How to Start a Virtual Business | GoJo Accountants
Dream of starting your own business? Starting a virtual side hustle is one of the best ways to get started. In this video, Gio Bartolotta (CPA) and Joyal Jose (CPA), co-founders of GoJo Accountants, discuss the foundation of starting a business including infrastructure, client relationships, and so much more!
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Ariel Herrera 0:00
Hey everyone, are you looking to start your own business, perhaps you want to start your own real estate business or something completely outside of that. Maybe you want to take that experience that you have from your W two job and finally start that side hustle so you could work for yourself. Well, in this video, Gio and Joyal, CPAs, and co founders of Gojo accountants will give us a deep dive into how to start a business. We'll cover tips on infrastructure, client management, and so much more. Let's jump right into it.
All right, welcome, Gio and Joel, back to the analytics area channel. How are you doing? Good,
Gio Bartolotta 0:46
thank you. doing wonderful glad to be here.
Ariel Herrera 0:50
If you haven't checked out already, we've gone over the top five tax benefits for real estate which do enjoy kindly gave us an overview of with their Gojo accountants business. And we're going to be covering today's a little bit more about how Gojo accountants even started. So before we jump into that, could you guys give a little bit of an overview of how you both met, and what ultimately came to the decision of starting your own business?
Joyal Jose 1:17
Sure, I can take it off. So Bo G and I went to Rutgers University together, we met and our freshman year yeah, met our freshmen and go rockers that our freshman year in our dorms, were just very just young kids just kind of figuring out you know, life kind of figuring out our major or the path we're gonna choose going forward. And from their own kind of beginning really awesome friendship, I would say they start off with and he just bought knew that we wanted to kind of pursue from an accounting perspective as our career path. And as we learn more and more things in school, we kind of knew, Okay, you know, we'd like to aspect of kind of what we can do with this. And the idea behind the fact that, hey, we can help people and we can kind of grow and learn more in terms of how to help people into saving money and filing tax returns, or whatever any different ways we can actually use it. Kind of going from there, we initially had some ideas, we've talked about it in the beginning, like, hey, maybe we should do this, you know, have our own firm and kind of go down this path. But you know, starting off like school, going through it, we both had our loans, just like everybody else kind of going through school and going going through those challenges. So we both kind of graduated. And we both knew we wanted to kind of make sure we finish what we started got our CPAs. And then we kind of start our own jobs, working through, you know, day to day to make sure that we can pay our bills, pay our loans, and kind of get that out of the way. And essentially, kind of once it got out of the way I know, we had some plans in geocon accounting was like, Hey, I think it's time to you know, put our put our put our plans into action. And I was like, You know what, I think it's a great idea, I think this, this might, there might be no better time than this. And that's one thing I don't say to everybody, like, you're always better off just starting as soon as you can, when you're capable. Just give it a shot, you have nothing to lose when you're young. So that's how we came to be initially kind of got started from a business perspective. And then once we initially got started, I think the biggest thing is, for anybody who's kind of starting a new business, it's very important to set like a fundamental base with kind of having your own all the administrative stuff being taken care of and being ready to go. Because once you start kind of really investing your time into the business, you if when it starts growing, it's really hard to manage it if you don't have the administrative stuff done in place. So I know Gio was really awesome about it, and he set up us our own QuickBooks, you know, she was already already certified in QuickBooks and has become pretty much an expert in it. I'm still kind of dabbling and figuring my out in that area and figuring my way through that area. But definitely, we've learned a lot and kind of having that as our base, having our bookkeeping kind of already being completely set up and ready to go. Being able to kind of make sure that we have our software's that we need and making sure that we have our you know, now Calendly, just to make sure to set up meetings with people, it's really important to kind of start working through those admin things in your spare time and when you can. So once you have that stuff ready, and we kind of get things rolling in last year, we had a significant chunk of people who came through to us from a tax return perspective. Now we've been kind of growing into the small business space kind of understanding, you know, setting up new businesses. So when somebody has an idea that, hey, we're wanting to do this, we're getting started, what are the steps, we're happy to kind of help through that process set up the LLC is, you know, help them understand what are the bookkeeping that it would require. And even like that, it's not just like one industry, we have had, like various different types of people, whereas different types of businesses. And again, it's if you have an idea, and you want to go through with it, and you have, like, you know, current activity already starting, I would just say prioritize and getting you know, CPAs and just making sure your all your bit, you know, tax returns, bookkeeping and all those things have been taken care of just so went by the time you get started and you can just focus on your business and making grow. You're not stressed about the admin activity. So those are the few things I would touch upon. I'll hand it off God wants to add a few more things to that in terms of just setting up our initial business and a quick intro.
Gio Bartolotta 5:06
Sure, um, yeah, well pretty much explained all of it. But, um, I will say that like our passion, you know, ever since drone I'm that we've always kind of, we've been we've drawn, we've been drawn to each other because we have this passion to help people, we really love to help people, you know, with solving complex issues. And that kind of that passion, it carried over perfectly to this type of business. Because we're working with individuals and small businesses, people who are not experts, and you know, kind of the nitty gritty details of starting a business not not experts in tax law, not experts in things that deviate from their own business. So we wanted to provide those services at a low cost, but high quality. And the way we do that is by being paperless. And by kind of taking out a lot of these administrative items that aren't, you know, they aren't really relevant to modern society. And so by kind of just adopting technology and adopting a new way of working with people, it's allowed us to provide high quality services from CPAs, but at a very cost competitive price point. And, and really, it just stems from the fact that we want to help people like everyday people that we see. And you know, that we're passionate to help and, you know, help them just like, not lose that $10,000 deduction on their closing disclosure, or help them save that $20,000 on the on, you know, active participant deductions when, you know, they wouldn't know about it. So yeah, so that's pretty much why we do it. And also, you know, Joel and I, we like to work in a high paced work environment. And it's just that this business is very high paced, especially during tax season. So it kind of just lined up with our artists fast paced nature. So it's another reason why we kind of jumped into this and felt fully comfortable doing that. And so that was pretty much the beginnings and why we started our business.
Ariel Herrera 7:07
Awesome, I really love it, I could see the passion just like coming out of you guys being able to help others. And even maybe helping businesses stay open, expand just by having like the right deductions and foundations in place. Just huge. So I do like that, you mentioned that you both like the intensity and can both handle it. So what is it like to be a CPA working during tax season? How are you able to manage? Yeah, the intensity of it.
Gio Bartolotta 7:36
Um, okay, so I will say that Joel said this before, and it's really about having the infrastructure in place. So being able to anticipate your client's needs, at a moment's notice, and having the infrastructure having the resources. And when we say that, we mean, like, you have the right technologies in place, you're using the right platform, so you're familiar with those platforms. So in our case, we use into a tax product. So we made sure to learn those products inside and out and set those products up to optimize our success. So that way, that way, when we have a client and they need a tax return in two weeks, they can easily access the platform, drop their documentation, you know, via PDF or image, answer some questions in a easy to use platform, and then we take it from there and do all the work and it really streamline the streamlines the process. And if once you have that infrastructure in place, you can deal with the the the hard to answer questions like Is this a deduction? Or is this not a deduction? Or do Am I really going to pay this much in taxes? You know, answering those questions at a moment's notice. So yeah, so, um, you know, being as prepared as possible is allowed us to kind of jump right into it. And it's pretty intense, because you have people who are dealing with their money, and money is a sensitive topic for people. And you're dealing with sensitive information. So it's really just making sure you build that good client relationship from the start and making sure they know that you're here to answer their questions, that you're competent, and that you're enthusiastic and making sure that their situation gets, you know, accomplished and seeing through. And, yeah, so having that infrastructure and having that rapport with clients, those two will take you a long way, and stressful periods of time.
Ariel Herrera 9:23
Awesome. So going to the first part, the infrastructure piece, I feel like in the tax world, as well as the real estate world, it's so similar and that there's so like, you know, people sending things through email, which luckily, your business you're able to just drop things into your platform. So it's a lot easier for the client perspective as well as your own. But say if I have a business and I'm looking to get our business idea, and I'm looking to get started, how do you start assessing different like, platforms to use or know like, what's the right path to take? Because as you start with one platform, it's very difficult to go to another
Joyal Jose 9:59
It's a conversation we have all the time. We and as we're growing, know, it's like we love our platform, don't get us wrong, like we're doing, we're doing great. But at the same time, we're like a, as we jump into the next phase or next growth, do we still want to stick by this? Right? And do you want to consider something else? We were having a conversation pretty much last week. So in terms of kind of assessing that, what I would say is, obviously, the first thing that comes into mind is understanding what is service area and things. And yeah, you're right, from a real estate perspective, like, it's gonna be more about kind of bookkeeping, and keeping track of those things, expenses and things along those lines, one, and then two, just making sure that you're able to kind of keep track of those specific records, like, as you said, having a closing disclosures ready, you know, getting your tax cards from your, you know, local government and just making sure like, you know, you have the details on that, because those details really help like in just an example randomly, just like you know, the difference between in your pricing for the land and the building gets split out on those tax cards. And those can be very useful information. So for me, the way I kind of have the competition is first understand the specific business itself, and then seeing Okay, for my understanding the businesses, XYZ requires, you know, ABC things. Now, here are the few different platforms that can provide you those ABC services that can be helpful to you. Now, again, you have to consider certain things. There's obviously free items online on the internet that you can use from a tools perspective. But the question really comes into play, you should always kind of envision down the road in a year or two, how much growth am I going to see, when that growth comes in? Is this free service or going to be enough for me, if not, if I'm making a purchase, what are the services that are in addition, in addition to ABC services that I can get for the price that I'm able to spend? So kind of comparing and contrasting that away? A very specific example, this would be like even QuickBooks itself, right. And a lot of businesses exist, where it's like service providing or even specific merchandise inventory. And now, when you're making those work dealing with those specific businesses, we have to kind of help them first to understand to understand the business and say, you maybe need just QuickBooks, like the most basic version, or you need QuickBooks premium like And that all depends on the specific business itself, and helping them understand what the differences are. And don't get me wrong, like QuickBooks gives you that nice little sheet like, hey, go, here it is. But at the end of the day, like you only you're so focused, most of our clients are just so focused on our businesses, they might not know what those specific items mean, from an accounting perspective. So I think having that conversation and understanding it, that's why we may even, you know, we have that setup, where, hey, free consultation, just come talk to us, tell us what you're looking for, and tell us what you're doing. So we can kind of tell you give you some consultation on what is the best way forward. If you agree, and you want help, we're happy to kind of work through that and Set Up QuickBooks and kind of go down that path. But it's all by just very specific. So my answer is really it depends on the specific type of person and the business itself. But yeah,
Ariel Herrera 12:44
yeah, that makes sense. And I really like the point that you mentioned, it's not just thinking of now but also for the future of whatever business that is. So then on the second point, we talked about infrastructure, the second point of managing clients and that client relationship, I think that's also very in line with real estate, especially for those who may be wholesalers or agents, maybe they're looking to get off market property deals, and they have to have these conversations that can be tough about money with property owners. So what are some maybe tips or tricks you guys have and just client relationship? And maybe how to gather leads, and build your business that way? Oh, that's a great question.
Gio Bartolotta 13:23
Julie, want to take that one?
Joyal Jose 13:25
Sure. So I think the biggest thing is for us is obviously you enjoy delivering good news, like delivering good news, anybody you save money is always easy, right? But when it comes with more challenging answers, I think it's always what we what we like to do is just have that conversation in person as much as possible. In the current environment, that's obviously very challenging with COVID, and how things have been right. And for that, like, again, coming back to the infrastructure perspective, we have set up a Google meet. And for us, that's kind of platform we've been using just to kind of have that conversation. So when we set up a call where you know, face to face, having a video chat, and you know, going through them in detail, and it's always better best to deliver the news when you're trying to convey the message right away. Instead of dilly dallying and working around it is one thing we definitely do. And then to just making sure to help them understand like, look, this is what we understand based on things that you've told us, I think making sure that they're completely clearly understanding it. But then also helping them understand, hey, maybe going forward, here's what we can do to kind of help alleviate the situation or make it better going down next year. Right? The good thing is our attacker term perspective and bookkeeping. It's not something that you can just do once and you're done with it. It's something that you can continue to work on and make improvements on. And we've had those conversations with quite a few individuals where, you know, sometimes it's last year, they had some random, you know, account into data, but not the CPA, and they did things wrong and did it incorrectly. And then it's a matter of kind of having that comes in to say like, look, here's what you should do, and you make an amendment and here's what you can fix, you pass me to pay more, which is not good news that they want to hear. But then you say if you don't hear subpoena penalty that could possibly come from the government when they see that they understand as to why we're recommending it, right. So you can't really force people to do things XYZ But if you give them more factual base reasonings and kind of explain what you're trying to tell them, I think people usually take undertake the news a lot better. But again, the key thing is just managing in terms of working your way up to the news versus delivering the news, and then kind of giving the necessary facts and support to it to make them understand and that I think will be more depends on the client themselves. And I think you'll get to learn in a service in a client service providing industry kind of how to work that depending on the person itself.
Ariel Herrera 15:30
Great answer? And do you feel like both of you, your roles coming out of college, working for large firms help with that initially, or you always have had a way of, you know, working with people and understanding their needs?
Joyal Jose 15:45
I would say it most definitely has. No, you know, me for a long time, I think God, so as you and I used to be at an extremely fast speaker, I think when I initially came to college, like sometimes people don't even understand me, and I think over the course of the time, you know, going to that client service, you know, industry and you know, being in consulting, for me, at least, dealing with various different type of personalities working with various different types of people, it has really taught me a lot to kind of always understand and think that your idea is not always the best idea. And you should always kind of at least understand and listen to other people and kind of work off of that. And even delivering news or requests to clients, you you go through it a lot in the consulting world. And I think for me, just going through that process has definitely put me in a place where I'm able to communicate more effectively. So I would definitely say it's definitely helps to go down a path where you're working for big firms like those are not bad experiences that I wouldn't recommend. It's just always something to consider take the best that you can out of it and kind of understand what you want to focus on. But definitely helpful Overall,
Ariel Herrera 16:47
about YuGiOh. Also, it doesn't impact.
Gio Bartolotta 16:50
Yeah, I mean, it was a really big impact. Because I think the hardest thing to learn is how to anticipate a client's needs, you know, you can you can try to train yourself to talk in a certain way, communicate in a certain way. But if you can't anticipate what's going to happen, they're still going to complain about it. And it's still going to create an issue for you as, as a consulting person or consultant role in that situation. And so I think that working in big corporate, it really helps you anticipate your managers needs or their managers needs, and then you know, how it kind of all flows down and sort of just preparing everything that way, it's ready to go on a moment's notice. Because you're able to sort of, you know, just anticipate that your manager is going to want something. And so the same thing goes for clients too, in that sort of perspective, because really the whole relationship, they're paying you to just answer their questions they're paying you to, for just to make yourself available and to provide a service. So if you can get ahead of that as much as possible, that's going to make them happy. Like if you know, if we have a client and they in a contact, draw ourself, and they say, oh, you know, the IRS hit us with a $500 tax bill, I don't know what to do. But like, if you're able to anticipate that that could happen with any of your, you know, any of your clients, you can, you can know exactly where in the tax return to look for you, you can you can anticipate based on what the IRS has done in the past and what they've hit some of your other clients with, you can anticipate that's going to happen to future clients as well. And something that's across the board. And so when you when you're doing that I'm your clients are happy, if you can answer them within the same day and explain why they're being hit with that 500. Or if there's a way around it, they're going to be so happy and you're going to be that responsive consultant, and they're going to keep wanting to come back to you and keep using you because you're responsive, and you're responsible. And, and that's what they're looking for, you know, clients are looking to be service, they're looking to feel like there's someone listening to them and someone, you know, ready to help them at any time. And so I think that even if you're not the best, as long as you provide that level of attentiveness, and just Care customer care, it's gonna take you a long way, in my opinion.
Ariel Herrera 19:04
Yeah, I completely agree getting ahead of it, providing that knowledge for clients being that ear for them that they could speak to and actually feel like they're being heard. Those are all great points. And then all the times I also hear how people who want to go from a W two job, they think, Well, I have no experience for a small business, there's no way that I could ever create one. However, you guys just both stated so many things that even w two jobs for several years have gained so much experience, you're able to leverage to your own small business, which is amazing. And where do you see the experience that you've gained, and Gojo accountants going towards a future? Where do you see the company going out maybe five years from now?
Gio Bartolotta 19:52
I'll take this phone first. Um, because it's probably gonna be divergent from what Joel thinks. But um, the way I see it right now as we are focused on, you know, helping people not necessarily just in our age bracket, but really any, any person that is looking to come out of COVID and looking to come out and kind of try something on their own, you know, do something different. Start a side hustle, start a business, start a corporation, whatever it may be, do personal investments, maybe try to achieve financial independence, retire early fire. There's lots of goals out there and stuff that's really kind of percolating under the surface in our economy. So especially at the small business and individual level. So that's something we really want to help and PR is something I'm personally have a passion for. And so I think that we'll continue down that road and possibly dabble into other types of investing as well. So being an accounting firm, but also a firm that can provide investment advice. But that's something that remains to be seen.
Unknown Speaker 21:01
Excellent.
Joyal Jose 21:04
My, I don't think my answer is much different, I think I think Gio pretty much kind of covered it really well. But, but the, for me, the biggest thing is just kind of diving into more and more newer types of people and businesses and things as Gio kind of touched upon it, too. We've been jumping a bit more into trust funds and estate funds. And now I think that's been kind of our goal this year to kind of jump into. So I think, for me, that's the way I kind of, I kind of look at it, where, you know, we have these, you know, huge chunk of kind of individuals that came in the beginning, we work with, you know, various different types of individuals, customers investment accounts, and things like that, that they dealt with. Now, you know, dove into kind of small businesses and a few of those over there earlier, earlier this year, I helped them kind of set up and make sure to kind of get those returns, while you know, going while forward, which was great. And then now we're jumping into a state and trust fund, which is awesome. And then kind of next year, just pick up a new challenge and kind of work through that and kind of work through adding new types of industries and types of businesses into our portfolio. Because to me just kind of getting that more diverse knowledge definitely helps. I think, for us, like we've been very focused on getting our knowledge to be as as best as it can be, like, as any new updates come in, we're aware of what's happening right? Next years, you know, 401k, balances are increasing by the $1,000 is different, like, you know, the threshold is news that's coming to us. So we care about kind of learning more things about that. But I think you only start caring about those news. And you kind of start focusing on those when you start diving into more into the actual work itself. So that's the way I kind of look at it for Gojo in terms of kind of getting involved in more areas and started getting more variety more client base. And then from there, just kind of see where it goes. But yeah, investment base is something that that I really personally enjoy. You know, I personally enjoy investing on the side and things along those lines. And I would love to kind of carry that over into the business side of things. But it's obviously it's more of a time consuming thing where I want to make sure we're covering all our bases and a bit more. You know, it's understandable and make sure that people take the advice, the way that it's an advice and not like it's a Bible or anything like that. So there's a lot of different challenges that come into play. But like I said, the goal is just to diversify our client portfolio and just kind of grow organically as much as possible, because that's been the best so far from what I've seen.
Gio Bartolotta 23:17
I will also add to I was gonna add to Joel, another thing that we've really seen a big thing is cryptocurrencies and NFT. And collectibles, like digital collectibles. And that's something that we're seeing is growing tremendously. And people are looking to do it full time, whether it's mining, or staking Kryptos are just investing Kryptos. And that's a whole new industry in and of itself. So I guess kind of is growing along with some of these infant industries that are starting to pop up. Definitely.
Ariel Herrera 23:47
Yeah, that's amazing. I just see so much like growth potential and then just seeing you guys just never get bored, because there's so many different areas that keep you know, changing and being highlighted versus the other years out. So it's very exciting. And then aside from Gojo accountants were your like fun activities you like to do on your own.
Joyal Jose 24:11
I have been starting to get into more gaming, considering the COVID aspect, I think, I love playing outside sports and things but it's starting to get to a point with a few injuries can have to slow down that bit by just trying to just get into a bit more gaming, just being indoor and just looking for indoor activities. So maybe even like badminton and stuff is my kind of future like by the end of this year, I want to kind of get into that that's kind of the goal I've set aside, but for now just playing a little bit of video games here and there. traveling a little bit just exploring the area, you know, the tickets are a bit more cheaper and you know, I'm vaccinated, so I feel pretty comfortable kind of traveling a bit more. So just been trying to explore new areas, try new things and just be as active as they can be. So that's kind of a goal and that's what I usually find fun.
Ariel Herrera 24:55
But that's me. Awesome. How about yujia
Gio Bartolotta 24:58
I really liked to be outdoors outside as much as possible, um, like to hike a lot and travel the United States, um, and just like listen to music and read books and just kind of hang out. Um, yeah. And also hang out with friends to love hanging out with, with friends and, and now it's a lot easier to do that. So I'm blessed. So yeah, that's pretty much like to do with my free trade off to do a small
Ariel Herrera 25:23
PCT reunion in Tampa. You guys ever want to make your way down?
Gio Bartolotta 25:28
Definitely. That would be a lot of fun.
Ariel Herrera 25:31
Cool. So where can people find you?
Gio Bartolotta 25:35
People can find us on go to accounts.com. And we can also be found on our socials on Instagram, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Ariel Herrera 25:46
Great, thank you so much do you enjoy I'll really appreciate it.
Joyal Jose 25:49
Thank you.
Gio Bartolotta 25:50
Thanks for the talk.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai