Ryan Evans: Where the Puck Is Going in Wealth Management

Craig Castelli:
Welcome to the Close M&A Podcast from Caber Hill Advisors. I’m your host, Craig Castelli. And today my guest is Ryan Evans. Ryan is a Regional Director and Partner with Merit Financial Advisors. I met Ryan a decade ago or longer when he was building his own wealth advisory firm called Blueprint. And Ryan, you and your partner, Nick, built this business really from scratch, grew it up to 1.2 billion in AUM. No small feat. So just take us back to the beginning. When you guys were first getting started, what was the idea and why did you think it would work?

Ryan Evans:
Well, we weren’t actually even sure it would work, but we knew we kind of had a vision of what we wanted. And this was roughly March. March of 2012 was when we officially started Blueprint. We kind of came to the decision before that that we wanted to do something ourselves and have this independence. We knew that we wanted to be not beholden to a bank or an insurance company or anybody that had any say into what we wanted to do. So that was key of why we thought it would work is to sit it across from somebody and recommend something or give advice. We wanted it to be purely independent of who we worked for. So that was kind of the genesis of why we thought it would work. And then some of it’s just the leap of faith. Like you said, built it from scratch, left. Nick and I, my partner, met at a previous firm and they had a little bit of a benefits focus and that wasn’t something we wanted to focus on, great firm, but we just thought we wanted our focus to be on this wealth management holistic view of the client approach. So that’s kind of why we thought it would work. I think if we sat down and walked through numbers and a whole bunch of details, maybe we wouldn’t have, but yeah, but I think that’s part of the game. And fortunately it did.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah. I mean, I think starting any business is, it takes a lot of confidence. You have an idea, but there’s an element of guts and naivety that you also have to bring to the table and figure it out as you go, right?

Ryan Evans:
Kind of. Yeah.

Craig Castelli:
So you guys, I mean, by the time you reached the deal with Merit, and we’ll get to that at some point, but the business was a lot more than you and Nick. So day one is the two of you sitting across from clients and potential clients and telling this story and this works, but you can only scale the two of you so far. So how did you go about building the business and what were some of the biggest challenges you guys felt as you reached certain milestones?

Ryan Evans:
I think initially, and this is what I would tell other business owners or people that’s going through this, is this concept of building a team around you and hiring. So if you have a vision of where you’re going to go, you should be hiring towards that vision. And for us, I think it took a little bit to come to terms with that. We were looking at straight P&L and numbers and what we were making. And oh my God, if I have to hire an assistant at $75,000 plus benefits, which we didn’t know anything about, we’re like, oh my God, can we wait another six months? And then if you wait too long, then you’re going to hire somebody out of desperation and might not be who you want long-term. So once we decided that we started hiring to where we wanted to go, not necessarily where we were at the time. So that probably took us a little longer at the beginning than it does now. And I think having a strong bench of quality people around you that actually in all honesty are smarter than we are, once we came to terms, that was really what it was able to escalate us. So when you’re starting, you literally have every hat. I remember going to the post office and printing out self-addressed envelopes and then all the stuff that we had to do to get it going. Once we started taking that stuff off of our plate allowed us to be focused on growth and revenue generating type of activities, that’s really what allowed us to scale quickly.

Craig Castelli:
I mean, it’s tough. I remember early days of Caber Hill and just thinking, who am I to pay somebody to do this when I can do it myself and we barely have a business? I’m not paying myself right now. Why am I going to pay someone else to do some of these tasks? But you’re right, it really frees you up to maximize your output and really just spend all of your time where it’s the highest and best use of it.

Ryan Evans:
And then as we moved on, I think it’s, and this is for solo advisors, for people building a larger firm, I think embracing technology, especially these days is not a, should I do it? It’s you have to do it. And some of the tools you can really leverage to get time back to provide more value to clients, to scale, to build, or just free up time for you.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah. I mean, I think your hiring quote made me think of this, but I think there’s a technology angle too. It’s like, I think it was Gretzky who said you want to skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is right now. And you can’t build unless you are really seeing where things are going and putting yourself in the right position when it gets there.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah. In fact, I use that quote all the time as to one of the reasons why we partnered with and chose Merit is this industry specifically is moving so fast who’s thinking to where the puck is going? And not that we weren’t before, but yeah, I think that’s critical in any business that you need to scale and grow in.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that a little bit because in the press release announcing the partnership, I don’t know whose quote, I think it’s Nick who might be quoted, but you talked about how you’d been with Commonwealth forever and then they announced their selling to LPL and that was like a catalyst for you ultimately exploring your options and doing this deal. I guess talk a little bit about the why behind all of that.

Ryan Evans:
And so we had a great relationship with Commonwealth. That’s who we’ve been with since 2012 and there was no urgency there to leave or do anything. And in fact, internally at Commonwealth, they were having some offerings where Nick and I were saying, “Well, maybe we can look at this RA channel within Commonwealth and we can use them for this but not this and still be affiliated and use them under their umbrella.” And then once they said, “Hey, we are selling to LPL,” that literally caused us to pick our head up out of the sand and say, “Well, what else is out there?” We didn’t want to just accept it. I think we probably would’ve been fine, but I know they are a large publicly traded entity that supports 40,000 advisors and it wasn’t quite the feel that we were looking for. And again, may have been fine. So then we started like, well, what else is out there? So that was kind of a blessing that they did it, honestly, because we weren’t looking. And so once we said, well, what’s our value? What’s out there? Where’s the puck going? That was where we started. We had these aha moments immediately after that.

Craig Castelli:
Sure. I know you have a lot of business owners in your client base. Do you talk with them about this and how similar dynamics may be at play in their own industries and how it should shape their thinking about growth, exit, anything that they may be planning for?

Ryan Evans:
And just being business owners ourselves, it was a big part of our business because we were able to talk the talk a little bit.
I can talk about payroll services and how you’re structured and compensation and how it flows to you and how you can maybe shelter some of that income. And so all the things that we were doing as business owners, we were able to share that. So then once the news came out, a lot of these questions are, well, what was important to you? What were you looking for? What should we do? And so some of the things I think that were benefit to us, and I don’t even know if we realized it 15 years ago, but we wanted to make sure that when we built this, it wasn’t Evans Financial. We chose the name Blueprint that was universal. Even the process of choosing the name was, “Hey, we sent it out to 10 people we trusted. We sent four options out to 10 people we trusted. Seven of them said I like Blueprint” and we ran with it.

Craig Castelli:
That’s exactly how Caber Hill was named as well. It was pretty fun. Yeah.

Ryan Evans:
So we’re like, okay, you could spend months and months analyzing this stuff in different logos. And we’re like, so that’s kind of funny how you started too. So we wanted to eventually build something that had one process, had one uniform solution that no matter what office people were in when they came in, they had the same experience. And then also Nick and I could walk away for a month and nobody would notice if we wanted to. That’s what we were trying to really build. And then now we’re at a point where we are really growing this G2 of advisors. And I guess I’m old enough to say G2, but yeah, this G2 advisors who we are now, they’re hungry and they’re like, “What can we do? ” And it’s a fun place to be. But yeah, I think that the difference that I would tell a business owner that’s thinking about this, to us, it happened to us. They literally made the announcement on Liberation Day of last year, which is kind of a funny funny timeframe. We were both on spring break and markets were crashing and Commonwealth was announcing it was crazy. But the sale happened in August of that year of last year and then all the money transfers in November of this year. So advisors had this timeframe to … It wasn’t a five-year runway, but it was 12 months to make a decision, which is it’s your life’s work quick. So the one thing that I would tell business owners that we work with is I would look three to five years out. If you’re thinking of selling, it can’t be this year. There’s certain things that you need to be doing and thinking about to prepare yourself to optimize value to do it. And I know our industry specifically, I think we are more valuable because we had a team and a process, not just assets. We had a director of operations. We had somebody that handled our advanced planning. We have somebody that oversees our 401k business. So if Ryan or Nick walk away, there’s a business there, not just assets.

Craig Castelli:
And that’s advice that is universally applicable to just about any business out there. I mean, the risk tied to overreliance on the owners and the transition of what that owner does. It can be graded a little bit by industry with what you guys do. You’re probably in one of the higher band of risk right there if you don’t have that team in place because it really is truly reliant on you from relationships all the way through to operations. And the more that you can put people in place, the more turnkey that business becomes and it opens it up to a larger range of potential buyers.

Ryan Evans:
Right, exactly. And I don’t even think that was intentional for us. We just wanted to build something that was self-sustaining. But going through this process, once they announced they’re like, we value you much more than this other person, even though they might have higher margins, but it’s them. And if something happens to them, there’s nobody else to take it. Or if somebody takes it, they’re 24 years old and might not have the experience of somebody, not that that’s bad. I mean, that was just one thing that … And very intentional behind the scenes even over the last couple of years is to get our G2 and the service team to get comfortable talking to clients, meeting with them, being in the face. There’s nothing that makes us happier now than when somebody calls in and doesn’t ask for me. I’m like, that’s exactly what we … I’m still here. I always will be, but that’s very exciting for us to know that that’s working.

Craig Castelli:
So have either of you taken that month off yet?

Ryan Evans:
Nope. We are not yet. And part of this decision we can even get into a little bit is we didn’t want to just transact and walk away. I don’t know. I would not be able to golf five times a day. My wife would not want me at home five days a week. So we still love this business. There’s so much growth that’s changing so fast that I don’t know if I ever want to quote unquote retire. But obviously because of this transition, it’s a big deal. This is a service industry. We’re managing people’s nest eggs, we didn’t want to take it lightly and we didn’t want to do this again in two years. So we were pretty critical on the decision process and who we’re going to partner with and what that allows us to do. Since we closed November 15th and since then, it’s just been all hands on deck, making sure that clients are comfortable that they can see everything. We wanted that experience to be the same, if not better. And so we’ve been just uber focused on that.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah, I assume you have over time a lot more to bring to the table just because a matter of scale, the resources that Merit could offer are greater than the resources that any one individual component of Merit could offer on their own, but there’s a trust factor too. So you have to really handle these relationships delicately and make them understand that you made the decision that was right for you two, but that you also think is right for everybody else involved, team, clients, everything that you’re doing on a daily basis.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah, as we were going through the process, it was our clients and our team that were always at the forefront. We always knew we’d be fine.

Craig Castelli:
Transact, it’s multiple very, very small differences, but we wanted to really be seamless, not seamless, but a great opportunity for clients and staff. So yeah, some of the things that we can now do for clients we weren’t able to do before our staff is now, they are owners, so we were able to negotiate some equity for them. That’s great.

Ryan Evans:
So they got a seat at the table, they can see the value grow, they can see it go. So that’s kind of exciting. We wanted that for them and still having this independence of, “Hey, if it’s not all perfect right now, let’s figure this out and let’s make sure we’re comfortable.” So initially it was the amount of paperwork and DocuSigns and all this stuff to do, it was just all hands on deck. So I’m looking forward to that month. I should probably just book it and set my out of office already, but yeah, not yet. Yeah.

Craig Castelli:
Like most things, unless you force yourself to do it, you’re just going to keep grinding and-

Ryan Evans:
Just keep grinding. I don’t know.

Craig Castelli:
I’m just wondering when you can give me more strokes on the golf course because you’re out there playing so much.

Ryan Evans:
I would love that. I would love to have this. I would love to have that conversation, but yeah, our next podcast we’ll do on the course.

Craig Castelli:
Maybe at the turn, we’ll set something up. I don’t know. I mean, that’d be a good name for a podcast call it At the Turn. And in the time it takes us to drink a beer, we have to cover some salient topic to whoever the audience is.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah. Okay.

Craig Castelli:
Million dollar idea right there.

Ryan Evans:
I’m gonna write this down. This is good. All right. Yeah.

Craig Castelli:
All right. So let’s talk about your sale process a little bit. So you guys hired an M&A firm that specialized in your space and they ran some sort of a process. I don’t know all the details about it, but just talk about how you went about the process and the value you found in working with a specialist firm that really intimately knew your business and your industry.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah. We actually, as we were going down this path, we didn’t retain anybody from the beginning. And so we were talking to everybody and I think we were looking for almost just a gut check to hear where their vision was and just get a feel of all these different places. And then by the time we actually retained them, we already had an LOI in hand. So at that point we said, all right, I don’t know. I like the firm. I like the people. The story makes sense. It all resonates with us, but I don’t know if this was a good offer or not. So then we retained them to help then tweak the LOI, negotiate that and then it was really beneficial for us because then at that point we felt confident moving forward that they said, “Hey, this is a very competitive … I’ve never seen this before in the industry. I’ve never seen this before. You guys can feel good about signing this and moving forward.” So for us, I think we did a lot of the, and I don’t know if it was right or wrong, doing a lot of the work upfront than just meeting with people. And then by the time we got that LOI from them, having them tweak it, review it, we changed a couple things and our attorney looked at it and changed a couple things and it was a very minimal. But yeah, that was extremely helpful having this specialist of saying, especially when Commonwealth announced this, I think it had to be one of the busiest M&A years on record just on the financial services world. And there’s certain of these firms like a Merit that I think is the future. I think a lot of this is where the puck is going. So we decided that we didn’t want to go to a large bank. We decided we didn’t want to go to another huge broker dealer like a Raymond James, even though I feel like they’re a great firm and we know some people that went there and are happy. We thought, well, 10 years from now, where do we want to be? And that’s kind of what we were looking at.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think on the process standpoint, this day and age is so competitive for deals. Finding somebody who’s interested in buying your company in so many different sectors is not the hard part. So you can choose to have those conversations on your own. You can choose to outsource that upfront vetting that is a personal decision, but you’re going to get the calls, you’re going to get the emails. Most companies we meet as prospective clients of our own have talked with a potential buyer at some point, but even if it’s that limited scope engagement, it can be lower lift for the banker, but hugely impactful on you even just tweaking a few terms on the LOI. Might not even touch the top line enterprise value. It might just be in structure and other terms of the deal and that ultimately impacts both how you operate going forward as well as how much of that enterprise value you take home at different timeframes or realistically achieve.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah, I think we decided relatively quickly that we’re smart enough to know what we don’t know and this is too big of a transaction. This is too big of a … I mean, it’s our life’s work, for instance, that we wanted some eyes on it. And then it helped us give this peace of mind to then get over the finish line and say, “Okay, this is great for clients. This is going to be great for our staff and we can feel good moving forward.” So yeah, I can’t imagine not doing it with this size.

Craig Castelli:
Oh, for sure, for sure. I mean, I say that, but it’s somewhat self-serving and nobody believes me when I say it, but I mean, it is the reality. So a lot of that in my mind at least touches on the legal and the economic components of the deal. How did you figure out if culturally this was going to work and everybody would be happy and inspired continuing to work there?

Ryan Evans:
I mean, one of the benefits that my partner and I had was that we were looking for months, months and months and months. So we looped our staff in pretty relatively early, but I think maybe it’s just the entrepreneur or the owner mindset, but we’re comfortable with risk and looking a little bit longer term and seeing where things are going versus where we are right now. So part of what we liked about them, and as we decided this is the world we wanted to be in, we decided, well, do I want to build this on my own again? Do I want to partner with a couple other advisors that we know and let’s build it, which is the compliance, the billing, the technology. And there’s some platforms out there that could allow us to do it, but honestly just didn’t know if we had it in us to do that again. And then there’s also people that are a little further along. So when we joined Merit, back in November, they were at 20 billion of assets. Now they’re at 30 billion by Cinco de Mayo. So we wanted to find a place that we had a seat at the table. We don’t want to retire and walk away. We still are very growth-minded, growth oriented, but we all wanted to have some say. So as part of as we were negotiating, who can we talk to? Who can we join that’s got the piping in place? Maybe we’re still building a little bit of the plane as we’re flying it, but we can still have say in how we want this to go. And they saw our practice and what we built and are like, “Yeah, we want that from you. We want you on our leadership team to help us build this. ” And so that was very attractive, one, and we can get into the ownership and how it looks, but that was very attractive for us. We didn’t want to be a number. We actually got higher offers from other places just from an enterprise value, but it was cash. It was like, thank you for playing, we’re going to take it from here. And I don’t know what that meant for staff. There’s no guarantee that everybody would be here, no guarantee that the client experience would be any better. So we didn’t really want that either. So finding that firm in the first or second inning that allows us to participate in that too, because part of what we did is we exchanged a lot of our blueprint equity for merits.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah.

Ryan Evans:
So we said, “Hey, I’m diving in. I want to build this. I think you can grow faster than I can grow blueprint.” And so that’s how we structured it a little bit.

Craig Castelli:
So you were comfortable taking that risk based on everything you know about them and you’re still a young guy. You’ve got plenty of income generated years left in you if you want them. Thank you. I’ll take my payment on the side later. I suppose the ability to make up for lost time if it doesn’t totally materialize. Think about some of your clients who are business owners because everybody wants to talk about role over equity these days. It’s a huge part of the capital stack in so many deals, so many of our deals, so many of, I’m sure, your client’s deals. How do you help them understand the risk/reward of a transaction structure and when it’s beneficial to take more in cash or when it’s worth jumping all in with whoever’s buying them and rolling a lot of the equity forward?

Ryan Evans:
I would say a lot of it and probably applies to other industries too. I think a lot of it applies to what you want to do. We did not want to just get a value and walk away. We’re still young, we still wanted to grow. For us, we wanted another, for lack of a better term, maybe buy it at the Apple down the road and then we can help build something pretty cool. I think that’s important to come to terms with of are you willing to do that or not? And if you are willing to do that, then yes, then having some type of equity play or rolling equity into the firm makes sense for people. If you’re like, look, I don’t want to do that. I’ve been working my butt off for so many years, I’ll need a break. Well, then maybe that’s more of a cash deal. And I know since now we are part of the M&A team for merit, I know when we’re out there looking for people, somebody that wants to build that’s like a blueprint. I mean, it’s almost six or seven X versus somebody that’s a succession player. I’ve got a great business, three staff, high margins, but I’m going to sell, I’ll stick around for six to 12 months and I’m gone. Not as valuable in our minds as we’re looking to grow and build.

Craig Castelli:
That makes a lot of sense.

Ryan Evans:
So to those business owners, what do you want to do? Some people are like, “Look, I built it. ” I forget Ziglar who said, “Well, why do you start a business to sell a business?” So maybe that’s all they want to do and they’ll take their multiple and they’ve did a great job and it’s a lot of money and then they go do something else or nothing. So sometimes I have this conversation of like, what do you really want to do? If you’re 54, do you want to just retire? Do you want to go to get a boat? So for us, we were very much, I don’t know if I ever want to retire. I would like to take a month or two off as we talked about, but it’s still so much fun.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah. Well, that’s great. You don’t always hear that. I think you went into it with the right mindset. We found that with a lot of our clients when they go into partnership type deals with their eyes wide open, I won’t control 100% of things. I will control certain things and if they’re important enough to me, then I can maybe not worry about the fact that I don’t have full control over everything. And the new boss isn’t doing every single thing the way that I would do them before when they have blinders on just hear the sales pitch and don’t really dig into the weeds a little bit more about what life actually will be like post-sale, I think that’s when people tend to struggle the most because post-sale employment agreements in so many industries are just the norm. If you’re generating revenue, if you’re integral to operations, most of the roll-up plays just don’t have a bench of talent waiting for the next owner who’s like, “I just want to cash out and leave and say, great, here’s your check.
We’ve got something to hear.” You need to figure out how to transition that. And you’re an entrepreneur for a reason, probably because you didn’t want to work for somebody else anymore, going back to having a boss is its own transition in and of itself.

Ryan Evans:
And for us, that was one of the first questions we were asking and it was like, I’ve never had a boss or had to … And they’re like, “This is not it. We don’t want you to do that. We just want you to keep doing what you’re doing and we want to partner with you because of that. ” And so far it’s been all a It’s been very true and been exciting. But yeah, that was one of the things too, and I don’t know, and you probably have more insight, but I know when we were talking to other people, PE is a very much part of all this stuff going on now. A lot of the people we talked to … PE had a majority interest in their firm and they said, “Well, that doesn’t really matter. Here’s all the benefits to it and why it’s there and this is great.” And we just didn’t know any better. I don’t know if that’s something they say, but we wanted to stay away from that. And so I know Merit has a partner, but it’s Constellation Wealth who only takes minority interest in RIAs and these advisory firms. And the other 65% is owned by advisors. It’s owned by us. So that framework was just appealing to us of the owners, the presidents, everybody was an advisor at some point. So it’s nice to look through the lens of an advisor when making decisions about some of this stuff and not using the capital and the debt stack to help with M&A and stuff going forward, but not, all right, well, we’ve got to do this now because that’s what we have to do. And so we liked the sound of that. We liked how it was structured, whether or not that’s … Again, the world of PE in this world is a little bit news, but that was another decision point in our timeline.

Craig Castelli:
So as somebody who’s lived really the full lifecycle here, you start a business, you build a business, you exited business, now you’re working in G2, version two of Blueprint with Merit here. What are some things that you’d tell business owners who are listening here? I guess give me one or two things on the personal planning side and one or two things on the business exit planning side that you think are fundamental to making an exit, let’s say they’re five years away to making that exit maximum impactful in their lives.

Ryan Evans:
I’d say on the personal side, let’s make sure that whatever number you think after taxes provides you what you want. So sometimes people think when they’re like, okay, I just sold my business, I netted seven and a half million dollars, I’m 55, I’m done. And then we show, well, we got to stretch seven and a half million dollars over the next possible 40 years and you want to do this and this and this. Can we do it? So I think just a basic mathematical plan of just seeing, can this work? One helps them say, all right, I can or cannot make this out. I’m going into this eyes wide open that if I do this, then I still may have to work for a little bit or I have to change a lifestyle that you or my spouse would want. And then afterwards, I know what’s exciting now is we have some things that are able to aggressively tax harvest. So it’s nice with business owners. So we have a few that they’ve exited, they’ve taken a percent of cash upfront and then they’re rolling some equity or they’re rolling stuff for another four or five years. We have now tools in place to start aggressively harvesting losses to make most of that next bite tax-free. So from a tax standpoint, we do a lot of that of it’s not necessarily how much you make, but it’s how much you keep. So what can I do to minimize the tax impact of this sale as much as possible? So there’s some interesting things on both those sides, but looping in your bench, your CPA and your attorney years in advance I think is probably one of the smartest things because they’ll have some insight into of how we need to clean up the books. And some of the business owners don’t have a good grasp of that. They just think it’s, “Hey, I’ve got this top line number and 70 employees and I think it should be worth X because my buddy sold his company that’s not even in the same industry for X and that’s what I want. Those are the multiples.” And it’s all very industry specific and everything is not the same, but it’s kind of funny sometimes to hear that.

Craig Castelli:
You sound like me. I mean, that’s the reality, the conversation we have all the time. It’s country club valuations, meaningless. Everybody lies. You have no idea what is actually the structure underneath a price that somebody says. I mean, we-

Ryan Evans:
18X? That’s what I want.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah. Right.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah. Okay.

Craig Castelli:
Well, 18X if you hit your earnout and if your equity 5X is and then it’s 18X. But today it’s really 10, which in most spaces would be fantastic. As you know, we’re huge advocates of one, the financial advisor relationship. It’s a gating question for us every time we’re onboarding a new client. Do you have a wealth advisor? Have you talked to them about the plan? Do you have a good understanding of your income needs in retirement? Selfishly, we don’t want to get to the post LOI phase and then have them sit down finally for the first time at that point and realize, oh, I can’t afford to do this deal. But even moreover, if there are planning opportunities to take advantage of, they’re maximized before you have that LOI in place. And so that takes a critical step in making this happen.

Ryan Evans:
Yeah, 100%. And I think it helps to … I mean, I think the term advisor can be used pretty broadly, right?

Craig Castelli:
Yeah.

Ryan Evans:
Like you’d say, I’m a financial advisor in just selling mortgages. I think partnering with somebody that not only has this independence, higher net worth flow, but maybe they’ve done this, they’ve transacted, they’re doing what you’re about to do. I can show people what I’m doing for me, and I think that resonates. Even this tax strategy, I know one of the things that there’s a deal up in … It’s just a quick example of somebody up in Wisconsin, they sold their business for 60. 60 million is what they got and they were going to transact in December. We talked to them to see if they could transact in January. So the parties agreed to it. We took 40 million of that and invested it in a tax harvesting strategy. So in that year, we were able to harvest 37 million in losses. So we were able to, because it all was in the same year, offset almost 40 million of gains in this transaction. And so when you look at what they saved in taxes just by pushing it from December to January was it’s a huge savings for them. So it’s just those kinds of things, which you can’t have those conversations after the fact, right?

Craig Castelli:
Right. That’s absolutely incredible. I was just thinking you were going to say you saved them, you bought them an extra year before they had to pay the taxes, but the fact that you can accrue all those losses along the way, I don’t think the average business owner understands that that’s an opportunity that they can take advantage of. It is missed more often than not.

Ryan Evans:
Correct. And that’s not something I had access to at Commonwealth. It’s not something that LPL offers. So part of the reason of moving to this progressive firm of where the puck is going is now I can talk about things like this, which when you’re talking to a business owner and you’re saying, I could potentially save you X millions of dollars through this, I think that’ll resonate with people. But yeah, it’s amazing what’s out there and what we’re able to do now.

Craig Castelli:
Yeah, well said. So Ryan, this has been a lot of fun. Appreciate you hopping on here. If anybody listening or watching wants to get in touch with you or learn more about Merit, where should they go?

Ryan Evans:
They should go to, I think my email might be best. It’s ryan.evans@meritfa.com and be happy to have a conversation about what you’re thinking about or even share more details about what we did, what we would do different.

Craig Castelli:
Right, which is as value we could have another conversation or podcast about that topic alone, I’m sure.

Ryan Evans:
100%, right?

Craig Castelli:
Well, thanks for coming on here. Really enjoyed the conversation. Ryan Evans from Merit Financial Advisors, and thanks everybody for watching us here on The Close.

Ryan Evans:
Absolute pleasure. Thanks, Craig.