Living The Red Life - How a Small-Town Hockey Player Built a $25M Empire

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

What happens when a failed NHL dream becomes the foundation for building one of the fastest-growing CPA firms in North America? In this episode of LIVING THE RED LIFE, entrepreneur and finance strategist Robert Gauvreau breaks down the mindset, leadership principles, and financial systems that helped scale a multi 8-figure accounting, tax, law, and advisory firm serving entrepreneurs across North America. From being rejected by banks and underestimated as a young founder to working alongside Tony Robbins and speaking on stages with Gary Vaynerchuk and Kevin O’Leary, Robert reveals why most entrepreneurs misunderstand cash flow, taxes, and growth strategy. He shares practical insights on bookkeeping, financial reporting, tax planning, KPIs, business leadership, and building long-term wealth while scaling a company in a traditionally slow-growth industry.Key TakeawaysWhy 92% of business owners legally overpay taxesThe financial metrics every entrepreneur must track weeklyHow Robert scaled a CPA firm to nearly 200 professionalsWhy cash flow matters more than revenue growthThe leadership mindset required to build a multi 8-figure businessNotable Quotes“Start scared. Start small. Just be sure to start. The first move changes everything.”“Cash is king. It truly is.”“If you don’t know your numbers, how do you know what strategy you can put in place to win the game?”“Don’t spend money just to save taxes.”“Resilience isn’t about never failing. It’s about bouncing back and transforming every challenge into an opportunity.”Connect with Rudy Mawer:LinkedInInstagramFacebookTwitter

92% of business owners were paying more tax than they legally had to, which was shocking to me, meaning 8% only had, you know, were paying the appropriate amount of tax. The rest were not. So it was kind of shocking, but the foundation of that is... Robert Gavro is a visionary, growth-driven entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Gavroo accounting tax law advisory. Drawing from his expertise in accounting, tax strategy, and business advisory,

he helps entrepreneurs build profitable, scalable businesses while redefining how professional services support long-term financial success. One of the greatest foundations that I would say, Rudy, for business owners, and maybe this is one of the largest mistakes, is that business owners just aren't paying attention to the score of how their business is performing. So what is actually happening in their business? Are they profitable? Are they not profitable? And it really, this comes down to the foundation of, do you know your numbers?

What are the keys sort of five, six, seven, eight metrics they should be tracking in their company? One of the greatest tools I think business owners can implement to make their business successful is actually doing. My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast. I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the Red Life, ditch the Blue Pill, take the Red Pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. Hello and welcome back to another episode. So joining me today is Robert and we're going to talk about your favorite, favorite topic, money and how to not only understand your money better, track your money better, but also how to

keep more money by maybe optimizing your tax strategy. Roberts, a tax expert, finance expert, him and his firm, hundreds of staff, top podcast, author, expert all around when it comes to, like I said, managing money, bookkeeping finance, finance strategy for your company and then obviously the other side of that taxes, which is so underappreciated by entrepreneurs. I know I sit this many years ago. So wanted to have Robert on to just educate you guys more about it. So Robert, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Rudy. So let's dive straight in. You know, I talk about money, right? And I talk about in business, there's three phases of business. Phase one is like trying to earn more money and grow your

company, right? And then phase two, when you do a good job of that, is like trying to keep more money. and that's what we're going to focus on. And then there is a third phase eventually when you get really rich, which is protecting your money and we'll maybe leave that for another day. So let's talk about number two. How do you help an entrepreneurial business owner, you know, manage their money in their business? Yeah.

And one thing I want to say, like we don't touch people's money, but we help guide them and advise them on how to make sure that they make the most of their money. And one of the greatest foundations that I would say, Rudy, for business owners, and maybe this is one of the largest mistakes, is that business owners just aren't paying attention to the score of how their business is performing. So what is actually happening in their business? Are they profitable? Are they not profitable? And it really, this comes down to the foundation of, do you know your numbers? And when we talk about

knowing your numbers, it's really thinking of what's your financial scoreboard. Are you winning or are you losing the game? Sort of the analogy that I use basketball. Right. If you walk into a basketball game and you don't really have an idea of what the score. If there's no scoreboard there, what's the strategy? Are you on full offense? Are you on full defense? Was that a three point shot, a two point shot? If you don't have clarity around your numbers and your business, how do you know what

strategy you can put in place to really win the game? And I would say that, you know, for business owners, they need to have up-to-date financials. They need to be accurate and they need to be reliable. And then lastly, would be they need to understand what they mean. And you don't need to be an accountant to understand. understand that, but as a CEO, you need to know your numbers. The most successful CEOs in the world really know their financial numbers and their business. Good. So I'm glad you bring that up because, you know, for about eight years, seven, eight years in my life, I consulted so many small

companies. And they'd come entrepreneurs, they'd come to me for marketing and social. But, you know, really to market well, you've got to know your numbers, right? It's all the numbers game. What's your acquisition costs? What are you making per customer? Obviously, How much is your budget, your ad spend? And I think I was really good at this as a business owner because I came from a sport science background. So, you know, as a scientist, you're tracking all of these things in a different way. What's the way, body, fat, resting heart rate, all those things.

And it's kind of the same here. So like, I have dashboards everywhere. And, you know, I know every, I think I know every number possible, like more than anyone. I would try and ask you, but I'm pretty obsessive over the numbers. But let's start from reverse. if someone isn't, what are the key sort of five, six, seven, eight metrics they should be tracking in their company? Yeah, and probably the first one that everyone sort of leads off with is revenue, right?

And but even before you get to revenue, you have to have an expectation of what you want your revenue to get to, right? And so what is the expectation? What is your budget? What is your goal? And is your revenue tracking to help you get there? But business owners usually understand revenue in a really great way. The second one, and probably the most important that I find, Rudy, is understanding a gross profit number.

So a gross profit is really revenue minus the cost of delivering that revenue. So if you're a service industry, you know, it's maybe wages, subcontractor fees, you know, to deliver on that revenue. If it's a manufacturer or retailer, you know, you've got purchases, you've got materials, you've got maybe subcontractors. Again, wages. So really understanding the cost. that goes into delivering that revenue. Because gross profit number is something that every business owner should be focusing on. It will show you the trend of whether you're heading in the right direction or in an opposite

direction, especially with everything going on in the world right now, you know, recessions. You've got increased costs of fuel. Purchases may be going up. Labor costs may be going up. And if we're not paying attention to that as a business owner, we can see our margins diminish. and all of a sudden what was a profitable business could go into maybe not making money

or having cash flow issues. A third one that I would say, understanding your net income is important. You know, net income is a number that needs to be positive. I know a lot of people say, oh, you know, a business when we get started, it's not expected to make money for, you know, five to seven years.

That's not true. You know, if you're in a startup company and it's a tech company and you're investing a lot and creating an asset, maybe that's true. But if you're in my space or in your marketing space, right, as an agency or really 95% of businesses, you should be making money right out of the gates

and you need to be paying attention to that. The fourth one, I would say, and maybe I'll end with the fourth, is really on cash flow. And I think the importance of cash flow people understanding that. One, cash is king, it truly is. But two, even if you have profit in your business, it doesn't mean that you have cash flow in your business. You might be losing cash and having really high profits.

You need to understand the difference and some of the mechanisms that impact cash flow like loan payments, you know, shareholder or owner drawings, inventory increases, you know, a lot of those things. So understanding the difference in cash flow can have a huge impact on the long-term success of your business as well. Yeah. And one thing I think, you know, we all struggle with as entrepreneurs is, you know, when we start, we kind of obsess over this like, oh, let's chase a million dollars. Let's get to a million and five, then 10. And it's always about juggling, you know, profit, right? And I've gone through different phases of my life and goals and focus, like chasing gross revenue because that obviously means a bigger brand, more customers, bigger database. And obviously can grow your ecosystem. And then, There's times where it's like, hey, actually now this year or this phase, I want to focus on profit. So I think that's something that's important to understand is like, because it's the same when I did to support science. It's like one phase might be, hey, I'm going to eat more calories and grow muscle this phase. And then the next phase, I'm going to eat less calories and lose body fat now. And it is important to know what you're aiming for because trying to do bits of both.

It normally is suboptimal. It's kind of hard to do both at the same time. It's possible. But so I think that's what, what do you think about that? Like having, you know, the entrepreneur having clear focus for himself or herself and the team? 100%. I think it all starts with good goal planning and a strategy. And, you know, good to great.

If anybody's read that by Jim Collins, you know, in in that book, he focuses on some of the most successful companies that ever existed and what made them great. And one of the consistent things that he talked about in the book was having a long-term plan, having goals that the company was striving for, but also having the KPIs and the metrics to understand, how do we actually accomplish these goals? So, you know, one of the, one of the greatest tools I think business owners can implement to make their business successful is actually doing budgeting. You know, I would say 95% of small businesses, they might budget, like you said, the revenue goal to say, hey, we're just going to focus on on growing this top line. But, you know,

do you have expectations for every level of your business, your cost of goods, your overhead costs? If you have expectations that you set, it will help you continue to drive profitability in your business. Yeah. So we talked a bit about the key numbers and that side of things. What about like the more tangible size? So like how do you track it? Is there a difference between tracking that and bookkeeping? Let's kind of segment into that now. Yeah, and I think, you know, we're big users of QuickBooks Online. It's a really great way to integrate your banking feeds into your ongoing books. But again, they have to be up to date. They have to be accurate. I feel like a lot of the challenges is that small business owners will maybe do their own bookkeeping, which maybe they're good at. But, you know, a lot of times in our experience, there's a lot of things that are missed. And when we continue to talk about, you know, the financial metrics that drive. success in a business. We didn't talk about tax, but, you know, maybe I'll circle in on tax because paying too much tax is just an extreme cost that's avoidable. And, you know, when we think

of the books, the books are really the foundation of good tax. If you miss out on expense opportunities, it's probably because your books aren't right. And we definitely don't want to pay tax. I actually worked with Tony Robbins for three or four years at his business mastery events. We were his global accounting advisor partner for Canada. And one of the outcomes that we discovered when we were doing all these free tax reviews was that 92% of business owners were paying more tax than they legally had to, which was shocking to me, meaning 8% only had, you know, we're paying the appropriate amount of tax. The rest were not. So it was kind of shocking. But the foundation of that is, you know, good business structure, making sure that you're optimized for tax, but not missing out on those

expenses. So to go back to your question, you know, what really goes into having good numbers? Some of it's bookkeeping. Some of it's having really good goal setting. But then some of it is setting the KPIs, right? What is it that's going to drive those results that you can track on a weekly basis with your team? So here's a good example. My team, we do a lot of financial reporting. So like financial statements for businesses. Each individual is responsible to complete two financial statements a week for businesses. That's a KPI where I can say, hey, if we are going to complete two financial statement packages for business owners this week, that helps drive our revenue. That helps keep accountability to our team to drive results. That keeps our client expectations

in check. It also drives success. So that's one metric of about 30 that we, we have, understanding what drives performance and tracking that on a regular basis is so important. So up-to-date financials, good KPIs, and don't pay too much tax. Well, and I was trying to lead there, you know, because it's two-based, right? It's bookkeeping and tax. So, you know, we jump to tax. But like, one thing I've learned is you can't have everyone's like, oh, what's a sexy tax strategy?

But it's like you've got to do the boring bookkeeping, right? every day, week, month to actually get the right P&Ls and to obviously categorize everything correctly to even know what the tax strategy can be. And I think the reason it's so important that most people don't understand because I didn't understand this is what most entrepreneurs do is, okay, end of the year, I do my books. But then the years ended. So then when you're like, oh, wow, I got, you know, good revenue, good profit. I owe this much tax.

How can I lower it? It's like, well, you can't now because you actually miss that calendar window. And I think that's so, if there's one thing I highlight here in today's podcast is like by doing it monthly and knowing what taxes you're going to maybe paying where your profits at, most of the tax strategy actually has to happen in the previous year. You can't at the end of the year look back and go in March or February. I got to write off some stuff from last year. It's like, no, you missed that window now. So let's talk about that. Like how do you track it on a monthly basis or quarterly to make those decisions? Yeah, being proactive is key for sure. And, you know, one of the greatest questions that I get asked every year, Rudy, at tax time is what is it that I need to spend money on in order to save taxes? And usually I say, spend it on me. I'll take your money. That's no problem, right? But, you know, depending on where you are, let's say, in North America, you know, the tax rates are different, depending on the state, depending on the country that you're in. You know, taxes can go anywhere from

zero all the way up to about 50% in the United States and about 55% in Canada. So you need to understand how the tax system works and based on your location to really truly understand the strategy. But my point with this is, you know, don't spend money just to save taxes. That's the worst possible thing that you could do because, you know, if you're going to give me $100, let's say worst case scenario, your tax rate is 50%. You give me $100. You're going to save $50 in tax. So you have $50 left because you save the tax money. Whereas if you give me the $100, I have the $100. I pay tax at whatever rate, let's say it's $20, I have $80 left. So would I rather have, you know, half of it or more than half of it? I would keep the more. And I would make sure that

I'm, you know, if I'm going to spend money, that it's going to be very strategic to help me make more money in the future. Don't just spend money for the sake of saving taxes. You know, there's lots of gurus that are out there. And I won't name any, but, you know, there's lots that are out there who are going, oh, you know what, buy the new car that's class of debt. Buy the jet. Yeah, get the yacht. Put that, get the motor home. Buy the fancy car. It's like, well, no, that. If you really want that, you know, let's find a way to make it tax deductible in the greatest way possible. But don't do that just for a tax benefit, right? The other thing that comes up with me, Rudy, at the end of the year, is usually when somebody will say, oh, well, you know, how is the year? And I'll say, well, this is great. You know, like you said, after the fact, you know, you had a really great year. You owe $20,000 in tax. They go, how do we possibly owe, like, we didn't make $100,000. I don't have that cash left in my business. And they go, well, that's, that's great. Well, you bought a new truck with your, you know, your cash in your business. You took a lump sum out because you thought you were doing well. You know, now that, you

seasonality maybe, you know, the business is down. You have no cash. Now you have this big tax bill and you're mad at me where the reality is you need to be more proactive and understand where you're at throughout the year and have those conversations, you know. Truthfully, for me, it's more strategic timing than it is what can I spend to save tax money. You know, if you're in a business right now and you're coming up to the end of the year and you're realizing, you know, what in the spring, I have to bring in this new equipment or I need, you know, there's new furniture. I'm going to do a renovation of our space or whatever it is. Be strategic about your timing because if you put that in place in December or you acquire those assets in December, you're going to get a

large depreciation or full deduction expense at that time. And you can take advantage of the tax deduction now because if you pay the big tax bill and then you go to do the renovation or buy the equipment later, not only are you at the cash for that, but you're also at the tax from the year before. So be strategic in your timing, but don't waste your money on things just to get a tax deduction. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's so important just to add, like, I, you know, when I first moved to America, first grew my business, I didn't do this well. I didn't have a good tax guy. And I did the exact thing. I was, you know, living a decent lifestyle. And I still had money saved. But then, you know, eventually he didn't do my tax as well.

I hired a better guy. I realized I had like a 300 grand tax bill and I didn't have the money to pay it because I had spent a lot of that. I had some money, but I needed it for the business. So then I had to like go back and pay it off over years, right? And it's like, yeah, I think everything is like a lesson. You get better from it. Like I was like, thank God this happened in my early 20s because now I've like learned

the hard way forever, right? But that's why I love podcasts and doing these things is people can learn from our mistakes, you know, like, you know, spend a couple of gram, you know, I was trying to be cheap, but it's like spend a few more grand a year because like I probably paid a hundred grand in interest over the few years paying that off. Sure. Yeah. If I just spent another five gram more that year, I would have like not had that problem, right?

So. But that's true, right? And people forget about that. They forget about the interests. They forget about penalties for late filing, the cost to go into those things, you know. To work with the IRS and like, yeah, I got threatening led at all these. things, right? And I was okay with it. I knew we'd figure it out and I wasn't trying to like do tax evasion or anything. And they were pretty understanding you got on a payment plan, but like,

I don't think everyone handled it as well as me. You know, it would have freaked some for sure. And well, that's a peace of mind is so important as well, right? To know, to sleep at night, knowing that everything's taken care of, right? So some entrepreneurs that are a little bit more aggressive risk takers, that's okay, right? We can handle that a little bit more. But those that are a little bit more conservative. The last thing they want is the IRS letter showing up and threatening to take their home. You know, it's, yeah, it's not a situation you want to get into. Yeah, good. So it's the last question. Just, you know, as we wrap today, people like are interested in this. Obviously, it's a lot for them. How do they speak to you? Where do they start learning?

How do they find you in next steps? Yeah, for sure. So any social media channels, you can look me up, Robert Govro. I'm on every platform. But if you want to reach out to our team, go to our website directly, govrocpa.ca.ca. There's a contact us element rate on our main page, drop a line. You know, as I mentioned, we did work with Tony Robbins. We did free tax reviews for all his members. We're offering free tax reviews for anybody who wants to come in, right? Again, 8% of people are paying the appropriate amount of tax.

92% are paying more tax. Come in, get a free tax review. if we can save you money, maybe we work together. But check that out on our website, govrocpa.ca.ca. Yeah, great. So we'll put that in the show notes. And, you know, maybe people are going to start there, maybe listen to some of your stuff, start learning these things.

And then, yeah, I hope today kind of inspired them to, it's a great time of year if they're listening right now, to take control of it for 2026. So, yeah, excited a excited few to help some of the folks listening. and guys if you listen hope you enjoy today and it's not always the most exciting you jump on right away but once you've got it set set and kind of forget and you use you know work with someone that's taking care of it frees you up to do what you do best right which is growing the company and being the leader and all that jazz so robert thanks so much it was a pleasure and uh guys take care

i'll see you guys soon