EP197: Dan Baker - What You Need To Know About Making Your Business Profitable

Michael Palmer: Well, the implications of running a small business are huge. A lot of them fail a lot of the time because they get absolutely terrible advice, but it has impact on much greater than just that individual. Marriages break up because of failed businesses. You've got the economy would be in a much better shape the more small businesses that we can help become successful. You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back. Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and today's show is going to be a great one. Our guest is the owner of DMB Tax Services and the CEO of Profit by Intention. Dan Baker, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Michael. Pleasure to be here. It's great to have you and, uh, excited to hear your story and share what you've been up to with our listeners. And so Dan, before we get into all of it, tell us about you and your career journey leading up to this point.

Dan Baker: Oh boy, well, it's been one heck of a ride. I, so I am a certified financial planner by designation. So I have my CFP designation and I'm also a chartered life underwriter. And I had done that since 2002. I came out of university, started working with a major insurance company. I left, went to work for a major bank. Around 2008, I decided, you know, if I'm doing financial planning for people, I should probably know something about taxes. So I did what most, what a lot of people do. I signed up for H&R Block's tax course and I worked for them 2 times and I was like, this is really great. I quite enjoyed doing it. And then, but I saw what they were charging and I thought there's going to be a better way to do this. And so I just opened up a personal tax business, but I used some, some referral structures and I charged relatively inexpensive fee to do taxes at the time. But what it did was it allowed me to really grow a client base quickly. We were getting, through our referral program, we were getting 3, 4 referrals from pretty well everybody. And we grew from 30 tax clients to now we serve approximately 650 to 700 individual tax clients. But what that did was it really gave us a base of