#170: New R&D Tax Law: Impact on Software Startups
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Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast! Today, we are joined by Paul Bianco, founder and CEO of Graphite, to discuss a recent change in tax regulations that could significantly impact software companies, especially those with a large engineering team. We'll explore the details of the new law, its potential consequences, and some potential strategies to mitigate the tax burden. We also explore the broader challenges faced by entrepreneurs in today's economic climate. Paul Bianco, formerly a Director at ff Venture Capital, brings his expertise to shed light on how this new regulation might impact your startup.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
Complexity of tax laws for startups
Importance of strong accounting team
New Regulation: Companies must amortize R&D employee salaries over 5 years (US) or 15 years (offshore).
Impact: This increases taxable income for software companies with high engineering costs.
Potential Mitigation: Consultation with tax accountants and R&D tax credits
Bonus Tip: Follow your gut instinct and prioritize attention to detail
Resources from Paul:
Resources from Mike and Nichole:
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler
Everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today it's a pleasure to have Paul Bianco on, we're going to talk a little bit about startup accounting services outsourced CFO support, if you own your own business, thinking about it, don't do your own taxes, don't do your own finance stuff. There's just too much liability. So we're going to talk about the ins and outs of what you shouldn't shouldn't do. How are you doing, Paul?
Paul Bianco
Doing well? How are you?
Mike Stohler
Good, doing great. You know, I could be on the golf course. But you know, Tuesdays are my podcast days. So getting busy with that. We're gonna dig a little bit about graphite financial, and why you're doing what you've been doing. Tell us a little bit about your background, let our listeners know who is Paul?
Paul Bianco
Sure I so I don't know where to start. Even now, you know, started this company a while ago, we're almost 100 employees. Now I'm just a kid from the suburbs out in Long Island, and, you know, grew up, my dad was a mechanic learned over time, you know, kind of how this business world works. I ended up majoring in Accounting. Frankly, my dad told me, he knows a couple of some of his clients that have nice cars, their accountant, so maybe try that, really, I'm not even kidding. That's what I did that made my way to accounting always wanted to run a company, though. Got my CPA soon after school and wanted to start a startup didn't know much about it ended up trying to dabbling in a couple of things in the background, but actually found a job at a venture capital fund, and got that job at a venture capital fund being an accountant. And we're investing in startups and like, these are great companies have a lot of potential, but we're investing lots of money in these companies. And really, we don't know how they're doing. Because the books are so bad. The historical books are not the best that projections are not the best. And we were looking for sort of public companies sort of reporting, we needed just to have an idea of where things are going and the most important things about the companies. And that was the genesis of starting graphite marrying the two worlds of startups and, and accounting. And here we are, it's been about seven years started with a couple clients, and in a handful of people in about 100 people now. And that's the that's my life story in two minutes.
Mike Stohler
There you go? Well, we appreciate it. You know, you don't really think about I remember when I first started back in the day started my private equity group, the accounting part in the finance portfolio, the last section that I thought about, it was just grabbing asset, getting the company started and making money. And then it wasn't until my third CPA or my third financial company into it that there say, Hey, why aren't you doing this? Why aren't you doing that? And I'm like, well, because I didn't know about it. I didn't know I could be a real estate professional. I didn't know I could deduct these things, all these things. So I left a lot of money on the table, because I didn't hire the right finance people that, you know, focused on not only real estate, but maybe you know, the startups and things that they could do. What are some of the things that you've seen when you first started, you're like, Oh, my God, I can't believe some of the startups are doing this, you know, some war stories, maybe?
Paul Bianco
I mean, first and foremost. And it's funny, because I ended up doing the same thing with graphite, but seeing a lot of founders trying to do the work themselves, let alone trying to find another firm that specializes in technology startups, but just trying to look the blessing and a curse is you could go on QuickBooks website, and you could get QuickBooks Online. That doesn't mean what you put into, it's gonna be like, exactly correct or good or give you good, you know, real value. So I love so a lot of founders spending a lot of time spinning their wheels doing it themselves, when you should probably be talking to customers, landing deals, developing your product, right? So some of it was even just time arbitrage, let alone it being incorrect. And one thing I found really early on is when the books are kind of messy to begin with, it's really hard to project for the future. If you don't know exactly what happened in the past, and what led to those things happening. How are you going to know what's forget about three or four years out? How are you going to know what things look like in three months or six months? So some of the Genesis was really just that tactical? Like, let's just figure out what's happening here. And what do we think is going to happen in next few months? I've seen basically everything, you know, I've seen some of the Genesis, we're getting calls from companies saying, Hey, we didn't realize but we're not gonna be able to make payroll next week. And I'm thinking like, you know, how much payroll is right? No, you're not hiring that many people. So you know how much it is every other week. And you have a bank account at a minimum, right? So even that level of detail, right when when companies weren't focusing on the financial stuff was getting missed, either. We were very unlucky. And we're only investing in companies that were focused on that kind of things other than financial, or this is kind of a broader opportunity in the market.
Mike Stohler
It's so funny and you hit it right on the bullet point. I talked about this all the time as entrepreneurs get stuck because they're working in In the business, why are you writing bills? You know, why are you writing the checks? You know, in doing the invoicing? You should be out expanding, right? You're focused in in number one, it could be as like, why don't spend the money? Yeah, yeah. But you have to spend it to make it, you know, at some point, and that was my realization. It's like, Man, I am just circling the wagons here because I am not growing. And what I did is I did a schedule of my day, a diary of my day and realize how much time that I was actually putting, doing menial stuff, not the CEO stuff. You know, that's one thing that you see, you know, mistakes, what are some of the other as far as the financial realities on entrepreneurship? You know, the planning, the preparing, what are some of the things Okay, I just started my business, you should get the team going ahead of time you be learned that team?
Paul Bianco
Yeah, there's always a fine balance, right? We work with companies that basically just started all the way to hundreds of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And at the very, very beginning, maybe there isn't a whole lot going on. But you should at least maybe have a conversation. If it's one person, you got a credit card, and you had three transactions this month, and you're really just getting off the ground. And you can kind of just look at the bank statement and just see what it is. But start tax planning and understanding that side at least I think it's pretty important. But you know, honestly, going back to what you said, I think you're right, it's a thing to do. Right. So as a founder, no one's telling you how to spend your day you don't have a boss telling you, I guess the market is your boss, your customer, potential customer base, I guess is your boss. Or if you have investors, they end up becoming your boss. But, you know, I think it's a thing to do you feel busy, it's part of doing the business technically accounts, it fills up your day. It's not super valuable. So I think doing that is really important. I think that's where the world is, has sort of moved
Mike Stohler
Everyone's like, well, I'll just go watch a YouTube video and figure it out. And it's like, look, find your unique ability, right? You know, mine's not finances, how's an econ major, and you CPAs do everything backwards. Credits, debits. That's a negative, it should be negative.
Paul Bianco
Lot of founders, a lot of founders we support, you know, went to some, maybe their MBAs or whatever they weren't exactly, you know, accountants, it's a different skill set. And one of the most important things you can do early on, really, for any business is, you know, even if there's not a whole lot happening now, let's build a financial plan, budget, a Model A forecasts, whatever you want to call it. It's what we think this thing is going to do and what type of business we want to build. What are those hires? How much cash we have now, what hires we want to make? What do we think revenue is going to do? What does that revenue model end up looking like, and tweaking that? You know, and the interesting I found thing I found is doing that, yeah, you're not gonna get it all right, right away. But you could make the mistakes now in Excel, and see what's gonna happen, like, Oh, crap, I didn't realize if I over hire here, right end up, my burn is gonna go up and make them mistakes. Now, they're much easier to before you actually do them in real life. You just do them in Excel or whatever tool you're using to forecast out the business. Too many times I've seen it go the other way. Like, let's just make decisions now. Oh, things seem to be working with one salesperson. It's working. Let's hire 10. More like tomorrow? Who's going to train them? How are you going to overlap? Or they can overlap? How is that going to work? are they focusing in different industries, markets, they clash, things are not in no one's really hitting their target. Just common sense a little bit, but just modeling out what you think is gonna happen. You're like, alright, that's, it's gonna take a while to pay that all back if things don't quite go, right. If things don't go perfect, we're going to run out of money. And I've seen that a lot of times.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, a lot of businesses go out of business because they expand too quickly. Right?
Paul Bianco
So that's number one. That's the absolute number one reason we see companies fail. I mean, there's two, right? We're in the startup world, one is two phases to business. One is you're building something you don't really know if people quite want it yet, it's really early on. One is sometimes you build a thing that's not whoever your buyer is, it's a nice to have, but it's not a need to have sort of thing and it never White gets traction and product market fit. You could die from that and you never quite gets anywhere, right. And the second is you get product market fit, and you just scale too quickly, and you don't understand why things are working and what you need to do to make it work at scale. That's the second most common reason I see companies fail.
Mike Stohler
Especially if you don't know, your finances. You know, something that our team does is we look at our projections or performance. And then we look at it every month, you know, did December hit our budget and our performer or you know, the projection and then you can also see, why are we spending so much in supplies? Did you not look at the budget or the forecast and is there a correlation And so it's just not the top level part, right? It's tracking all of your expenditures based on what you can afford. And what you see as your outlook. Like on a monthly basis, just look at every accounting line item to see where it ranked up at the end of the month compared to what you projected. And what your breakeven is.
Paul Bianco
Yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, we just did that today, as a team, we always do this called a budget versus actual for folks listening. So you take your budget, you make that file, and each month, once you close the books, and you see what happened, you say, what did we think was gonna happen? And then what actually happened? And if it's different, what did we get wrong? So even today, you know, just we go through vendors who say, they're software companies that kind of sneakily increase their price on us and just sent a quick email and we didn't really see it or whatever. So we do that every single month to see if we budget at a vendor level, every single vendor we use. So then we know, okay, this is the culprit right here. We didn't say yes to this, it just kind of happened. We got to renegotiate, or whatever, that kind of keeps you in check that really opens a lot of questions as to well, if things didn't go how we expected, you know, then exactly why. And I think creating a realistic budget or pro for use the word pro forma, it's funny, there's so many different words for the same. Yeah, creating a realistic budget that you really believe as a founder, you know, the business better than anyone else. A realistic budget they think is going to happen, I see a lot of companies, entrepreneurs are always optimistic. But if you don't have a layer of realism in there, if your projections, your budget, your performance, say that revenue is just going to kind of go up like crazy, it's been going up a little bit, now it's gonna it's gonna start going up like crazy, it's really going to skew your view as to what things are really going to look like in a few months. And you know, I've spoke to founders in the month that they're forecasting, we didn't close the books yet. I'm like, Alright, so for August, we're talking in the month of August, like, you're saying, you went from 50,000 a month in revenue last month to 200. Here in August. It's the end of August. How much money did you make in August? And they're like, oh, yeah, I guess that is a little bit expensive. It's more like 55. And really, if entrepreneurs can be that optimistic, I've even seen a company that, you know, they were gonna go from zero revenue to I think the next year was a billion. And this is like revenue, not some like, bro, sort of value, V type of thing like actual revenue. Like, I'm not sure any company has ever done that. And so therefore, like it really what does this teaching us? You know, it the truth is, it's, it's only going to skew and distort our perception as to what things are really going to look like in a year, let's kind of build this more realistically, forget about other stakeholders, and what's actually forget about what you think investors might want to see, like, what are you as a founder think's going to actually happen? That should be the basis for the mob.
Mike Stohler
And that's why you need a team because, you know, as entrepreneurs, the founders, were the dreamers were the ones who have this grand plan. But we don't know a lot of times how to get it done. We don't know the business aspect and the finance aspect. So it's really good thoughts that you had? Because I don't know I think about it's like, going, Yeah, I'm gonna buy this. So Tonga, buy this and make this amount of money? Well, wait a minute, you know, how about summer months, and Phoenix? No one comes in when it's 125 degrees, softer mark, there's some things you can't project out. And you know, how have you handled this with the changing of the economy, the inflation, the interest rates? What are some of the things that you've told your founders, it's like, look, gotta cut back, you know, as the finance people, how are you kind of guiding them during this uncertain time period?
Paul Bianco
Yeah, anytime I talk to one of our clients, and this comes up quite a bit, the world has changed. Most of our clients are startups, which is another way of saying they took venture money, the VC funds and angel investors and so on invested in the company. So they've got some excess cash, and they're losing money on a month to month basis, right. So their bank accounts going dwindling little by little. And that's just that's how the whole markets been built. You know, what I say to founders is, like I said earlier, there's a couple phases to companies. The first one is figuring out if anyone even wants to buy this thing. And if you have product market fit, I really recommend just to stay as lean as you can, during that process. Don't over hire before you really know if this is truly a thing and customers are really going to buy this and stick with it and your the retention is going to be good and you know, you've got to thing keep it pretty lean up until you get there and don't overdo it. Treat every dollar like it's your last you take if you raise a couple million dollar seed round from investors. You don't know if you're gonna get a Series A even if you've got a great business, even if you've got a great business by traditional standards, you got a business that could grow 50% a year forever that I mean that's you know, that eventually becomes larger than the GDP but 50% a year compounding down more of a traditional small business that may not be enough for a Series A investor or a series B investor or you may not get more money. So treat this round like it's your last. If things do take off like absolute crazy, yeah, you could always raise that money in the future. But you know, do it on your terms. Just because you run out of money as a company doesn't mean that some investor is going to come in and save the day, that kind of was the case for years, the entire bull market. But now I just recommend being way more cautious. You still got to build something of value, but think about it in those inflection points. Do people really want this thing? We got a thing? Now can we distribute this thing? Let's say it's software, can we distribute this? Should we build a sales team around this? How quickly? Should we do that? What's the payback period on each incremental salesperson? Should I bring in a sales leader? Off the bat? Should I start bottom up? Like how do I do that, like being really, really intentional about once you got product market fit the distribution of it, and the incremental product enhancements, how big you want to build that engineering team? I recommend caution right now for sure. Be careful, don't overdo it. You could end up running anything out of business you want. Now you get nothing as a founder. And I want our client I want our founders to make money. You know, they stepped away from probably a good job. And they took some rest to build a thing and I want them to all make a quite a lot of money. One way to not make money is to thing ends up kind of just going bust, because we overdid it, and we over hired due to our external pressures perhaps to grow faster, or this or that really do what you think is right.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, it's very important. All of our listeners that are thinking about starting their own business, spend the money to get a feasibility studies, feasibility reports, market studies, you know, is your business even viable in the area that you're at? I see so many startups, it's like this cupcake. storefront sells cupcakes in the high rent district. I'm like on you know, many 1000s of cupcakes you have to sell to break even companies seems to be a very stressful part. Did they do a feasibility study on Would that work in this area? You know, that's yeah.
Paul Bianco
It's funny, a basic financial model, even if you're not an Excel guru, again, outside someone who understands your industry, but man, you know, understand, that's a great point. What are my fixed costs? What are my variable costs? It's fair to say, I've heard people refer to them as cupcakes is a good example. Right? But how many cupcakes you got to sell? And if the answer is in a small storefront, you know, 20,000 cupcakes? What's that? Well, how many customers you need a day? I always think the same thing going into small businesses like like, like that I get I get anxiety. No, because I know how businesses work I get around their financials. Some may make it work, there's, they're around,
Mike Stohler
Makes me want to go and buy a cupcake just to help them out.
Paul Bianco
I always do. Coffee shops and things like that.
Mike Stohler
Yeah. Coffee shops, like Oh, my God, you know, you're right in the heart of this area.
Paul Bianco
You have three employees, and I don't see anyone else here as a customer right now. So yeah, do basic math, do the math. How many days are there in a week? What are your business hours? Right? If you're a storefront? Think about the things that drive the store, you'd have to make some assumptions, X amount of foot traffic, how many people end up coming in? What's the average sale price? What's your cost to run it? What are your cost of the product, the flour, the sugar? You know, I see a lot of founders, when they think about revenue, they're forgetting that there was a cost associated not just to fix labor, but there's a thing called cost of goods sold or cost of sales, right? So there's a there's a margin, maybe your margins actually 50%. So it's 50% of what you thought you're gonna get. Cupcakes are probably pretty high, pretty high margin, but you know, you need someone to make them. But yeah, just thinking about it, do it on a piece of paper, compare it against the you know, the employees, you need to compare it against your other costs, like rent and whatever. And that's for small business. And you could apply the same thing to hotels to your, you know, what you're saying to software companies to consumer products, consumer products, it's very challenging, right? We are paying a bunch of money on Facebook or Google or whatever influencer marketing to get people to our website, onto people on our website, we try to convert some amount of them and they buy a thing, we have some cost to acquire customer customer acquisition cost, and we have some gross profit derived from that sale. More often than not, I see that gross profit derived from that first sale be quite a bit lower than a customer acquisition costs. Therefore, the question has to become, how do you drive that same customer back over and over? And at what point does that same customer breakeven on that initial customer acquisition cost? Really important math to do and look, if you haven't started the thing yet. There are benchmarks and that's that's the benefit of even just getting an advisor that understands your business they can explain how this all works.
Mike Stohler
And you know, that's a good lead way into Graphite Finacial. Everybody this listening is graphitefinancial.com talking about getting mentors, financial consultants, some advisory group let's talk about what you do and click on graphite Finance. So what do I see? What are some of the things that you do and offer at your business?
Paul Bianco
We're very simple. We're a fractional finance and accounting firm as a service. So we plug into startups and small businesses and startups could be either SAS or FinTech or any kind of property tech, insurance, tech, and then also consumer products, CPG companies, whether you're selling an Amazon or Shopify with about 100 employees, we have experienced in a lot of different areas, and we plug in and act as your full accounting department. So we're not kind of just a bookkeeping service, we really tried to get embedded in the company, we're going so far as we could run your invoicing for your end clients, pay bills for you every take everything off your plate as a founder and give you a really good month and reporting. Do these budgets and performance that you're talking about? benchmark that against other, you know, other clients of ours to make sure we're on the right track. And we're thinking about things the right way. And we have a tax department as well. So we try to be a one stop shop for startups and small businesses to plug into us. And we try to support them from the time they're founded through quite large, even if you have a CFO already, we actually we have a lot of clients that have CFOs, and we act as controller down basically and tax. So we kind of have a different approach, depending on the size of the company. Yeah.
Mike Stohler
And what's nice about that is, you know, I'm thinking about overhead and my employee costs and things like that, it's nice that I don't need a controller, I don't need a CFO, I'm not paying all the taxes on that person not paying the salary I'm not, you know, I'm actually saving money by giving that third party and that's why, you know, some people even third party out some of their employees, it's like, you know, one of my hotels, I don't even know when the employees, property management groups does. And all of a sudden, just like a while it kind of frees me up, I have some costs associated with that. But I don't have any the insurance and I have taxes, I don't have the payroll,
Paul Bianco
you don't worry about if people leave, right we have, when we have when we have small companies or even like decent sized companies that have maybe CFO controller, if one person quits on you, you're not going to find a replacement in two weeks and get them trained up, it's virtually impossible. So we have staff, so you don't have to deal with that sort of human retention risk, you know, we manage finding good finance and accounting talent, that's really, at the end of the day, that's our core competency. We have a system and process make it really efficient, it's less money than hiring someone by a lot. It's quite a bit less when you get larger than hiring a whole stack of finance people, you know, the CFO, the controller, the Accounting Manager, the AP clerk, the bookkeeper, you know, all that when you put it together, we're significantly less and when you're a small company, we're way less than even having just like a staff accountant, we could give you the full stack.
Mike Stohler
Do you do like when you go on and then we click More info or something like this.
Paul Bianco
You can go to a couple different but you can go to graphitfinancial.com/podcast, we put that together, there's a link to talk to me if anyone wants to have a one on one. Otherwise, you could reach out to our sales team on there. There's some resources free financial model template, the stuff we were just talking about. Not a real estate one, we get a SaaS one and an E commerce one. But you could check out a bunch of stuff on there. And if it's of interest, you can reach out.
Mike Stohler
And you have different bundles, you can do one little thing you can bundle it and do all the way.
Paul Bianco
Yeah, there's no one size fits all. That's one thing I learned about accounting pretty early companies, sometimes they have one person internally, even if they're small, they've got kind of an operations person doing all the client invoicing their clients. We don't need to do that. That's fine, right. But we could do the other stuff, right? That same person's probably not going to GAAP financials and give you a nice reporting package, different skill set. So we kind of work around the needs of the company. But generally, we're either doing the accounting work alone with you, or the accounting and the financial modeling, more CFO work. That's kind of how the stack tends to work.
Mike Stohler
Yeah. And that's, that's really nice, because when I was smaller, it's like I can do QuickBooks. I've got just a few properties. I do QuickBooks, and then I had got a bookkeeper, they can do the book, that sort of stuff. But then that's all I wanted them to do. Yeah. And then they talked to the finance people, the CPAs. And then they, they guess.
Paul Bianco
Which are we trying to put it all together and make it as customized as possible. Every company is a little bit different. A lot of companies are the same. You're paying people, you got costs, you got rent, you got some kind of revenue coming from some source, but every company is unique enough in the employees and how it all fits together. We try to work our way into the operations and kind of be that missing piece of the puzzle.
Mike Stohler
I noticed Washington is starting to really change you're starting to really focus a little more on the IRS and focus law changing some of the things some of the recordings even with an LLC as they want to know all these different things now with it with the new I forget what the act is that they have, what are you seeing that kind of has red flags, it's like okay, you know what, as a entrepreneur, you really now need to focus and pay attention to some of the new stuff that's coming out from Washington.
Paul Bianco
Yeah, there's something very topical now that it may get overturned. But if it doesn't, it could really affect your software company, specifically, if you're a software company that is profitable or close to it, and you've got a lot of engineers in the US, or in particular overseas, there's a new regulation that came out, it may go away. But if it doesn't, it's killer for companies. Let's say you're a company that has a million bucks in revenue, and a million dollars of expenses. And let's just say argument's sake, every single person that works, there is an engineer. Right? So all your expenses are engineer salaries. Alright, so I made a million bucks in revenue, I got a million dollars in expenses. Everyone's an engineer never really worked that way. I'm trying to keep it simple. But in the normal world, okay, we made no doubt we made no money here, revenue exactly equaled our costs, and we're so no taxes this year. Well, there's a new thing that came out that says, For US based engineer or r&d employees, and there's definitions around that. You need to amortize that salary over five years. So you can only take 1/5 of that in the given tax here. So you're going from, okay, we made a million in real life, we made a million we spent a million, we owe no taxes to we made a million we did spend a million but only 200 of that counts. We profited $800,000, this year, you're gonna get a nasty tax bill. And it gets pronounced even more if you have offshore engineering, resources, r&d resource, you have to amortize that over 15 years. So you're getting a real sliver, it's a big, big deal. I think it's gonna go away. But ask your ask her, ask your tax accountants about changes to r&d, I really hope that this goes away. The way we help our clients around it is it is what it is right? Like you, even if they even if the law doesn't make sense, and it punishes the innovation economy. Yeah, it's the lawn, you just pay the taxes. But there is a way to offset some of it doing an r&d study, and you can get an r&d credit, it is not going to get rid of all of it. But that's been around for that's always been a thing. So there are r&d credits, you could do. Either way, you could go for an r&d credit, even if this doesn't hammer you. But that is something to look out for. So ask your tax accountant about r&d. We have a little bit on our website about it as well.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, it's crazy. It's a bunch of people that don't work, say how can we raise more taxes get more, and they don't realize the end result seems like, you know, if some of the things that came out after COVID, with all of a sudden, all the payroll rates go up, you know, the minimum wages go up, all these things are going up, we're getting taxed more, but we're still coming out at COVID. And cycle women, you know, our cost of goods going up. So it's so hard to be an entrepreneur now without really good accountants and finance people. Because the system now seems like is is shifted where it's against us.
Paul Bianco
It's tricky. I'm sure being a founder has always been tricky. You know, I've only been one for like, seven years. And I've been working with startups for about 10. But it's certainly tricky. And I think this r&d One I mean, I don't think let's give let's give Washington the benefit of the doubt. I don't think anyone was like, Hey, let's, let's hurt small businesses. I'm sure it was it was a thing written?
Mike Stohler
Yeah, they don't know. They don't know the repercussions. They don't know.
Paul Bianco
And that's why it really, really makes no sense. If you think about it. And I think it hurts, it really penalizes companies, I do think there's going to be some change to it. And my understanding is that working through the house now, and we will see what ends up happening, but we're gonna be more stuff things always get more complicated, not less complicated. Law, tax law, anything even GAAP, right? Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, forget about tax, even just how you report things, hey, if you get bank loans, if you need to get an audit, things are always gonna get more complicated, they're never going to be like, Hey, let's just make it even more simple. And that is where, I mean, your firms like us and others, that we have teams just studying this stuff. Right? So it's, I guess that's good for us. Maybe not the world's best for every entrepreneur, but you know, again, at the end of the day, because the industry we're in is professionalizing and getting larger and the accounting industry, their shoulders to lean on. Alright, and there's some you know, there's enough competitive dynamic where it's an economies of scale working with a firm like ours, where it's certainly less than hiring, like a tax expert, you know, full time or something like that. It's you know, you can give advice and feedback.
Mike Stohler
All right, before we we get off is there anything else that you wanted to talk about? That's maybe something that I missed? That's important for our viewers or listeners?
Paul Bianco
I don't know. I mean, look that that was about the company, but just generally, anyone starting a company again, I think just the only thing I've learned is, you know, follow your gut. Never think that someone else knows take outside advice. I've always taken a listen to outside advice. But at the end of day what you feel and your gut feeling on a certain thing is often the right thing. That's the one thing I think that plus some really attention really excruciating attention to detail and what you do if I were to give any advice I'd say that that's that served me well so far. Try to continue following the just the gut feeling data driven but gut feeling and common sense and attention to detail.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, exactly. Paul outside of Graphite Financial, and then the podcast link. Is there any other way? Are you on LinkedIn? How else can people find you?
Paul Bianco
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Well, my handle is I don't know if all Bianco search for me to see the CEO of Graphite financial. I'm on Twitter, I don't or X now I don't post that much. I, maybe I will. But it's @pbianc, just without the O at the end. And that's my handle there. If you want to follow me there. Sometimes I retweet things like things that I find interesting.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, there you go. Well, Paul, thank you so much for coming on the Richard geek, everybody. I hope you got a lot out of this and learn some stuff. If you need help. If you're a startup, don't do it on your own. You're going to get to the point where just for liability reasons you'll need experts, you know, stick to what your strength is. Let the other experts handle the other stuff. Paul, it's been fantastic. Thank you for coming on our episode.
Paul Bianco
Thank you.
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ABOUT PAUL BIANCO
Paul Bianco's entrepreneurial journey began at nineteen, sparking a lifelong commitment to business creation and growth. With a rich background in consulting and venture capital, he established a solid base for his venture, Graphite. For nearly seven years, Paul has focused on delivering accessible fractional finance and accounting services to entrepreneurs, enabling early and growth-stage companies to attain financial expertise without the expense of maintaining an in-house finance team.