Examining Growth Strategies – Jenna Biancavilla

Jenna Biancavilla:
As you learn more, don’t you just feel more like an imposter because you realize how much more you don’t know? Isn’t that the journey to grow and to graduate to the next level and then to be new as a sophomore? I would argue if you’re not growing and if you don’t feel a little uncomfortable, like you don’t know everything, you’re probably repeating freshman year. You’re probably a cog in a wheel and you’re not getting anywhere, and you’re just doing the same thing on repeat, which means you’re not growing. I think maybe just rebranding it, calling it growth.

Dana Robinson:
Exit Plan is a podcast for business owners and those who want to be business owners. I’m always in search of the lesser known stories of entrepreneurship. In the exit Plan podcast, you’ll hear stories from startup to sale and hear from the professionals who helped business owners achieve their exit. Hosted by me, author and private equity manager Dana Robinson, along with my co hosts and guests, you’ll hear real stories, tips, and tools that will help you plan for the exit you want, whether you are still working at a day job or running a business. Let’s get started with this episode of the Exit Plan podcast. Hey, everybody, it’s Dana Robinson on the Exit Plan podcast, coming to you with today’s guest, Jenna Biancavilla, a well known commodity, a recent award winner panelist on creating and enhancing your FEMA client practice, and someone who has a lot of things that she can share across all of the subjects that we tend to cover on this podcast. Jenna, thanks for coming on.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Thank you for having me.

Dana Robinson:
You know, anyone who’s listened to this knows that I’m horrible at trying to introduce people and figure out what makes them shine. And people also don’t like to tooth their own horn. But I do want you to introduce yourself and talk a little bit about what you’re doing right now. And then I want you to tell me how you got to do what you’re doing right now.

Jenna Biancavilla:
What I’m doing right now is a loaded question because I’ve gone from, you know, practitioner to solopreneur to mo to, you know, the full, like, enterprise business owner to multipreneur. Because, like, probably a lot of people listening, if you have the entrepreneurial bug, you usually don’t stop with just one business. So it’s been a journey that the bread and butter my business, that is my primary one, is a wealth management practice. And I’ve been a wealth manager for 1516 years now. But I opened this the shop that was an independent wealth management practice about eight years ago. And kind of like I shared, I didn’t want to manage people again, so I did it by myself with just a couple admin for a little while and then realized I identified more as a business owner than a I created a job for myself. So I now run a professional wealth management firm, not just a solo advisor trying to give advice. But then I launched a financial technology or fintech company with my sister about a little over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, so that’s fine.

Jenna Biancavilla:
I have a branch of a lending company. I launched a financial literacy course. I’m dabbling in online courses, and I have a private investment club. So everything in and around finance, they all kind of relate to each other and work well together. But it’s been a fun journey to do a couple different things.

Dana Robinson:
I love it. That’s great. I love people who do what they do and then find ways to convey that and teach it. I’ve done a lot of that. As I was talking to you earlier about courses I put on LinkedIn learning. So you wanting to teach is great because I think most people listen to this podcast to learn something from someone or learn what they didn’t know they didn’t know. So I definitely want to draw that out from you. Disclaimer none of this is legal advice, and nothing you hear from Jenna is investment advice.

Dana Robinson:
And since we can’t get investment advice from you, when we get to talking about what you teach people, we do want to learn about what you teach people. In other words, like, let’s go there. But I want a little bit of your entrepreneur journey before we get to what you can tell us to help. You said you started a business that became a job and then realized that’s a completely different thing than owning a business. Talk about how your journey into that. You know, this is a place where a lot of people get stuck, and some people want to be stuck there where they’re just, I am the boss and I have two admins and everything hinges on me. Was that your goal? Like talk about, to talk me through how you got there and then how you got out of that?

Jenna Biancavilla:
So I worked at large institutions, as most people do early on in their finance career. And if I’m advising someone who’s getting into financial planning, I usually say start at a big shop because you need to know the rules to play with it. You need to know the guardrails. And if you don’t know the rules of this industry, the SEC and FINRA and our regulatory bodies will kick you out faster than you can figure it out. So with all those regulations, it’s nice to start at a large shop. After about eight years, I had clients that I was promising. I was going to do everything to make their financial lives better. And then I had to answer to my employers and bosses who were wanting to make the profits of the firm bigger and better.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And these things weren’t aligning, and I really struggled with that. So I eventually branched out on my own, and it wasn’t that easy. I didn’t have all my ducks in a row. I wasn’t perfectly ready to be an entrepreneur. I had a series of people taking advantage of me, doing bad things, being unethical, and finally I said, I can’t trust anyone in this darn business is I’m just going to do it by myself. But that adversity in the moment, I didn’t realize how good it was for me, but it forced me out to create a shop where I can put the clients first. I don’t have to answer to big banks and make sure their profits are ahead of clients. And I had managed a team when I was at the previous broker dealer that I worked at.

Jenna Biancavilla:
So it was just this revolving door of ten to 20 advisors that I was constantly recruiting and training and hiring. Plus I was handling my clients and my book of business, and the revolving door of advisors was a pain in the butt and managing people’s rough. And so when I finally launched my own firm, I said, well, I don’t want to do that again, that was terrible. And so I thought that’s all I wanted, was this solo advisor practice where I could really just take care of my clients, get a couple admins, do exactly what I wanted to do, because I love serving clients. And I did that for four or five years. It was just me as the only advisor in the practice. And then at some point, as solopreneurs, you start getting tired and you realize you can’t take a vacation. And so if a client wants a trade, I was the only person in the firm licensed to make the trade.

Jenna Biancavilla:
So it didn’t matter where I was or what I was doing, I had to stop it. And, you know, I, in the middle of the night in Italy, make trades or whatever, I thought, whatever vacation I thought I was getting, I didn’t get a real vacation. Then I was at like one of those entrepreneur summits and someone had said, you know, if you can’t take two weeks off and not think about your business, like, really take two full weeks off. You don’t have a business. You created a job for yourself. And that was, like the dagger I needed in my heart, where I was like, I identify as a business person, and I understand I’m not. This is a job. This is not a business.

Jenna Biancavilla:
But I want to be a business owner. And so that was kind of the dagger I needed to look in the mirror, self reflect, and take the next steps to start turning it into an enterprise and less of a job.

Dana Robinson:
I love that. Let me pause, because it is my podcast, so I get an occasional shameless plug. I wrote a book that came out in February called the King’s Fly swatter, and it’s a parable of a young person who becomes the fly swatter to the king. They get very good at the fly swatting, and then their mentor tells them to start listening to the king. And by doing so, they become very wise. Right. By doing this horrible job that nobody wants to do in an environment that might not be the greatest. And the parallel, of course, is that, as you said, anyone in any kind of high specialty has to go work for some group person firm.

Dana Robinson:
That sometimes can be an awful place to work. Eight years is a long time, Jenna, so I’ll say that you survive longer. I survived in a law firm for four years, but I needed that to become competent enough to become entrepreneurial as a professional. And you did too, right? You couldn’t have stepped out and been that competent advisor had you not done a pretty reasonable amount of time learning the skills.

Jenna Biancavilla:
I agree with that wholeheartedly. Learning the skills, learning how to do it. I did that from 21 years old to 29 years old. And I was so my whole twenties, I was working for big firms. But the average advisor is in his sixties. So the average advisor is the guy you see in the movies, the old guy with the gray hair, who’s going to retire probably before you are, and then you’re on your own to figure it out again, who to hire next. And so in an older demographic of a profession, where a lot of people are getting into this profession at an older age, starting a firm at 29 years old with only eight years of experience, I was a baby. Women don’t open registered investment advisory firms, and especially young women.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And so I started it. Even though you said, eight years is a long time. The rest of my community looked at me like, what are you doing? No one trusts any people with their wealth. So lucky for me, it all worked out really well. But most people in my industry would have said, stick it out longer.

Dana Robinson:
And do you think that phase of being a business owner with a job also contributed to your ability to then do what you’re doing now by turning that into an enterprise? I mean, was that a walk before you run phase, even though you. You had managed people and you knew what that took? You had the chops to build an enterprise right out of the gate. But maybe working for yourself was the right thing to kind of, you know, get establish your sea legs.

Jenna Biancavilla:
I appreciate the journey I’ve been on. Like most entrepreneurs, now that I’ve hired a handful of people, I guess more than a handful, but I’ve hired people, and I have all these butts in these seats, and it’s starting to really, we got the processes. It’s starting to look more like that swiss watch than that chaos that business can sometimes look like. Looking back, I kind of wish I would have done it earlier.

Dana Robinson:
Okay.

Jenna Biancavilla:
As we all say, we should definitely hire as quickly as possible and start delegating. So there were things I should have delegated earlier. So, yeah, I love my journey. I love the way it happened, but I probably should have hired earlier.

Dana Robinson:
All right. I love that. And I think I have more listeners who are probably business owner operators than those running enterprises. I’ll call attention to this. Jenna says, hire people sooner rather than later. If you’re thinking about growing your business, you want to grow an enterprise. You want to build a business that’s capable of being sold. It can’t rely on you anymore.

Dana Robinson:
I think that’s a mantra that people have to get around in their head.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Jenna, we’ve heard every single business person who gives advice say, hire faster. Hire sooner. And I heard all that advice, and I listened to all the podcasts, and everyone was telling me, you had to hire your first hire, and you had to hire your second hire, and you had to hire your first salesperson. And I am such a conservative person. I’m a financial advisor. I help people keep money. My goal is, don’t run out of money before you die. That is the main goal for what I put together for most of my clients.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And so watching the salary number, right? Thinking about, I’m going to pay this huge annual salary number, go out the door and leave our bottom line, and not be something that I could put in our reserves account. That was a painful band aid to pull off. And all I could see was it an expense. When I was looking at it, when I was looking at hiring, it was an expense. And then it was, who’s going to train them? How am I going to find a train them? And then what am I going to have them do? It was just that, what are they going to do? These stupid things. This. I call it head trash. You make all this head trash? But you know what? I had my first person part time, and it was fine, and we did it hourly, and I could stomach it.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And she was coming out of being a stay at home mom, so she wanted to slowly ramp up into working, and I wanted the same thing. I wanted to slowly ramp up into having an employee. And I found this perfect match, and, boy, I should have found that sooner. So it doesn’t have to be this head trash crazy hire that’s going to be super expensive that we make up in our head sometimes.

Dana Robinson:
I’m so glad you gave an example, because I piqued my interest that I want to hear more about how you got over that hump, because I’ve owned businesses that are reliant on me or my wife and I, even my law practice. To be honest, when I broke away from hiring just law clerks and finally got a full time lawyer, that lawyer ended up becoming the one I sold the practice to. But the most people who are not hiring are saying, I don’t have the money to hire, and then what am I? And just like you, then what am I do with them? And then who’s going to train them? And then, you know, then. And then. And then. And I love your solution. It’s. It’s elegant, because you just say, find that person who’s got all the competence that doesn’t need a full time job, which means it saves you from having to solve all those problems and then let them create the job in real time.

Dana Robinson:
So you’re going to build the plane while you’re flying it.

Jenna Biancavilla:
I love the term, build the plane while you’re flying it. I had this epiphany with this term about four or five months ago. I was talking to a firm that is similar to mine, but a lot further along. So they’re just a multibillion dollar investment advisory firm talking to the heads of it, and they said, oh, yeah, we did this new acquisition, you know, huge firm, trying to figure out merging cultures. We’re just building the plane while we’re flying it. We’re trying to figure it out. And I was like, you never make it. You’re always figuring it out.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Like, no matter what stage of business you’re in, you’re always just figuring it out. And I realized so many people say imposter syndrome, like, what am I doing? But the best and the brightest business people don’t say imposter syndrome. They just say, I’m building the plane while I’m flying it. Because we’re all, as business owners, if we’re growing, we’re all figuring things out and we all don’t know what we’re doing. Because you haven’t managed a firm this big before. You haven’t managed as many employees before. You haven’t acquired this before. So it’s always going to be something new.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, yeah. And I love it. Thanks. I’ll use some real numbers from circumstances that I’m aware of with. I’ll be anonymous because you don’t need to know who it is. But I can give you an example of a roll up where at the beginning of the journey, it was a $5 million valuation business. Three years later, it was a $50 million valuation. Three years after that, it was a $500 million valuation.

Dana Robinson:
Whoever, you know, the group that bought it at that price is still building the plane while they’re flying it. Right? They are still. They’re more capable of the exponential growth than each of the caretakers along the way with, I think, the landscape business that was begun as the beginning of the platform we’re involved with now, 2020 might have been a million and a half dollars. The roll up now has that at some 30 plus million dollar a year business. So three to four years can go by and still building the plane while it’s being flown. And if we grow that and sell the platform, whoever buys it is going to say, all right, you know, we’re going from a regional to a nationwide. We’re going to keep doing these things, that they’re big, hard things. But do you? I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten over imposter syndrome, even though I gained lots of competencies.

Dana Robinson:
And I’m the kind of, I’m the swiss army knife of kind of our group. And so I’m admitting that on air for everyone to hear. How do you feel about, as you hear that from a group that’s ahead of you, you’re looking at them and saying, like, I could be. That I could grow this to that, or I could, you know, I’m on that journey. You realize that they’re doing the same. They have the same problems as you, doing the same thing as you. How has that shifted the way you feel about your imposter syndrome?

Jenna Biancavilla:
I really have tried to shift it to just growth mindset. I always look at my firm and the inside workings of it. It could be better. It could be perfect. There’s so many things that we can iron out, all of these little kinks. Maybe I’m a little bit of a perfectionist, and I wish it was perfect. If anyone owns a business, you know, they’re not perfect. But then when you actually look under the hood of other firms, and I intentionally, and I’m a part of other mastermind groups, I talk to what people would call my competition.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Luckily, I have a lot of people around me who have abundance mindset. So we share inside secrets about the inner workings of our firms. And you realize, oh, well, we’re better than that. We’re definitely better than that. And so you realize that you might have these really high standards and you feel like an imposter, like you’re not doing it well. But if you can actually meet with your peers or your competition and see what they’re doing, you’ll realize, well, hopefully, hopefully you’ll realize that you’re not an imposter at all. If anything, you might be a little bit better than your competition.

Dana Robinson:
That totally true. I think you start off with the word growth mindset. I think you’re constantly trading a new competency for a new incompetency. And so maybe some of the imposter syndrome we get is that if you’re, if you’re growing, you’re just about the time you’re. You’re actually an adult in something. You take on something new because you’re willing to take on something new. You. You’re eager and ambitious for growth, you know, personally and professionally.

Dana Robinson:
So maybe. Maybe that’s where I’m just talking out loud. Maybe that’s where my, my own imposter syndrome comes with what’s new and what I’m incompetent at. While I can look back a little bit and go like, well, but I am competent in some things, and that makes me feel like an adult sometimes.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Well, I mean, as you learn more, don’t you just feel more like an imposter because you realize how much more you don’t know as you learn more. It’s almost the people who feel least like the imposters are the teenagers who know it all, right?

Dana Robinson:
Yes, absolutely. The. Yeah, the. The meme that came out some years ago. I was today years old, you know, when. When I learned blank. I love that because there’s always some new thing that I’m. That I’m learning.

Dana Robinson:
I’m like, well, I know that now. Embarrassed that I probably should have known that a long time ago. But, yeah, to your point, teenagers know it all, and it’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. And as you learn more, you’re exposed more to the unknowns and the things you don’t know. And it’s humbling, but also, I don’t know. I find some gratification and being able to, like, start with incompetence and move toward competence, and that’s. That curiosity, for me, is enough to overcome the, you know, awkward and embarrassed, embarrassing phases. We just closed a big deal on our private equity fund, and, you know, we celebrated, like, big high fives and all that stuff.

Dana Robinson:
And I realized at that point, we’d gotten through a freshman year. And then I thought, wait a minute. We’re sophomores. This is the worst year. This is the year where we have to be really careful, because now we know just enough to be dangerous and think we know a lot, and it’s time for us to actually, like, put our heads down, do our homework, and be good students of the sophomore year.

Jenna Biancavilla:
But isn’t that the journey to grow and to graduate to the next level and then to be new as a sophomore? Because I would argue if you’re not growing and you don’t almost. I’m not saying you need to feel like an imposter because there’s some negative connotations around that. But if you don’t feel a little uncomfortable and, like, you don’t know everything, then you’re probably repeating freshman year, right? You’re probably a cog in a wheel, and you’re not getting anywhere, and you’re just doing the same thing on repeat, which means you’re not growing. So I think maybe just leaning into imposter syndrome or rebranding it and just calling it growth.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah. So anyone listening to this knows that right now I’m a sophomore. And if I’m giving you advice, I’m just treating you like freshmen, and I’m probably wrong about a bunch of stuff. Jenna, the one thing I was thinking about, you were talking about bigger businesses, talking about buying and integrating their acquisitions. One of the big benefits of an advisory practice that isn’t relying on you is that it is like, it’s a portable business. That’s an asset you can eventually sell, isn’t it?

Jenna Biancavilla:
It is. Advisory practices are sellable. I have to say, I got to a place when I was thinking about my exit planning from this business, because I advise other people on their exit planning. I have a lot of business owners, and it’s what does retirement look like? When do we get you to stop working? How do we get you to exit? Let’s talk about the journey of how we get this thing sold. And so they turned the mirror on me, and they said, well, what about you? When are you selling your business? What does your retirement look like? Oh, crap. All right, I have to drink my. Take my own medicine, if you will, or take my own advice. And I realized my plan was I think of my clients as my.

Jenna Biancavilla:
My family, my babies. And the reason I started it in the first place was really to take care of them. And so selling it didn’t seem like the exit plan that made sense for the reason I started it. So selling it to, you know, this unknown buyer or this firm, that was all about profits. That was really not. Not going to be the plan that I had set in place when I promised my clients I was taking care of them and not putting profits before them. So my access strategy is actually going straight to my employees. So my employees all get to continue on this business.

Jenna Biancavilla:
It is not being sold to the outside, which is kind of nice and great for retention for my staff, that they know this business will live with them when I’m no longer here. But another reason I started the technology company, because I definitely want to build something to sell. I’m not dumb and silly that I’m going to waste all my time building businesses, not to sell at least one of them. So the technology company we’re building to sell and the financial planning practice is more a little of a legacy plan for me.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. I mean, I sold my law practice, but I’m still on the practice didn’t get merged with a big firm, the practice that I built with my junior partner, until I was able to hand it off to her. But, yeah, I think that’s still an exit. You slowly sell shares to your associates who become owners at a time when you slowly divest. That’s an old fashioned exit plan, and it’s still a valid one. It doesn’t have a multiple of EBITDA or multiple of service revenue or some such thing. It still ought to be an exit that honors all of the things that you intended for your clients and for the employees. So that’s awesome.

Dana Robinson:
Well, then, hey, let’s talk about one of the things. I’ll just call this out and you know it to be true. When you’re one owner business running the whole thing, it’s really hard to do entrepreneurial things on the side. Right. You can’t take some of your winnings and spread them around unless it’s purely passive. And certainly you could have done that. But in order for you to throw yourself into these other ventures, you probably couldn’t have done it until you built a business where the business could run without you.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Almost, but not perfect. I actually had the idea for the technology company when the financial planning practice still needed me way too much. But I was really excited about the idea, and it was the idea that actually pushed me to make the financial planning practice really run without me. So I was trying to do this concurrently, but it was the extra push I needed to pull me out a little bit more and delegate a little bit more. So I can’t say it was perfect in the way you shared Dana Robinson here.

Dana Robinson:
Quick plug for my book, the King’s fly swatter. You can see it here behind me. If you’re watching this, I’ve got it in my hand. It’s a beautiful hardcover book, printed to make it giftable, something that you can share with a family member buy as a gift. So this latest book, it’s a fable about a person who has a really crappy job. Let’s just start there. This is a book that most people can relate to because we’ve all had crappy jobs. This is the story of Ubar, a servant in the court of a babylonian king who masters his boring, monotonous job and then learns to listen to the king, hearing him rule the kingdom while quietly swatting flies behind a cane.

Dana Robinson:
Eventually, Ubar becomes the wisest and most successful man in the kingdom. The story is fun and it’s easy to read, but it’s not mythology. It’s my story. And as I shared the idea with colleagues and friends, I learned that it was their story. And guess what? It’s your story if you’re at a job of any kind, one that you love, one that you hate, one that’s just enough to get by. This little book gives fresh perspective on how to leverage that job to get you something greater than a paycheck. The lessons in this parable are entrepreneurial lessons, but not what you might think from the current entrepreneurial zeitgeist. If you or someone you know are looking for a real pathway to entrepreneurship, here’s the secret.

Dana Robinson:
Your job is the way out of your job. It’s counterintuitive, but once you see how it works, you can’t unsee it. Learn the way of the fly swatter from the parable of Ubar and from the stories I share from my 30 year business journey. You can get a free copy of the King’s Fly Swatter by going to danarobinson.com. well, but to that point, you learned while you’re trying to do both, that you can’t, and that forces you to then say, all right, if I want to be entrepreneurial in this software thing or this startup or this venture, the thing that you call your day job, your business has to be something that’s capable of, you know, existing without you. So that’s whatever the catalyst is. It’s a truism for everybody. It will burn you out if you try to do the thing that you’ll call your profession, that’s full time operator, and this thing that you’re, that you’re jumping into.

Dana Robinson:
I’d like no more, if you don’t mind talking about that business. I’m entrepreneurial and always want to know what it is and a little bit about that journey and where you’re at, if you’re a year and a half into it, how it’s going.

Jenna Biancavilla:
I’d love to share. So, through the financial planning practice, I consistently saw a lot of women who were taken advantage of by predatory salespeople. And I really just thought it was the business I built. Everything I shared about my financial planning practice, it’s this safe place. We’re fiduciaries. We put our clients first. So I thought, this is what I built is a safe place where people get referred to when they’re taken advantage of. And then I started doing some digging, and I found specifically, one in four women will be the victim of a financial crime at some point in her lifetime.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And I kind of had this overwhelming, well, how do I scale pearl capital management? Big enough, fast enough to solve this problem in this country. And if anyone’s working in professional services, it is really stinking, hard to scale professional services. So, like you were sharing with a law firm, you can’t just go big, wide fast or you lose quality. Yeah, because you’re giving. There’s the ratio of person giving advice or giving professional. Yeah, professional advice to clients. And they hit capacity. Right.

Jenna Biancavilla:
They can do ten household, or 80 households, 100 households, and then they hit capacity, and then you need another person. So scaling is tough. And so it was. Okay, how do we do this with something that’s not regulations? Because regulations haven’t worked thus far. We’ve got the most regulated industry there is, and Bernie Madoff esque type advisors are still popping up everywhere, so the regulations aren’t working. I can’t scale service based fast enough to solve this problem. So inter technology idea where I know how to weed out all the bad actors. So it’s a vetting program for the financial planning community first, but we’re going to launch in some other expertise areas as well, because I realize it’s not just financial planners who can be bad.

Jenna Biancavilla:
So it’s a lot of technology that’ll do all of the vetting and the background checks and the active license checks and make sure there’s no complaints against them. So we know how to check all of that. And then they get live interviews with females because we’re connecting these experts specifically with female investors. And then it’s a matchmaking algorithm, so the female investors can come on, they can put in everything that they want, and they can get connected with someone who’s been fully vetted by us that they know they can trust. And that’s the tech service. It’s called savvy without an a. I tried to do the tech name, so it’s s v y, four letter word. That isn’t a normal english word.

Dana Robinson:
Love it. And is that.com? svvy.com.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Well, I’m going to say I would like to buy it. I shouldn’t say this on a podcast, because now someone’s going to buy it from me. It’s bsavvy.com. besvy.com. But we did trademark the name, so should be pretty useless to anyone else who buys it. But I think it’s over $100,000 for that. Savvy.com.

Dana Robinson:
Yes. Vvy.com. yeah, yeah, yeah. That. That you don’t need it. And if they, you know, they want to sell it for less and they’re listening to this, then they should reach out to Jenna and offer a better deal. You’re doing something good with this business, which is. Which is fantastic.

Dana Robinson:
So it’s a, you know, mission driven. And so far, I mean, you’re live. People can sign up, start using it right now. How much time did it take you in terms of your involvement? I’m always interested in the co founder, kind of, who’s got another business going on. And did you manage that without your dog starving, without the rest of your spinning plates falling off?

Jenna Biancavilla:
Well, luckily, I already had a successful business going, so I didn’t really need to worry about the funding as much as most startups, technology companies have to think of. And I really. I almost approached it like an investment, like a venture capital investment. How much money am I willing to throw at my idea and lose? Which is not how you’re supposed to approach investing in a technology company. But I’m an investor and that’s where I started. So I knew what I’d be willing to put in for development and feel okay if it didn’t work. I priced out developing the technology in the states versus overseas, and I am very adamant about not going overseas because I like building in America. But it was, I think, over $150,000 to build it in the states and they charged me $10,000 to build it in India.

Jenna Biancavilla:
So I built it in India. I regret all of it because we’re rebuilding it now in the states. But I learned a lot and it was really easy to work with the schedule because India time and our time never overlapped. So if I was working on the tech company, it was early morning, late evening, and never overlapped with my day job. So that worked for me in the Git MVP up and running stage.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Oh, my gosh. You get what you pay for.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, I’m with you, though. I’ve been involved with probably six businesses where the MVP was built overseas and mostly India. And the product has been very MVP ish. It works and it breaks in ways that you can easily fix while you’re testing the business idea. And I’ve had, I haven’t done this with any of my businesses because I’ve not had the capital to lose, but I have had clients that have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build here when they really don’t know quite exactly what it’s going to do. And you end up with so many smart people overthinking things that you never really get to that MVP. So you might be better off in the end to have done that way. But, but I agree that if you’re going to build a SaaS that is stable, that does everything that you expect it to do, you probably should be using developers who you can call in your own time zone, who you can call into meetings, have that your annual retreat and whatnot.

Dana Robinson:
Super interesting. And then that’s a business that for you would be a business that you get to a certain point and create an exit.

Jenna Biancavilla:
In theory. It is also a business that could just be a cash cow that we could keep. And there’s a pretty strong passion behind it. I shared earlier. I founded it with my sister. So my sister’s career is around technology. So the finance person and the tech person building a fintech company worked really well. She’s the one who had to deal with the developers more than I did, so.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Poor thing. So the passion and the sister. Sister founder, it sells really well. Yeah, I don’t know. We’ll see where it takes us. But I would love to sell it if we can get there. I also get really attached to my businesses, which I am, again, not taking my own advice. I tell my clients all the time, you need to find your identity that is outside of being business owner, so that you can not self sabotage your transaction as you’re going through the sales process.

Jenna Biancavilla:
If you don’t know who you are without your business, you’re really not going to go through that transaction. Smooth. In a smooth way. I’m sure you’ve seen that countless times. And then here I am saying that I fully identify with my businesses and love them.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. No, thank you. This is another shameless plug for the businesses I’m involved with. We are for the current fund, acquiring landscape companies, mostly from owners who are ready to retire. And they’re smaller, so there’s not a high demand for them. We think we have a platform that does well with keep preserving their legacy, their employees. But there is always a thing that you realize this person has done nothing but build this business for their life. It is tied to their identity.

Dana Robinson:
They aren’t sure what it means to live without that business and that role. And so we do have to, with each transaction, survive through somebody’s kind of existential crisis. And that getting through that takes some empathy. And I’m not sure a larger upmarket private equity shops have that because they’re run by spreadsheets and smart people that know a lot more things that I don’t even know what I don’t know that they know. But, yeah, that identity crisis, if you’re listening to this, you’re going to sell your business, start separating that ego and that identity from your role early, and you could still love the business, Jenna, you can’t fall in love with your role in that business, because that business, if you give birth to it and you get it to the place where it has life without you, then you’ve done something much greater than add another accomplishment to your resume. Right? You’ve done something. You give birth to a business that goes on and lives without you and accomplishes all of that mission at scale. That’s much bigger thing to be proud of than holding on to it because it’s yours.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Small percentage of businesses that actually have a successful exit, that it’s probably something to be more proud of that you did it, that you did the whole you won the business game, right? You don’t have an exit. Did you win?

Dana Robinson:
Right? Yeah. There’s very few businesses where you know whether you won unless you exit. Well, the, the third thing said you that you’ve got is our courses or a course. And I want to take an opportunity for you to talk about what the course is, but also teach us the things that you can, that you know without giving us the entire course in one podcast. But I’d love to start with the course itself and how you came about doing it.

Jenna Biancavilla:
The course came from just a lot of demand. A lot of people who wanted the same information on repeat maybe didn’t hit the right threshold to be a good client to work with us, or maybe just weren’t there quite yet to want to hire individual advice. But it was next level, it’s more advanced. There’s a lot of beginner financial literacy all over the Internet, but once you get through all of the beginner content and you wanted something a little more advanced, all you had was salespeople hire me to get the next level, the more advanced level. So I thought, well, there’s a hole in the market, I will just put more advanced content out there and sell it as a course. I didn’t do it alone, though. I brought in ten different industry experts and kind of, it felt more kind of like podcast style ish. So each different course, or I guess class segment, I don’t know what they’re called, each segment.

Jenna Biancavilla:
In the overall course, I was bringing in different experts, so I did bring in a couple different attorneys. So we went deep into estate planning with an estate planning attorney. And how does this connect into your financial plan? And then we went deep into tax planning with a tax specialist. We did talk a lot about business tax and this, because that’s where a lot of the tax savings can be, is for business owners. And then we connected. How does this connect to your financial plan? And so I pulled all of these different components that always feel really segmented and different and apart and pulled it all together in this holistic, all these things are intertwined approach, which usually people don’t get it intertwined, they get it segmented from all these different professionals, and they don’t know how it all connects together. And all these professionals expect you to be the CFO and be the hub and pull it all together, when usually that person is way too busy to try to figure out how to connect all of that jargon. So that was the idea, was doing something a little bit more advanced, and it’s a lot bigger than me because I brought in a lot of other people, people to help put it together.

Dana Robinson:
And how do you communicate. Is that on a platform like udemy? How do I go get a hold of your course?

Jenna Biancavilla:
So you would go to elevateyourwealth today is the URL. It is down right now, but I’ll put it back live. We had a couple things that we were working on in Kajabi. So Kajabi is the platform that it’s sitting on, which is pretty popular online course platform. So we just use what works. Really don’t like reinventing the wheel.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah, clearly. Yeah. I’ve tried to use kajabi. It’s too complicated for me. It’s really got, you know, got too many marketing bells and whistles that you have to hire someone to show you how to use it. But. But, yes. So let’s just repeat it, and then we’ll put it in the show notes.

Dana Robinson:
Elevate your wealth today, Dot. Today. I’m gonna put it here for myself so that we’re done. Sorry, everybody. I’m typing this into my computer so that I can look at it when we’re done. So aside from your kajabi bugs, you’re gonna keep that live so that people can. Can get in, pay a fee, and learn from almost a dozen experts?

Jenna Biancavilla:
Yeah. And I’ll see if I can get a discount code for you to put in the show notes for the people listening today.

Dana Robinson:
Okay. That’d be great. Let’s now move you. We’re talking about you teaching and gathering other people to teach. What are the top things that you think are within your expertise, that are important things you think that are commonly misunderstood or that people don’t know that sort of. You’re like, all right, like you said, you created this course because you kept having the same questions, like, play this on repeat. Clearly, it’s a big course full of a lot of materials, so I don’t need you to repeat all that. But if you can indulge me a little in the.

Dana Robinson:
Like, I’m new, I walk in, and I’m like the normal client walking in your office and plop down, and I’m ready for an advisor. What are the things that you think I don’t know that most. That most people most commonly don’t know that you can teach us?

Jenna Biancavilla:
Big thing that people aren’t prepared for or aware of is. So we have this idea that we just put as much money as we can into the 401K or the IRA or whatever tax deferred retirement plan as we can, and then when we’re in retirement, we’re in a lower tax bracket. We figure it out there. And that’s kind of most working people’s retirement plan is fund the retirement plan and figure it out later. The retirement plan you’re deferring tax on for most of them, unless you’re doing a Roth version. But for most people, they don’t want to pay more in taxes. Their accountant tells them, use this plan to pay less in taxes. And that’s the basis of the retirement strategy.

Jenna Biancavilla:
What people don’t know is when you get to your early seventies, the government requires, requires you to take money out of your retirement plans at a percentage. It’s called RMD, required minimum distribution. And this, along with maybe some other recurring income you might have. If you have a rental property or you have a business that’s paying residual income that you don’t have to actively work in, or if you have Social Security or you have pension, whatever it is, plus this RMD that you’re forced to take. A lot of retirees get unintentionally forced into high tax brackets, sometimes the highest tax bracket they’ve ever been in in their life, and they go, well, this wasn’t the plan. Why did I defer taxes only to pay the highest tax bracket I’ve ever paid in my life? It’s this huge problem that people get blindsided by. If you don’t have an active plan to make sure you’re getting the money out of that deferred tax retirement plan ahead of RMD age. So that’s a big tax planning conversation we have with our retirees.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And there’s this sweet spot between sell the business, retire from working, intentionally pay tax on that money before you’re forced to pay tax on huge chunks of that money. That’s a planning focus most people aren’t aware of.

Dana Robinson:
And if you have a Roth and you don’t, then you don’t because it’s been post tax contributions. It only applies to your 401 ks, rollovers, and traditional iras.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Correct?

Dana Robinson:
Super. I was today years old when I had to think about required minimum distributions. And that may matter for a lot of our listeners that have not thought about. You start drawing at 65 and by 70 have to have the RMD kick in so you only have a five year window in which. Anyway, I don’t want to do the math on air, but the obviously great opportunity for a tax planning advisor. Let me interject a question for you. I recently had a tax lawyer in a matter complicating the heck out of everything. And then another an M and a lawyer said, stop talking to tax lawyers, they’re not thinking utilitarian with what they do.

Dana Robinson:
They’re thinking of risk. And an accountant who’s just a tax accountant actually gave much more practical advice. Someone’s, you know, doing their. Doing their planning. They come to you. You’re a. You’re an investment advisor. So much of this is tax related.

Dana Robinson:
Like, what’s the avatar, what’s the professional that you send people to for me when I’m trying to figure out some of this estate planning?

Jenna Biancavilla:
So I bringing tax future tax projections in house, because we continued to search high and low for cpas that would do forward thinking tax planning. They’re few and far between. And so when I finally found one, if you are one, call me, please. But when I finally found them, I would send them all of my clients and say, I found one. Here you go. And then I’d fill them up. They weren’t built to scale. And then they’d say, I’m not taking more clients, Jenna, thank you, but don’t send anyone my way.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And it was this. This happened to me on repeat several times. And so far, too many cpas are just. I call it looking through the review mirror.

Dana Robinson:
Right.

Jenna Biancavilla:
They’re just looking at what already happened. I’ll file your taxes based on what happened. And we’re planning for someone’s future, so we want to talk about what’s happening in the future. As I said, you know, forward casting. We know RmD’s are happening. How can we do tax strategies ahead of that to not get killed in taxes and retirement age? And so I just started doing the projections in house. So we brought that tax. Financial planning.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Tax planning. I call it tax planning in house. We write out all those multi year, like, 40 year projections, or usually they’re multi generational projections. How do we get money to the next generation with not having to pay too much in estate taxes if someone’s subject to that? And then we just hand it to the CPA and say, you’re welcome. We did your job for you. And then they file the taxes based on our plan. So that’s how I got around it. I would love to have more of those professionals, but they’re hard to find.

Dana Robinson:
Got it. So your advisory practice then has that person, if someone comes to you and says, yeah, I’m going to have you manage some wealth, but I need all kinds of advice around it. You’re starting to collect the pieces to enable your practice to deliver that.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Yeah. And we do have some third party people sometimes that we’ll bring in. So if we’re selling a business for a multiple and we need to maybe work into some charitable remainder trust or something that’s going to mitigate the tax that’s going to be hit all at once. We’ll bring in specialists in specific areas if we’re looking at certain trusts, but we do have some hourly consultants that are not attorneys, that are not paid. If they sell the trust, they’re just paid to kind of consult and talk about the tax mitigation planning, which usually is a lot more beneficial for the client than being sold something.

Dana Robinson:
Absolutely. Yeah. So they’re just paying consulting fees to help understand the options, see if they can deploy some of that as a plan, ramping up to their exit, and then they’re deferring taxes on some of their exit with some of the advice they’re getting.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Yeah, that’s the goal. And for anyone who wants to try to defer tax on some of the exit money, you got to plan this probably six months plus in advance. You can’t come to me after you sold the business and say, I don’t want to fail this tax. That one doesn’t work. So just making sure people know that that plan needs to happen in advance.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. I will confirm that no one should be selling a business that they haven’t gotten professional advice on six to twelve months beforehand. If you can give yourself 18 months, that gives you plenty of time to talk to all of these advisors and take what might be actions over the course of two tax periods as well.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Well, let me clarify. I love my business owners to start thinking about their exit at least five years out. Not thinking about it, planning it. Five years is a golden time frame to exit in a very good way. I don’t like scrambling. I’m sure you know that the six month number I threw out was, please don’t come to me with, like, three days before closing. But if you. The more time you can have planning your exit, probably the better multiple you’ll get.

Jenna Biancavilla:
And you probably can speak to that more than I can.

Dana Robinson:
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, it gives you. It gives your advisors time to help you realign your p and l and balance sheet into GAAP format, you know, years in advance. Then you have three years of financial that you can deliver that are not kind of a hokie recasting with lots of ad backs if you’ve actually just built your system. I talked to an accountant once about even a really small business that I was involved with, and I said, when should we start doing gap style accounting? He said, build your quickbooks on gap, like build your chart of accounts, your p and l, your balance sheet, build it on GAAP, and then pay me at the end of the year to do your tax returns, which where we have to do a lot of, you know, sort of recast. So then you’re recasting of all your taxes, but your books are always in order to deliver and due diligence to a potential buyer. I thought that was a really interesting advice.

Dana Robinson:
And of course, you’re doing that for three to five years. Then you’re not going to have people challenging your accounting because you’ll have already been doing it according to the principles that they used to calculate EBITDA, which is the value. You know, anchor.

Jenna Biancavilla:
For most transactions, that’s usually the first person I recommend someone outsource to is get your bookkeeper. If you’re fully solo, I think bookkeeper is the first person you hire. And it’s not that much. They don’t need to be full time in house, just third party bookkeeper. Usually you can get your tax preparer to be your bookkeeper as well. So it’s all the same. Person knows how to do it all together. But that’s my favorite first outsource for a new business owner.

Dana Robinson:
I love that. It’s great advice. Well, keeping your teacher hat on. As we get toward the end of the podcast, other teachable moments, things that you think based on what you’ve gained as an expert and as an advisor, without giving us any investment advice, any other important takeaways that you can leave with my guests?

Jenna Biancavilla:
Oh, well, because we’re talking to business owners, I would say the unexpected is what usually blindsides most business owners. We love to put our money and our resources right back into our business. We know our ROI. If we throw these dollars at marketing, we know what we get out of it. And it’s. It’s really easy to take that extra income and throw it right back in. And it’s what you can’t see that blindsides you. And I’ve seen it for countless businesses.

Jenna Biancavilla:
I’m sure you saw it for countless businesses. No one saw a global pandemic coming. It’s the thing you just can’t predict that comes out of nowhere. And so from a planning for the human, the human business owner, not the business, but the human. Take some money off the table for yourself. Diversify your investments. Your business is one of your investments. It shouldn’t be your only investment.

Jenna Biancavilla:
So make sure you’re paying yourself, taking some money off the table, putting it somewhere else, even if it’s a different business or real estate, you don’t have to be putting in stocks. You don’t have to hire someone like me, but get it out of the business. Most business owners hate that advice, but it’s important to pay yourself and take money out of the business.

Dana Robinson:
Yep. Yep. I’ll second that. I think, I think especially for a business owner that’s going, is running their business for most of their, their kind of adult career and are making money that they can sort of split between growth and diversification. Almost every business owner that I know that actually has a retirement, they get a pop when they sell the business. But the real estate that they’ve bought and the, and sort of the investments that they have under management are really important because then they’re really ready for whatever that number is. The sale happens. They have these other assets that have been part of sort of this well rounded estate, I guess, for lack of a better word.

Dana Robinson:
And people like Jenna can advise on a bunch of that investment stuff. Thanks, Jenna. That was really good advice. Business owners and exit plan listeners. If you want to reach out to Jenna, she is on LinkedIn, as every professional in the world is. It’s J E n n A, Bianca. B I n c A v I l l A, Biancavilla. What’s the website where people can get.

Jenna Biancavilla:
More information about you, Jenna, pearlcapitalmanagement.com is our financial planning website. But you know what? Grab me on LinkedIn. We’re pretty active on LinkedIn. And, and I’m lucky to have a long last name because I’m the only one. So you look at my name, you’ll find me pretty fast.

Dana Robinson:
All right, Jenna, everybody. Remember, you can always reach out to me. Hello@danarobinson.com. Thanks for listening to the exit plan. Thanks for coming on, Jenna.

Jenna Biancavilla:
Thank you for having me.

Dana Robinson:
Thanks for joining me on this episode of the Exit Plan podcast. I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to hit me up with questions or comments by emailing me at hello@danrobinson.com or leave comments and questions by calling 858-252-7785 call 858-252-7785 and leave a message.