The Three People You Need in Your Corner Once You Start Making Real Money
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Written by Mario Almanzar, Accountant & Tax Strategist
Mario Almanzar is an Accountant, Tax Strategist, and business advisor who helps small business owners reduce taxes, improve cash flow, and use financial data to make smarter business decisions. He is the founder of Maxscale Accounting and serves clients across the United States.
A client called me a few weeks ago, excited. He runs an HVAC company, does really well for himself, and has just found a property he wants to buy. Two units on one lot, both already rented, close to the beach. He wanted to know one thing before he did anything else. Would it save him money on taxes?
Nothing wrong with that question, and he asked the right person. But taxes are only one piece of a decision like that. He also needed to know whether the property was actually a good deal and whether it made sense for him financially over the next five or ten years, not just for next year's return. Tax savings shouldn't be the only thing driving a purchase this size, it's one input among a few, and each one comes from a different person.
This only becomes an issue once a business owner is actually making real money, buying property, buying equipment, moving real dollars around. If you're just starting, none of this applies yet. You have to build the business and make the money before there's anything to plan around. But once you get there, a single advisor stops being enough, because no one person is trained to answer all three of those questions at once.
Why one advisor is never enough
Here's the thing I tell every client: once their business hits that next level, you're going to want to lean on the person who happens to be on the phone with you at the time. If it's me, you're going to ask me if the investment is good. If it's your real estate agent, you're going to ask them what it does to your tax bill. Neither of us is really equipped to answer the other person's question, and that's exactly the problem.
Each of these three professionals is trained on something specific, and none of them overlap as much as people assume.
The real estate professional
This is the person who tells you whether the deal itself is actually good. Does the property cash flow? Are the comps solid? Will it hold the permits it needs for what you want to do with it, whether that's a long-term rental or something like a short-term Airbnb setup? A good real estate agent has seen hundreds of these deals and knows what a fair price actually looks like in your market. That's their lane, and it's a deep one.
The tax professional
This is where I come in, and it's a lane most people underestimate until they're already in trouble. A tax professional isn't just filing a return once a year. Before a big purchase, we're the ones who can tell you what actually applies to your situation and what doesn't, and there's more nuance here than people expect. Two examples come up all the time.
The first is the short-term rental strategy. In simple terms, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) normally puts rental properties in a separate bucket from your regular business. Money and losses in the rental bucket generally have to stay in the rental bucket. They can't just spill over and reduce the tax bill from your main business. But there's a well-known exception for short-term rentals, and if you qualify for it, the losses can move into the same bucket as your business income and actually lower what you owe there. Getting that exception isn't automatic, though. You have to run the property the right way and be genuinely, actively involved in it, with real hours spent managing bookings, guests, cleaning, and maintenance, not just owning it on paper and collecting a check. Skip that part and the IRS treats it like any other rental, no crossover benefit. Once you qualify one year, you can't just flip it to a regular long-term rental the next year because the numbers didn't work out. Doing that looks exactly like what it usually is–someone taking the tax break and then walking away from the extra work that was supposed to justify it, and that's a good way to get a letter from the IRS.
The second is how the deal itself gets structured, whose name it's in, how it's financed, how it's held. It sounds like paperwork, but it isn't. How a purchase is set up can change what you're allowed to deduct and how, and that's true well beyond this one property. It's worth having your tax professional look at the structure before you sign, not after, since some of these things are much easier to set up right the first time than to fix later.
This is the kind of detail a great real estate agent or a great financial advisor simply isn't trained to catch, and I mean that as a compliment to both of them, not a knock. It's not their job. It's mine.
The financial advisor
This is the role people skip the longest, usually because it feels like the least urgent one. It isn't. A financial advisor is the person who looks past this year's tax return and asks whether the move actually makes sense for you long term. Will this be a good investment in five or ten years, not just a good deduction this April? How does it fit with your other debt, your retirement, and your family's future? A tax strategy can be completely legal and still not be the best use of your money, and a good financial advisor is the one trained to tell you that.
I'll be honest with clients about this every time, I can tell you what saves you money on taxes. I cannot tell you whether it's the best investment for your family for the next twenty years. Those are different questions, and pretending one professional can answer both is how people end up making decisions they regret.
The part people miss
These three people don't need to agree with each other, and honestly, it's better when they don't always agree right away. I've sat in on conversations where a financial advisor pushed back on a strategy I thought made sense from a tax standpoint, and they were right to do so, because they were looking at the return on investment over the next decade, not just next April. That kind of friction is healthy. It's exactly why you want all three voices in the room instead of just one.
Once you're a business owner buying property, buying vehicles, paying off equipment, and moving real money around, that's when a single advisor stops being enough. It's not about spending more money on fees for their own sake. It's about getting three different, trained perspectives before you commit to something you can't easily undo.
The client I mentioned at the start ended up doing exactly this, he kept working with his real estate agent on the property itself, he reached out to a financial advisor for a second opinion on the bigger picture, and he asked me to run the actual numbers, both as a long-term rental and as a short-term one, so he could see what he'd really owe under each and whether he'd even qualify for the treatment he was hoping for. That's the process. Not a single phone call, but three people, three lanes, one decision.
If you're navigating a similar decision and want a tax professional in your corner, you can find more on how I work with business owners here.
Read more from Mario Almanzar
Mario Almanzar, Accountant & Tax Strategist
Mario Almanzar is an Accountant, Tax Strategist, and Business Advisor and the founder of Maxscale Accounting. He works primarily with small and growing businesses, helping owners legally reduce taxes, improve profitability, and gain clarity through better financial reporting and planning. Mario believes accounting is much more than compliance–it is one of the most powerful tools business owners have for making decisions and building long-term wealth. His focus areas include tax strategy, bookkeeping, financial reporting, business advisory, and proactive tax planning. His mission is to help entrepreneurs use their numbers to work for them, not against them.
