things that I want my tax dollars to guarantee. I mean, I don't like paying taxes, but if it's going to pay, like building bridges and roads, okay, you know, I guess those things are necessary.

Speaker 2:

Right? No, you know. And the thing is, I don't want to be political about any of this either, because both sides contributed, both sides Okay. So this is not one side is doing bad, one side is doing good. They're both bad.

Speaker 2:

Both sides, for the last 100 years, have been treating this country like their own little piggy bank, with zero oversight. That is not okay. If you and I did any of this stuff and you would be in prison in three seconds, no questions asked, and all my assets would be frozen, that's the bottom line. Okay so, but the bottom line is our community. We're not interested in risk, we're not interested in putting ourselves in that position. We're interested in staying. We're a community of accountants. These are risk averse people. We are not here to break laws. We're here to stay within the black and white lines. It's very, very important to them. It's very important to the business owners that they serve, very, very important to them. It's very important to the business owners that they serve. And we're, like I said, we're here just to look at the tax code and to find out what's in there. How do we make business owners more efficient?

Speaker 2:

Because another interesting point is we have a charity that our CPAs and some of their donors have been supporting and this charity is called the Mitchell Thorpe Foundation, and because of the work we've been doing is we've donated over $300 million of total gifts to this charity. Those gifts are being distributed to the charity on a yearly basis, where the charity receives seven figures a year in cash distributions and that cash is funding over 200 families that have very, very sick children that are requiring medical care that those families could not afford. So prior to getting these distributions, the parents were sitting home, couldn't afford to go to work. The parents aren't doctors. They're trying to take care of their sick children without any ability to take care of their sick children. Now they're able to use medical care and basically apply to Mitchell Thorpe. Mitchell Thorpe says yes and just pays their medical bills.

Speaker 2:

Because of our community of CPAs completing due diligence on a structure that is now delivering seven figures of cash every year to these 200 families, making a huge difference in their lives. We're very, very proud of that. So you know we're doing a lot of different things across a lot of different channels. Some of it is sexy, like producing movies, and some of it is meaningful, like making a difference in the life of a 16-year-old who has six months to live and we're going to make that six months their best six months ever and make that family feel better.

Speaker 2:

We're trying to make a difference. So there's a lot of benefits when we save money. We don't know where all different channels create different opportunities, but we know there's suffering in this world. We know money makes a difference and putting it in the hands of various charitable organizations, of business owners, of people who are going to make a difference with that, at the end of the day, we track all of that and we want to create win-win-wins. It's not just about helping CPAs make more money or helping the business owners save more money. We're seeing, you know, on a multi-generational basis. When that savings happens, it results in other amazing things in those communities and we're just sharing some of those highlights.

Speaker 3:

That's awesome. Tell us about the upcoming Due Diligence Project Summit.

Speaker 2:

Here's the thing We've every year we feel like we've seen everything under the sun, because we're the due diligence project, we're the center of the tax planning universe. We've seen every tax strategy and every year we see five new strategies we've never heard of, and every year we're like, wow, how the heck did they do that? So last year, at the end of the year, we found a new idea, a new strategy that's so innovative. That is very similar to some of the things we've done before, some of the things we really love in our program, but they've taken those concepts and added a couple different ideas to it that basically completely changed. It's like an evolution. It's a real evolution of tax planning, financial planning.

Speaker 2:

And so what I like to say is our community is we're a bunch of tax geeks where we're taking up this hill and combining it with finance bros and meeting at the very, very tippy top of a mountain where there's very the air is rare. It's very high up there. It's easier for us to take the tax geeks up there and teach them the finance stuff. If we try to take finance bros and teach them the tax stuff, they get lost. The learning curve of tax is so steep. It really takes. It took me about seven, eight, nine years of being inside the tax code before I was promoted. From nothing you are totally useless to to you know very little Like that's the learning curve. And then, from knowing very little, you become like literally the top people in tax.

Speaker 2:

The people at the top of the tax mountain are so much smarter than the average tax person. They've gone up so high up this mountain. No one wants to go up this mountain. You can't breathe up there. But I've interviewed thousands of tax professionals and what I can tell you is the true tax geeks. They're so curious, they keep climbing. They keep climbing when the oxygen runs out. Their curiosity keeps going. Everyone else stays down here because it's easy to breathe, it's relaxing. Oh, we already make a million dollars a year. Why do we have to learn more tax strategies? Why do you need more tax strategies? Your firm's making a lot of money. Just pay your tax and be happy. There's a lot of CPAs right here. Just pay your tax and be happy. Who are these nut jobs that keep climbing the mountain? Michael Jordan, kobe Bryant, larry Bird? They're not satisfied being. Oh, I'm already in the All-Star game. I'm already the best player in the world.

Speaker 2:

No they're like there's a kid that's going to watch me play today. That's never seen me play today. That's never seen me play today and I'm going to show what Michael Jordan plays like. So we're looking for the Michael Jordans, we're looking for the Kobe Bryants who are not satisfied, who don't see themselves as being tax expert. They see themselves being the best in the world in what they do and they're going to continue to push themselves from curiosity, just from curiosity, because they don't want to see like I don't want to see another firm do due diligence better than the due diligence project. These cpas do not want to meet another cpa that knows more than them. Yeah, that would be like kobe bryant meeting another basketball player that's got skills. He'd be like what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no right, kobe had one guy that was better than him, michael jordan, and he's like I'm gonna beat this guy, I'm gonna beat this guy, I'm gonna beat this guy and he and he got so close. He was the closest one ever because he had one goal, one site, and he was maniacal. He was like I'm going to keep going until I get there and he was the closest thing to it. And those are the two guys that are at the top of the food chain. Lebron fans, sorry, I don't care, but the point is that analogy works and when you're a nut job like Kobe, when you're a nut job like Michael, when you're a nut job like Larry or Magic, you just keep going. You know LeBron can't get better, so he just uses the media to try to tell us that he's the best because he's played the longest. Whatever Great, everyone can see that it's fine In the tax planning world.

Speaker 2:

It's. The results are going to show it. It's all in the black and whites, it's all in the bottom line. How much money did you save your business owners? How much money did they make? How much money did you save? There's no. We can clearly see who's doing the best job. Show me those tax returns. When we look at tax returns of the Fortune 500 companies out there, 18% are able to zero out their tax return. 82% of the Fortune 500 companies with the top CPA firms, law firm in the country have no idea how to zero out their tax return. 18% do it every single year. So those 18% of tax planning firms are running circles around 82% who really don't know what they're doing. Who are the best CPA firms in the world. 82% of the 500 most profitable companies in the world. That's the difference between having Michael Jordan be your two guard on your basketball team versus some guy who shows up at YMCA's on Saturday who's really good at playing basketball. That's your two guard.

Speaker 3:

Thank you so much for your time today. I am motivated, I am inspired and I am looking forward to the Due Diligence Project Summit coming up in May. We'll have the information around this and so can't wait to see you there, alex. I'll be presenting a course and I can't wait to see if we break those numbers that we've had in the past. What was it? 847?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we're excited about the summit we need 848.

Speaker 3:

848 or more.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the summit is super exciting. You know, every year we do something different at the summit. The concept is the same. We talk about, you know, world-class due diligence. We talk about operating a virtual family office with best-in-class resources at the highest level, with best-in-class resources at the highest level, and then we introduce a group of specialists to talk about their tax strategies. We give you enough about those tax strategies to wet your whistle, get you excited and see if you want to plug in and learn more. And it's been a really wonderful event that we've been doing for many, many years and we're excited to do it.

Speaker 2:

May 7th, 2025, due Diligence Project Summit. I believe it starts at 9 am Pacific time, 12 Eastern. Don't miss it, we'll see you there. Thanks so much for doing this, paul. I think this concludes the Due Diligence Project State of the Union. We got everyone up to speed and we're getting ready for another record-breaking year here in 2025.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic. That's all for this episode of the Due Diligence Project podcast. Be sure to visit due diligence project dot com to access the resources we have available for qualified CPAs and family office leaders. Our mission at the Due Diligence Project is to help you deliver more significance and value to your very best clients, while shifting your traditional practice into the firm of the future.