Category: Get More Tax Clients

The Tax Resolution Real Estate Agent Business Model

This weekend, I’m packing up my worldly possessions and departing for the long trek to Salt Lake City. I’ve mentioned this in passing on webinars and emails recently, along with the fact that I’ve been studying for both the real estate agent exam and the Series 65 exam. This has caused a fair amount of confusion amongst viewers and readers.

To catch you up to speed, after leaving my day-to-day role at my software startup, Prolaera, last summer, I decided that I would reboot my tax resolution practice and build another boutique firm. I spent an entire month doing nothing but evaluating various business models, service options, and other important considerations for starting a new business. What I ultimately decided on was to integrate my personal real estate investing strategy into a tax practice, and build a hybrid tax/real estate brokerage/financial advisory practice all centered around a specific strategy for acquiring rental properties.

The tax resolution aspect focuses on doing only lien withdrawals, subordination, and discharge work to help facilitate real estate transactions (the lien work only model).

Moving to another geographical areas wasn’t originally part of the concept. However, as I started the search for my next rental property purchase, the local market conditions, driven by spillover from Seattle’s blazing hot real estate market, started to look less and less desirable to me. I’m not a fan of rapidly increasing prices, low inventory, and multi-offer situations. That’s just not a game I like to play when it comes to real estate. So I started contemplating a relocation.

As you may have seen last week in the market area selection video I unlocked for a few days, I think it’s very important to be strategic about the decisions you make in your tax firm. Since I happen to have the flexibility to change my geographic location without disrupting anything else in my life, I made the choice to do so. After researching several other markets, including Vancouver, WA, Klamath Falls, OR, Boise, ID, and Bozeman, MT, I ultimately decided that the Salt Lake City area was the best fit for me for the next few years.

Why Salt Lake? I have a long laundry list of reasons. Here is a short sampling of the bigger reasons:

  • A balanced real estate market with plenty of inventory in “blue collar” neighborhoods with homes priced well under $300,000 – my preferred type of rental property.
  • An
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Free Tax Resolution Kindle Book Week

This week, through Saturday, all of my titles published on the Amazon Kindle platform are available at no charge. Whoot, whoot!

For the rest of the week, the following titles can all be downloaded to your Kindle reader, your smartphone, even your computer (Amazon has apps for every platform).

Tax Season Profitability Guide: 8 Big Ideas For a More Profitable Tax Season (all 8 ideas also apply to every other service you offer)
Effective Copywriting for Accounting Professionals
Tax Resolution Secrets (written for consumers, not tax pros, 2011)
How To Build A Million Dollar Tax Resolution Practice In 12 Months Or Less
The 80-Hour Workweek: A Practical Guide to Escaping the Bonds of Mediocrity and Getting More Out of Life (not really about tax resolution, but it has some useful ideas if you’re interested in a non-traditional, virtual, or semi-retirement type of practice)

In addition to that, I’ve temporarily dropped the prices on all print books in my Amazon catalog by 50% or more, including The Tome:

The Complete Tax Resolution Practice: Uncovering the Lucrative Opportunity Hiding Inside Your Tax Practice (released in 2013, but not much has changed)

If you don’t already have these, I encourage you to take advantage of the opportunity. Again, the Kindle book promotion ends on Saturday (Amazon has a 5-day limit on these). After reading, I’d appreciate you taking 30 seconds to leave a review on Amazon.… Continue reading

Tax Resolution Marketing Letter: Why it works

In marketing parlance, your most successful marketing piece, the one that becomes your lead generation workhorse, is called a control.

Over the past couple hundred years, there have been a number of marketing controls that have had incredibly impressive runs. Two of the most famous examples from recent times:

  1. The Wall Street Journal’s “Two Young Men” letter, generated nearly $2 billion dollars in sales for the Journal during it’s 29 year run. It was mailed continuously by the Journal to select household mailing lists from 1974 to 2003. It is considered the single most successful direct mail sales letter in history, and is well worth studying.
  2. Self-help guru Tony Robbins has one infomercial that ran continuously in English speaking countries around the world for 18 years. It was literally broadcast 24 hours per day, always available on at least one basic cable channel or over the air broadcast network. Although at much lower volume, that infomercial still runs today. The infomercial sells his flagship “Unleash The Power Within” program, and to this day sales from that program generate $9 million per year in net profit for him.

ControlLetter-1 The power of a control piece cannot be underestimated. Having a solid control, along with a well-defined target market to send or broadcast it to, is almost like an ATM that prints free money.
In 2012, I wrote what would become my direct mail control piece. I affectionately refer to it as the mug shot letter. This letter was the workhorse of my practice, across multiple niche tax resolution markets and a variety of different offers. It worked well for me in the western US, and it’s worked well for coaching clients from Texas to Florida to Chicago in it’s original form. Other practitioners have created heavily modified derivatives that work very well for them, including a CPA in Maine that created a version that has helped take his tax resolution business from just a few thousand dollars in 2013 to over $250,000 in 2015.

Last year, when my postcard sequence to drive people to a webinar wasn’t delivering the results I wanted, I went back to this letter, and results immediately improved.

The obvious question is: Why does this letter work?

Let’s step through it to see why. Tax Resolution Academy® members can download the letter from the tax resolution marketing library.

1. It shows a real human being.

The first thing most … Continue reading