It shouldn't be hard to do good.

0:00 Hello, welcome everybody. Thanks for joining us for another episode of Arthur's roundtable. Super appreciate the support of the Family Office insights community and participating and listening in when it resonates with you. So thank you for doing that and please feel free to share it with others. It's sort of a social media thing to say, but really mean it. So if you if you like what you're hearing and we don't monetize these podcasts, but if you care to share it, please do so just to be clear, Christian and I don't know each other. We first met for the first right now, but is subject matter is germane to the audience. And so I hope you enjoy it. I'm fascinated to hear more. So Christian, is it la Fer? Yes, it is. If you're in US, you know it could be a la Fer if you're in Perry. Yeah, so my.

0:44 Dad's from France and he came here at 12, joined the US Navy. You know, I'm just thankful that somehow I ended up in the greatest country and in history and hope to make it better. I happen to agree with you. My ancestors came from Greece. They had big balls to come here, it turns out. And I'm super happy and grateful to be an American as well. So thanks for sharing that. So give us a little background on your journey and then tell us about the business. Yeah, I, you know, we all have our sort of hero's journey, right? And, and there's that formative place where what makes you who you are? And when I was about 8 years old, my mom had taken my little sister, who was almost 4 at the time to the doctor.

1:26 There was nothing apparent physical wrong with her or different, but she was non verbal at a pretty late age at that point. And we discovered that she was developmentally disabled, what they called mentally retarded back in the 70s. And whatever term they use, you know, I wouldn't trade her for anyone else on the planet. She is the most warm, present human. She she's still non verbal at the 50s. She's about five years younger than me. But what I love about her is she you get what you see is what you get. And don't we wish we had that in all of our other relationships. When she's happy to see me, I throw the ball to her, and anyone who throws the ball to her says hi. They've got a friend for life.

2:06 But when she wants, when she's tired and the conversation's over, she'll gently grab my shoulder, turn me toward the door and say bye. You. Know it's like you know where you stand and so I have of a lot of pictures of my sister having grown up around Special Olympics where she became kind of a track star. Almost always was on second or third on the podium. Sometimes she'd be first. But what would happen is they put the fans next to the finish line and when she'd be rounding that turn and you know, headed for the finish line, she'd see all our fans in the stands and have to run over on high 5:00. Then that's just who she is and everybody say get back on the track. But you know, much, much later just I just thought that that's how the world worked.

2:50 What people need help or when people can live a better life, other people come around them and contribute to that. And so I got to meet all these amazing people through that organization and many others. Later on, around 2002 thousand 920 ten, I volunteered to do the application part of starting a nonprofit with a couple of friends. Now, you know, I remember you, you sort of submit your initial application, they send you a form letter with your agent's number on it. Well, I could never reach that agent. And as I started to do research on the Internet, I saw that it was really opaque to convoluted process. So I called the IRS and you know, I'm a good talker. I was sure that I could just wend my way through that phone tree and and get somebody to pick up my application, which of course I thought was really I did a great job. And they sort of, I could hear them almost chuckling in the back when I when I in backroom, when I finally got a hold of someone and they said, well, yeah, this is going to take a year.

3:46 We have a process. You know, it's 1110, eleven months at this point. And I just remember looking at the phone in shock. And that night I went to bed and I I kind of was restless. And I had this moral outrage about it. And we've all been to motor vehicles, so this shouldn't have surprised me. But what I realized was that that moral outrage was over that anyone who wants to do something wonderful for the world, like help special kids in Special Olympics or whatever it is, would actually have to crawl across broken glass and wait for this ridiculous amount of time to start a business entity that's actually helping people, right? Why should that be way harder than it shouldn't be hard to do good, which is our tagline Instant nonprofit. And so I set about changing that instead of I took that phone number and I changed the last couple of digits knowing I'd probably get someone in the exempt organs department.

4:36 And anytime I'd get somebody on the phone, I'd say, why is this so difficult? What are the typical things that make up an application? Great. What are the typical things that get you a delay or a denial? And if somebody were to make your day as an IRS bureaucrat on the other end of this process, what kind of file would they hand you? And I curated what I call the love letter to a bureaucrat and I updated my file and resubmitted. I also subsequently did this for for others, but first, I, this was my own use case and I compiled all these sort of hacks and I ended up getting a very fast approval of maybe 7 weeks or something. And I said, OK, well, maybe that was a fluke. But then some folks in town, I was talking about this, some folks in town wanted to start a little private school.

5:18 We were in a rural area. And I said, they said, well, the only catch is we have a billionaire donor who just sold their company to big big tech acquisition and he'll match funds unlimited if we can get kids in this school year. Well, this school year was about 7 weeks out and I just couldn't resist taking that challenge. I was like, I'll drive down there, whatever ivory tower, you know, whatever bureaucratic office I have to and make this happen. But I'm going to take this challenge. And lo and behold, I again use this love letter to a bureaucrat. And I got an approval time underneath that seven weeks. And boy, was I nervous while that was coming down. But I was so excited because I realized I really might be on to something.

5:59 And from there, I took my first paid customers and I just continued to focus on process. But not only Karen caring about the customers needs, but nobody loves bureaucrats hardly right? We only we're typically annoyed by these processes. But what if I could really show love to that bureaucrat on the other hand, make their day easier, make them feel like somebody actually cares about their job. And I think that's been the secret to our rapid approvals for these 5000 nonprofits later. That's really interesting and don't mean to be negative, but those of us who've been subject to this sort of thing in any variety of ways, getting permits or and subject to the, the bureaucrat and let's just call it what it is, the administrative state, right?

6:44 We've been tainted to think that they just, even if you have your love letter and you make their life easier, there's a seemingly A sentiment that says I'm not getting paid a lot. I don't need to move fast. And if I move too fast, then other people, including me, could lose my job. So it's more it's like job preservation, right? They don't, they don't want to take any risks. They don't want to do any extra work. They don't. And I'm being negative on purpose. So I'm wondering how you were able to get over that? And was it really just making somebody's day in lieu of them saying, look, I don't want to make this easy for you because if I do, all these people are going to, you know, we're going to go from, you know, 20 people in this division to 5, right? Well, the way I like to give people credit and give people the benefit of the doubt, but they're even bureaucrats and sometimes they're, you know, creating obstacles or or, you know, being seeming difficult right when you go to that front desk to get your your new bathroom plumbing permit approved.

7:46 They're just not that strategic, right? There are institutional barriers that they create often and but it's often never attribute to malfeasance what you can attribute to incompetence, right. So I think that these things just kind of happen organically and not through some diabolical plans. So what I had learned before this, I was active in the liberty movement. I just basically did direct mail. I did issue advocacy. And so I learned that it wasn't about my great writing ability. As a matter of fact, I had to unlearn a lot of my good writing that I, that I had picked up, you know, through. Dumb it down a little. Reading and and college and a lot stuff and sort of dumb it down. But what I realized through being doing millions of pieces of direct mail is that each component of the direct mail had one job and one job only. The envelope was to look like it came off an IBM Selectric from their Aunt Gertrude so that they would be compelled to go. This isn't one of these throwing pieces of mail. This is for me.

8:46 That's the only purpose of the package is to get it open. And then each subsequent, the dear somebody, the first line, they definitely would stop at that point and flip the whole package over and they would look at who signed it and the PS. And the PS had one purpose, right? To get the person to be intrigued enough to go back and read the first paragraph of the letter and so on and so on. I had learned to sort of breakdown human psychology in the consumption of communications. And so we did the same thing with this file where the cover page would be so intriguing and unlike anything they had seen before, where we watermarked the EIN at the top of the every page. We put a table of contents right on the cover sheet so they knew they could flip through and that all the components that they would want to finish a file were there. From there, they'd be intrigued.

9:36 Who the hell sent me a file like this? This is amazing because what a bureaucrat really wants generally is 1 less file on their desk and one win for the boss at the end of the day. And if we could get them to be able to punch out to lunch early because we sent them this file, that was obviously going to make their day easier. They still get credit for the two hours it takes them to go through that file, even if they do ours in 30 minutes. So this is interesting, Christian, I'm sorry, incentives work, right? So if you were able to determine what triggered them, not triggered, that's a bad word because it's been used, right? If you could determine what would make their boss happy. Sometimes it's amorphous, right?

10:20 You don't really know. But if you figured that out, what did you figure out? We just figured out that they had through these conversations that they had a certain amount of output that they were put that they needed to perform to get a good job review. And so if our files could allow them to more easily burn down the number of files that they needed to without so many files that they get have too much of one thing and or not enough of another. But if we sent them this Goldilocks file with just enough of everything and they could just take it a little bit easy, go out for a smoke break, punch out to lunch early, or just get their mind together, then they would hit one of their little KPIs there, one of their requirements for having done a good job. So that was just one of many insights that I think I had applied here.

11:06 But it was really through this passion of sort of the world is a hard place for, for especially bureaucratic things, but really making people feel good about what you're doing that affects their life is really important. So at our company, we have what I call a culture of love. And that means that we want people, even if they're just filling out a simple form to learn more about how to start a nonprofit, a Family Foundation or whatever, and how great we are. We want to make them feel smarter and not Dumber after encountering our opt in form, right? Anything that they do, they should get an emotional win. And I read books like emotional. There's a UX book called Emotional Design and it talks about how you can sort of gamify things. You can make things so that the person actually wants to do what you want them to do by their criteria, not by yours. And I believe that great marketing, great sales, great service is all an act of love because you have to take yourself out of the equation, your biases, and really try to empathize with what the other person is dealing with. And if you can look at things from their perspective and remove the barriers to them getting through your form or completing, how many people have watched the Tony little infomercial in the middle of the night? They buy the AB Flex, right?

12:23 And then they stay fat because it goes in the garage, right? There's gotta be a way to get people little wins on the way to the big win. And so kind of being obsessive about reaching people where they're at is how we have built a company that has incredible level of five star reviews, incredible customer experience, the best deliverables on the planet. It could stand alone on just that. But it's not just the deliverables. We give people the love and encouragement that they deserve, especially not the institutional nonprofit founders who have done this before and really can can, you know, just get through a process. But people who are sticking their necks out because all they know is that they have foster dogs and crates in their garage and they can get free food from that supermarket if they start a non profit. That's all they know.

13:11 And so it's our job to make that so easy for them that they can create this structure and they can make a difference in their neighborhood without adding to the burdens of their life in a modern world where we're already just overwhelmed with admin. So this is super cool much, you know, so much of what we do in business and otherwise, but let's just talk about business is relationship building relationships. So when you need something, you can call on somebody and they'll deliver, right? Vice versa. For example, I needed to to renew a family member's passport that we're going to leave in seven days in New York City before COVID. Wow, and there was a Romanian guy that came to this country, set up a an office in Penn Station, walked all the files down to the place it needed to get walked and for 500 bucks he'll get it done the next day.

14:06 Like normally it would take 15 days. You have to send regular mail, your original documents and hope they don't get lost, right? So we know it can work, right? That's not really relating to the he. The reason why I said relationship is because he had a relationship with the local people in that office that he could come down and physically give them the file and they would turn it right around the next day. And off you went. And there's 500 bucks and it was worth every penny, right? Is that the same sort of thing, or is there people scattered all over the place that you're dealing with? Well, we we filing articles of incorporation and various other state filings in all 50 states. They all have a different timeline. We maintain a database of how long they take.

14:49 What's the latest as each an administrative administrator comes in with each election or an appointment of a Secretary of State or whatever, people move their own people in. And you know, you have different timelines. Sometimes the IRS goes through hiring waves. And so you have to be ready for any of these eventualities. And basically we've only regrown dramatically through reputation, right through referrals. We've only recently turned our guns kind of turned our our battleship toward aggressively marketing. I've spent 10 years building a scalable back end in an incredibly complex niche so that it is now simple and elegant for the user. And that every single eventuality that we run into, we've got an issues pipeline that that little virtual index card pops into for non payment for card needs updated for government rejected filing because they looked up something else and they didn't see what they needed to see.

15:45 There is not an eventuality that we haven't predicted. And what I found is by trying to save me and my staff trouble by building this very elegant assembly line process. We've built a mode around ourselves and it's every dollars I put it up against any patent because if I gave our competitors the logins to our third party and software platforms, it would take them years to figure out exactly how we've built this thing. Because every single week this team, whether it was just me and one other person or now we have a org chart of about 10 people, we're serving at a higher level and growing constantly because of this level of service. But we would push up every week and sort of a agile Sprint.

16:30 What is the next biggest, most advantageous obstacle we could knock down for our customers and for our staff so that we can optimize this process? What are the things that are having to have a human think about something and make a decision that isn't standardized, isn't in an SOP. And we would just standardize the next thing and next thing. And now we've built a really durable back end that can serve an incredible number of customers and make them feel like they're just not a number because they're not. Every single nonprofit that comes to us as a sacred trust, and we treat it that way. But all the things that we can have robots do, we do. And that way our humans can serve people in a very human way and care about their situation.

17:13 If they're in a rush like you're describing with your passport, that is critically important for a lifetime of family memories are going to depend on that passport getting created. That's how we look at these nonprofits, is not this bureaucratic process, but what are the lives that are going to be changed if we can get this done quicker for this person? Good point of view. Encourage them. Yeah. And just like the Romanian guy at Penn Station, at a certain point, California, out of all the states was ridiculously like, 10 weeks to incorporate. Now they've improved since then. But we actually did do the same thing. We found somebody across the street from the Secretary of State and out of all of the 50 states, we had an expedite option and we would send them to that person and he would walk these files.

17:56 That was incredibly challenging for my staff. But that commitment to a level of service Times Now thousands of customers is why we have raving fans. And you know, we just want to serve people because we're changing the arc of history by empowering, by providing a platform for others to do the same in the way that they see fit. So I, I will say that the, the website's welcoming, it's not, it's not like some law firm website saying, OK, if you want to do a non profit, which by the way, if you look at your pricing, it's a fraction of what a law firm would charge you to do this. Lawyer lawyers are sending U.S. business like crazy, Family planning off family offices alike, estate planning.

18:42 We're also doing more and more foundations all the time because there are things that attorneys are great at completing a you know, government multi step government bureaucratic process is not necessarily one of them. This is all we do. We're not like some other companies that try to be all things to all people and really do a poor job at this particular thing. And so that allows us to predict, hey, if the IRS does come back with an additional request and you know, 95 plus percent of our files get through on what's called a merit close. That means just like a mortgage, you send that paper in, you get an approval. But like the TSA, they do randomly sometimes pull something or if somebody's going to do overseas activity, they want to make sure you're going through the OFAC terrorism watch list before any money is dispersed.

19:28 Well, we head off as many of those things as we can. But when that IRS agent who might be brand new on the job one day and they just start putting in these, what's called RF is request for information. We know the hidden Band-Aid anti fraud measure behind the question before they even ask it. So not only are we providing a great service, but we're kind of providing insurance, right? It's like trip insurance. If something goes wrong and your plane is out of service, we're going to get you onto another plane. It's the same exact thing where you don't have to do anything. This is a 100% done for you process and we're just going to get some information on some forms. You only have to fill out your name once, not 16 times in trip. Yeah.

20:09 And then we're going to handle everything. And we even have a 200% IRS approval guarantee. If we are unsuccessful, we give you double your money back. Now my finance department loves the fact that we've never had to pay on that, but it's our, it's our commitment to say this is so important. We recognize this is sacred trust and we are going to deliver no matter what it takes. And I think that's, you know, our, our staff is so proud of this, right? They'll stay late, they'll do whatever it takes. If we run into an odd case. And don't we all know, you know, the, the IRS that they lost about 30,000 or 20,000 payments? They were not, they came disconnected from the applications that they went to.

20:50 Well, none of our customers had to check their bank records because we handled it for them. We get the IRS right back online because who doesn't know that the government makes mistakes occasionally? Don't we all? Yeah, not only that, it's impossible to, unlike a customer service organization, it's impossible to unravel the mistake without any with some efficiency, right? It's like they don't care. Yeah. So I did notice, by the way, on the website that it it and it was a compelling statement that said, and if something goes wrong, we're not going to send you another bill to do more work. We're just going to get it done right. Absolutely, yeah.

21:31 If you're getting on now, PE is unfortunately destroying Southwest Airlines, so it's not a good example anymore. But of course, if you're getting on a plane, of course you want to take a bag. You know, of course you want the peanuts included. And a lot of discount airlines now are literally, you know, up charging you for even a tiny carry on. You don't even get one item. And you know, we just believe people want a result people when they still want to start a non profit. They just want the thing and then they don't know that they want other things because. But they'll. Soon find out that they will need a special set of instructions to take to the bank so that the 22 year old associate's degree candidate behind the desk who doesn't know how to choose the right type of corporation in their drop down.

22:20 We're going to provide that. We're going to tell you how to run a board meeting without reading Robert's Rules of Order and fumbling through something and being embarrassed in front of the two friends that you've asked to be on your board. People want to feel like I said smarter, not Dumber. So we tell people not here's how to run a board meeting. We tell people here's how to look great in front of your colleagues and friends, even if you've never run a board meeting. Nine step agenda training video and pre filled documents for everyone automatically included, even for the lowest level package. Because some of some of the people listening might have gone through this process before. But if you've never gone through the nonprofit filing process before and you're never probably going to again, you shouldn't have to become an expert at it.

23:07 Yeah. What? Should be focused on your mission and that's our mission as a company. This has worked so well. I'm, you know, proud to say we're putting capital together right now to go take on this niche in a much bigger way because there's really no one else serving people at the level that we believe they should be served. And it's sort of a moral imperative on me that if I want to help the people who are like the founders of Special Olympics, we can tell government's not coming to save us. It's up to us. No one's coming to save us except us. Only you and your neighborhood and only you and your situation, right? Whether that was a traumatic childhood background and we talked a little bit about that before the show started. Only you've walked the miles in your shoes to be able to solve the problem in the way you believe it needs to be solved. And so if we can do this times, you know, 100,000 founders, that's what's going to bring this world healing and overcome all of the division that's being caused by algorithms and big tech or political battles and all that stuff is stepping up in our neighborhood, in our state, in our country or globally and doing what we can to make a difference. Yeah, I agree with that.

24:16 Meaning the government's not going to save us and if you feel like you're entitled to something from the government, you're probably not. What is the effect if any of, and a lot of people don't pay attention to the news and I accept that, what's the effect if any having to do with the brush for which Ng OS has been painted that any Ng OS a bad NGO, has that affected your business development at all? So I agree with you, I really try not to get sucked into the news cycle right, because it's designed to suck you in. I will look at headlines. If you glance at Drudge or you glance at any aggregator, you only need to see the headline to know the story, right? The stories don't change much.

24:57 Not only that, you only need to see the headline to know where they stand. Exactly. So yeah, nonprofits and NGOs that have been abused for political purposes are definitely giving a black eye to the whole idea of NGOs or nonprofits. I don't know if it's because I don't allow that to affect my outlook on things or if I buy my background in issue advocacy. I know how to manipulate media and I know how that's done. And so I don't believe that the people that are out there to make a difference are, you know, they have to, they must be finding ways to keep themselves also from becoming completely hopeless and lost in the new cycle. That makes sense. I think it's a good thing ultimately for nonprofits and the entire sector.

25:41 I think it's good that the rot is being weeded out because that catastrophic level of fraud is taking money out of the hands of legitimate organizations that want to do good with that money. That's the biggest problem. It's. Going to be painful to see it cleaned up, but after it's cleaned up, there's going to be an level of trust in those organizations again that will help restore trust. And that all of the money that's been siphoned off to do nefarious things that are really against our interests either will go away and not be, you know, just be there, or it'll be redirected like the current administration or not. One thing's for sure, they don't believe they can do everything. They believe that power should be devolved to the States and communities a little bit more. So the majority of the government work is done through nonprofits.

26:30 So as that power and money gets devolved down to the local community, nonprofits are going to be required to put in grants and take care of those things. And most community food banks. I spent the evening last night with a woman in in Denver who is an incredibly powerful attorney, incredibly good person and runs a feeding program for for immigrants. And that community has really been under pressure, right with the current administration, you know, for for better or worse. The point is she started an organization that does millions and millions of dollars in food programs, that is getting money to the ground in an area that's badly needed. And that's not going to stop because of, you know, some, some negative headlines about NGOs. I think people ultimately, I trust people that they can sort of weed out the real truth and the real story and look at this as ultimately a good thing.

27:24 Just like, boy, we have to go in. And I had to go and clean out my garage recently and I found that some mice had gotten in there and it made my job 10 times harder. Everything had to come out, but boy, that thing looks beautiful now. I didn't need a lot of the things that were in there. And so even though I had to go through that painful cleanup period, my garage is a lot more effective now. And I can actually find my like tennis rackets and the, the old bicycle that was stuck in the back. And it's just going to make things better ultimately. And I really feel like that's what's going on. You know, in this sort of nonprofit scenario, there's a tiny, tiny percentage of bad actors in any sector. There's a tiny tiny. Percentage always will be, always will be. Yeah, No, I think what is the the pain of cleaning it up in most cases is worth it, right?

28:08 It's kind of like remember you, you might be young enough to remember the Fram oil commercials, the filter, the Fram oil filter for your car. You can pay me now or you can pay me later, right? You can, you can, you can replace your oil filter or you can just leave it in there and let your engine blow up, right? Yeah, yeah, it's like that. Great. And I'm a gearhead, so I'm totally with you on that. I used to fix up cars like crazy up in Jersey where I grew up. There was also a dental dentist billboard and it said through, you know, not like your other problems. Ignore them and they'll go away. Exactly like your other problems. Exactly. Yeah. So I found it interesting because I happen to know how much it would normally cost to hire a lawyer to do a nonprofit.

28:55 And I know you have different segments for different reasons and, you know, based on licensure. However, the proper terminology is, but it was incredibly inexpensive in my perspective compared to what I know. If I hired my general counsel and said, OK, I want to do this, you'd go, OK, time and billing, but you know, 15 grand just to start, right? And you're a fraction of that and. We're a. Is it largely the efficiency of the process? It is because of this incredibly efficient, durable process that we've built. We give people really predictable results that again are easy for them, but it also produces a level of profit that we're able to continue to invest in making things better all the time.

29:43 And we're able to do between the basic small budget nonprofit, right, the 1023 easy and absolutely everything. I mean, we do bylaws, all of the complementary paperwork, compensation policy, everything and of course guarantee the IRS approval. And if for the smaller organizations that use the more streamlined application, it's under $1000. If you go up to larger organization or up to a private foundation, it's ranges up to $2000 plus government fees. That is industry wide. That's the best pricing that you're going to get and the results speak for themselves. I don't need to tell.

30:24 People can certainly go on to Trustpilot. They can go on to all these third party rating apps, Google, Better Business Bureau and look at our nearly five star consistent, you know five star reviews. What's important about that is by sort of inadvertently trying to save our own staff from the headaches here, we've built a process where we can serve people at this great level at a really excellent price. And then once they start the nonprofit, starting the nonprofit leads to all these other challenges, right? That they then need a website, they then need a donation platform. They then need to learn how to create at least some operational structure so that it doesn't become a burn a burden and overwhelm and burn out the founder or or the board.

31:10 And so we do offer these things, you know, ongoing, we have an annual maintenance program that's very inexpensive. We're going to make sure that you're not like one of the 275,000 nonprofits that were rendered defunct by the IRS back in 2010. They did a big sweep and even today about 28,000 nonprofits every year are administratively revoked for tax exempt status because of a failure to file the annual tax return. Basically the 990. We offer that at a dollar a day for the very smallest nonprofits and then it graduates up based on the complexity of the tax return. But you know, there are three legs of the stool in our book. You want to start the nonprofit seamlessly, easily and inexpensively.

31:54 You want to maintain it and protect that investment, which is that sort of nonprofit autopilot we call it. And then the third thing is how do you at least get out the door and raise your first 500 to $1,000,000? We think major Gifts is a great way to do that. So we have a great training program for that. And then how do you operationalize and just put that structure around so that you can, you know, you need to walk before you can run? And so we help people with those three areas. Once somebody's raising $1,000,000, there are plenty of consultants and other companies that can help move them along and, and do more deeper work. But you know, the, the child is most vulnerable when they're an infant. You know, they, they just don't have what it takes. And so we're there to nurture these organizations from idea to IRS approved on C3 and then through their first year or two of growth.

32:46 And then we just put them on automated support year after year to make sure that they stay in good standing and don't lose that tax cut status, don't lose their corporate good standing at the state level. And so from a business case perspective, that's good to hear because there's recurring revenue. Excuse me, how similar is this to the companies that have made a fortune in being your corporate entity creation company like the all the all the companies in Delaware to create your Delaware LLC for example? Right. You know, I've been fret I I've been and am friends with the CE OS of some of these companies that specialize in maybe a for profit companies or whatever.

33:29 Those are much smaller in in scope because there aren't all these required forms required. The tax exempt status is a completely separate process from the entity creation. So excuse me, by specializing in this niche, just like some of those have with Delaware corporations or LLCS, it really helps you to be expert at that one thing. And since this has so many discreet steps and requirements in it, you know, it's said we're, we're growing very quickly. And my, my goal is to really be the specialist in this one thing and not be everything to everyone. Other companies do they do contract, they might do that. Well, they do LLCS.

34:12 They might do that well, but no one is really serving well in this sort of complex niche. And in fact, we've even had some folks who naturally, you know, companies who naturally have a customer base that attempts to, you know, get them to do 5O1C3 formation. We, we've had some private conversations with companies much, much bigger than ours proposing that maybe it would be a good partnership for us to serve that particular product because it is so unique. And so there's so many steps, but it's such a small part of what they do that it's not worth it for them to build out the level of, of complexity and, and elegance that we have.

34:54 And we're all too happy to get those phone calls because, you know, get those contacts because it really is a compliment to us as to what we've built. So can we talk a little bit about business development meant aside from optically your you have legitimate, legitimate rating benefit, Where do you see is it the lawyers that are coming to you? Is it just direct to consumer? Where's your your your best business development Ave. Yeah, I really see it in in three areas. There is the direct to consumer is always going to be probably the the biggest area, right? People are trying to do this on their own. They start the process or they're or they're already serving. Like I said, they're already helping foster animals or they have a beach cleanup that they now need to go get free club gloves and PPE and things like that. Advertise and have all the benefits of, for example, coordinating with the local government, right? The municipality.

35:51 They're going to do a partnership with a non profit. They're not going to do it with just a group of people. So these people get started and direct to consumer where they go. I think I need a non profit. I don't know if this is for me. Those are the people who book a call with our staff who are real experienced people. As a matter of fact, the person that talks to, you know, prospects who call us most most often they speak with someone who was an executive director, ran and built a nonprofit from 200,000 to three and a half million per year, really knows her stuff, right? That's the kind of people that we have here next to direct to consumer, I think. And and actually inside of direct to consumer, we have what's called no click search. Google is absolutely losing market share. And now your link, right, your article might appear and be the answer to somebody's search question. But now with AI, there are these zero click searches. They're calling them where they literally don't go off of that page of Google because the AI is answering the question for them. But what we're finding, and this is a little bit unintentional, no one knows really how these AIS are are working yet and people are finding out and and yeah, we're sort of learning as we go incident nonprofits being recommended by AI because it's out able to go out there and read every review. It reads our whole website when my 20 something group of marketing staff are making me famous and I put out another video.

37:16 It's actually watching the entire video and it's compiling this profile saying these guys can be recommended over the other OPS. Yeah, it's like Perplexity was the 1st and more and more because with chat GDP, you are always wondering where do they got their data, right. With Perplexity. They were the first ones that come out, I think, to say here's all the sources. Boom and so and they're starting to do that now, right? But now they're linking and saying on Google and on BBB and on Trustpilot, instant nonprofit has the best ratings, but we had to go out and build enough ratings to do that. So being a smaller player, you know, sometimes has its advantages, sometimes it has its disadvantages, but direct to consumer is that that first leg next would definitely be the professional class, right? The attorneys.

38:03 I'm, I'm actually in a group that of a sort of a mastermind with hundreds of family estate planning attorneys. A5O1C3A Family Foundation is a great puzzle piece in a wealth management platform. And you know, when you're, when you're doing this kind of planning, you want to at least know if 5O1C3 is going to make sense for you amidst, you know, a trust and some of the other things that more and more people are knowing coming to know. You don't have to be a professional now to learn about these things, right? So that's a really big area. We have lawyers and accountants who are calling us on behalf of their clients where sometimes they're doing it for the client and just, you know, adding their services and saying, OK, I'll do the whole thing and then I'll advise you and be sit on your board.

38:56 And it's this much. Little do they know in some cases, you know, we're just executing. It's the Intel. Inside it's really cool. No one don't. Care, but often they're they're literally just sending our link over and just, you know, saying work with these people. I trust them. And now that we're getting more and more of those, we have the credibility of the professionals. And the third area I would say is the honest brokers out there who are the, you know, the referral sources. Like every nonprofit association across all 50 states has at least one and some, like in California, they have a lot nonprofit resource centers. And almost every single one of these nonprofit resource centers has a little area, right, because they don't start nonprofits.

39:40 They have a membership. They need members and that's their business model. Existing nonprofits sign up with them as members and in order to become a nonprofit, if you go to their site, they don't want to deal with that because that's not what they do. They actually have a link to the IRS, which is the last place you would want to send any. That's a lot of fun, so. We're all too happy to partner with these regional organizations, nonprofit consultants. So many people don't know where to go, so they call someone who does grants, or they call someone who does nonprofit program development and consulting and. We are becoming more and more known with those trusted sources as the place to go for nonprofit formations. Those are probably the three biggest areas I would say that we plan to grow and that's kind of our go to market in our pitch deck right now.

40:25 Yeah, super interesting. What about Daffs? I love Daffs. We've we've done some of those and I have a good friend actually who is kind of an influencer. He's a, he's just a good dude and has done everything that he's done, even in business, has had A cause component to it, right. So when they go do their masterminds and retreats, they go to somewhere, they treat the, the local community very, very well, right? It's successful entrepreneurs and they, they actually engage in the culture and learn about the local community and don't just go to some fancy resort. And you know, just like when people go to Tony Robbins or go to Brendan Burchard or any of these influencers, Mel Robbins, once you've made it, I mean, how many, how much more money do you do you really need? People want to have meaning and impact in their lives. And so these people like Tony Robbins are saying, you know, I just recently went to UPW and he's like, look, you have to have meaning to your life because it becomes very empty. And you end up with this sort of crisis if all you do is work, work, work, and you don't really connect that with meaning and making a difference in other people's lives, bringing your family together and all that stuff. And so, you know, a nonprofit can be a means to to bring your family together to project your legacy and your values. And isn't the whole world abandoning all the things that we used to attach our identity to? People are less attached to their family of origin or their alma mater or any of these

41:57 church politics. All of these institutions have kind of let lost some relevance, so we need to create a way for people to create relevance and meaning in their lives. And what better way to do it than to walk people through process that says here are my values and here are how I actualize these values in the real world. Put that into a nonprofit. And then like the Carnegie's, the Melons and everyone else who certainly put their stamp on things and have influenced the world with propagation of information through libraries, doing wonderful things, you can do that with your own legacy through a non profit. And that's what's exciting to me. We have to find a way to reach young people and to inculcate the traditional, you know, the tradition values that we have.

42:42 Some things about tradition can certainly be left behind, but some things are really important to be preserved because if we try to reinvent the wheel, we're going to really have promises in society. And I think we're already seeing that. How much of what you're the is it does it make sense for somebody rather than go set up just a GoFundMe page to set up the 5C and then attach a GoFundMe page to it. Now there are legitimate, you know, nonprofit and it would cause arguably 'cause people to feel better about it the rather than just sending money. Not only will they feel better about it because there's sort of a Halo, right, that's put on the IRS isn't really approving your mission, but they are saying that that mission meets these charitable ends, right? So what's what's scary and what most people don't know is that if you set up a GoFundMe page or or anything similar, the money that comes in could be looked at the by the IRS as income. If you don't have a tax exempt entity through which to drive that money, because who's to say that you're using that money for good?

43:49 And haven't we seen where people run these GoFundMe pages because of something that hit the news and then they steal the money and use it to buy themselves Ferraris or whatever it is all the time. Three tickets. I don't know. So people actually don't realize that the IRS can come back for years and years and say, hey, you ran this GoFundMe. You raised money for this cause. And even if you spent it on something good, that's your problem. This is not done through a taxable entity, so it actually gets taxed. Tax exempt and. Worst kind of taxation which is income taxation, ordinary income level of. Tax. Exactly. Oh, the people, unfortunately not well counseled, right?

44:35 Say, wait, you just can't take in money, You have to account for it, right? Absolutely. Even if you put it towards a good cause, the IRS doesn't care. You have to prove it right. Right. Yeah, it's, it's on you. If if they catch you, you know, it's on you. And you could be, you know, they say no good deed goes unpunished, right? And so, so many people have caught them, caught themselves in this trap. And and what's important is like, we do sometimes make these decisions at a breaking point, right? I I just, I can't take not doing anything good in my neighborhood. I'm going to do this and maybe there's a flood or maybe there is a crisis in the community because a family's been terribly disrupted, lost a lost the parents in a car accident or something.

45:15 It's good to want to do things in quickly in those situations. And what's great is that most people don't know that you can raise money tax deductibly almost immediately, even before the IRS approves your application or before you've even submitted an IRS application. And the reason is their official policy at the IRS is to backdate tax exempt status to the date of your incorporation. So if you get in touch with Instant Nonprofit today and we incorporate you in Colorado, which is one of the many states now that has online incorporation, we incorporate your nonprofit tomorrow. From tomorrow on, you can put a donate button on your site, give people a tax deduction so they get that off their top line of taxes and they payless taxes.

45:58 And that is absolutely not taxable to you because this is a non taxable entity. And that astounds people when I tell them because yes, we want to get you approved as quickly as possible and our averages are 18 and 70 days for the short and the long form for the IRS approval. That's very fast in the context of a traditional one year. But what's even better than that is most states now will the incorporation will be done within a week or so, maybe two weeks. So we can get that done and you can start running by. You can barely schedule your first fundraiser in that period. So you can take action very quickly and we actually give you a memo that quotes the IR s s official policy around that. And that's what you give to your donors. That's what you put on your website until you get that official letter.

46:47 And people's eyes just light up when we tell them that policy. Is there like setting up a corporation? You don't want to do it in New York, you don't want to do it in California. You want to set up your corporate situs in Delaware, Nevada, TX. Right? I mean that's pretty standard stuff that might change and people might have different opinions about that. Is there a a state that the situs would be better for a non profit over another aside from the expediting the process? The good news is other than, like you're saying, other than the window of time it takes to, you know, from submission to approval of the articles, after which we immediately get the EIN online and you're, you're in business. You can go to the bank and open the account and everything. There really isn't any advantage of one state over another other than I would say Hawaii.

47:45 Washington's a little difficult or Oregon's a little difficult. California is harder than some states in the annual maintenance, but it's really not as difficult as as Hawaii and and a couple of other of those N Northwest states. But generally you should start the nonprofit in your own state because the reason for Delaware and and Nevada being the the famous cases and now Wyoming's a pretty solid for profit. It provides a more secure corporate veil. It's harder to sue the corporation and divulge your their private records, their corporate minutes. And all of those private things are kept a little bit more private in those states. But because a nonprofit is a public trust, there aren't really shareholders.

48:31 You don't own a nonprofit, you govern it through the board and it's a more transparent public type of entity. So there are certain things that are published about your nonprofit, not your donor list that's never published. Or hopefully they don't, you know, go after and try to, you know, other than in political situations, you'll see that. But generally that donor list is sacrosanct. But many elements of the tax return are public because this is a public trust. There's an exchange in exchange for tax exemption. You are giving up a certain level of privacy. But again, they can't get your corporate minutes. You know you don't have to. Public information, isn't it? Is that the? Right, 90 is, but those private conversations are are not right.

49:13 So in most states, the nonprofit's fairly well protected to the extent of the private documents, the public, the things that are public are out there and that generally conveys the information that people need to to trust the organization. So there isn't really an advantage of one state over another, although you can kind of, if you were to look at a list of states, you could probably guess which ones are little bit more regulated versus a little bit less. For example, 40 states regulate fundraising activity. Fundraising activity can be almost anything in some of these states. So you can imagine California, New York, the Northeast, they regulate that pretty tightly. And states like Arizona actually repealed that law. The only state to do so.

49:57 Texas is easy. So there are states that don't make you register in order to throw a fundraiser, put a donate button on your website. And you know, naturally those are going to be a little bit easier to maintain your organization year over year. But the difficulty is low enough that I would say it's offset by having to set up a registered agent, not get the mail at your local PO Box or to your home or whatever. So I generally set recommend Pete to people, you're not doing anything controversial. Go ahead and just use your home state. Keep things easy on yourself because we can often overcomplicate things for objectives that really aren't that important and aren't worth the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Got it.

50:42 And I would imagine that you, if you were going to enlist the local Chamber of Commerce, the local fathers of the, of the city and officials, then you could say it is a, you know, current state nonprofit. And that can't hurt. That's true. People do have a little bit more of a trust factor if it's a, you know, corporation here versus in some faraway place. One sort of it's not really an exception, but one case that where we do right make a recommendation where to register is we do a lot of registration for what we just did. Well, I'll give you a great example. There's a Vietnamese organization that has a huge jungle preserve where they are literally preserving the life of some of the only examples of these endangered species in the world.

51:30 And they have to contract with the government. They recently had to move their many, many 100 acre, you know, preserve somewhere else because the Army wanted their spot. And so they don't. They don't have a board here. They don't have a presence here. We will establish the presence, establish the registered agent for them. So they have to get a taxpayer ID number to be able to register and get the EIN. So they sort of have to become a taxpayer in effect here, just like if somebody moves here on a visa and wants to collect AW2 paycheck. So we do all of those things for them. And in that case, we'll often recommend Washington, DC, because what does an international organization want to show on their letterhead? But Washington, DC, it's that's where optics do matter. And sometimes optics matter.

52:18 If you're an ocean organization out of Minnesota, you might want to register in California or somewhere where there's actual coastline. Nantucket. So yeah, what's the in terms of managing expectation? 2 questions. One, if you were doing a short term fundraising and you wanted to do it legit, so you set up the fund. So you raise the money in two years and then you shut it down, pay your taxes, file the 990, and then you shut it down. That's plausible, right? Unless you have an ongoing purpose, right? It's totally plausible and totally realistic, especially if you're using instant nonprofit because we also have dissolution services. We can wind down an organization pretty cost effective. And you know, the main thing is how much friction are you having in your life?

53:03 How much brain damage, I like to call it, are you creating in your life by ramping an organization up for for a disaster? Maybe. And boy, wouldn't we like nonprofits to have to dissolve after a while because they solve the problem that they not all problems. That's the problem with some organizations is they start for a great cause, but then the purpose of the organization becomes self perpetuation instead of actually solving the problem. Making sure people have jobs, yeah. So I love it. I, I don't like to unwind nonprofits because it became overwhelming or because they were unsuccessful. That's natural. That's going to happen just like in small business. But I really love, it's bittersweet when a customer calls us and say, you know what? We, we crushed it and we solved this problem. And now this is being taken on by this. We, we've created the hospital wing. They've now found a cure for this, you know, ailment and there's no reason for to us to exist anymore. And that's really exciting to see because actually, you know, I almost wish there were more of those because that would mean, right, we're solving these problems and not just mitigating them.

54:11 Yeah, so. But it has to be low cost and low brain damage to be worth doing for a short time. And when an 100 year flood comes into Lake Pontchartrain and Katrina happens, you might need 500 nonprofits to solve everything from sanitation to giving people furniture and a place to live and all these things. Many of those won't have reason to exist after 3-4 years when the build is rebuild. This happened. That's perfectly fine. But if it cost you five $10,000 to start up, most people just walk away. And that's where we enable these things to happen and be worthwhile. So that's where I was headed realistically to manage expectations.

54:54 You've got your your fees, the filing fees, what's the ongoing maintenance? Look for your middle silo operation. I mean very small nonprofits under 50,000 a year, it's about 400 to 500 a year to maintain that organization including your tax return for pretty good standing at the state and year round office hours and one O 1 level training on all the things that will at least just keep the wheels on moving up from there. Above $50,000 is about 15, about $1700 a year right When you raise more than 50,000 you step over this threshold where a much more complicated and detailed granular tax return, basically an 1120 corporate tax return style return is required that requires ACPA or really professional tax preparer. Most Cpas or tax preparers won't touch a non profit 990. So we are able to just source again, that's all we do. So we're able to source the kind of specialists that really know what they're doing and that's an area of our practice that's really growing is that maintenance of those larger organizations.

56:07 And then if you're a private foundation, sometimes there are projects or grants that you have to manage that require a special level of audit or compliance sort of accounting that has to do just inside each of those projects. And from there, you know that that price can go a little bit north of that, but just sub $2000 level. But no matter what, it's certainly less costly than most accountants who are trying to figure this out. And they're literally pulling the guidelines and law books off the shelf to figure this out where we only deal with, you know, if, if we don't do it in house. And we partner with ACPA, we partner with a lawyer. We have a lawyer on staff on call.

56:48 Those people specialize in nonprofits. And that's very rare to find someone who does enough nonprofit work to really know that stuff off the top of their head and simply stay updated on the the updates that the government comes across with every year. Is the rationale, what's the rationale between for the $50,000 threshold? It's just that if you're going to get up to a higher number than you, that's going to be meaningful if somebody starts stealing stuff. I think it's accountability. I think the government, what happened was around, I think it was 2014, the government had this huge backlog and they were really getting a lot of backlash and political pressure because people are trying to do good things and it's just taking forever for even the smallest organizations. And if there isn't enough money to abuse, then there should be a lower level of scrutiny for that organization. And so they came out at that time with this more streamlined application.

57:39 And the level of information for the tax return is very minimal, right, when you step over that $50,000 threshold. And this is not adjusted for inflation. So I'm not sure what 50,000 is worth today, but it's certainly less than it was back then. But that is just an arbitrary threshold the government sets. We don't and what we do is people start on that lower level. We're excited to see when they graduate up and we simply check in with our customers at the beginning of the calendar year. In the United States, your personal taxes, your 1040 is due in, in April. Corporate is due in March, March 15th, right? Your 1120 or your your LLC if you elect as a corporation due in March.

58:21 For nonprofits, it's May 15th. So it's March 15th, April 15th, May 15th for corporate, individual and nonprofit returns in the United States. That's how that works. Yeah, super interesting. Is is the entity one that you choose or is the by definition like you can when you file a corporation, you can do LLCC Corp S Corp blah blah blah. Is the 503 C the entity? No. It's interchangeable, right? People use the term 5O1C3AS interchangeable for a non nonprofit, right, or tax exempt nonprofit. But C3 is really a tax designation that is bestowed onto the corporate entity and that's a federal tax exemption, right?

59:05 You're exempt from federal corporate taxes and the states follow suit. Almost every state doesn't tax any revenues other than I believe Washington. So you start the, the organization, the state entity as a nonprofit corporation in almost every state. A few states, I think Arkansas, I believe Virginia and maybe one or two other states call it a non stock corporation because there aren't shares in the corporation. It's governed by a board, not shareholders. But either way, it is a special type of corporation. And we have so many customers who were prospects, right, who are thinking about being a customer. They already went out and they started an LLC or they started a corporation and thought maybe it was an election because maybe they've done an S Corp or something where they elected to be taxed in a different way. And unfortunately we have to dissolve those for them, get that out of the way so that they can use that name that they want to use.

59:59 And then we filed the correct type of corporation. But that's just part of our service. If that needs to be done. We we don't even charge extra for. We do charge extra for dissolution. But incorporation is included in our service. If somebody's already incorporated and they believe they did the right type of corporation or they don't know, we don't charge any extra for that because it's just it's actually more costly for us to vet their paperwork than for us to start clean. But we just throw it in because again, people want to be able to drop this off and know that it's being taken care of. 100% correct. And the more comfortable they feel the trust in us, the more they can stay completely focused on executing their mission, which is what we're all about.

1:00:41 That's the whole idea in most cases. Yeah. So this has been super interesting, Christian. We ran way over, but it's OK. Glad we did. I'm glad we did. Yeah. So what I'd like to do if it's OK with you is do this again and maybe a couple months, see how you guys are doing. Meanwhile, we'll share it with everybody in the community. And I think that everybody will benefit from hearing from this. And I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but there are people who are have foundations, have nonprofits and I think they would have learned a lot from what you've discussed already. So that's great. Super appreciate it. Absolutely and if if I could just shamelessly plug ourselves on the way off here.

1:01:23 Anyone wants to reach us. We have a about starting a nonprofit. We have a great gift of a startup kit. It's all of the things that you need to know on the way into. If you're thinking about starting a nonprofit, whether you know a lot or you know a little, we have this great startup kit. It's at instantnonprofit.com/podcast, so you don't have to remember much and we won't harass you. It's, it's low obligation, but we have worksheets that help people figure out their one sentence mission statement. What would a great name be? We have processes for all those that are really lightweight and easy. So somebody can feel confident. Yes, this just might fit. Then they can book a call. We have a button right at the top. You can book a call. And this is not a call center. You will speak with an expert on, on nonprofits. And there are a number of other things, right, that you can learn by going to our website.

1:02:10 You can follow us on social. We're on all the socials, like I said, I have some wonderful 20 somethings on our on our team that are are making me famous in spite of my, you know, this nude skill of of getting on video and talking about these things. But I love doing this. And so it's really been fun to get out there on social. So follow us on social and then if somebody wants to reach me, whether your family office and its mission might be aligned with our cause based. You know, we are a corporation. We we do have shares and we are out raising equity capital right now. And, you know, sometimes they don't say something like that on a podcast because these things live forever. Totally OK for. Us, we are in this limited window where we want people who are aligned with us to be our partners and to be our stakeholders.

1:02:53 And so if anybody thinks that might be interesting, we've got a great story, we've got great materials. Like I said, our mission is furthered by aligning with people who agree with us. So I can be reached at christianinstantnonprofit.com. And I'm sure if you were to reach out on social or anywhere, somebody can get you in touch with me. And I can share a little bit more about how we plan to take this exciting, you know, platform to the world and serve at a higher level and, you know, make a dent in in history. Yeah, I think the timing's good. Really appreciate. It. And I also appreciate you mentioning it to everybody that you're in a raise because that could be helpful for you as well as everybody else. So for sure, Christian, thank you. And let like I said, let's do this again in a couple months and get an update.

1:03:39 I love it. I can't wait to do that. And thanks for what you're doing. I'd love any questions, comments, anyone, anything anyone has. That's what we're here to do. So look us up and I look forward to getting back together with you again and talking about exciting things like Utah and the outdoors and all of things that we seem to share. Yeah, I love that. Let's do it. So thank everybody for sharing with us the only thing you can't make more of. And that's your time. Till next time. Thanks for listening in.