Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Steve Phillips Managing Partner of CCG CPAs

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Steven Phillips, CPA, is a financial professional with a background in public accounting and extensive experience in tax planning, retirement strategies. He works with individuals, families, and business owners to develop coordinated financial strategies focused on tax efficiency, sustainable retirement income, and long-term wealth preservation. Steven is known for combining his accounting expertise with practical financial experience to help clients make informed decisions and build greater financial confidence.Lear More: https://www.ccgcpas.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-steve-phillips-managing-partner-of-ccg-cpas

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of influential entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with the Steve Phillips, who's the managing partner of CCCCPAs. Steve, welcome to the program. Thank you. It's great talking.

you. Hey, I'm excited to talk to you because it's always neat to hear people's perspectives from different, you know, life experiences, career experiences. And I know that you are not just a CPA. You get into tax planning and retirement plans and financial planning. So we want to hear that hybrid approach that you would take with your clients. But let's dive in first to a little bit of your story and background. And how did you get into the industry in the first place? So I like to joke, it found me. So I was brought up. in a bunch of family of CPAs. In my family, we either CPAs or engineers,

and by gone it, I was gonna be different. Well, after going to college, getting an undergrad degree in finance from GW and struggling early 90s to find a job, I just thought I was a CPA. Then in 2000, I was, you know, I worked at big public accounting firms, small public accounting firms,

the biggest in the country. And then in 2008, the industry found me. In Southwest Florida, if those of you who are mature enough to remember the good times of 08, 09, the real estate market kind of fell apart, right? Good times in air quotes. Yeah, good times in air quotes. Sorry, this is audio, so I can't do air quotes. Right. So it found me.

I was given an opportunity from one of my friends. I was looking for a job because I was the controller of a company and then worked in home building for, you know, I was at. Lenar, which was one of the big builders. In my region, we went from like 3,000 employees at that time to 100, and I wasn't one of the 100. Yeah, it was obscene, ridiculously brutal, but like every good challenge, it was an opportunity for me. So in 2008, 2009, I was looking for something to do, and one of my friends said, why don't you try this? I said, you know what, I've always having an undergraduate degree in finance, having a very strong tax and accounting background, I was wanted to help people. When I started my practice, one of the things I always said is the first time around at the other firms, most accounts are reactive.

For most of the year, from April up until September, October 15th, we're still filing returns from the prior years. There's not much I can do, right? Dyes cast. I can't help you with your taxes. I can't help you. Maybe I can help with your finance going forward, but Uncle Sam is going to get the check. It's just a question of how do we minimize it? it's not a question whether we can restructure it.

So I've spent, so from my strategy standpoint was I got into it because I wanted to help my clients do better. Because, yeah, there's great advisors out there. But I, you know, listen,

I also saw a lot of bad ones. You know, isn't it true that you take a, an approach on tax planning versus, you know, just tech prep? But isn't it true that that kind of becomes a fulcrum of from there, once you get that dialed in well,

we've kind of plugged up as much of the holes as possible in leakage and in taxes. Because you can never avoid all taxes. You can just mitigate. But from there, that becomes like opening up Pandora's box to see what else that person or business owner has. That could be some opportunities, right? Correct. So a lot of it, absolutely.

So much of what I do is trying to make sure they're paying less taxes today, tomorrow and forever. Because what I find out is, yeah, especially business owners. Like the bulk of my client tell are small business owners. One, I'm trying to mitigate their tax liability, but also make sure they save for the future. Because most of them pile most of their money back into their business. And they have no tax strategy for when they retire. They just all think they're going to sell their business for, be the next Google, you know, Microsoft, that they're going to make billions.

Well, the reality of it is some do. You know, we all, I hope all of my clients do. But most, you know, have a great life. They make a ton of money. they accumulate assets and they're just trying to figure out how to mitigate those tax strategies and maximize their wealth through throughout their life. Yeah. What are some of the typical things you see when a business owner comes to you and they think

they're just coming to you for, oh, help me with my taxes and you start uncovering going, hey, if I were just a tax preparer, I'd fill in the blanks and send you along your way. But I'm noticing some things here. What are some of those things you're noticing that could be opportunities for the business owner? So one, I don't think they're maximized in their retirement plans or they're not structuring it correctly. I think that's number one. Two, listen, none of them are very financially organized. That's the easy one.

You know, Mike, you got to, I'm assuming you got a junk drawer somewhere, right? Yeah, we all do. Right? We all throw crap in a drawer at home. So it's the same thing. What we find out is people just do stuff along the way. with no coordination, no tax structure coordination, no organization through there. So a lot of times it's just putting the pieces together to say, how do we make this puzzle work

better for you? So what I find a lot of times is there's just, you know, my plumbers, my electricians, they've never been taught how to run the business. Like even a lot of CPAs, I'll be honest with you, we're not taught to run the business. It's a learned behavior. The advantage I have is I'm talking to six to seven business a day, learning their mistakes, their challenges. What I find out is, like I said, most business owners, they're very good plumbers, doctors. They don't know much about business.

You know, the perfect example is one, I have a friend who was cardiologist years ago, and he spends something like 15 years in school. Take a guess how many business classes that person had? Probably one class in one, you know, one, you know, one, section of a class, not even a whole class, I'll bet. Not even that. Yeah. And he was buying into a multimillion dollar cardiology practice. Wow. So, you know, listen, I've spent, I have a master's green accounting, undergrad, or finance, I'm licensed CPA, I'm Siri 766 license, you know, I've done all that planning. And I end up talking to the school of Hard Knox where I'm talking to

six to seven business owners a day. They just don't have that experience. experiential knowledge. They don't have the business knowledge, let alone the experiential knowledge. Do you find that, you know, that was one of the mistakes you mentioned is like they don't maximize retirement. And I want to, you know, cover a few more. But where does the line come into where it's, you know, you've got the financial moves that can be made. But also you might need to have like a business, coach, consultant, operational kind of non-financial person coming in going, hey, let's help some of the top line revenue, right, as well. You know, we're plugging up some holes in the expenses and taxes, but, you know, let's let's help the business grow at the same time. What do you see there?

So what a lot of times I find out is that sometimes I'm the psychiatrist, the psychologist, and the financial coach. And sometimes I manage their money. Sometimes I don't. But in many ways, I try to be the best strategist. So, you know, I like I get coaching. I personally get coaching from other coaches. I think everybody should have some sort of coach. whether it's marketing, you know, you can't do it all yourself, right? It is, you know, you are limiting yourself if you do it all yourself. And my best relationship with my best clients, I do what I do well. I do strategy and manage finances and taxes.

They do very well at building buildings. Yep. Yep. Yep. Do you work in specific niches and industry solely or as a focus? Or do you find that most of your clients come from? many different industries. It's many different industries. So listen, I have a, I have a decent amount in construction, real estate, restaurants. And that's more of a function of where I live, but there's not, you know, my philosophy has always been, if somebody wants to help is take the advice and, you know, has good intentions, I'll help anybody. Yep. So what are some of the other,

maybe not mistakes, but things that are overlooked when you're meeting with a business owner for the first time that they've been doing that they either shouldn't be or there's an opportunity that you could be doing this and they just didn't even know about it. So I think that's a great question. So I think a lot of it is savings. You know, in the business owner marketplace, they're not given any direction whatsoever where to put money or just put money away. Think about it.

If you're an employee at a Fortune 500 company, you've got your 401K, you got your health insurance, you've got all of that. Nobody's coaching them to make sure they do all of that for themselves and their employees. Yeah. Right? There's a lot of regulations in a lot of states where they're forcing people to perform one case. I don't know if that's the right thing for them, but it might be.

Everybody's a little different. Everybody comes to the table with different fact patterns and different information and different goals. You know, most of my desire and help with clients is, can I get them to where they want to with goals? I just got off the phone with a client an hour ago. have two elderly parents, their real estate investors. One is in memory care, the other one they're worried about it.

So they're trying to manage those relationships and the financial burden they carry at the same time to manage their real estate practice and their parents' trusts or assets to maximize their retirement. So that's a different case than somebody who's a up-and-coming plumber or HVAC company or, you know, I'm using typical trades who is trying to figure out how to hire their first employee and put it in the right structure in place so that they can make sure they grow. I don't know if I answered your question, but you totally did and you brought up a new point, which is sometimes if you are not staying up with the times and regulations and codes and things on the tax side,

you can either make a misstep or not take advantage of an opportunity, but you brought up something with memory care, long-term care, and from putting your financial advisor hat on, you probably know that a large percentage of people upwards of 70% of all people will need some type of long-term care, whether it's the full-on memory care or assisted living. What are you seeing your clients doing that scenario? Are they prepared? Or when that comes up, it's like, wow, we better dip into our retirement account. and now that derails what we were hoping to do.

So you're right. So I think there's two sides of that. One, I think nobody's ever truly prepared, right? So, I mean, to get blunt, when I started in the business 17 years ago, the first conversations I had was with both of my in-laws and my parents, please make sure you have some long-term care. Whether you have the assets or the insurance or at least,

let's talk of a long-term care plan for you. like because I can tell you it I don't want you living in with me right it won't be good for either one of us it's not good for I love you dearly but yeah I have my own life plans and what I find out is that most people just don't have that plan irrespect of the assets so and as much as you can have those conversations early on it's better um for the simple reason if you know what the goal is it's easier to make the money work accordingly um but I I'm 53 years old. I'm dealing with the same challenges.

I have two, I don't think of them as elderly, but mature, right? My parents are in their 80s. My in-laws are in their 80s. And though in great health, they need somebody to keep an eye on them, right? And as they get older, it may not be that they need memory care or something exotic as that. They may need to be an independent living where they have somebody reachable. But it creates a huge family burden. the finances, honestly, I believe the finances are the easy part.

I think the bigger challenge is what that care looks like because it could be all of a sudden, and I'd like to tell the story, think of it this way. You're in your 50s, all of a sudden you're really excited. You studied, you worked really hard. You put all the money in college planning. Your kids are going to grade school. You've got that covered. Your retirement's in decent shape.

And all of a sudden, you're partying because you've, dropped your kids off to college. And all of a sudden, you close that door and there's a knock on the door. Now your parents are living in, moving in. Yikes. And that's a big challenge emotionally and financially to manage. It's like, I hate to say it's easy to manage the finances. That's a number.

But what I see for most people is at least having a strategy that's tax efficient, that's financially, you've thought about that because it's going to affect your life. Irrespective. And maybe that's what makes me a lousy financial advisor, but I also think you got to take care of the emotional side because what it does, I'll speak for myself running the business. If my parents moved into me, I'm not as a good at an accountant for my clients, which will eventually affect my income. And most of my clients are business owners or all of a sudden, I'm in my, you know, if you're in your 50s, you're in a high wage earning years, this is an opportunity where you're pulling away your time and energy to something that's more important,

but will affect your income. Yep. 100%. So what are some other things that you're seeing when a business owner comes to you that maybe even let's think of this. What's a big mistake that you're looking for? Like, ooh, I see this over and over again. This is being done.

Here it is once again. And let's address this. And then once you fix that, what does that do for the business owner? So I think the biggest, maybe a blind spot. I think the biggest challenge is exit strategies, right? Oh, yeah. From a long-term perspective, right? I think, well, listen, there's basic black tackling.

Hey, have you, do you have good books? Do you have good finances, financial organization? But I think the big macro level one is exit strategy, meaning you've got to be pivoting in fluid. I've said over the last three years, I've had more clients that I don't think ever planned to sell the business, but they got offered. They've offered big checks. Yeah.

And it, or they think they're going to turn it over their kids and the kids want nothing to do with it. Or they've never done any retirement planning beyond the business. Yeah. Like I said, it goes back to that concept. So, you know, or what they'll come to me and say, I can't get rid of this. I'm 70. What do I do? I think it's worth $300, $3 million, whatever number.

It's a third of what it's worth. How do you know, it's, we used to do. joke, you never put somebody in your backseat if you don't know how, you would never put your kids in the back seat if you didn't know how to get them out of the car, right? Yeah. We've seen people get into business all the time, but they have no idea what their exit strategy is. And there's a half dozen strategies on that.

Yep. And now they're doing it on the back and they're losing a business that's deteriorating. Or what I'll see the opposite is they think they're going to sell it and sell it and sell it and they never sell it, so it dies on the vine. Yeah. You know, it's so especially in the business owner marketplace from a strategy and a finance standpoint where that is their biggest asset in their life, right? They're not managing as just another investable asset.

I think also there's a, there's a point to that if you're talking to someone about retirement and you ask, hey, what does retirement look like to you? And you're going to get 10 different answers from 10. different people because everyone has their not many people are going to say i want to retire in florida and play golf all day long not many people will do that they'll get bored and all of that same with what you're mentioning about exit planning i feel like you need to have that vision of you know when i'm done punching the clock in my business that i've built for 30 or 40 years what is my life what do i want my life to look like and you could get so bored to tears that you don't want to sell

and give me that big check so if that's the case we need to put a different plan into place so where does it come in that you help them paint the picture of what the end of game looks like? Yeah. So a lot of it is the conversations of it's, you know, it seems like like the economy's a little looser, little lighter than it was a couple years ago. And at least down in Florida, we had some boom boom a year. And it's, you know, it's still good. It's just not as good. So what I find out is, one, what does that next step in your life is? Because most entrepreneurs, and I'll speak for myself and everybody I talk to. Retirement is not playing golf five days a week.

Like, I'm blessed. I live in Florida. I could play golf and offseason literally four days a week, but I don't. I don't make time for it, right? Wish I played more, but I don't play as much. Second of all, what is your purpose? Yeah. Right?

For most of my business owner clients and my clients, my tax, so much of that is their purpose is that business. So if you're going to give that purpose on it, in Florida we joke, and this is true in a lot of parts of the country, it's 5 o'clock someday every day. You will find somebody and your health will go down if you don't have a purpose to get up in life.

Yeah. So the best business owner clients that I've worked with, we've planned that. We've fixed the financial problem because, listen, most business owners who are successful, they can fix the financial. They just need some strategies and help to make that execute.

Then it becomes they get to choose what they want to do with the business. That's a lot easier conversation than having to sell it or do a large financial exit. Yep. Right. And you might even walk them through that and go, I would be so bored to tears if I did nothing that I still want to have my hand in the pot. So why don't I sell this percentage of the business to employees, family, someone else? And I'll stay on and work one day a week or something like that. It doesn't have to always be, give me a big check and I'm walking out.

No. I mean, I think because of the way the world is and where finances have changed over the last 30 years, you know, there's not a lot of big pensions anymore from the big Fortune 500 companies. There's not a lot of that. You rarely see people taking the gold watch and being out after 40 years. It's just, you know, I think it's the jungle gym of the corporate world has changed all of that. So you see more entrepreneurs, which are, typically what we see in business, they're not stopping. They're never stopping. They're just pivoting. So a lot of it becomes, but what I've seen too many, too many times over the years is also those that never pit of it, they ride the horse until it dies. And that's okay. Yeah. If that's what your plan is. You know, that's a, it's kind of, you know, let's use that statement, you know, riding the horse till it's, you know, actually too late, you know, oh, I ought to sell this stock. I ought to sell this position. I'll change this.

I'm going to wait because there's a little bit more. And then it's not. And so it's like what the, I think it's attributed to Warren Buffett. Like, you know, you can never go broke taking a profit, you know, and always make a profit. Rule number two, you know, refer back to rule number one. So, you know, you've got to know that end and like how Stephen Covey taught in his books begin with the end in mind. And whether it's retirement or your business or your exit, know what that looks like.

and then start working backwards from there. That might mean you need to have a great financial strategy, a great tax strategy, a great legacy strategy because it's a whole lot more than getting to retirement. You've got to get through retirement. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you've heard this story. You know what? Where most people die climbing man up first? On the way down.

You got it. I mean, literally, I've heard that as an analogy to, you know, your financial planning. But in real life, if you're climbing Mount Everest, more. people die on the way down because they get careless. They think everything's good. Well, now on their accumulation phase of building their retirement nest egg, that's all fine and good. I don't know how to do that. But then the decumulation phase, that's where people start having some missteps. And that's where it gets really important. Someone like yourself, look at it. Absolutely. And, you know, I think, you know, I'll kind of add to the Warren Buffett. Nobody gets, nobody goes broke taking

profits. Listen, nobody's gone broke by paying taxes because if you're paying taxes, you've made money. Now, that said, you don't want to pay you much. Right. Right. That's a great point. Right. I laugh all the time. Nobody in my office. And I, listen, I hope somebody comes in. Nobody, Repub, R or D or independent, nobody has ever come into my office said, damn it, I just paid too little in taxes. Yep. Nope. It's just, it's the American way, right? How do we? Avoid tax. No one ever. Yes.

That's a great point. Well, I tell you what, this has been really interesting, and I know that you would, you know, concur with this point. You know, none of these sectors of your business are silos. You can't just go, I'm going to handle the tax side of things to make sure that's all polished up and then neglect the other. So they all work together. It's a holistic approach. You need someone that could look at the big, the full field as a coach, quarterback, whatever you want to think of it as and go, we need to be. we need to make sure this piece is not going to interfere with that piece.

So that's the approach that you're taking with having all of these areas of expertise. Absolutely. And like I said, I think I have a very unique perspective as a financial advisor planner and as a CPA because, you know, there's a lot of good money managers. They look at your money. I can do, I can, I typically try to strategize across it. Do we mean is a firm? Do we manage a lot of assets? Absolutely.

Do we do a lot of tax returns? Absolutely. Most, like I said, my target market is typically business owners because they truly do need so much help. Yep. Yep, that's true. Well, I tell you, if there's a business owner listening to this going, hey, maybe take a 30,000 foot view at my business. Where are some leakages? Where are some things I can plug up and shore up?

What's the best way they can learn more and then connect with you? Yep. I would love to. I love to help anybody that I can. What's the website and best contact? Absolutely. www. C-C-G-C-C-P-A-S.com.

My name is Steve Phillips. Feel free to reach out to me on the website. Steve, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Pleasure is mine. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. www.

influential entrepreneurs radio.com.