Welcome to the Financial Advisor Success Podcast, where you go behind the scenes with financial planner,

speaker and consultant Michael Kitsis to hear stories of how leading financial advisors

navigated the inevitable challenges that arise on the path to success and get insight from

leading industry consultants about how to break through to the

next level in your advisory business. And now here's your host, Michael Kitsas. Welcome, everyone.

Welcome to the 208th episode, The Financial Advisor Success Podcast. My guest in a podcast is

Debbie Freeman. Debbie is a partner with peak financial advisors,

an in Penn & RIA based in Denver, Colorado that oversees 175 million of assets under management

for 105 client families. What's unique about Debbie, though, is the way her firm does not only

tax planning for their clients, but in-house tax preparation, a service for which they charge separately,

but view as an essential component to both add value to clients and better retain them with the firm.

In this episode, we talk in depth about how Debbie and her firm actually handle operating a tax

preparation business within their wealth management firm. The cumulative amount of staffing hours it takes to

collect an input data, prepare the return, review the return, and file the return. How the

seasonality of tax preparation with April 15th and October 15th deadlines forces the firm to engage

in meeting surges during the off months for their non-tax planning regular review meetings with

clients. Why Peak Financialists

decided to keep its tax preparation in-house and not work externally with other CPAs. And how the

real return on tax preparation for clients may not just be the additional 5% of revenue it generates,

but the additional 5% increase in retention rates it provides for Peek's core advisory business.

We also talk about Debbie's own journey through the financial services industry, how she

started out at a big four accounting firm but quickly realized that she didn't enjoy traditional

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