The Hidden Tax Savings in Your Business

John Jantsch (00:02.075)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Peter Holtz. He's a former Big Four accountant and multi-company CFO turned founder of Peter Holtz CPA, a fast growing firm recognized on the 2025 Inc and 5,000 at number 3075 and named to...

The top 25 IPA, top 500 with decades of experience in tax accounting and CFO advisory. He helps business owners legally reduce their tax burden through proactive year round planning. So Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Holtz (00:38.318)

Thank you very much. You got it exactly right.

John Jantsch (00:40.635)

Yeah. So we are recording this. People may be listening to this at other times of the year, but we're recording this right around the March 15th deadline for a lot of businesses to file taxes. So it kind of leads me to teeing up this question is, what's the real cost in waiting till now to think about or have this tax conversation?

Peter Holtz (01:05.29)

It could be like tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. if you, you know, the problem is you got to structure yourself and make sure you take, all your write-offs in place before year end, most of the time, right? So that December 31st timeframe is very, very important. And what's critical about what we do and what business owners should be doing is they should be like planning their taxes year round. They should be having quarterly meetings with their tax preparers, tax advisors, whatever.

and really tax strategists. we recommend is a solid tax strategy to make sure that of where they are, where they're going, how much money they're going to make, what they need to set aside, and everything else that they need to.

John Jantsch (01:46.747)

So, particularly folks that they have an accountant or a CPA that really kind of just does their compliance with tax reporting, where do you see companies like that leaking the most money? And I guess the follow-up question is, why isn't there a CPA telling them?

Peter Holtz (02:05.294)

Well, that's one of the biggest problems in the industry, right? And there are 1.2 million people in the United States license, prepare taxes with the IRS. And only about 1100 of us are certified tax planners. it's an additional education you can get if you're really interested in helping your business clients. It's not that difficult to do, but it teaches you some of the more...

basic and more advanced tax planning techniques to really reduce taxes. And when you think about it, it's basically 99.993 % of that 1.2 million are basically compliance guys. They put the numbers in boxes. Sometimes they don't even think about the numbers they put in the boxes. Like I've seen businesses with no assets. Like I've seen a gas station tax return filed with no assets. And I'm like, how do you not have any assets?

John Jantsch (03:01.115)

You

Peter Holtz (03:01.58)

Like you take everything out with your hands and pour the gas and the, mean, it's just impossible. So, and that's really a shame. think it, I think the industry to a certain extent has been more compliance oriented in terms of putting the numbers in the boxes and do it. That's it. And they've not thought about really what can I do to save the client's money? And there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff that the tax code lets them do in terms of depreciation, bonus depreciation.

John Jantsch (03:03.919)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (03:26.53)

You know, the Augusta rule, paying your kids, how to structure things, should you be a C-Corp, S-Corp, LLC, those are all really important questions.

John Jantsch (03:34.223)

Well, and I want to come back to the, I do want you to address where you commonly see companies leaking, you know, places, but I want to follow up on what you said about the CPAs. Is there also an element of the industry that is sort of risk averse? And even if something's in the tax code, it might get looked at harder than that. I mean, I've heard that from accountants. It's like, we probably don't want to do this, even though it's in the tax code and it's legal.

It's going to get your return looked at. mean, is there, is there sort of an overarching attitude that leans towards that?

Peter Holtz (04:09.134)

There is, there's a lot of real conservatism when it comes to that. you know, I don't know what to say about it, but it's wrong. mean, it really, if it's in, you know, Congress writes the tax code. And last year we had the big, beautiful bill, for example, that allows you, they do it so that people will do certain things so that the economy gets better. You know.

John Jantsch (04:19.375)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (04:36.398)

You know, you think about just think about depreciating, depreciating real estate, the long term real estate appreciates every year at 4%. Right over the long term 4%. But yet we can write it off. We can depreciate it. Right. It is the only appreciating asset we can depreciate. And the reason the government does that is because they want places for people to live because a civilian population that's living inside is much happier than when it's living outside and they want people to work.

They grow the economy by offering these tax rules to incentivize investment, and incentivize certain things. Low income housing credits, solar tax credits that we had and a lot of were eliminated. The electric vehicle tax credit that we put in place. All of these things were so important to the changes that the government wants to make in economy in leveraging really the entire economy.

to try to move in the direction that they wanna move. And a lot of it's built into the tax cut.

John Jantsch (05:37.527)

So the tax code is what? Upward 700, 800 pages? Nine to 10,000. Okay. So how does somebody like you keep up on the fact that it may change, I mean, change dramatically this year?

Peter Holtz (05:41.998)

No, like minor 10,000 pages. Minor 10,000 pages.

Peter Holtz (05:51.221)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what we do is we it's continuing professional education. We make sure we understand and focus on on on the things we need to focus on for our business owners. We just continue to study, study, study. Right. And I think what's interesting is I think now we know with AI and so forth, it's going to allow us to leverage to study even more. Right. And to get into the nitty gritty and really expand our range of services and help people save even more money.

things like, you know, more exotic things like certain types of trust, property trust, revocable trust, irrevocable trust, all those other things, I think are gonna become more and more important as we continue to grow and increase complexity.

John Jantsch (06:35.557)

So, let me loop back to what are maybe less three or four of the most common things that you see all the time. You've mentioned assets a couple of times, so depreciation is probably one of them. But what are some of the things that you just see time and time again?

Peter Holtz (06:45.826)

Right. Yeah.

Peter Holtz (06:51.852)

I see people that don't reimburse themselves for home office. I see people that don't take the Augusta rule, which is ability to rent out your personal residence 14 days a year to your business and create tax-free income. I see people not paying their kids. I've heard other CPAs saying, that's a red flag. Well, nonsense, OK? The tax law was established that any child above age seven can work in your business. You can pay them a fair amount.

for the work that you're doing and you're gonna have to do payroll or create the time records and give them a job to actually do it. But to them, to a child, if you pay them $15,000 a year and they're monitoring your social media, maybe they're helping you with whatever, to them it's at their standard deduction. So it's essentially tax-free income. yeah, exactly. I see people. Yeah, I see people.

John Jantsch (07:43.919)

Yeah, and you were going to give it to them anyway. Because they needed the money, so they were going to get it one way or another,

Peter Holtz (07:51.694)

I see people spending money on their kids, sports, their music lessons, their schooling, whatever it is. And these people are using after-tax money instead of pre-tax money. The more you can shift from after-tax to pre-tax, the more money you save. And if you use all the rules properly, if you're a business owner, let's say you're making $150,000 a year in a business, which is okay, right? But you've worked your business, you've made yourself a decent profit.

John Jantsch (07:57.221)

Right.

Peter Holtz (08:20.633)

probably you can turn close to $100,000 of that $150,000 into tax-free money. If you use every, and you properly manage and control your business, you're gonna have your home office be, I mean, I see, every time I see a contractor, right? You know their primary storage facility for a contractor is a garage.

John Jantsch (08:42.299)

The garage.

Peter Holtz (08:43.183)

Right? Every single contractors garage is full of stuff. And it's funny when I talk to clients who are contractors and the husband and wife is there, it's like I always mention that. Oh, was like, oh yeah, for sure. Or I'll have guys that deliberately, maybe they have a bigger piece of property and build a barn on their backyard in the backyard to store their equipment, their trucks, their extra materials, whatever. And they never write it off because nobody asked. This is really where it gets in my profession. Really, really is a problem.

John Jantsch (08:47.227)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (09:12.705)

is people don't ask questions. Like every time I start talking to somebody I'm asking, know, what's your business like? What are you actually doing? How do you do it? Where do you work? Are you working out of your home? You know, are you paying your kids or whatever? How many of this? How many? And it's like you would be, I literally have people who are still, they have their parents living with them, supporting them, and the parents are helping in the business and they're giving their parents money and supporting them.

they're not taking it out, but even though the parents are doing stuff to help them. it is, know, trying to think of everything is about asking. It's not about the answers, it's about asking the right question.

John Jantsch (09:53.603)

Right, right, right. So I should hold, I actually have my office in my home. So you just gave me a hint. should hold a retreat once a year for 15 days and lease or rent the home to my business.

Peter Holtz (10:04.099)

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Holtz (10:12.119)

Absolutely. Well, you know what? Quite honestly, I have I have an attorney in the Northeast that's a client of mine that does major events and the and like he's got a very large place, a very large house, and he does major catering events out of his house for clients that are business building. And if he would go to a Hilton or Four Seasons or a large hotel, you know, the Augusta rule still applies. It's what you

what you would pay for an equivalent space outside. sometimes we're taking very large, you know, imagine 12 events at $20,000 an event, a tax free income, because it's like, and a lot of, man, you know, there's a lot of people that can benefit by that.

John Jantsch (10:52.379)

Sure, Yeah. Yeah.

You

John Jantsch (11:01.563)

So when you first sit down with a business owner, are there some pretty telltale signs that they've probably got a tax problem versus a cashflow problem?

Peter Holtz (11:09.805)

Yes, absolutely. Well, what we do is we, when we sit down with the business owner, get your last two years tax returns, business and personal, we study them. We understand exactly what we see on the tax returns. Then we kind of go back and we ask them questions about what we see for the business and everything else like that. And there are some telltale signs. I made that point about the gas station with no assets, right? Or it's like, hey, you know, you're, and it's always the balance sheet that you can really find a lot of mistakes. Like they may, you know,

John Jantsch (11:31.055)

Yeah.

Peter Holtz (11:39.182)

We know they may use this type of business where they may use credit cards, but yet there's no credit card liability for what they've already spent money on. Lots and lots of stuff that we can see in the numbers that just look weird compared to other businesses, other people in the same industry. So those telltale signs are really, all in the numbers. And I'll have people come to me and start talking to me and say, and I'm like, I got to look at your numbers. And once you start,

John Jantsch (11:56.303)

Mmm.

Peter Holtz (12:08.655)

I mean, I've been doing this for near 40 years, right? So once you start looking at a business and you kind of know what to expect in terms of margins and everything else like that, and in terms of bottom line, and when it's not there, you're going to figure out why.

John Jantsch (12:23.867)

So you also offer CFO services on a virtual base. Is there a point at which a small business needs that level of thinking, or is it like day one?

Peter Holtz (12:27.011)

Okay.

Peter Holtz (12:38.093)

I mean, to a certain extent, you need some financial acumen, certainly from day one. Certain elements of the tax code from a business owner are really, really tricky. Probably the trickiest one is sales tax, right? And every state has auditors that go out there that try to find additional money. Everybody tries to find additional money for their people. And the sales tax can be really, really tough.

John Jantsch (12:59.547)

shoot every city.

Peter Holtz (13:08.119)

that's a regular tax start hard enough, but, you know, Yeah, but really as a business gets bigger and really they're thinking about growing really they're thinking about, you know, what they're going to do next. Should I buy this next vehicle? Should I buy my competitor? Should I get a building? Should I do, you know, what's going to be the long-term impact to me, not only from a tax receptor, but also financial perspective is really, really important.

Can I afford to do this? What does my business look like? How is my marketing paying off for me? You know what I mean? And just all the different questions that you want to ask as a business owner, having another person who knows numbers, right? Because here's the thing, most business owners understand what they do, right? They know how to fix a car. They know how to pump gas. They know how to do a restaurant. They know how to do catering. They know how to do construction, whatever it is that they know how to do it,

John Jantsch (13:55.407)

Yeah, right.

Peter Holtz (14:05.486)

But when it comes to the numbers and the compliance and the, you know, how are my numbers going to fall in the next couple of years? Studying that is really, really important. Having just another set of eyes to say, hey man, you know what? I think I want to buy my building. And I'm like, okay, well, what's the, what's the, what's, what's your current rent for your building? Right? Okay. Whatever. was 10, $4,000 a month. If you buy the building, how much is your loan payment going to be?

$3,000. Well, that's an easy one, right? Because you're buying a building, you're getting depreciation, you get the write-offs or whatever. Looking at those breakeven, even understanding breakeven and what you have to do and what your margins are can really, really, I mean, can be night and day for a business owner.

John Jantsch (14:36.392)

Right.

John Jantsch (14:45.189)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:55.973)

Talk to me a little bit about the mindset that you see. know I've worked with thousands. I've done this 30 years too. I've worked with thousands of businesses and profit seems to be a really misunderstood and often maligned word. The relationship that businesses have with profit really seems screwed up. How do you help fix that?

Peter Holtz (15:15.68)

I think you have a very, very good point. And I think it relates to, I think that mindset relates to the fact that when most people get, if they start their own business, most people get started in business and they come with the attitude of, know, I just need to make, I just need to pay my bills. I just need to pay my bills. So they're kind of going along, working their butts off, trying to get to this level. Then they start paying their bills and they level off, right? Then they don't say, wait a minute, I should make this building pay for my retirement.

John Jantsch (15:18.491)

Thank you.

Peter Holtz (15:45.585)

I should make this business pay for my retirement, make this business put money away for my healthcare, put money away from the college education. And what I'll see is that people go along and suddenly they got a kid that's got to go to college and they need find another 30 grand a year. They step it up. So why not step it up and push it all along the way and factor in your retirement, factor in your medical, factor in your kids' care.

factor in everything as part of your utilities for your business. And you rarely see people factoring in a savings plan into their business operations. And that is really the-

John Jantsch (16:18.607)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:27.387)

Sure. Well, we talked about it before we jumped on recorded here. You know, we're both fans of Mike McCallowitz's work, Profit First. And I think as simple as that idea was, it really did, you know, the idea of actually instead of paying all the bills and going, I hope there's some leftover, it was really more of just what you said. It's like, no, this is a bill, profit's a bill. You pay it first.

Peter Holtz (16:34.542)

Yep.

Peter Holtz (16:55.563)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (16:57.392)

There does tend to be a real kind of, we'll work to the level of what's left, right?

Peter Holtz (17:04.172)

Exactly. it's not, there's nothing bad about that. It's just people's understand, you know, they know what they know. You know what I mean? And that's one of the things I like about Profit First and what Mike has done is that he's educated people on, got to pay yourself first, man. That's what you're in business to do. Right? A lot of people love the freedom and being in their own business. They love not being their own boss. But it can, if they don't take care of themselves, it can be...

You know, a heavy, heavy load. remember once I met a pool contractor that was in his sixties and he spent his life, good 20, 30 years building pools for rich people in one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. And he ended up broke because he never watched his numbers and he never took care of it. And it was like, it was sad. You know what I mean? I would see pictures of the works of art that he built and, you know, it, I never want to see in my clients go down that

John Jantsch (17:44.539)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04.709)

So if you were advising people, whether they call you or anybody they're working with currently, what are a handful of questions that they, regardless of the relationship they have with their tax advisor, they should be saying, hey, wait a minute, ask me about these four things to get better sort of strategic picture rather than just like add up the numbers and fill out the forms.

Peter Holtz (18:29.487)

Yeah, I think you want your tax person or your business advisor or accountant basically to ask you questions like, tell me about your business plan. What do you think you want to do? Are you going to grow? Are you going to stabilize? You're going to sell? What are you thinking about doing in the next three to five years? I think you want them to ask them about your...

family and your personal life and who you support and everything else like that so they can maximize their your deductions. I think they want to get in they want to get into your business and talk to you a little bit about how they're planning to grow their business. Okay. And I think they want to you want them to ask you questions about this is an interesting way. What have you paid for outside the business that you may be using in your business?

I will run into plenty of times where it's like, you know, I bought this pickup truck and I never really put it in the business, even though I use it for the business. It's finding those misplaced assets. You know what I mean? And it's really what you want is somebody that's going to ask a lot of questions. And really get it out of spending not only your business life and your personal life and where you spend your money.

John Jantsch (19:43.067)

All right.

John Jantsch (19:49.861)

So this is a tricky question, the only tricky question I'm gonna ask you. How far do you think people should push it? So there's some things that's like, that's kind of gray or I mean, it's in the code, but you really would have to document every second you did that or so. I mean, how far do you just kind of say, let's take advantage of what they're giving us without killing ourselves?

Peter Holtz (19:53.242)

Okay.

Peter Holtz (20:12.847)

Yeah. You know, I think,

You know, the line is tax law, right? I think you want to go up to that line. Okay. In all cases, right? I'll give you a good example. have an airline pilot that once wanted to claim to be a real estate professional, yet he was getting a very substantial W-2 from the airline business. Well, upon further research, airline pilots can only fly 20 hours a week. And when this guy was on layover or waiting to fly, he was doing his real estate portfolio.

He had multiple properties. He was managing contractors. He was collecting rents. was doing this. So we got him declared a real estate professional, even though under full-time W-2. And it worked. And now he can take all the depreciation from his real estate against his W-2. And it was pushing the limit because the IRS came back. And they said to us, this guy's got a six-figure W-2. What are you guys crazy? And it's like,

John Jantsch (20:46.715)

Yeah.

Peter Holtz (21:13.563)

Federal law says he can only fly 20 hours a week. It's a part-time job. And we were able to prove that he was working 25 hours a week on his real estate portfolio.

John Jantsch (21:23.109)

Yeah, well, that's a great one too, because you had the backing of that. You know, it wasn't him just saying, I only work 20 hours a week. was literally like, I can't.

Peter Holtz (21:31.396)

Yeah, exactly. you know, the other great news, he was an airline pilot and you know, airline pilots are fastidious about keeping records. So he was very, very, he had all the contemporaneous records that we could possibly need. And the IRS was like, well, we got nothing. Right. So sometimes it's worth the challenge when you think, and once you, once you get through that challenge in one year, he's, he's, he's been able to do this now for five, six, seven years.

John Jantsch (21:38.491)

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

John Jantsch (21:48.027)

Yeah

Peter Holtz (21:58.694)

which has been amazing. So I think you want to take it to the tax law. I don't think you want to break the tax law. I think everybody needs to understand where the Internal Revenue Service is right now too. They're in a mess. It is a, I would say, unqualified disaster, the Internal Revenue Service. Their staff has been cut 25%. They're on, and these are not my opinions, these are facts.

John Jantsch (22:10.074)

Yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (22:26.329)

when they, and you can chat GBT this stuff or whatever from their announcements, when the government is shut down, half their operation is shut down. They've actually told people, when you file, you need to have your refund direct deposited, otherwise you'll wait another six to eight weeks to get a paper check, because they're not processing paper. And they're letting their automated systems run, but they're not processing the paper that would feed into the automated system.

52 % of the letters that are being sent by the IRS are incorrect. It's probably much higher now because of the current situations. I mean, there's nothing the people in the IRS can really do about it because we've had conversations we've never had with the Internal Revenue Service before where it's like, hey, we need to talk to a revenue officer to help this client take care of a balanced past due and to work out a payment plan. And the IRS will tell us, well, there's nobody available.

John Jantsch (22:59.803)

You

Peter Holtz (23:23.665)

So it is, that's one of the things you want to factor in, in terms of what you decide what to do and understanding that the Internal Revenue Service is not the efficient organization. I won't, I'm not even gonna say it that way. It's not as good as used to be and it never was the efficient organization. I mean, COVID, during COVID there, so much stuff disappeared. So many things disappeared. Paper that was filed and it was just a nightmare.

John Jantsch (23:40.482)

Right?

John Jantsch (23:54.299)

Hmm.

Peter Holtz (23:54.405)

I mean, millions upon millions of documents at once.

John Jantsch (23:58.533)

Well, I'm fearful we're going to go down a rabbit hole here that we won't be able to recover from. So Peter, where would you invite people? I appreciate you stopping by. Where would you invite people to learn more about the work that you do and connect with you?

Peter Holtz (24:03.493)

We definitely could if we want to.

Peter Holtz (24:14.039)

at go.peterholtz.com.

John Jantsch (24:22.765)

Awesome. Backslash Ducktape, because he's going to have all kinds of freebies for you there if you go there, right?

Peter Holtz (24:27.791)

Yeah, we got some goodies in there. have self-assessment PDF we have in there. We also offer a free tax strategy meeting with our team. And it's not really anything to do with the IRS, but we can definitely take a look at that tax strategies you currently have in play and look at the last couple of years tax returns and see what we can do to help you out.

John Jantsch (24:46.127)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we'll maybe we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Peter. Thanks.

Peter Holtz (24:51.398)

Sounds good. Thanks, John. Great meeting you.