Are you having a difficult time deciding on a business structure? You’re not the only one. While having a formal business structure can provide you with significant legal protection and save you a lot in taxes, figuring out which one is most suitable for your small business can be a real challenge. In this episode, Gene Marks along with Christina Lewellen, a PhD, CPA and associate professor of accounting at NC State University, and Nathan Goldman, a CPA, PhD and also an associate professor of accounting at NC State University, discuss the different factors you need to consider when choosing the best structure for your new company.

Podcast Key Highlights

  • What Are the Benefits of Forming an S-Corp?

    • Forming an S-corp gives you a pass-through entity similar to the way a partnership is taxed.
    • Another major advantage of forming an S-corp is that it provides you with a layer of legal protection in the event that you’re sued or need credit protection.
    • An S-corp is also easier to set up compared to other types of business entities.
    • In contrast to a C-corp, you only have one layer of taxation when you own an S-corp.
    • With an S-corp, although you’re being taxed on your individual rates, you’re not taxed on any distributions from the business, just on the income. This makes it easier to pull out money when you need it.

  • What Are the Disadvantages of Forming an S-Corp?

    • There are a lot of restrictions with regards to which businesses can actually become an S-corp.
    • S-corp businesses have to have 100 or fewer unique shareholders, all of whom must be U.S. citizens or residents of the United States.
    • S-corps have to remain underneath a certain income threshold in order to reap the benefits of the qualified business income deduction.
    • Due to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, in which the corporate tax rate was dropped down to 21%, while individual rates stayed in the upper 30’s, many S-corp businesses are being taxed at a higher rate than the corporate income.

  • What Are the Advantages of Forming a C-Corp?

    • If you’re more focused on the long-term goals of your company and you’re keeping most of your money in your business by reinvesting back into it, then the C-corp tax rate of 21% is a better option.
    • C-corps allow you to raise money more easily; having the ability to publicly list your company provides you with more unique avenues to raise capital.

  • Is It Difficult to Switch Back and Forth Between Being an S-Corp and a C-Corp

    • If companies want to move to the C-corp from the S election, it’s fairly simple; they just fill out a form. Similarly, it’s easy to make that S election from the C-corp as well.
    • There are some restrictions to switching back and forth between business entities. For instance, once you drop that election, you can’t do it again for five years.
    • Although you need every shareholder to agree in order to go from a C-corp to an S-corp, you only need the majority to go from an S-corp back to a C-corp.

  • What Do Small Business Owners Need to Know About Partnerships?

    • Partners can take distributions from partnerships and it doesn’t have to be an equal distribution, whereas in an S-corp, it does need to be trued up at the end of the year.
    • There’s a lot of flexibility within partnerships. Participating partners can set up a partnership agreement with whatever terms they want.
    • The primary drawback of forming a partnership is that all the income that flows through from the partnership is also subject to self-employment tax.

Links

Transcript

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Gene: Hey everybody, it’s Gene Marks and welcome back to another episode of the Small Biz Ahead podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. This is the most exciting podcast ever. You’ve got three CPAs on this podcast. What more entertainment could we want? As you guys know, I am a CPA. I’m speaking with Christina Lewellen, she is a CPA and a PhD. And also Nathan Goldman, who is… But Christina and Nathan are both professors. Christina Lewellen is a associate professor of accounting, and Nathan is an associate professor of accounting, both at NC State University. So first of all, guys, thank you very much for joining me on this conversation.

Christina: Thank you.

Nathan: Thanks for having us.

Gene: Glad to have you here. So the topic that we’re going to discuss is about business formations. I’ve written a couple of blogs about this on the Small Biz Ahead platform, and it generates a lot of conversation because the business owners that are running existing businesses or freelancers or entrepreneurs, people are starting up businesses, it always comes to the question of starting up a business and what type of an organization should you have? And as I said before we even started recording this, this is like a six-hour conversation that we’re going to try and get done in under 30 minutes.

Gene: So Christina, I’m going to start with you. There are some main types of business organizations that you can choose from, there’s pass-throughs like S corps, LLCs, partnerships, and then there’s also the standard C corp. But really the main type of business formation, that at least I see among my clients, is S corps. So Christina, I’ll start with you first. Talk to us a little bit about an S corp. What is it? What are the pros of organizing yourself as an S corporation? What do you see as some of the downsides? And then Nathan, I’m going to give you a chance to jump in on that topic as well. Go ahead, Christina, give us some of your thoughts.

Christina: Yeah, awesome. I would say the same thing. So back in the days, I was a CPA for five years before I decided to do the PhD route and become a professor. And I would say probably most of our small business clients also were S corps as well. So you have that nice dimension where you get that legal protection. It gives you that pass-through entity similar to the way a partnership is taxed. But also you have that protection, so if you’re sued or if you have credit protection, those types of things that you have that nice layer. So that’s the nice thing compared to a partnership that you have with S corp. And I think just the ease of setting it up, and I guess if we’re comparing it to a C corp, you only have that one layer of taxation from the standpoint of the double taxation that comes along with a C corp.

Gene: Right. That makes sense. Nathan, if I can also jump in and redirect to you. So just at a top level, an S corp is a corporation, it’s like you’re filing the 1120 tax returns, it’s a corporate tax return, but it’s an 1120-S, versus what a C corporation files. Is that correct?

Nathan: Yeah, so the S corp, one thing that I think people get confused about when we’re talking about S corps, especially in comparison to an LLC or something that might have similar other characteristics, is that the S corp is a C corp that then makes the election to become an S corp. Some of those elections can be kind of complicated because S corps are really restricted on who could actually become an S corp. We have to have 100 or fewer unique shareholders. So that does kind of count family members as one individually unique shareholder. But then they also have to be essentially U.S. citizens or residents of the United States. So you can’t have this significant foreign investment, which maybe we didn’t think about back in the days being quite as big of a situation, but I think we’ve seen now with the influx of non-U.S. investment, this is actually becoming a really big key consideration.

Nathan: There’s also some restrictions when you talk about how the entity is being taxed when you think about things like the qualified business income deduction. So what Christina was saying was totally on point with that, okay, they no longer have this double income taxation layer that you’d have with the C corp, but then as long as they’re qualified, as long as they have a low enough income level, they do get the benefits of this qualified business income deduction, which I’m guessing we’ll talk about in a bit when we’re talking about some of the other business entities. But it’s important to point out that they do get that benefit as long as they’re underneath those income thresholds.

Gene: Great point. And Christina, let me redirect back to you. So Nathan brought up this qualified business income tax deduction, and it’s relatively new. It was part of the 2017 tax legislation, and it impacts pass-throughs, like an S corp. So question number one is let’s make sure that we define what a pass-through is, because that’s what an S corp is and a partnership is, and I’d love to get your definition of that and also talk to us, just educate us a little bit why that’s such a benefit for this qualified business income tax deduction that’s special for pass-throughs.

Christina: Yeah, that’s a great question. So the way that a pass-through entity… Well, I guess I’ll start with a C corp. So you have all the income from the business income from the C corp gets taxed at the corporate level, which is right now the rate’s 21%. Then when we pay dividends to our shareholders, that gets taxed again at dividend rates for the individuals. So with the pass-through entity, there’s actually no taxation at the business level, but the business income passes through to the shareholders and gets taxed at the shareholder level. But the interesting thing about that is, as a result of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that in 2017, the corporate rate was dropped from an average of about 35% down to 21%. Individual rates kind of stayed the same, top rates in the upper 30. So without this QBI deduction, the pass-through income would get taxed a lot higher rate than potentially the corporate income.

Christina: Now it’s kind of complicated just because that’s some function of the corporate income and then how much you pay out to the shareholders. But so S corps can pay out dividends to shareholders without having any tax consequence. The business income gets taxed at the individual level, and then they can pay out distributions as they choose. So QBI deduction is really complicated and it’s mostly for smaller businesses. So there’s caps on how much income that you could have from that, and the types of businesses, like different types of businesses aren’t really qualified and it’s really complicated function of wages and different types of things that go into that. So it’s quite complicated I think to do that, depending on how much income you have and what types of income you have.

Gene: So Nathan, so to sort of go off of Christina’s points, the corporate tax rate, if I had a regular C corporation, my tax rate would be at 21% of my income. But if I have an S corporation, all that income flows down to my personal tax return. And my personal tax rate could be in the low to mid 30s depending on how much money that I am making. So on the face of it you’d be like, “Well, you should be a C corporation in your business because your tax rate will be that much lower.” So Nathan, tell me why I would still want to be an S corporation. Why is there still an advantage considering that there’s such a potential big difference in tax rates?

Nathan: So I could start at the lower income levels of being an S corp. So if you’re underneath that 2023 cutoff for the QBI deduction, I believe that it fully phased it out at $364,200 in 2023. If you were getting the QBI deduction and you factor in that you are paying taxes at even the 37% tax rate or even something higher, low to mid 30%, so if you’re qualifying for this QBI deduction, you have that tax rate, you’ll be paying significantly less taxes or you’ll be making significantly more after-tax cash flows relative to if you were organized as a C corporation. And the reason why is because you have that 21% tax rate at the corporate level, but then you’re also going to be facing this individual level taxation when those earnings are distributed out.

Nathan: So you’ll have that dividend tax rate, which will either be zero, 15 or 20% depending on your tax rate, and that will lead to ultimately paying less in taxes as the flow through rate as the S corp relative to C corp. And I’ve done this calculation with my students tons of time, just going through lots of different examples, and it’s only until you get to the really high levels of income at the entity level that you’re starting to see where it at least evens out of it. Now, the trick is that the corporations have the advantage that you don’t necessarily have to pay out that income every single week. So if the corporation is making money and it decides to hold onto that cash, or it decides to reinvest that cash instead of paying it out to the shareholders, well that’s when they’re only going to face the 21% tax rate at that additional shareholder level.

Nathan: So it kind of depends what type of dynamic you want to view this from. If you’re viewing it from the perspective of, “How much am I making after taxes each individual year?” You’re going to say, “Well, the benefits clearly reside in being an S corp.” But if we’re thinking about businesses and how this is a multi-period game, very few businesses are just starting up and operating for a single year and paying out everything and then moving on. Businesses operate in multi-years, so they’re thinking about investments, they’re thinking about future opportunities for the business, they’re not going to pay it all out to their shareholders. Then all of a sudden you could start to see the benefits even out. Or in fact, maybe the C corporation would be preferred over the S corp.

Gene: Christina to go on what Nathan was saying is that also to me, it just sounds like it’s all about getting money out of your business. What Nathan was saying is if you’re having this long-term outlook and you’re keeping your money in your business because you’re reinvesting back into it, and you’re buying capital equipment or property or whatever, you’re just keeping the money in there, then yeah, your tax rate at 21% in a C corp, obviously that’s your better tax situation. But I think for most business owners, Christina, would you agree, we want to pull money out of the business, right?

Christina: Yeah, that’s what I used to see. They did. And that’s another thing that I used to see with S corps where if you don’t have an issue with legal liability and that kind of things, sometimes a partnership is actually better in that way because when you have an S corp, you have to have pro-rata distribution. So if you have two 50-50 owners, they have to have the same amount of dividends each year. And a lot of times small business owners, they’ll just write themselves a check whenever they need money or want to pay bills or whatever. And then when we get to the end of the year and one partner has taken out $100,000 and the other has taken out $30,000, and you can’t have that for the tax insurance, so then you have to have these loans back and forth, you basically loan the money to the shareholder and they have to pay it back, or you have to change the ownership percentages. So sometimes that can be a bit of a pain to deal with. That’s why in some cases I have seen people go with partnerships instead so they don’t have to deal with that dynamic. But you got to be careful about the legal liability there. If there’s any type of legal implications or opportunity to be sued or different things like that, I would say just be real wary of that partnership forum.

Gene: Okay, so let’s recap, first of all, what we’ve learned, where we’re comparing just S corps to C corporations. I mean, C corporations themselves, from a tax perspective, they have a potentially much lower tax rate if you plan on leaving money in the business. But an S corp, although you’re being taxed to your individual rates, which tend to be higher than that 21% corporate rate, you’re not taxed on any distributions from the business, just on the income. So it’s easy to pull the money out, but if you have multiple partners in an S corps, or multiple shareholders as it is, you have to make sure those distributions are equal between the two. So there is that sort of complicating factor. So all of that has to be considered.

Gene: Generally what I see with people with S corporations from a tax standpoint is you pay yourself the minimum but a reasonable level of salary, marketable level of salary, but you try to keep it as minimum as possible. And then any more money that you want to take out of the business, you take it out as distribution. With a C corp then any money you’re taking out is going to be taxed because it’s taxed as a dividend. Okay, so that’s the tax implications. And before we move on from S corps to C, I do want to talk about partnerships. Nathan, I’ll switch back to you. Talk to me about, putting tax issues aside, what other reasons would I want to form a C corp over an S corp? What other advantages do I have?

Nathan: I think the biggest one is just the ease of raising capital. A lot of C corps, they could be privately held, but you could also publicly list your company, which then allows unique avenues to raise capital. And one thing I alluded to earlier was just the inherent restrictions with being an S corp, just the overall limitations that you have of not being able to have a lot of different shareholders not being able to have as significant a foreign investment. Or if you do a non-U.S. resident investment, it has to be restricted to people that are living in the US.

Nathan: So I think little things like this can have a significant impact on not necessarily the early stages of the corporation, but as they begin thinking about long-term situation, “What do we want our company to look like down the road? Do we want this to be a blossoming multinational company?” At that point, an S corp is heavily restricted. But from the C corp side, especially with the ability to raise capital and the ability to publicly list your company, these could be significant ways to attract capital and track new capital to your business.

Gene: Which is why I guess if companies or startups, tech companies, they’re venture backed, they tend to skew more towards C corps for that reason, right? Because that way they have the most flexibility when it comes to future capital needs, and then they can take in as many shareholders they like, and foreign shareholders, that gives them the most flexibility, which makes sense.

Gene: Christina, what about from a liability standpoint? Is there really any difference in liability? If I’m a shareholder of an S corporation versus being a shareholder of a C corporation, am I exposed any differently as far as you know?

Christina: No. And they’re both corporations. They both have basically… I’m not a lawyer, so there could be some minute differences, but as far as what I saw in practice, they’re basically the exact same thing as far as from a liability standpoint. And the nice thing too, a lot of times companies will start out as an S corp, and then all you have to do is drop that S election. So it’s fairly easy, you just fill out a form to be able to do that. So if companies want to move to the C corp from the S election, it’s fairly easy to do. In the same way it’s easy to make that S election from the C corp as well. But normally I’ve seen that done at the beginning and then they transition more towards C corp later on.

Gene: Can you go back and forth between them? Can you be an S corp one year in a C corp the next?

Christina: No, there are some restrictions. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at them. Is it five years? Yeah, so once you drop that election, you can’t do it again for five years.

Gene: Got it. Got it. But there is a five-year window if we did want to switch things around, depending if the tax…

Christina: Yeah, so at some point 5 years later you decided, “Well, I was better off as an S corp.” Or if they change the tax rates. Let’s say they all of a sudden drop the individual rates back down a lot for some reason, I doubt foresee that happening, but you never know what the politicians are going to do and then five years later we could always add that back.

Gene: Got it. And Nathan, what about just from a paperwork and a compliance standpoint, is there any significant differences between S corp and a C corp?

Nathan: Not as much, especially when you’re not publicly traded. So if you do become publicly traded, that’s a whole different beast as a C corp. But from the other aspects, it does vary in terms of the type of tax forms you fill out. So you alluded to the 1120 versus 1120-S, as the S corp, you do have to calculate out your income and your items, both your income as well as your separately stated items by day, essentially depending on what shareholders are holding for each individual day.

Nathan: So if, for example, Christina is a shareholder for only three months out of the year and then she increases her holdings for the remainder 270 days of the year, you have to figure out what her, not just the income that’s being allocated or the losses, but also the separately stated items and how much of that is going to be allocated on that per day basis to be able to identify what’s going to flow down to her. And then one other thing I was going to add about just the changing of entity selection, you actually need every shareholder to agree to go from a C corp to an S corp, but you only need the majority to go from a S corp back to a C corp.

Gene: Interesting.

Nathan: Or as I teach my students, if you’re not in the majority but you want to go from an S corp to a C corp, you could also do an involuntary election and just sell some of your shares to your friend that lives in Germany and then all of a sudden you can’t be an S corp anymore. But for the most part, most people just saw those election rules where as long as you have the majority, you could go from being an S corp to a C corp.

Gene: Christina, do you have something you want to add?

Christina: No, I don’t think so on top of that yet. Did a great job.

Gene: Nathan, you just before we do a summary, I do want to talk about partnerships. But because you guys teach this to your students, Nathan, I’m curious, when it comes to C corps and S corps, what trips up your students the most? Where do they seem to have the most questions or problems or confusion when it comes to this? Because I guarantee whatever they’re confused about, the rest of us are going to be confused about times 10. So what do you normally find?

Nathan: Yeah, I think the ongoing changes in basis, especially on the S corp side, when you have differed people buying in for differing amounts of money, and then how all these separately stated items flow through to the actual basis that they’re holding in the company and why they have separately stated items versus non-separately stated items and how those interact with one another to determine what the overall tax liability is. Now, the one thing I always make sure my students know when they leave here is that S corps do not themselves pay taxes. So that’s always a big thing for me. I want them to know this. S corps themselves are not the tax paying entities, the shareholders, it flows through to them. So even though they see the word corporation and they’re thinking, “All right, we’ve already learned about corporations, we’ve learned about the 1120, we’ve learned about the 25% tax rate.” It’s so important that they know that it’s the individual taxpayers that are really feeling that tax burden, that the S corp is just a tax reporting entity and the actual tax burden falls on those individual shareholders.

Gene: And if I could add to that, and Christina, I want to get to you, because I want to start talking about partnerships while we have time left. But when you talk about calculating the basis, because S corporations, the income flows down to the individual shareholders, it’s very important to know what their percentage ownership of this entity is, right? Because that’s going to determine obviously what their income is. So is that what you mean when you’re saying about calculating basis?

Nathan: Yeah, yeah. Sorry, yeah, I thought you were asking that to Christina. Yeah, that’s what I meant with that.

Gene: You’re nodding there because you were like, “I guess, yeah, yeah, Christina, I’m sure you’re going to agree.” But yeah, that is what we mean by calculating the basis, right?

Christina: Yeah, and I would say to your point that my students, I teach the undergrad tax class and then Nathan teaches the graduate tax class, which is the next class of the sequence. I think, yeah, my undergrad students struggle even more with that. And in fact, we don’t really go through the basis calculations as much just because it’s so hard for them to grasp and it’s a little bit outside of the scope of what we need to do for an intro class.

Christina: But I would say that’s one thing I think that is different between the C corp and the S corp is if you have 20 shareholders, you have to calculate all that and keep track of all that basis and make sure that your distributions aren’t in excess of basis because then you… your capital gains and issues like that. Or you have to do loans back and forth. So there can be some issues there where it’s definitely more costly to file the tax returns and keep track of all that versus a C corp where you don’t have to deal with all those issues as much.

Gene: Good. All right, Christina. So while I’ve got you in the spotlight here, so we’ve talked about S corp and C corps. You mentioned just briefly about partnerships. One of the things that you brought up about a partnership is that different than an S corp, partners can take distributions from partnerships so it doesn’t have to be an equal distribution, whereas an S corp, it does need to be trued up at the end of the year. A partnership is also pass-through an S corp. So if you and I and Nathan are partners in a business, we each own 1/3 of it, 1/3 of that income is passed to our individual returns. So we pay taxes at the individual level. But tell me a little bit more about partnerships. It seems like an S corp, but other than that one difference I just mentioned, why do people go into partnerships as opposed to S corp Christina?

Christina: Well, there’s a lot of flexibility. So it’s not even just the distributions. We can set up a partnership agreement to whatever we want. Let’s say that one partner itemizes their deductions and the other one doesn’t, I can allocate all the charitable contributions or all these different things to this shareholder, I can allocate capital gains. This shareholder, I can say if I have losses one year, then this… Not shareholder, partner. Then this partner can have all the losses and this one can have all the profits. I can basically do whatever I want with that. And there’s just extreme flexibility in the way that I can handle that. So that’s the benefit there.

Gene: Yeah, I mean from a tax perspective, it almost sounds like having a partnership is even better than an S corporation.

Christina: Well, there’s a catch there. So the only thing about the difference between partnerships and S corps, all the income that flows through from the partnership is also subject to self-employment tax. So it gets taxed at the 6.2% Social Security and the 1.45% Medicare rate that gets doubled, so it’s like 15.3% up to the cap of whatever the social security cap is. So you have to pay self-employment tax on all of that. Whereas with the S corp, you just pay, like you said, you pay a reasonable salary, a reasonably small salary, and that’s the only thing that you pay employment taxes on. And the rest of it goes through without employment taxes. So that’s the one kicker there is from the business income standpoint, it’s taxed the same way, but from self-employment taxes, you get an extra 15% basically on top of that.

Gene: Right, right. So you’re paying the employer and the employee share, you’re saying?

Christina: Yeah.

Gene: That’s because you’re a partner of that business

Christina: Yeah, because you don’t have an employer, the business pays both the employer and the employee share of the taxes.

Gene: Got it. Whereas if you’re at an S corp, you’re just paying the employee’s share of it, I guess or what…

Christina: The S corp will pay both, but they only pay it on just the salary part, not the whole business income. So yeah.

Gene: Got it.

Christina: So if you have one business owner in both… Well, I guess it would have to be two if it’s a partnership. But from a very simple standpoint, if I have $100,000 of income in the whole business, I could pay myself a salary of let’s say $20,000 in the S corp, and that part would get taxed double on the employment tax side, whereas the whole 100,000 would hit the employee and the employer side part of that.

Gene: Understood. Understood. Nathan, we only have a couple of minutes left, so let me just ask you, and I know there’s no way anyone can answer what is the best organization for your business? Because it depends, right? It depends on every individual business and what their needs are. But I’m going to ask you to make a little bit of a leap, Nathan and say, just as a rule of thumb, just generally, what do you generally see businesses that form a corporation versus those that form an S corp versus those that form a partnership, and again, I realize we’re generalizing, but to at least give us sort of a 30,000-foot overview of what direction we might want to head before we get into the details of our business. So I’ll put you on the spot Nathan and ask you, what do you generally say?

Nathan: Well, I think the number one consideration, as much as I like to say it’s tax, it probably isn’t. Tax is one of the many important reasons what they want to be thinking about. Really the number one reason is the liability that the owners are going to face in this business environment. Many partnerships do not afford all shareholders limited liability, especially some sort of limited partnership. There usually has to be some sort of general partner which has unlimited liability. So yeah, maybe early on in the infancy of the company, the business might just kind of simply set up as a limited partnership and they give a general partner unlimited liability, but also a lot of freedom. And then limited partners to come in as investors and have that limited liability.

Nathan: But then what I usually see as the business evolves, it might start to consider being a limited liability corporation, or if it doesn’t meet those requirements, could become a limited liability partnership. And that’s where you start to see that general partner sort of offload some of that liability that they’re facing. And at least under the LLC, they would have the limited liability. Under LLP, if it’s some sort of professional services firm, then they would still have unlimited liability on their own actions, but it would give them the limited liability on other people’s actions.

Nathan: So I usually see more as an evolution where then all of a sudden as the business starts to really settle in and become this more legitimized business, that’s when I start to see them shifting more towards thinking about being some sort of corporation, whether it’s an S corp or C corp. And that continues giving them that limited liability, but it also eases the access to capital. Now it does have those other tax considerations that we already talked about, but I view it less about, “Which one should I start off with? And that’s going to be the business entity I’m always going to be.” And more about, “Okay, how can I change my business entity to evolve based on the needs of my business?”

Gene: Guys, this is great. I mean, I have so many more questions for you and we have a lot more that we could be drilling into details with and getting into even the difference between limited liability and general liability partners. But those are all, again, topics for another day. So I want to thank you both for joining me. This has been really, really helpful, and I think our audience will really get a lot of insights and walk away with a lot of great information up to help them form their businesses.

Christina: Yeah, thank you, Gene. Well, I guess I did want to add one more thing. I guess if we have one more minute.

Gene: Sure.

Christina: As far as one thing that I used to see in practice that we like to try to keep real estate out of corporations if we could. So I think sometimes we would see different types of entities like a collection, a lot of times we’d see the real estate be put into an LLC and then the active business income be in the different type of entity. So I think it’s important for people to think about just you don’t always have to fit into one box. You could have a collection of different entities as well.

Gene: Great. And I guess that gives you ease if there’s ever any type of succession or exit from your business or segregation of assets, that makes it easier to do that.

Christina: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Gene: That makes a lot of sense. Christina Lewellen is a PhD and CPA and associate professor of accounting at NC State University. Nathan Goldman is a CPA and PhD and also an associate professor of accounting at NC State University. Guys, thank you very much for joining. It was a great conversation. Thank you.

Nathan: Thank for having us.

Christina: Thank you so much.

Gene: Everyone, you have been watching and listening to The Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. My name is Gene Marks. If you have any need for any tips or advice for helping running your business, please visit us at smallbizahead.com or sba.thehartford.com. Again, my name is Gene Marks. Thanks for listening or watching. We will see you again soon. Take care.

Gene: Thanks so much for joining us on this week’s episode of The Hartford Small Biz Ahead podcast. If you like what you hear, please give us a shout-out on your favorite podcast platform. Your ratings, reviews and your comments really help us formulate our topics and help us grow this podcast. So thank you so much. It’s been great spending time with you. We’ll see you again soon.

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