The Restaurant Owner on His Corner Became the First Client of David Tunstall and the Tunstall Organization

Anthony Codispoti (00:00)

Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they've overcome adversity. As you listen today, let one idea shape what you do next.

My name is Anthony Cotusbodi, and today's guest was the finance director of the American Friends of the Louvre, the U.S. nonprofit that raises money for the Paris Museum. Over five years, he helped send more than $20 million in grants to the Louvre and other cultural institutions. He started out as an auditor at Arthur Anderson, then joined a small AIG team consolidating financial data from subsidiaries in more than 80 countries.

In 2004, he opened his own CPA firm, and in june 2008, three months before Lehman Brothers collapsed, he helped launch the Red Fox Income Fund. He has also helped OMG Pop, the studio behind Draw Something, build its accounting systems before Zynga bought it in twenty twelve. David Tunstall is the founder and president of the Tunstall organization.

A Charlotte-based CPA and fractional CFO firm that works in e-commerce, SaaS, and service businesses. His clients have completed exits, mergers, and money raisins totaling more than $1 billion. But before we get into all that good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company, Adback Benefits Agency. And if you help business owners get a handle on their numbers, this is a lever most of your clients don't know they have. See, here's the problem.

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Learn more at adbackbenefits dot com. All right, back to our guest today, the principal of Tunstall Organization, David Tunstall. Thanks for making the time to share your story today.

David Tunstall (02:45)

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Anthony Codispoti (02:47)

So, David, you started out at Arthur Anderson, one of the largest accounting firms in the world at the time, auditing private and public companies. And then in 1999, you moved to AIG, global insurance company, where you and your team pulled together financial data from AIG subsidiaries in more than 80 countries. Then you left AIG in 2002 and opened your own firm in January of 2004. What was the inspiration for going out on your own?

David Tunstall (03:17)

Yeah, well actually the gap was I I became a sole proprietor in two thousand two and and then didn't actually create you know create the S Corp until two thousand four. But yeah, basically I was a small team and just frankly I was laid off from the team. We were about s eight people, I think, and

they probably didn't need that many and it was something that I you know I was okay with I was actually looking I was good with I I'd always it was right around the time of like the Rich Dad Poor Dad book came out and some of these other learning annex things in New York City and entrepreneurship was just something that I

thought that I wanted to do and then this gave me the opportunity to do it.

Anthony Codispoti (04:20)

So when you first went out on your own, how did you find your first clients?

David Tunstall (04:27)

actually the for my first client was after I got back from my honeymoon getting married in 2002, I went to the owner of the restaurant. He owned like three different restaurants and was like, Do you need any bookkeeping or accounting? And he said, Yes. And so he was my first client.

Anthony Codispoti (04:51)

And why did you go specifically to this restaurant? W you had a personal relationship with them already?

David Tunstall (04:56)

Yeah, I would I mean I would walk by it every day. It was on the corner of where I lived in New York. And he was always out there greeting, you know, he was like the quintessential like restaurant owner greeting everybody that's walking on the sidewalks, like that ki type of guy. And so yeah, it was kind of hard to miss him. And so yeah, I asked him and he was like, Yeah, sure, you know, there's some things that you can help me with.

Anthony Codispoti (05:25)

So, you know, and I think this is the way it goes for a lot of small businesses when you're first starting those your first clients end up coming from people that you know or, you know, friends of theirs. It's kind of a a word of mouth sort of thing. As your company started to grow, is that continued to be the primary source of clients, word of mouth or folks that you already had relationships with, or were you doing any kind of other business development?

David Tunstall (05:52)

Yeah, in the beginning it was well, actually I did connect with a headhunter that found me a contract with a nonprofit. So that was another avenue where and actually I think they even hired the headhunter. The headhunter found me and then I just applied for the contract position. It's a little different because it wasn't an employee situation, but

But yeah, that that and then yeah, once I worked for that nonprofit, the auditor actually, the of that nonprofit referred me to other nonprofits that needed help with their accounting. So that was actually a pretty good referral source. Just the auditor auditing the books that you know I was creating would then knew of other nonprofits that needed help with their bookkeeping and accounting.

Anthony Codispoti (06:51)

You know, and I can tell you from my own experience as well as having talked with hundreds of business founders, like that word of mouth, that's the most powerful form of business growth that there is. Because you're being referred by somebody who knows what a great job that you do. It's not like people feel like they have to vet you as much. You're already coming in as a trusted source, right?

David Tunstall (07:14)

Yeah, no, it's for sure a warm intro and it's you're really just going in and like, Hey, let's solve the problem. And and kind of with that understanding it you know, usually and and oftentimes the fees have been at least floated before then too, so the pricing is kind of understood, you know, give or take.

Anthony Codispoti (07:38)

So there's no sticker shot coming into that conversation. So tell us present day, what does Tunstall do and who do you do it for?

David Tunstall (07:46)

Yeah, so I I moved the company to from NYC to Charlotte in twenty at the end of twenty seventeen. So let's call it like early twenty eighteen. And it I had a little naively thought that like I could just continue serving my book of business from Charlotte and

It's

all good. And but there was a life cycle. There's a life cycle as as you know, as we know as practitioners, you know, we don't always have, I mean, we have a long life cycle as accountants and bookkeepers and tax prep, but it's not always forever. And the companies that I was working with on the, let's call it the accounting side.

Some were growing, some were dying, and the ones that were growing brought people in-house, and then that's wonderful, but then I'm fired, right? So then it's like okay, wow, I actually have to continue the business development in a new market and figure out number one, just even figure out what industries are in this market. It was so so yeah, that that question too, and then

it took me a while. I mean, it took me about six or seven years to need to do that. But and then after COVID, it was like, okay, what am I going to do? How do I keep connected to people who need these services? And how do I even know what to offer and how to deliver it and stuff? And I I joined a networking group, actually, B and I. That kind of helped that helped, it definitely helped with it.

And

Anthony Codispoti (09:36)

BMI

led to more business for you. You made some contacts there.

David Tunstall (09:40)

Yeah, it led to more business, but one of the things that the hidden things that I didn't think did I didn't know what I didn't know, but just showing up there every week and pitching what you do, it you develop relationships with the people in the room, number one. But number two, you get to hone your message. And it one of one of my fellow friends there, he I think he put it best, he's like

You know, we were just like talking one day, and he's like, Yeah, you know, B and I is kind of like Groundhog Day. It's like you go there every week, you get 30 seconds to say your thing, nobody remembers anything you say, and then you know, you got to do it again next week. And but the what's happening behind the scenes is as you're you know delivering your 30-second commercial and you're meeting people.

You're developing relationships, and pretty soon, you know, metaphorically, you're playing the piano and, you know, winning the business.

Anthony Codispoti (10:46)

So let's hear let's hear the current day pitch after all that practice getting refined at BMI.

David Tunstall (10:52)

I mean, it's really distilled. you know, we're we help we enable business owners to make smart decisions. And we do that through tax prep, tax planning, tax representation, bookkeeping and CFO services. That's really it in a nutshell.

Anthony Codispoti (11:12)

And I believe today the firm focuses primarily on e commerce, software, and modern service businesses. Yeah. How did you end up with that client base?

David Tunstall (11:24)

That it it really that started in New York with working with brands and helping them with their online businesses, either just tracking their inventory or managing they're usually managing their inventory, but giving them tools to help to do that and integrate it into the books. and on the on let's call it the commerce side. So it's retail and e-commerce.

And then in terms of service businesses, it's really just whoever's in contacting me. Like I've had some kind of seemingly out-of-the-blue calls, but just people will find me on Google or people will know somebody and want to connect and say, Hey, you know, here's what we're doing. Can you help us? I mean, some of the more impactful calls I got were.

VC backed s software startups that didn't have revenue starting, but needed to get everything their infra their accounting infrastructure set and then they rapidly scaled. So those those were pretty interesting.

Anthony Codispoti (12:39)

So it sounds like this is mostly tech related companies.

David Tunstall (12:44)

There's usually a tech component to it for sure. yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, and that's one of the things that's the le if I go all the way back to even the nonprofits that I was referred to, like one of the the the ways I was able to leverage their accounting was, you know, going from

Let's call it a spreadsheet or or an Excel spreadsheet to QuickBooks desktop, you know, or going from QuickBooks desktop to QuickBooks Online, or going from QuickBooks online that wasn't working at the time, like let's call it 2010 to maybe 2015. It it was like an older version of it's not what it is today. They've done a lot with it, but and then going from there to to zero and getting just something that worked.

usually leveraging some type type of technology for the client. But

Anthony Codispoti (13:43)

Okay.

David Tunstall (13:43)

but to your point, yeah, some of the clients were in that business as well.

Anthony Codispoti (13:48)

Okay. Any old school, kind of old world kind of businesses too? I you did a restaurant there in New York to start with, or is it have you really gravitated mostly to these tech based businesses?

David Tunstall (14:00)

mostly on the accounting side to the tech based businesses, but so on this tax prep, on the tax side, we recently worked with an HVAC company, which is classic in it's it's classic anywhere, but North Carolina specifically is needed and can only imagine in Florida, but

But yeah, so some there's definitely, you know, some home services businesses that I've interacted with and worked with.

Anthony Codispoti (14:34)

So in two thousand six you also became a partner at Red Fox Capital. This was a hedge fund management company. The same time while you're running your CPA firm. How did that partnership come about?

David Tunstall (14:47)

well it was myself, my dad, and my brother, and we contributed capital to do options investing, which I traded. And transparently I was terrible at it. And it that portion that fund effectively failed. It it

We invested I mean, I was able to return capital to invested capital to my brother and my dad, but I ended up, you know, losing some some money. but that I mean

After that, it was a painful time. And I one of the questions you asked earlier was or in the packet was about Lehman Brothers. It's like, well, we were as blind as everybody else, you know, to the market conditions at the time. And so yeah, it was it was a fun adventure to if anybody's ever experienced options investing, it's basically levered.

stock trading at like it can be like a hundred to one it just depending on what types of you know products or I guess you know whatever you're using whether it's you know calls or puts and buying or selling but yeah so that

Anthony Codispoti (16:25)

So this was

a relatively short stint in the hedge fund space. You after after that you got out of it?

David Tunstall (16:31)

Well, so that's that's the interesting thing is like after that I pivoted to in to to Red Fox Capital then be c became like a a special purpose vehicle, an SPV that invested in startups. And so that won't that actually was pretty good because we contributed capital and then would invest in

You know, even some of the clients that I'd be exposed to just going out of pocket to say, wow, this is a really cool client. Is there any room on the cap table? Or are you and this is also a different time. It was like zero percent interest rates, you know, money, VC money in New York City. So there was a lot of opportunities to do that. And some failed and some did well.

Anthony Codispoti (17:32)

And so your your role in that is helping to raise money from investors or was this your own money, this was bank debt, and then the interaction with the client was you get on their cap table, you get some equity as opposed to this being a a debt vehicle for them.

David Tunstall (17:49)

Yeah, usually it was just participating in like whatever round the client was currently on. If it was seed capital, it there was a few cases of seed capital. Other I don't think I ever entered a a a series A. So it was yeah, it was really just seed or pre seed, early financing, early funding.

Anthony Codispoti (18:11)

Okay. And you still do this actively today as opportunities come about?

David Tunstall (18:16)

If there's opportunities, yes, I'm seeing less and less of them just because of I'm not focused on it. But yeah, if there were other opportunities like that. well, okay. transparently I'm also investing in a an angel fund, Charlotte Angels fund in but that's just something I'm doing personally.

Anthony Codispoti (18:40)

Okay.

David Tunstall (18:41)

and that's in Charlotte.

Anthony Codispoti (18:42)

Got it. So a month after you launched the fund, July 2008, you also became finance director at the American Friends of the Louvre. And over the course of five years, the organization sent more than $20 million in grants to the Louvre and other cultural institutions. Tell us how you got connected with this opportunity and the work that you did on setting up.

a fund accounting system 'cause I want to understand what that is.

David Tunstall (19:12)

Sure. yeah, I that was another referral from the auditor that was New York. I don't know if they were Philly based or New York City based. I think they had a satellite in, they had an office in New York, and they were auditing multiple nonprofits, and it was just a case where the executive director had reached out to

Or or some conversation happened where hey, we could use some help with accounting. So I came in and met with her. And I that was actually effectively a job for you know a certain amount of time. And we used QuickBooks desktop for that and we used classes for the funds and just getting everything organized and

Yeah, you know the nine ninety is a public document so you can see what was sent and what was raised and stuff like that. So yeah, did did that answer the question? Sorry. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (20:24)

So fund accounting system,

like is that explain to me more specific like I have an idea what accounting is. I you know, you know, QuickBooks and Net Suite and, you know, platforms like that. Is that kind

David Tunstall (20:35)

Mm-hmm.

Anthony Codispoti (20:35)

of what you were doing?

David Tunstall (20:37)

Yeah, yeah. So QuickBooks and Net Suite and Zero, those are all like quote unquote general ledger softwares. And so within those GL softwares in the general ledger,

you know, you can account for different funds and and how we had them set up at AFL was unrestricted, temporarily restricted, and permanently restricted. And basically what that means is when a donation or when event revenue comes in or however money is donated or comes into the

organization, it gets filtered to one of those three categories first. And the unrestricted it's usually for operations. It's like, okay, that can fund the salaries of people, that can fund whatever other office costs there are, rent, things like that. Anything that's temporarily restricted goes to a particular

project or program that has been set up. And that can be set up by the donor or it can be set up, it's usually set up by the donor or internally. And so if there's a program that's temporarily restricted for let's say some project that is happening, you know, at the Louvre, that'll be communicated to the donors and then they can donate to that particular project.

And then that money is cordoned off temporarily restricted because it's going to sit in our bank account, but it's going it's not going to be able to be spent on operating expenses. So that

Anthony Codispoti (22:33)

Why?

What where and how can it be used?

David Tunstall (22:37)

It it can be used for how whatever that project

Anthony Codispoti (22:41)

Whatever the

donor had specified.

David Tunstall (22:44)

Yeah, whether the donor specified it or it's already been pre specified by the by the entity by the nonprofit and then the donor just contributes to that fund. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (22:57)

Gotcha.

let's move forward a little bit.

I

David Tunstall (23:01)

Sure.

Anthony Codispoti (23:01)

want to talk about OMG Pop. This was the New York mobile game studio behind Draw Something.

David Tunstall (23:07)

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (23:08)

And Zynga, the social game company, eventually bought the company. This is in 2012. before that, you helped its team put accounting, digital filing, and cloud transaction reporting in place. Describe for me what

Things looked like the state of affairs when you first came in.

David Tunstall (23:30)

well I met with their I think they had a a designated finance director. I'm not sure if that's his like official title, but I met with him and the AR person and the AP person and just had an interview and they were in Noho, north of Houston on Broadway and

Obviously a really dynamic, exciting company. They were building I mean, even before Zynga well, I think that's why Zynga ended up buying them was for the draw something game that they had created. And so they were building software, building games, you know, it was fun. There was

you know somebody from the from wu tang clan was like there like one day when i was working like there was just it was like a definite new york scene and kind of vibe and but i went in there and my team and i we we were again on quick books and just organized whatever data we had

it was a little tricky because there was interstitial interstitial advertising recognition, like revenue recognition that was handled by a third party. So it was kinda I remember it was kind of hard to get like a clear picture on that data, but it didn't last long because

W the they really Zynga came into town. They saw you know, they kind of probably knew that they wanted to buy it initially. They had some due diligence people that connected with us, and then you know, a few days later they had been purchased and it was like, okay, we did what we yeah,

Anthony Codispoti (25:24)

It's a pretty short stint for you.

David Tunstall (25:25)

very short stint. It was like we did what we could do to get it to this point and

That was enough for the handoff and for Pete, you know, for them to have a confirmation. I mean, it was pretty atypical, right? It was I would imagine more due diligence cycles can be more rigorous and more intense. That one, it was a marketplace play, I believe, where it was just like, okay, we want this app. Let's buy the company, let's go. Something like that.

Anthony Codispoti (25:58)

And so, you know, I've been through due diligence before myself. I've talked to lots of folks who have been through it. I've not heard of a due diligence process like that because it's not short. It's always long and belabored and it looks like it's going to fall apart at a few different points. So very different kind of experience there.

David Tunstall (26:17)

I th and I was prepared for anything. It was like, okay, there's this whole team coming in from San Francisco. I mean, they also had the overhead costs of like travel and l and you know, and lodging. I'm sure they didn't want to like extend that out. I don't know. There were probably a bunch of factors.

Anthony Codispoti (26:33)

Okay.

David Tunstall (26:34)

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (26:35)

So I want to talk about this app that you started building called Xvoicing. And this is something that moves invoices from Stripe, an online payments platform, into Xero, the accounting software we've mentioned a couple of times here. What were you seeing happen in your client work that made you want to build this?

David Tunstall (26:54)

it

was really solving a problem with a particular client where we were they were invoicing in Stripe and then we had to manually enter all of those into zero. And it was just taking, I mean, it would it could take a month. It was like they were in the thousands of transactions. They were a scaling growing company. And so I hired a developer.

on upwork actually and was like look this is what we need is this something you can do he's like this will be a great challenge he did it it worked we it paid for itself in the sense that like the fees paid to to develop the app covered the decreased time it took and we were just it it just got us on track. It was like okay now we're not behind

we can actually be have everything with this sync. And there were some things I learned about development too, about just how different things had to be sequenced for it to work. but that was really the reason. And then we build it as an exe file, a dot exe file, so it could be installed on a c on PC. And then

Where

we kind of like jumped the shark a little bit on that was we're like, well, let's build a you know, a SAS product and we'll host it on AWS and that really didn't go anywhere. There wasn't a huge market outside of that particular use case, or maybe there is the market, but we didn't know how to reach it. And it was like we have other work to do. You

Anthony Codispoti (28:40)

Mm.

David Tunstall (28:41)

know.

Anthony Codispoti (28:41)

So you still internally use the EXE version or the SAS version or both?

David Tunstall (28:47)

The EXE version was what we used until we stopped working in that capacity with that client.

Anthony Codispoti (28:53)

okay, so you don't even have the internal need for it anymore.

David Tunstall (28:56)

Correct.

Anthony Codispoti (28:58)

How long ago was this? 'Cause it's out you you hired a developer, you didn't try to use like clawed code or anything like that. Hmm.

David Tunstall (29:03)

Right, this was pre AI,

so five, seven years ago, something.

Anthony Codispoti (29:09)

Yeah.

David Tunstall (29:09)

No.

Anthony Codispoti (29:10)

Do you think it's still a problem that exists? Like if you had somebody who knew how to go out and find the clients and get in front of them, or i has Zero or Stripe somehow already patched this or you figured out sort of the connector to to make it easier?

David Tunstall (29:27)

You know, I mean that's a good question. For something off the shelf, I think there are some people that do something around it, but to your point, if you just had to solve that problem, Claude, Chat or another a Grocbot or something are is going to probably be able to solve it.

Anthony Codispoti (29:50)

Hmm. Have you gotten into any of that? doing any vibe coding? Are you building any apps to use there internally to kind of speed up your systems?

David Tunstall (30:00)

Yeah, we I've been again solving a problem. I started with on Replit, which is a like a hosted cloud hosted thing. and we had a client that come came in with Excel spreadsheets as their financial statements and

The book any time that we would have a change, whether it was like, you know, depreciation or just something that would happen every month, it would take a while to get it back from the bookkeeper. So I I vibe coded the general ledger to capture that. And then I had something to check against all of his changes. So it's like I had my own thing internally. He'd send me back if it if it if it matched, great. If it didn't

I could ask those questions and be like, hey, did you consider this or this or this? And then we could resolve that. So, so yeah, I did that. But what I found was that Replit was really expensive. And so I moved to Cursor and kind of brought everything there and then hosted it in GitHub. So now Cursor's doing all of that stuff for that particular app.

Anthony Codispoti (31:26)

Wow. It's so cool. It's amazing what else you can what else you can do. Tell tell me a little bit more about how you guys are using AI, whether it's vibe coding or just other ways that you're kind of feeding things into the the frontier models and and how it's helping you be more efficient.

David Tunstall (31:43)

Yeah, no, that's actually a good distinction is we are we haven't figured out or I haven't figured out the how to do the open source that's that lives on your computer that you apparently is like 10x cheaper than the frontier model. So we're still using the frontier models and I'm sure that's fine, it's good, but it's yeah, it with through cursor,

just we made a skin for our I get I mean maybe it's not the right term, but it's like an overlay on our Google Workplace. So like we have Google Workplace, we have email, calendar, Google Drive, Tasks, bunch of things that Google does, and now we can have it all in one place in an app. And it's and and then one I mean just random stuff like

Google doesn't have a a send and snooze button. They have send and archive and they have send and they have schedule send, but they don't have send and snooze because I like to resurface the emails. So we built that into this skin.

Anthony Codispoti (33:01)

Send in

snooze means send the message now and then send me reminder about it a week later to follow up.

David Tunstall (33:06)

Exactly.

Exactly. And so we built that, like just little things that don't exist in Gmail, but if we have our own custom skin and the API does it, then we can we can build it.

Anthony Codispoti (33:25)

So I'm curious how something like that actually works. So you're using the web-based Gmail interface and you've built something that kind plugs into that or layers alongside of it?

David Tunstall (33:36)

It's a separate website that pulls all of the the the our company data because we're on Google Wordplace Workspace.

Anthony Codispoti (33:48)

Okay, so you have coded this thing that's pulling the data from Google. And part of what you see inside of your own app is an email interface where you can read the messages, you can reply to them, you can forward them the same way you would inside a Gmail. but now you've got this additional functionality such as send in snooze, send the message and remind me in a week to follow up on this.

David Tunstall (34:12)

Exactly, yeah. And then we lose some functionality too. Like Google and Google Gmail added like now you can if somebody sends you a Gmail on the web interface, you can press an emoji and say like thumbs up or wow or whatever. And but the API hasn't, at least not yet, doesn't let us do that internally in our app. So now we can send in snooze, but we can't do the emojis.

Anthony Codispoti (34:41)

Which which one is more important?

David Tunstall (34:43)

Right, exactly. So yeah, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (34:46)

emojis are fun, but hey,

not exactly the the most functional thing. So you know, a lot of your work is as a fractional CFO, as we mentioned, you know, part-time chief financial officer for different companies. And one of the tools that you build for clients or one of the reports is a 13 week cash forecast. I want you to help us from a layperson's perspective understand why this is such an important tool.

What is the important information that it shows the business owner and what kind of decisions does it help them make that they might otherwise be making with incomplete information?

David Tunstall (35:30)

Yeah, I mean I would just preface that by saying sometimes it's more important than others to have that view. it's usually important when cash flow is really tight. When cash flow is less tight, it's less important. But for when cash flow is tight, you can see when you're going to run out of money. That's the key thing. It's like, hey, when am I going to when is the company how long how long of a runway?

Does the company have all else equal based on today's snapshot information? And then, okay, what does that light a fire under me? Or the it gives you the clearer picture of like, okay, wow, I gotta make something happen in the next few weeks to keep going, or maybe the scenario might come up and

What if we what if this happens? What if we only get half of the payment? Are we going to be able to pay all the bills? No, we'll probably have to pay half you know, so it just it it starts the conversation on scenarios, but I think the main thing it does is like, hey, when am I how much cash do I have for how long?

Anthony Codispoti (36:50)

So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. If you were to build a dashboard for each of your clients and it shows them a very small select metrics or numbers on it every day, numbers that they see every day, what would be the most important numbers to put on that dashboard for them to look at?

David Tunstall (37:12)

That's a great question. it depends what they're doing. If they're like they're going to want to see their top line probably working capital, which would be, you know, your cash plus receivables less payables, you know, something like that. So you can see actually what is my real cash available.

And even from and maybe even broken out like that, like top line working capital might be helpful. but then

You know, it depending on what your you know, that's on the financial side, but then I'm sure they're going to want a whole new dashboard on the business side. You know, it's like, Hey, how are my clients doing? Where am I with this process? You know, kinda like a maybe a company operating system, you

Anthony Codispoti (38:08)

Mm.

David Tunstall (38:09)

know, something like that.

Anthony Codispoti (38:11)

Talk to me a little bit more, David, about the tax services that you provide for folks, because that can mean a wide range of things. Like we prepare tax returns, we advise on tax efficient strategies, we represent you in front of the IRS in the case there's an audit. Like, what does your umbrella do?

David Tunstall (38:31)

Yeah,

all of that, tax tax prep, which is the compliance piece, and that is just the filings that need to be done for you know, federal and whatever state on the income tax side. And from there, you know, depending on the client and the client situation,

Depending and also the entity type. So if there's an LLC or a S Corp, those are past through entities. So those are going to have imp impacts on the individual tax situation. So whoever's the owner and what percentage of ownership and are you know, are they doing a reasonable com you know, salary for the S-corp or

You know, just so many different issues relating to that pass-through entity to the individual tax situation of where it's landing. But then to your point on the tax representation side, it's like, okay, well, we filed our F bar, we file you know, I'm talking about like a

Anthony Codispoti (39:50)

What is the

F bar?

David Tunstall (39:51)

a a co a foreign a co a a corporation or a person with a foreign bank account or something. It's like we reported that, but oops, we didn't file our 5471 or something. Like let's say they control either individually or a corporation controls a foreign entity, a foreign subsidiary. Well now they have to file a another form for that reporting

not just you know the activity of transfers back and forth money back and forth but like the balances that sit in both places and there's just a whole rabbit hole you can go down for anything foreign but that's yeah the and they're usually really expensive too if you don't file them on time. They're f they're informational forms so it's not really income tax per se. It's just they want them on time, the IRS so and FinCEN. So

those are those are challenges. let's see, what else? yeah, and then getting a a form from the from the IRS, just hey, like an audit form. Can you justify this, that, and the other thing?

Anthony Codispoti (41:05)

So I think what listeners would be particularly excited to hear about are some tax efficient strategies that you like to advise to clients when appropriate. Things that are completely legal but can be ways to help mitigate that impact.

David Tunstall (41:20)

I mean the on the biggest thing on let's say real estate or something, like any individual who has a rental property or even a a Airbnb or something like that, there's you can accelerate the depreciation on a portion of your property. So like most properties have a long depreciation life, like

27 and a half years for residential property, 39 years for commercial. but some of the like the some of the pieces of that property, some of the pieces of the house, so to speak, have shorter depreciation cycles. They might only be five, ten, fifteen years. And what you can do with that is you can, it's called bonus depreciation, and you can depreciate everything in the current year.

But you have to do that, you have to identify it and document it, and that's called a cost segregation analysis. And if you do a cost segregation analysis, then you can have this really large upfront expense, which will help offset rental income, things like that, ordinary income even if it's a if it's an Airbnb and

Anthony Codispoti (42:45)

So you advise clients on this. Are you also able to provide the cost segregation analysis or does that go to a third party firm?

David Tunstall (42:53)

I use a third party just because it's a it's a specialized thing and there's a few of them out there that do it that I've used that that offer that service. So there's even somebody locally where where I am, there there are online services that'll do it and yeah, I I'd be happy to refer anybody to to something like that if it was something they needed.

Anthony Codispoti (43:19)

So tell me where future growth is going to come from for the Tunstall organization. New services, more clients, hiring sales reps, running ads online. What are you thinking?

David Tunstall (43:34)

That's

a great question. I think I'm sure there's a playbook for that. and it probably you know, we could buy a firm, you know, we could just really just go deep and like, hey, like we'll add on a bunch of revenue, new processes, everything. That would be one way. another would just be to continue to grow incrementally.

But to do that, then you know we bring need the right people, the right process in place. So that would involve probably hiring somebody else, which we're probably ready to do pretty soon. and yeah, I'd say those two ways, organically and buying.

Anthony Codispoti (44:22)

Any great mentors that you've learned from along the way, David?

Maybe think of somebody and one particular thing that they taught you that has stuck with you.

David Tunstall (44:37)

Well, currently, the guy that I mentioned at the beginning who who said B and I is a lot like Groundhog Day, he's been he's been a really good resource for me. He's an ex CFO. and then he kind of like left that business and is helping his wife's

well his wife started a marketing a digital marketing company and he went to work with her. So they're partners now and they do brand strategy and and all sorts of things. But he's a good resource because he's been you know, he helped a a company get do the actual merger with you know, through all that due diligence process with the private equity firm. And so

He his he's got always good nuggets and it's just good to like have somebody like that in my life that I can connect with and talk to every week and stuff.

Anthony Codispoti (45:43)

It's so important to have access to peers, whether it's in your own industry, which I think is super helpful, but also sometimes folks that are outside the industry. They give a fresh perspective. They come at it from a little bit of a different angle that maybe you're not getting from folks inside your industry. You know, another one of the things that I find is really helpful, though very uncomfortable, is going through hard experiences. Like there's really powerful lessons to be learned from that.

And I'd be curious to hear from you, David. What's one of the hardest things that you've had to overcome and what did going through that teach you?

David Tunstall (46:27)

I mean there's been a few times like okay so on the business side there's y getting fired was hard from a client it

I look back and I have way more ex clients than I do current clients. And it's like, okay, sometimes there are reasons, sometimes the business will fail. Sometimes, you know, we'll have disagreements. Other times, you know, we're we've gotten to our plateau with that particular client, and they're going to the next level with another team or another in-house person or something. Right? That can happen. And

It's always tough because it's it's a it's a sort of death in a way, right? It's like, now we're not the what we've been doing is not the same. Now I have to change. And okay, where's the new revenue source going to come from? And you know, all of that kind of stuff. So that can be really hard. And it but I would say getting, you know, just keeping it in perspective and

Prayer, frankly, and just anything that, you know, just keeping a a good perspective that hey, like if all things are really for good, how can how is this good? Just asking the question, is it is it good? And and just come finding what is good about it and

maybe going there because it's not maybe immediately present. It's like how is how is this good? I it's terrible. But

Anthony Codispoti (48:17)

Kind looking

for the silver lining in the experience. Yeah.

David Tunstall (48:20)

Yeah, yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (48:21)

So give us an example like losing a client that's terrible, right? It makes

David Tunstall (48:25)

Right.

Anthony Codispoti (48:26)

you feel bad about yourself. Why did they leave? What's wrong with me? Now I've lost this revenue. How am I going to fill it in? So give us an example of where the silver lining is in something.

David Tunstall (48:38)

It's

I had a I had a client that we, you know, I started started with. Like I accounted for the first transaction of the entity. And then they brought in different people as their in-house resources on the to be the, you know, the finance touch points for us. And it was just hard when we finally broke up, basically, because they had

replaced us with their in-house team and then, you know, we were c basically fired. And so it was all good in the sense that they had grown, things were working. Yes.

Anthony Codispoti (49:27)

It wasn't a performance

issue. They had just they had grown to the point where they needed somebody in house.

David Tunstall (49:32)

Yeah. And but then having the care having just different personalities come in and change and not it it it was like, wow, it's just different. It's hard. And so how do I how do you how did I come to terms with that? just you know, keeping it keeping it in perspective, prayer is huge for me. and just

You know, taking things step by step. I some things are unexplainable, some things you just have to power through and compartmentalize, even if temporarily, until or put you know, let's use an accounting c term, put it in suspense. Just let it sit there until we can figure out what it is and maybe through time and

twenty twenty vision you can see, you know, looking back, that's what that was.

Anthony Codispoti (50:31)

Well, and I wonder

if there's also an opportunity in a situation like that for you to look back at what you're doing and how you're doing it, and are there ways for us to improve? Would there maybe in that situation, and just throwing out hypotheticals here, for us to have been offering other services that might have kept that client with us? Or maybe we put too much time or energy into that client when we should have been also spending some time on business development.

Or I don't know. as I say those things, how does that land? I see you kinda chuckling there.

David Tunstall (51:06)

I mean, you hit it right on the head, those two things. It's like, hey, we're l yeah, those I mean

Yeah, that's those types of things are exactly those I mean, yeah, you hit it. Those yeah. Just looking back and it's like, hey, how could we learn from this? Were we doing the right thing? Were we properly allocating our time? Should we have been focusing on other things? Did we have too much scope creep? Blah blah all those questions.

Anthony Codispoti (51:38)

Yeah, sometimes it's those painful moments, as hard as they are, they're really good for self-reflection if you'll allow yourself to be curious about it and not just, you know, so shell-shocked and hurt by it. And sometimes there's

David Tunstall (51:51)

Exactly.

Anthony Codispoti (51:51)

a, there's a, you know, there's a progression that you have to go through. Well, I'm sad and I'm angry. And okay, now I've worked through that. Now I okay, I'm going to, I'm going to be introspective and and ask myself those questions. Okay, how can we get better from this?

David Tunstall (52:04)

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah. That's you're right. That's ultimately the path forward is just how what can I learn from it and to do better.

Anthony Codispoti (52:15)

So as you think about the work that you're doing now, David, what is it that you most want to be remembered for?

David Tunstall (52:23)

well with the work that I'm doing, in a way I'd almost like not like to be remembered for. Like I don't want what and sorry, I I maybe I'm saying that wrong. I want it to I want what the work that we're doing to stand on its own so it's not so there's so we've protected the clients for their situations. We've

You know, giving them the the right infrastructure that they can grow so that it's part of the story, but it's stands on its own. Meaning like it's not it's not like I don't want the I mean, I should be careful even saying this word out loud, but like the Enron story or something. You know what I mean? Like we don't want something like that. We want to do things the ro the right way so things are solid.

They're working for the client. And also, you know, we have a healthy amount of under, you know, protection for ourselves too. So I don't know if that answers the question, but it's for the work that we're doing. I'd yes, it'd be great to be remembered as a as a part of this of a success story, but hopefully it's just that we're

protecting our clients, doing right by them, and that anything, any issues that do come up, we're handling them.

Anthony Codispoti (53:57)

What's your favorite thing to do outside of work? Do you have any hobbies, David?

David Tunstall (54:02)

I would say these days, I outside of work, that's like literally not work is walking the dog and exercising and walking around our trails in our neighborhood. and you know, hanging out with going to dinner with the family and my wife and stuff. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (54:25)

Love it.

David Tunstall (54:26)

Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti (54:27)

I've just got one more question for you today, David. But before I ask it, I want to do three quick things for the audience. First of all, anybody who wants to get in touch with David Tunstall, go to his website, tunstallorg.com. It'll be in the show notes, but tunstallorg.com. And if you're enjoying the show today, go ahead, take a moment, subscribe wherever you're listening. See, it also sends a signal that helps others discover our podcast.

So thanks for taking a quick moment to help spread the word. And as a reminder, if you help business owners get a handle on their numbers, here's a lever most of them don't know they have. A program that counterintuitively turns their healthcare plan into higher net profits. The exact kind of hidden money you're already in business to find. It's backed by Bain Capital Insurance, so you can recommend it with confidence. Bring your clients a win like that, and they will pass your name along.

Adbackbenefits.com. Okay, David, last question for you. A year from now, what is one very specific thing that you hope to be celebrating?

David Tunstall (55:36)

Well, I hope we have been able to deliver for our clients. A few of them, you know, are do have, you know, those cash flow challenges and hopefully we can help them and hopefully with the same team. We have a good team, we have a core bookkeeping, tax and operations team and

Maybe we're celebrating you know, the growth of and and hiring somebody else.

Anthony Codispoti (56:11)

I love it. David Tunstall from Tunstall Organization, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate you being here.

David Tunstall (56:21)

Thank you, Anthony. Appreciate it.

Anthony Codispoti (56:23)

Hey folks, that's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired Stories Podcast. Thanks for learning with us. And if one thing stood out, put that into action today.

Connect with David Tunstall:

Website: tunstallorg.com