Speaker 1 00:00:05 Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now, Ashley Tyson Ashley, you are the founder and president of Aussie Pros, found on the web at Aussie pros.com. We're going to talk about what Aussie stands for in this conversation.

Speaker 1 00:01:18 It's great to have you Ashley.

Speaker 2 00:01:20 Josh, it's an honor and a privilege to be here. thanks again for having me on.

Speaker 1 00:01:25 Absolutely. Well, tell us a bit about, Aussie pros and who you serve and what you do.

Speaker 2 00:01:31 Yeah. So I, I am an attorney. I like to call myself a reformed attorney. I, I wanted to stop practicing and actually get in the game. And so I, I started out with a big firm, a little bit of background, right? Like, started out with a big firm, ended up going into, you know, like, big law firm. And it sucked my soul. And I was like, man, I need to get into where I can actually help people and do some impact work. So I set up this impact investment company and, started doing real estate, syndications through these things called Tenants in Common. And when the commercial real estate market crashed, went in 2008, went back to practicing law, built up an M&A shop, and, was bringing Wall Street level sophistication to Main Street America, where we're helping business owners buy and sell businesses.

Speaker 2 00:02:22 As we went through that process, I saw how much money people were leaving on the table, and I was like, man, it's not about how much you make, it's about or how much you can sell your company for. It's about how much you keep after Uncle Sam takes his cut of your deal. And I saw all these people just leaving senseless tax dollars on the table. And I was like, listen, we've got to do something in order to correct that. And so we, we started a succession planning and tax mitigation firm doing consulting for that stuff. And right around that time, I sold my law firm in order to be able to do this right about that time was when the Opportunity Zone legislation came out, and it was through the Tax Cut and Jobs Act of 2017, and it created this wonderful hybrid of 1031 in private equity. As a matter of fact, my favorite quote is that it's like 1031 in private equity got married and they had this beautiful baby, and they're named Opportunity Zones.

Speaker 2 00:03:19 And through an opportunity zone, you can basically defer capital gains, any kind of capital gain long term short term. And you can do it after the sale. So there's a lot of tax planning techniques that require you to do it ahead of the sale. Opportunity zones allow you to do it after the sale. And we were able to I mean, literally, we've been able to save people hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes by putting them into and setting up their own fund so that they can take advantage of this. you know what I think is the greatest tax incentive program ever created by Congress? And we did that, and we set up ozone probes in order to do that. And so we take advantage of opportunity zones, and then we use the Opportunity zone legislation in order to defer the taxes and help them take advantage of some of the other tax mitigation strategies that are out there to even further reduce and potentially even eliminate the tax bill that they pay.

Speaker 3 00:04:14 I.

Speaker 1 00:04:15 I need a little bit more help on understanding what Opportunity zones mean.

Speaker 1 00:04:18 Pretend we're a high school class here. And so if you were kind of give us a 101 on this, could you enlighten us?

Speaker 2 00:04:25 Yeah. So Congress created it in order to incentivize, people to invest capital gains, to take capital gains out of the, you know, the, you know, the traditional market or out of real estate and put it into areas that are underserved. So they gave the governors the ability to designate up to 25% of their low income census tracks as opportunity zones. And if you take capital gains, you put them into a qualified opportunity fund, which is literally just an LLC taxes a partnership and we help create people, create these captive funds. Then you can defer your taxes on that original capital gain. And then what you invest into Gump comes out completely tax free after ten years. And so the growth of your future investment, whether that's real estate or whether that's an active operating business, ultimately gets their taxes eliminated on that new investment. And it was designed in order to incentive people, incentivize people to go into these areas that had historically been underinvested into.

Speaker 2 00:05:30 And so it's resulted in $150 billion worth of capital coming into these opportunity zones, which has had pronounced impact. So the price of homes has gone up in these opportunity zones. There's been massive amounts of development, real estate development and businesses that have started in opportunity zones that otherwise probably would not have gone there. Right? What it presents for your listeners is the ability. So if they have capital gains, if they have a tax burden for us to be able to defer that tax burden and then to get them into, you know, whatever their next venture is, whether they're taking money from out of the market or whether they're starting a business or whether they're going out and they're buying a business, we can make it so that the future growth of that comes to them completely tax free.

Speaker 1 00:06:19 Yeah. so this is I mean, you know, again, in terms of like from an investment portfolio standpoint, yes, there's there is obviously the hey, we're actually doing something good here. I think about maybe, communities that really have just not seen investment dollars.

Speaker 1 00:06:42 And so maybe there's been some degradation in terms of, you know, the standard or, you know, just what it looks like. I'm curious if there are different risks associated with operating in investing or opportunities, own investing, what those risks might be and also what might be some not only just intangible returns, but what are the unique returns that that that could be had from this sort of an investment strategy?

Speaker 2 00:07:13 Yeah. So, you know, I have that question all the time. Well, on an opportunity zones in the derelict areas or people call me and they'd be like, hey, this place is in the this is in the dodgy part of town, right? this has got to be an opportunity zone. And a lot of times it's not. And the the governor's got to designate the zones, and there had to be either a low income census tract or they had to be adjacent to it. And this was based off of the 2010 census. And so a lot of those 2010 census tracts that were low income back then have completely morphed.

Speaker 2 00:07:46 We were talking about it before we went on recording. We were talking about an area that's right across the street from the Air Force Academy. And granted, I don't think that that was a low income census track, but it's exploded recently, and there's a lot of, you know, tracks that have done that that were either previously industrial and now they are vibrant, you know, you know, residential areas or just areas that, that hadn't got the investment. And now they are getting the investment because of opportunity zones. And the values of those are increasing. You know, when you when you do a real estate deal or when you're doing a business deal, what you're trying to do is create value. You're chasing alpha. And in chasing that alpha, what you're wanting to do is to try to make as much money as you can on the buy. So you're looking for undervalued stuff that you think is going to increase as much as possible. Opportunity zones create that vehicle, right? Because they're encouraging you to go into these areas that might be a little bit less valued.

Speaker 2 00:08:44 And then they're also giving you the back side benefit of at least a 20% savings. So you're going to pay at least 20% in capital gains taxes on the growth of that investment, sometimes 23.8%. And that's not including state tax. Usually you're in the 30% range, and opportunity zones allow you to eliminate that 30% tax.

Speaker 1 00:09:07 And yeah.

Speaker 2 00:09:09 So and and going into like your other point right, is that there's a byproduct in doing one of these deals. You are by very definition helping into incentivize and to help create jobs, help create activity, help create economic vibrancy in these communities. You know, a dollar of, you know, outside capital into these communities usually has between a 5 to 10 x, you know, multiplier on it with respect to what it does for that community. And so it's been really exciting to see, you know, the downstream benefit of when people do an opportunity zone transaction, how lives are getting changed.

Speaker 1 00:09:50 Yeah. actually, who would be like an ideal? I don't know if there's like a kind of an investor profile, someone, you know, maybe their situation, would just be really ideal for this sort of strategy.

Speaker 1 00:10:04 Like who comes to mind?

Speaker 2 00:10:05 Yeah. So anybody that's got a capital gain, that is either that they're getting ready to have or that they've already had within the last 180 days, or if it was through a partnership, we can go all the way back to the beginning of the previous year. So for 2024, we're able to defer somebody tax that they had, you know, January 1st of 2023, if they get it in by September the 11th of this year. And so it's anybody that's had that capital gain. They are a candidate. So that's the first realm of folks. The second realm of folks are, people that are starting a business, people that are buying a business. Right. That that, that they're buying it from somebody else. If they can buy that business and move it into an opportunity zone, we can show them how they can make all of the future growth of that business come out completely tax free. And so those are kind of our investor profiles. Somebody that's had a capital gain or that's going to they got a bunch of crypto and they're getting ready to sell it.

Speaker 2 00:11:05 We can help them to mitigate the taxes on that or somebody that's getting ready to start the next Facebook. And they want to do so in a way that's going to be, tax, you know, advantaged. We can put them in an opportunity zone and we can make it so that all of the growth. So let's say they start it for $5,000 and it grows and they exit it for $5 billion. All $5 billion is going to come to them tax free.

Speaker 1 00:11:31 Very cool. And Ashley, tell me a little bit about how you work with your investors. Like how do folks engage with you. how do you help them? Support them?

Speaker 2 00:11:40 Yeah. So like I said before, I am I'm a reformed attorney, so I hate sending like billable hours and all that kind of stuff to people. And so we've got packages, like our, our sweet spot is setting up qualified opportunity funds and helping people actually do opportunity zones. And so we've got a package where we we set up your fund, we set up your job, we do all the documents associated with it, and we help you with the compliance.

Speaker 2 00:12:05 And that's a flat fee. People can also, engage with us for a strategy call. And instead of getting a bill for that on the back end, they pay for it up front and we can walk through and say, hey, listen. Yeah, okay, your stuff's going to work or it's not. We've got, for somebody that, that is one of your clients, we love to jump on a free 15 minute phone call with them and have a consultation with them, just kind of see and to take their temperature. We've got webinars. We've got a string of YouTube videos for people that want to learn about Opportunity Zones. And then we also do compliance. So we can we're here to make sure that you're building out your audit trail and that you're building out the backup to the documentation, because the great thing about this program is that you don't have to ask for permission. You don't have to go to the IRS and say, hey, can I do this program? Is this going to work? You just have to do it.

Speaker 2 00:12:53 But then make sure that you do it correctly. And so that's what we help people do. We help them do it correctly, and we make sure that they've got a, a comfort in a, you know, state of mind that they're going to be okay if the IRS comes knocking down the road.

Speaker 1 00:13:08 Yeah, I am on, how many Opportunity zones are do you think there are in a typical city or state? so.

Speaker 2 00:13:16 A lot of it's going to depend on how concentrated the census tracks are. Right. So if you're east. Right, those census tracks are very dense because you've got a lot of people in and in one place. If you go out west, that population spans out. And so the, the, the census tracks are typically larger. But if you go to OSI Aussie pros.com/map. You can pull up every opportunities and census track that's out there. And there's approximately 8700 of them. Wow. And they're in almost every urban area in every state. Just so every state, every territory has one.

Speaker 2 00:13:50 And usually each, state will designate it so that every county has at least one. And so, you know, and the there's also a ton of them around college campuses. Yeah. One of the huge things that we've helped people do is to buy, like, if they've got a kid that's going to a, to college, we've helped them buy Airbnb assets inside of that and to package it as an opportunity zone deal so that that way, the growth of that asset, you know, over the next ten years comes out to them tax free. And, it's been really exciting to kind of see the the gamut of things that people do. You know, we've got farms, we've got, like I said, Airbnbs. We've got, you know, we've got people that are doing flex industrial centers, you know, and then they're turning them into blue collar incubators. We've got people that are, you know, it's amazing to see the level of creativity that people can apply to this. And what's really, I think, unique about this place based economic incentive is that it's not limited to just real estate.

Speaker 2 00:14:53 So you got typical 1031 where you can defer with that, but all you're doing is deferring within that and it's got to be real estate based. This allows you a similar arrangement, but it can either be real estate or it can be operating businesses, which I think is the huge distinguisher about Opportunity Zones.

Speaker 1 00:15:11 Yeah. okay. This is all very fascinating. And I suspect that there may be others like me who, are a little motivated. Like, I want to learn more. Sure. And so your website is OZY Pro's dot com. where do people go from here?

Speaker 2 00:15:29 Yeah. So literally go to Ozy. Aussie pros. Com and if you want to find your address go to Aussie pros. Com slash map. Or you can click on we've got a map link on our website.

Speaker 1 00:15:40 I've been playing with it while we've been talking. I see opportunity zones near me now.

Speaker 2 00:15:45 There you go. Right. And if it's blue, yeah it's you. Right. So you're good to go if, if, if it's blue and, and then if they want to, if they want to jump on a call with us if they're Aussie curious, or if they're like, hey, man, I'm curious.

Speaker 2 00:16:02 we'd love to jump on a quick call just to kind of flush out to say, okay, yeah, we can absolutely help. Or if your deal doesn't work. So if you've got like a, a, a retail centre that needs to be in like the Swankiest locations, more than likely you're probably not going to work. or if you've got something that's, you know, like one of the things they shut down is that you can't form like a stock trading company and then go buy a bunch of stock and then have the appreciation of that come out tax free, kind of similar to crypto. Now we can. And we have helped people do crypto mining operations. but we'll be able to really, really quickly be able to say, yep, I think your deal will work or no, I don't think that it's probably going to work or it's going to justify, you know, the stuff that you're going to have to do associated with it. And the key thing for people to understand is that it's not about what your gain is now, it's about what your gain is going to be in the future.

Speaker 2 00:16:54 So if you've got something that you think is going to grow and you think it's going to massively grow and you're concerned about capital gains taxes going up, which who isn't based upon, like what is going on in our country. We got to service that national debt somehow, right? And so they're looking to go after the rich. They're looking to go after capital gains. And this is a way to, effectively mitigate against that.

Speaker 1 00:17:18 Build wealth, save money on taxes, do well by doing good. Ashley Tyson again, you're the founder and president at Aussie Pros. Your website Aussie pros. Com go play around with the map. See where the opportunity zones are near you. That's Aussie pros.com/map. it's been a great conversation Ashley thank you so much.

Speaker 2 00:17:37 Thank you Josh.

Speaker 1 00:17:44 Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world.

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