An evening on the town on Austin’s 6th Street might not have been the most restful way to prepare for the first ever double seminar day in TaxTalk history, but it was fun! After an invigorating jog before sunrise, the NASE team made our way to the Texas State University SBDC for our first seminar of the day. The university was on spring break, so while we didn’t see many students, we had no trouble finding a parking space.
There are a lot of numbers involved in doing your taxes, but sometimes it is other numbers that can catch your attention. Did you know that the CPAs at TaxTalk answer over 10,000 questions a year from small business owners? How about that 1 in 6 tax returns (or 23 million out of 140 million) are filed by small business owners? I think our eight attendees at this morning’s seminar were surprised to hear that they have small business ownership in common with so many other Americans!
After a great morning seminar, we traveled to Lake Austin (actually a manmade reservoir on the Colorado River) for lunch at one of my hometown“hangouts”. We enjoyed the early spring sunshine so much that all of us ended up a little sunburned!
From lunch it was on to Round Rock for our second seminar of the day. The 12 attendees of this seminar didn’t seem to be suffering from that after-lunch haze, they were full of questions from the first few minutes of the presentation until the very end! There were a few questions and a bit of a discussion about entity form (corporation, LLC, sole-proprietorship etc.). I reminded everyone that the entity form of your business isn’t a tax decision. If there was an entity form that conferred a large tax advantage, every business would be using that form, and as demonstrated by a show of hands among attendees at the seminar, there were multiple entity forms represented at the seminar.
All too soon, it was time to hit the road back to Dallas. As a former football player, all I could say was, “I used to think two-a-day practices were brutal, but they’re nothing compared to two seminars a day!”