On today's episode of Gathering the Kings. Right. There's some cool things that we're doing for clients who are entrepreneurs who are growing their businesses now. Creating, you know, accruing significant wealth, but they're just focused on growing the wealth. I get it. But let's do something now to protect it for future generations. And it's asset protected. It's protected from creditors. It's a beautiful thing.
And the thing that I see about law firms generally is that they're glorified silos of small businesses where each partner has their own team and their own group of, clients Even a law firm needs a vision, and you gotta have values to back it up. You know, good habits lead to good results. What's up everybody? I'm Chaz Wolfe gathering the king's podcast coming to you today. With, you know, what might some people might consider this a boring business, but I cannot tell you how juiced up. I know.
I know. How juiced up this topic gets me, but Wayne Zelle is on the king stage today. My brother, Wayne. How are you? Thank you. Thank you, Chaz, for having me on the show today. I really appreciate it. Good. Well, tell us what kind of business that you have because I've already introduced you as a boring business, but tell us what it is because we gotta get into it because I'm jacked. You know, I got 2 businesses. 1 is a law firm.
That's boring, but it's not really boring because it's really exciting. Some of the things we do for our clients Yeah. And then I also have a business that is an exit planning business. The law firm is called Zelle law, zellelaw.com with 3 l's in the middle, and a aspire to exit is our new exit planning business, which spun out from the creation of my book, your multimillion dollar exit. I'm really excited about that as well.
Yeah. Well, we're gonna have to figure out what's in the book here and tell us where you can get where we can get it here, shortly, but the the boring piece about what you do that's so exciting to me is that I am, like, so excited about my legacy. And not like Chaz Wolfe, like my name. Like, I couldn't care less about that. I'll be forgotten here soon.
But from a perspective of what I can pass on, knowledge, and wealth is I'm just so excited about what my children, my grandchildren, and the future generations can can obtain and then keep flowing knowledge and wealth. And so you help people do this. And so I wanna pull out all the nuggets that you've got. And then on top of that, maybe we can point people in the right direction on how maybe they can work with you if that makes sense for Chaz.
Before we do this, the semantic piece, tell me, you've been doing this for a long time. Why are you still doing it? Why does it get you fired up? Cause you said it's boring, but it's not. But, like, what's the deeper part in there for Wayne? You know, as an estate planner, we do a lot of psychology. We're we're representing people and talking to them about their innermost fears and their greatest desires in terms of how they wanna pass on their legacy to their kids. Right?
Yeah. So I've been doing this long enough, so I've seen pretty much everything under the sun. And that started back in 1980 working in the area of estate planning, but I also do business planning. And the beauty of this is you know, I'll I'll give you a quick story. And around 2002, I learned that I had prostate cancer at the age of forty three. I was a young guy and had 4 kids. My wife was at home at that time with the kids. We had a mortgage.
And I was thinking, you know, what am I gonna do with the rest of my you go through something like that, you think, what are you gonna do? You're gonna be just billing hours as an attorney. Is that all you care about working for a big law firm? And Chaz was with a big law firm? And I I really sat down and I thought, what do I get the most pleasure out of it? And the most pleasure I get is helping people. So I created this tagline for the business that we still use today.
It's helping clients realize their personal dreams of wealth and freedom. And wealth and freedom mean lots of different things to a lot of different people. That's right. But it was it was that moment it was revelatory. It was that moment that I sort of went, this is why I do what I do. I do it to help people. I'm always giving myself and giving back We get back to the community. We get back to our clients. It's about helping people.
And that juices me up every day, even at my age today, I love doing what I do because I get to help people who want to be helped, who need help, who need to be helped. Yeah. That's that's really the the the origin of it, I think, today. Well, I I wanna I wanna tune your horn for just a half second here.
We just got we just met, but what what I've already learned about you, even in our little pre few minutes here before we hit the record button, is that everything that you get to help other people do you're super disciplined and focused doing it yourself. Because almost one of the first things that you said out of your mouth was that I'm excited about what I'm doing with my wife right now as far as us planning out the rest of our existence, our years together, and what that looks like.
And and so out of the heart, the abundance flows, or it's like, you know, like, you what you're doing for yourself and what you're doing for you and your Wolfe, planning the estate, the the not so much the exit per se, but, like, all the things. You know? Probably exit, we are gonna exit. Right? We all have to exit at some time either respectively or unexpectedly. That's right.
You know, the best best decision I ever made in my whole career of 43 years of doing this was to bring my wife on board as our chief operating officer, but more importantly, she's she's loving and handling a lot of the marketing of what we do. And what we do is educational marketing. We're teaching people constantly about ways that they can preserve their wealth, save money, avoid taxes, and protect their assets from creditors.
And so all of a sudden in the last year or so, since she's been focused on that with our marketing director, things have sort of started to spiral upward and skyrocket in the book has obviously helped Chaz. And I it's just giving me a lot of energy to do what I do. So best decision bringing in Lori into the business to help me do what I do and focus on what I do. So she can help me do what I do better. Yeah. Yeah. It's been awesome.
There's a lot of practicality to Chaz, wife or no wife in that position, that position being filled is a huge piece to to building a great business. And so maybe we'll get into that. I wanna know from, you know, kinda going back to the, you know, tax planning. You're, like, talking about, you know, setting things up to where things really can not only operate well, but then you can protect it. What do you feel like, you know, is, you know, I don't know.
Like, I I wanna start I wanna start baseline. Right? Someone is listening right now who maybe they've just started their business. They're in year 1. We've got people that listen that do 100 of 1,000,000. And so we're gonna get to that here in a second, but for the guy or gal listening right now, that's super baseline, and they just started the LLC. They're in their 1st year. They're under 500,000.
What should they be thinking from a wealth freedom perspective, like business and a state and or maybe even exit? Good question. I mean, part of all of this relates to financial planning, as well as a state planning. Right?
So I'm I'm not a financial planner, although I teach one of the financial planning courses at a local university at George Mason University, The way that I envision this is that you've gotta have a financial plan for yourself, for your family, If you have employees, you've got a plan for their well-being as well. And if you really care about your business, you're going to care about your employees.
If you care about your employees, you have to set up a structure so that they can start saving money for their future as well. So it's planning for the exit. You always have to start at the beginning to plan for the exit. Stephen Covey said it in his book, 7 ways. You've gotta have a plan in place now. Yeah. That may mean setting aside a $1000 a month, $10,000 a month. Into savings so that if something does happen to you, you can take care of yourself in the short run. Right.
Then it's also thinking that, well, I need insurance. I need life insurance. I may need disability insurance to protect myself. Again, I don't sell these products for clients. I have others that I bring in and refer to them to do that. But it's really important to think about this as a risk management exercise. So you're managing against the risk of some kind of early demise, early disability, And then planning for the future, what do I want out of this business that I'm building in the future?
And it starts with structuring the business correctly from the very get go. It's easy to set up an LLC. You can do that in any state online in a second. Yep. That's not the issue. It's how do I set this up for tax purposes? Yeah. How do I set this up to take care of my employees and myself and my family. Yeah. And how do I incentivize people? To stay with me as I grow this down the line. Because it may not just be me.
It may be others that are gonna be absolutely critical to the success an ultimate exit of this business. So, yeah, there's a lot of factors that go into it, and it's not just tax planning. It's not just a state planning. It's planning the business correctly too, so that when you do have the ultimate exit, It's done in a way that you've maximized the value of what you've been trying to build.
So along the way, there's some value drivers that you could enhance that you may not be aware of or not not focused on Right. That an exit planner like me that could come in and basically show you what the value drivers are in your business, or take what you've told me about the value of your business articulate it in current terms. What is the value of the business today? How do we measure it? That's part of the book.
And then how do we grow that value to the point where you can exit significantly and substantially and successfully or transition it to your family, transition it to your key employees. Whatever the exit strategy is, you should have one. Yeah. And you should be thinking about it in the back of your mind from the very beginning. How does one do that? I mean, I love this extra size of starting with the end in mind and working backwards. This reverse engineer effect, but but it's also a skill set.
It's like, this is real. Like, you have to be able to go there and then work backwards. And so for for some, that's not as natural for them. And it doesn't mean that they're any less intelligent. It just means that their brain works different. And so what's the easiest way to sit for a second? Think about the end in mind and then work backwards like what you're talking about. For for the guy got listening right now that's still kinda in in the phase of like, I'm just getting this thing.
I don't even know what it's gonna be. How do I even know? Know what I mean? You know, I've I'll I'll give you another quick story. My my son-in-law is starting up a business and he he's got a vision. It's gonna happen. You can tell that he's gonna be successful. So, I'm guiding him along on that on that, journey. It's it's it's really exciting for me because I'm watching him you know, deal with other advisors, get advice from different people, and start to grow what he's got the vision to grow.
Yeah. But I'm also helping him in the short run to focus on the things that he may not have thought about because he's focusing on growing this business to make it a multimillion dollar business and sell it. You also have to focus on your family. You gotta make sure that you've got protection today. Yeah. So part of it is involving a financial planner or some type of financial plan so that if something happens to you now, You've got a flow of assets and income. Right.
Chaz can take care of your family if you can't do it yourself. So there's the unexpected And then how do I grow this successfully over time? What are the components that I need to grow this business successfully And how do I exit at the maximum value if I wanna exit, or how do I make this into a legacy business where I could generate cash flow Yeah. For my family, even into retirement and beyond.
Yeah. Yeah. So if something happens to me, the the family still owns it, there's a lot of family owned businesses in the country. That do survive. Most don't, from one generation to the next, the statistic is 75% will fail after the 1st generation. After the 2nd generation, another 50%. So you're down to, like, 10 to 12%. Yep. And it just goes on from there. So how do you plan so that it can succeed.
And, you know, war instead of working in the business all the time, should be setting aside time periodically with your adviser to work on the business. And part of those Chaz advisory team is financial planner. Maybe your CPA that is going to help you with the income tax planning that you need to have on an annual basis and how do I minimize those taxes legally and effectively going forward, you need an estate planner involved.
You need a business planner involved or a business exit planner involved. Especially if you are starting to focus on the exit, but you should be focused on the exit from the beginning. And, you know, talking to other people that might be able to help you and your business HR executives, recruiters, valuation, people, financial people that have expertise in growing, building, and selling businesses. Your banker, you gotta have a relationship with them.
You should be building relationships with all these different disciplines so that you have a team, a rock star team available to you to help you sell or transition the business in the way that you want to later on. Yeah. I think you built up this, you know, awesome monstrosity of of information that you just gave to us as far like, the path, which I love. But but you started with your son-in-law saying he had a vision So I want you to talk about that just for half second because you're right.
There is the first thing, and we're absolutely in agreement on that. The rest of it, the certainty of planning for the future. Right? You said, like, he knows it's gonna be multimillion. He knows he's gonna exit. He, like, he's certain. You can tell even just in hearing you talk about him, Chaz he's certain because he's rubbed up. But having the vision and being certain or having a burning desire as thinking Grish talks about, is kinda like that first. Like, I gotta be here.
So there's people listening right now. They're just like, I don't I don't know if I'm gonna be doing this business in the next 12 months, 36 months. I don't know. I just I'm just doing it to make money. Would you encourage them to do something? There's a great book that was written by Gina Wickman Traction. You probably have talked about it on your show. I love the book. Oh, yeah. We used EOS entrepreneur operating system here.
And, you know, I've worked in, gosh, almost a dozen different firms over my career moving around looking for the right place. And what I realized was the best place was here. With me because I had a vision of what I wanted to do. Yeah. And I have a vision, and I'm executing on it finally.
And the the vision is to grow something that is going to be there for our clients after I'm gone so that there are like minded individuals servicing those clients, taking care of them, giving, you know, making sure their needs are met. Their legacies are being passed on. So you gotta have a vision, and the vision sort of, you know, dovetails with having an exit plan. Right. You gotta have a a vision to have an exit plan.
And then you have to have values that you're inculcating into your business. Every business needs Chaz. The the thing that I see about law firms generally is that there's, you know, glorified silos, small businesses where each partner has their own team and their own group of, clients.
And in late in late years, the big firms just basically move one group of lawyers to another firm to another firm, you know, back to another And it and it there's a lot of lack of vision as to where these firms are going. Well Sure. Yeah. Even a law firm needs a vision. Our exit planning firm has a vision and and you gotta have values to back it up. And then from the values and the vision, flow your goals. Your business goals Chaz it do I wanna sell this business in 10 years?
If I do, what do I need to get there and edit what value? And then backing it up into a strategy that is annual, maybe over 3 years, and then quarterly. And then monthly and weekly and daily, what are the things that I need to do on an ongoing basis to build the value that I won at the end of that 10 year period. Yeah. Chaz, you know, I thought it was the best articulation of that strategy was in the, traction book. But I've seen it in a lot of different books. Oh, yeah. Good to grade.
You know, there's a lot of great books out there. Yeah. But you've gotta you've gotta incorporate that into your daily living. And, and how you approach every day. Making your bed is one of the first things you should be doing every day. You know, good habits lead to good results. That's right. You were you just, you know, spun off on exactly where I was gonna bring you back to because all of the, you know, planning, I mean, I love the language.
Like, I'm all in I would plan all day long every day if if I could because I love being in that space. It's so creative and so energizing for me. But at the same time, so we use a we use a company called Working Genius as well. And so in that, you know, high, you know, ideation skill set where where it's invention, but then I'm all the way down to the bottom tenacity as well. It's like, no. Like, let's plan but then, like, time to go. Let's let's get it done. Let's let's, like, achieve things.
And so everything that you just said is like, hey. Let's we can talk about it. And that's cool. Chaz feels good. But then, like, what are we doing today? Tomorrow, this week, this month, this quarter, this year, because that's actually how things get done is the discipline that you mentioned just, you know, 5 or 10 minutes ago, you're like, you know, it really comes down to the discipline of exit planning, right, or a state planning. Well, you know, it's funny.
I when I was, early in college, I came I was driving home with my dad from school, and he asked me what I was gonna major in. And I said, Well, I'm thinking music and drama because I was, you know, I used to do shows and, sing a lot and wrote a lot of music and I was just that was my passion. Right? Yeah. Still is my passion. But and he he he was quiet for a second, and he said, well, so how are you gonna pay for school? I said, what do you mean? How am I gonna pay for this?
Good question, Dan. How are you gonna pay for this? Why do you ask that? He said he said, because I'm not gonna be able to subsidize you to go into a profession where, you know, maybe 1% of the people succeed And they it's usually a a matter of lucky breaks because there are a lot of talented people out there, and I'm not saying you're not talented. You're a talented guy. But there's no way that, I'm gonna be comfortable with you doing that. I said, well, what am I gonna do?
He says you're gonna enroll in the commerce school at the University of Virginia and you're gonna, you know, major in business. I was like, man, I'm a right brain person I'm create I'm the visionary. I create I think out of the box, and he wants me to study accounting. Are you serious? And so it initially, very tough. Yeah. Same thing happened after I got out of school. I majored in a county and did very well, but it was a struggle at first because I had to take the right brain and calm it down.
Yeah. Start focusing on the left brain where it's details, analytics. Yeah. I went to law school after I worked as a CPA tax tax accountant for a couple of years because I felt like I needed some better skills in analyzing and writing. Got to law school, and I was like, oh, man, these are all English and history majors, and they all know how to write. I didn't really know how to write, except creatively, you know, creative poetry music, things like that. I learned how to write.
I learned how to write well. And I ended up going from not doing so well in my 1st year in law school to getting an award in my last year. Wow. Law school for success. And again, it was shifting the right brain preference to the left brain. And to this day, I have to go back and forth from the creativity, providing creative solutions, creative ways to solve problems for clients, to getting into the details to the nth degree to make sure that the clients are absolutely protected.
Yeah. And what we're saying in these documents that we create for them It may sound like legally is to you, but it is really important stuff. Yeah. And so you have to take that importance to the nth degree when you're doing what we do. At least on the legal side. And the same thing for anything else that you do in life. You gotta be able to focus on the details to some degree. Hopefully, you've got people that you can delegate to to do that even better than you do. Right.
And then you wanna find people that are better than you to succeed to you so that you can feel comfortable that your clients are being taken care of. Chaz everybody's being handled with due care. Absolutely. The the last question I wanna ask you here, kind of, in this thinking ahead, maybe I'm still a new business owner, is, you know, this I mean, well, you just gave a really, really keen picture in my eye of the importance of this language.
And there's a lot of younger business owners, not age wise, but 10 year wise. I remember being, you know, 10, 12 years ago, starting businesses and going like, okay. Fine. Like like, just the documents, like, just the the the legal stuff. You know? But some of those things have come to pass already where, like, that document I needed to use it. And for what it was designed for. It wasn't just like, oh, this is nice. Let's refresh.
Like, it was like, no. Like, I'm in a situation, and I need to reference the actual document And this is now going to be the way that either things are handled, whether it be in court or not or whatever. And so the the weight of what you just said of, these things actually matter How does that person again, thinking that they they haven't really experienced anything probably too crazy yet, too heavy, too negative. How does that person think ahead?
You've already gonna give us that, but with the weight of, no, like, the language matters. It all matters because there's going to be a time where you go to court. Someone sues you, you know, like, something happens, like, where the the The importance of it actually matters. You know, that's a good question. My my philosophy on representing clients as a lawyer and also as an exit planner is first keep people out of court.
Figure out the best way to keep everybody out of court, you know, whether it's in an estate planning document or whether it's in a contract that we're drafting for a business. Right. How do we protect the client and keep them protected in the event of a dispute And if there is a dispute and invariably there will be yep. How do we handle that dispute? How do we manage the dispute in a way that's in the best interest of the client?
And so every client's different and some people are willing to fight it out in court, and they're willing to be ambiguous in their contract. And nebulus in terms of the language, and they instruct us to do that. They don't want a 15 page contract. They want a 2 page contract. Shorten it. Make it two pages and say, we can't. Just be aware of the risks of doing that. So it's a risk allocation risk analysis that everybody's gotta go through. And what's the most important thing?
When you're starting up your business, getting contracts, getting business in the door, selling product. However, you have to do it. Sometimes you're gonna have to sign the vendor's contract that does things that you didn't anticipate when you signed. Like, did you give away the intellectual property that you created in your business? Oh my goodness.
Yeah. I have a a a famous celebrity chef that is a client who signed a contract early on to start up a restaurant And in that celebrity chef contract, he gave away the intellectual property to to all his recipes and all his, you know, intellectual property going forward. We contacted, you know, the other party and said, we're not gonna honor Chaz, first of all, but secondly, let's work out a reasonable compromise. Here in terms of what was originally intended.
Cause this guy was just getting into business, and he just signed anything he could because he wanted to get into business right away. Right. You don't need to do that. You need to spend a little bit of money be penny wise and pound foolish is what happens if you shortcut everything. You pull documents off the internet.
You have legal Zoom draft the documents for you, or you have somebody that's inexperienced do something for a very low cost because they quoted you a fee that's a fraction of what somebody else would charge. You get what you pay for in this world. And so, you know, the question is, what can you afford within your budget and how do you protect yourself to the maximum extent? And so, I always say to bit and then we represent a lot of startups. I've represented thousands of startups over my career.
Just be careful when you're starting up the business. If you're doing it with a partner, be careful that you've sort of anticipated what might go wrong down the road. Let's not talk about it too much, but Let's plan for that in our original documentation. Yeah. And if a lot of my clients will say, I trust him, He's my best friend. I'm not worried about it. Okay. Fine. You, you know, you've been warned.
The things happened between friends Chaz well as people who don't know each other that well when you're combining talents and businesses. Chaz if what if? I know the what ifs that's what you want as somebody who can ask what if to make sure that you're thinking through the issue all the way through before you, ma'am, sort of pull the trigger and sign the con track and sign the agreement and do whatever it is that you've gotta do to get this business up and operating as fast as possible.
Hey, Kings and Queens. Chaz Wolfe. I wanna talk to you about something that's super important to me. We put a lot of time and effort. We, meaning myself and my team, into this podcast into the content that goes out every single day. And if you have been getting any sort of value or insight from this, we want it to be able to reach other business owners too. So we would love if you would like, comment, share, leave a review, post, share again, all of the things.
On social media, on all the different platforms, or even on the podcast mediums of Apple and Spotify. We would love to be able to get our content into more hands, more entrepreneurs so they can grow their business as quick as possible. Together, we are building a community of like minded entrepreneurs who are committed to growing their businesses to new heights. So let's do this. Let's help each other. Let's help each other grow. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a I'm hearing poise in your answer.
I'm hearing, like, just a, like, an understanding of timeline and that, yes, you wanna hurry up and get it done, but there might be some prudence necessary to just make sure things are good. You don't need to be, you know, go spend a ton, but you need to be aware of that, you know, there are certain things you might just wanna make sure that that are right. Now, let's fast forward to some of the listeners that, you know, they're doing millions, maybe even 100 of millions.
Give us, I mean, because I know you got clients that are doing 1,000,000, 100 of 1,000,000,000, you know, the whole deal. So Yep. Give us something that they've either, I I'm gonna go kinda far fess here. Like, something they've never heard before, but something that is that should be in their estate plan that you know probably isn't. What's that one juicy piece that's missing? Here's a good one.
It's it's one that's used by a lot of high level estate planners and one that I've used and we're using currently. Let's say you're starting up a fund, an investment fund. A hedge fund, and you're doing it legally, and you've got a great advisor who's helping you build this fund you're taking in outside money and the thing is growing. I was, you know, talking to a a young guy just a few minutes ago. I think I mentioned that he he wants to build a hedge fund.
Well, how do we plan for the ultimate success of that Right. And minimize the impact on his family if something happens to him or he just passes away at the normal time. Right. If this thing grows to $250,000,000 and we haven't done any estate planning to that point, Right. The family is going to suffer immeasurably because on death, from a federal perspective, at that level, you're paying a tax at death of 40%.
So a $100,000,000 of wealth will go immediately out the door to the internal revenue service. Wow. And, you know, as much as I look like our government and I feel that there's a reason for having taxes. That's right. It bothers me when we have to pay that much in taxes to the IRS. Yeah. So we come up with structures. One structure that we use is something known as a derivative strategy. It sounds really complicated.
It is kinda complicated, but it's basically you could sell an option to a trust that you've created for your family that might last for generations. Known as a generation skipping transfer tax exempt trust, also known as a dynasty trust. Lots of different names for that. Depending on how we structure the trust. But you could sell an option to transfer the upside in your business or your investment. To the trust.
And it costs a fraction of what the actual interest would be worth because it's simply an option, if you know how options work in the real market. And so you're selling it, and the trust has to have enough funding to pay for the option. And sometimes, it'll pay a little bit in cash, but mostly give back a note, a promissory note And this trust might be treated as your trust for income tax purposes, but your family's trust for a state tax purposes. So it's out of your estate.
So you're transferring upside into the trust and you are responsible for paying the taxes on the future wealth accretion, and you're thinking, why would I do that? Because if your wealth is that high, you can burn down the size of your estate in a tax burn. You're paying the income tax for the trust. Yeah. And all the assets inside the trust, including the upside of that option or whatever structure we used. Is growing a state and gift tax free outside of your estate at a rate of 40%.
Yeah. Per generation. Yeah. Yeah. So each generation that you're skipping, you're saving 40% And so we've done this for 100 of clients over the years. And we've got a lot of clients in tow that we're trying to bring in, but they're like, I'm just focused on growing my business. I wanna hit a 1,000,000,000. Okay. Fine. Let's get something out before it goes up to 250,000,000 or even a 100 or even 30,000,000.
Let's move something out today into trust for your spouse and your kids that's still outside of both of your states when you die and may skip generations for generation to generation. Yeah. So the option derivative strategy is one that we've used. Another is transferring an asset by federal estate tax this year is $12,920,000. And it's gonna go up to $13,660,000 next year. It drops by half at the end of 2025 due to the sunsetting of all the trump changes that were made in 2018.
So so we use we can use 7 or $8,000,000 of exemption that will never be brought back into your state even if it drops back down. Right. There's some cool things that we're doing for clients who are entrepreneurs who are growing their businesses now accreting a you know, accruing significant wealth, but they're just focused on growing the wealth. I get it. But let's do something now to protect it for future generations, and it's asset protected. It's protected from creditors.
It's a beautiful thing. And, yeah, that's just one of the techniques. Yeah. No. I appreciate the the the the double the double whammy there. I I wanna encourage that, you know, even the smaller guys, you know, the $1,000,000 or maybe even a smaller I I was in my twenties when I set up my my trust. And I just feel like if you start with the end in mind, Chaz is it gonna look like?
Now I think that there's a lot of work that I need to do in order to make it what it needs to be, but there's there's steps along the way. Is what I'm trying to encourage maybe the the younger tenure guys. And for the guys that are a little older, literally, like age wise and or just tenure wise, they're doing just more in business they've been in business for a while. Yeah. I I it's like the opposite. It's like you you ran out of time, bro. Like, you gotta hurry up quick.
Reach out to my man here because something could happen and then and then just gobs and gobs of wealth doesn't transfer to future generations for you. And and I know some people aren't motivated by Chaz. But here's what what I have found is that everybody is motivated to an exponential result. Some people, it's for their community. Some people, it's for, like, I had to get on the podcast yesterday.
Were talking about he he doesn't have many kids of his own, but he wants to send a million kids, to study abroad. And he's got he's connected with this program, and that's, like, his major aim in life. Every one of us is motivated and driven by some sort of exponential like it's gonna last beyond me. Otherwise, I don't know what you're doing, but, like, think outside yourself for half a second. But inside that for me, it's legacy.
Like, my next my kids, my grandkids, and maybe future generations after that, the Bible says for me, like, I need to take care of my kids, my grandkids. So I'm, like, hyper focused on it. And everything that you're talking about for me is, like, yes. Let's talk about it because these are this is how we do it. Right? Like, this is this is the practicality of it. Wolfe, you got it. I mean, and that's the, you know, I have a similar vision too. My goal is to help 50,000 families over my career.
I'm Wolfe on my way to that goal, but I, you know, the 50,000 is a lot of people, but it's within reach And I've got another, may, maybe 10 years left in me that I can do it. So Never know. I've had some folks on the pot here that talk about living to a 100, 108 you know, with with that type of runway, you got all kinds of time left. So okay. Let's let's talk about some practicals for you.
I'm gonna come out of the estate planning world for a second, but still use those examples if it's necessary, but I wanna know if it's just a really solid good decision that you've made in your own business that's led to a lot of the success that you personally have. Yeah. I mean, I I think I mentioned, my wife bringing her in was the best decision I I've ever made. I'd always been doing this on my own. I had staff.
I had you know, worked with other lawyers, other people, but she knows me better than anyone. And, she's a CPA also and also she certified in HR. She's got her assurance certification. She's just absolutely brilliant. So bringing her in was the best decision I ever made only because she's great with people and, you know, she's not overly intense like I am at times. And she's a great balance for what we're trying to do, but she's also bringing a lot of creativity, and she's an implementer.
Whereas I'm the visionary. I I'm always looking ahead looking at new ways of trying to do things more efficiently, more effectively, not just in delivering services to our clients, but for ourselves. And she's, you know, she's the one that said, okay, I can do that. And she figures out the way to do it. And it's like, woah. Not everybody can do that. In fact, very few people can do that and understand how to implement it.
So as a law firm, I think we're we're way ahead of the pack in terms of implementing and using technology, not only to market our services and educate our clients and bring better service to the clients, but just in delivering everything that we promise on a more than timely basis. The last piece there that you said, I gotta just I gotta sit on that for a because the result is we provide 10, a 100 x, the the value to our clients. You were doing a good job before.
Obviously, you had a good business. But but that was the accelerator. The the fuel already on just this lit fire that made the explosion happen. And I liked how you said that the explosion wasn't necessarily more money in your account, although I'm sure that's been the case. The explosion for you is we get to do what we do better, which then provides the better value. And, of course, that's gonna circle back to the bank account every single time.
The other, I guess, the other best decision is in involving all of the employees, all the staff, and all the decisions. So we because we use EOS, and we use, you know, a sort of a collaborative model. We try to have a flat organizational structure. We are You know, we get great ideas from everyone. And because they're in the trenches doing the stuff, and they say, well, why don't we do it this way? It's like, yeah. You're right. Why don't we?
And so I I think that the, you know, a collaborative environment where everybody, it's and it's also involving transparency. And one of my clients wrote a book called Transparency. He, and he's also a longevity guy like you were talking about, but I think the the idea of transparency is under emphasized. It needs to be emphasized more and more. And, you know, there's now a corporate transparency act that was enacted by Congress Wow.
Which infiltrates the state planning, business planning, everything we do with all of our clients It's not only to let people know, you know, how much we're making and how much revenue and how many clients we're bringing in, but how we do it. And so we're very transparent with our clients too on pricing everything. So I think it's really, you know, in collaborative transparency, you know, all of those things are real important to the business.
Yeah. I think Chaz, there's a lot of scarcity around transparency because if I'm if I'm open, right, then then what are people gonna think of me? They maybe they don't wanna do business with me. You know, they don't wanna work for me, you know, whatever the the situation is. But, actually, oftentimes, what happens is what you're saying is that it brings people closer together. There's more glue there because you've been real. Would you have you experienced that? I do.
It's interesting because everybody's different in of their personalities and their goals and their preferences. We have kids here that are, call them kids, but they're they're adults that are, you know, 23 on up. And I think they're they're extremely valuable to what we do. We learn from them every day on how to deal with people, how to approach people in today's environment, just particularly the younger ones. The older ones, you know, they're I'm a little more used to Chaz.
And there's the old school way of thinking, right, and the old school way of handling clients, but there's a younger way of doing things too. And we're learning a tremendous amount. I mean, we used texting in the business, which before was almost ethically impermissible in in, you know, law firms. You couldn't even advertise as a lawyer before. It's the whole world has changed.
Yeah. And, you know, I I like the idea of being transparent and and and giving them as much information as they want to help them understand why we're doing stuff. Yeah. And sometimes we make mistakes. So that's the way it goes. We're humans. What about a bad decision? Let's flip the coin. Let's talk about something that you've done where you're just like, I wouldn't do that again, but maybe you're thankful for You know, bad decision.
I there's Does it does it does it does it extreme planner like you make bad decisions? Well, I wasn't really an extreme planner until more recently, probably the last 15 years Chaz I really started becoming an a a better planter because, you know, lawyers don't plan. They just do. Right? They just do. Yeah. And so, of course, yeah, So where's my next billable hour coming from?
I think the the a decision we made recently that was not a good decision was to try to outsource some of our marketing for purposes of increasing the volume of clients that were coming in Chaz I wasn't just generating myself or through my my own, you know, efforts. And so we brought in and out sourced, marketing firm.
I'm not gonna say who it was, but in my mind, while it may have worked for some of their clients, it would it did not work for us, you know, because we're a very niche practice or niche practice, as they say. Yeah. But we have entrepreneurs who are focused on growing their business. We have we do a state planning for a lot of different people, not just entrepreneurs for everyone.
But our focus as a business in terms of who we're best able to help are these entrepreneurs, founders, CXOs, people who are very focused on their business and in their business and wanna grow it. And so we use our our skill set to pivot to either help them with their estate planning or their business planning or their tax planning. We'll combine it all at once. But we help utilize those skills to help everyone who needs those services.
So it might be just somebody who's just starting up a business for the very first time. How do you form a business? What should I be on the lookout for? I had a guy who was in the Secret Service. Call me up. He's leaving. He's been in the Secret Service for 30 years. And now he wants to set up a security company. And we talked about it. We talked about it. We talked about it.
We help focus him on exactly what he needs to do as opposed to him just saying, just go to legal Zoom and set it up on or, you know, go online and, you know, set it up online. Yeah. We've talked about taxes. We talked about licenses. We talked about location. We talked, you know, all these different things. Yeah. It's good. And I think he really appreciated it, and it was His his comment was, man, this was totally worth the investment of Oh, yeah. A few dollars to to do.
To have you advise us on that kind of stuff. So bad decision outsourcing the marketing. We're bringing it all in house, and it's working really, really, really well. Yeah. I think that there's a lot to be said to that. I think there's a lot of marketing agencies, unfortunately, that are just, you know, ho humming along and it doesn't really great, get great results.
In fact, I just recently finished, a marketing book by Dan Kennedy, great, great marketing mind, almost one of the originals, but he said a lot of times it's like, it's not that thought that you wanna bring it in house just to like, oh, I can do it better. It's that that's just that a lot of times, you know, you can you just know your stuff better. Really what it comes down to. Yeah. This guy from a guy who runs an agency. Yeah. He tried to fit the, you know, a square peg into a round hole.
It's never gonna fit. And that's that's one of the issues, but know, there was a book. I can't remember. The guy's name is Marcus Something, but he wrote they ask you, Answer. Great book. And it's it's all about social media online marketing, and we've used his strategy in the book to to really reformulate all of our content that we're and we have I have decades worth of content that is, you know, so deep and and we have so much stuff.
So we're re repurposing, today some of some of it's still valid 20 years later. Oh, yeah. Where we repurpose it in the form of a question and an answer because people go on the internet asking questions. And they want answers to their quest that's how I search on the internet. It's like, you know, if I go on Google or wherever, I'm typing in a question. How do I do this? Right. And then up pops a YouTube video or something like that. Right?
Yeah. Exactly. I think I think there are things that we constantly are learning how to do things better. And how to deliver that content. And then bring it to the to the masses in a way that it attracts more people to us as a business. Yeah. Yeah. We could we could spend a whole, podcast on on what you're doing there, but I think it's a good to recognize for the listener that, like, hey, First off, you have to have a marketing effort.
There's plenty of people listening right now that are just letting business come to them, which is great. That's a great way to start. You got business coming to But eventually, in order to to have anything sustainable, something beyond you, again, going back to that thinking beyond yourself, you have to have a a marketing system and then a team that obviously facilitates it. So I got I got one last question here for you, Wayne, because we've just gone into such really high quality stuff.
I wanna switch the switch the gamut on you here, but my last question is, if you had the opportunity to whisper in the younger Wayne's ear. What would you tell that guy? Wow. Well, first thing I'd say is Learn how to be patient. Mhmm. Be more patient. Number 1. Number 2. Listen more generously and carefully. To the people that you're talking with instead of thinking that you know the answer before they give it. And so let them tell you about themselves.
Let them tell you about their problems and really listen and ask more questions and more questions. And more questions in terms of what I do for a living. If I had to do it over again, I think I'd be retired by now, probably, but I'd I would have approached things less headstrong, more patient, and with a a much more generous listening mind. Yeah. I could not agree more. I love that little deposit information.
Actually, what I heard, as you were saying, all that, was that I heard the older attorney talking to the younger, like, you know, Wolfe, we we all know the younger attorney. He's he's sharp. He's arrogant. He he he doesn't listen to anybody, and he also He's got shiny shoes and a and a and a fast car. It's like, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the transparent guy that's gonna wanna help me, like, genuinely.
And so in order to actually wanna help me, like, all the things said here today, you gotta ask great questions. You gotta listen. You gotta actually care about this human on the other side. Man, such great advice. Wait. How can we find you if if someone's listening right now and they wanna connect you as an entrepreneur, just follow your content, or if they're like, no. I gotta set up a trust. I gotta stop thinking about this business planning, this estate planning stuff, how can they find you?
3 ways. One is to go to zelllaw.com for the legal services, zellaw.com. For the book, your multi $1,000,000 exit in entrepreneur's business succession planner. You can go to waynesell.com. That's my author website. And order it there or on Amazon. Of course. And then lastly, for exit planning for a to receive the benefit of my knowledge and my expertise Chaz an exit planner, you can go to aspiretoexit.com, which is a new website, and we offer services through that as well. Love it.
Well, we'll put all that in the show notes, make it super easy for for listeners to to connect with you, whether it be the book, an introductory stage, or go all in. I'm, like, the all in type. So, like, if I connected with you here today, I'm going all in. I'm hiring you for all the stuff. That's just my style, but I've already told you that personally, we're gonna get to know each other because I need guys like you in my life for sure. So I appreciate you being here.
I look forward to the relationship that we will build. And I hope that the listeners, choose to connect with you as well. But thank you for being here. Blessings to your family and all the things that you are touching here in 2023. Chaz, thank you so much for having me as a guest on the show, and I really appreciate, being here today. Thank you for listening to Gathering the Kings today. I hope that you were able pull out a few nuggets to go apply into your business right away.
More importantly, though, I hope that you're realizing that it takes more to be successful than just being by yourself doing it all on your own, carrying the weight all by yourself. What I have realized, not only in my own journey from multiple businesses in multiple different industries and now interviewing over 2 or 300 other very successful 7, 8, and 9 figure business owners is that It's tough to do it alone. And so gathering the Kings exists to bring together successful entrepreneurs.
In fact, we are putting together 1000 kings, specifically who are grateful, but not done. We're intentionally assembling kings who fight tooth and nail for their business, family, and communities, and here's what we believe Chaz in the suit of excellence in those areas Chaz it ignites within us the responsibility to govern power and forge a lasting legacy.
So if that relates and and resonates with you and you know that you need people around you, sharp, qualified other very successful business owners. I want you to go to gathering the kings dot com. I want you to take a look at what we're doing and see if it makes sense for you to be part of our pursuit. To 1000 kings. Talk soon.