Steven Schwartz (00:24)
Hello and welcome to the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Steve Schwartz, and it’s our pleasure to have you along on this discussion today. Today our guest is Eunicia Peret and she’s from Excelstra.

And we met recently at a concierge medical conference near Atlanta. was a marvelous event and it was great to get together and speak and get to know each other a little bit better. And as I learned a little more about her business, I wanted to have her on our podcast. So Eunicia thank you for joining us today.

Eunicia Peret (00:53)
It is such a pleasure to be here with you, Steve.

Steven Schwartz (00:56)
Thank you. Thank you. So let’s dig right in. First of all, would you please spend a couple of moments and share with our listeners your background? Where did you study? What is your specialty? Building businesses? Tell us about yourself a little bit so that our listeners get a better idea of your background, please.

Eunicia Peret (01:16)
Absolutely. So I studied finance at the University of Georgia, Terry College of Business. I then went into strategy consulting, the probably the business side of I would say professional services that cannot necessarily be thought in a textbook. And so I did that for many, many years. I worked for companies such as Ernst & Young, Boozing Company before they were acquired by PWC and Deloitte.

And during that time, my area of expertise was always, again, you might guess it, on not just the finance operations, but I also had the pleasure and the fortune of working with a lot of financial institutions. So think of the intersection of finance as the back office, meaning where the money and all the transactions are happening. And finance as an industry, think of banks such as Bank of America and Citibank and American Express, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I bring a wealth of knowledge to our clients and to what we do, not just through my experience as a strategic consulting consultant, but also through the industry lens. And then of course, from a consulting standpoint, the beautiful thing there is that a lot of the experiences that I honed in during my time in the industry are the same exact solutions and strategies that we’re actually delivering.

and using in helping our clients achieve next level success when it comes to their own personal and business finances.

Steven Schwartz (02:50)
Wonderful. And could you give me a better idea of who your perfect client is as far as maybe age or location or net worth or income? Something along those lines so we have a general idea of the type of folks you normally work

Eunicia Peret (03:05)
Absolutely. And I love the question, especially since I know you work with a lot of physicians. We do too. We support a lot of physicians, especially those that are practice owners and individuals that are on the higher scale of compensation. The reason for that is because we are a consulting firm. And a lot of the strategies that we do are very uniquely positioned to help individuals.

figure out how to, of course, legally optimize their taxes, optimize how, when, why, where money’s invested. And our typical clients are the individuals that are asking themselves the question of, am I missing? We don’t exclude anyone, but typically we work with a lot of professionals that are going to be in their 40s and older. Typically, they’ve kind of been around the block. They’ve gotten bitten, they’ve gotten burned. And when they’re asking that question of, gee,

What do the uber wealthy do that I wish I could do? That’s where we come to play. That’s where we we enabled their success.

Steven Schwartz (04:06)
Nice. Well, excellent. So now we know who we’re talking to and for how we can provide, or I guess who we want to provide these services to. Let’s talk a little bit about integrative strategies. We talked about growing and protecting and preserving wealth. Can you share a little bit along those lines on, generally, how you help your clients succeed in these areas?

Eunicia Peret (04:32)
Absolutely. would say based on a lot of studying and research out there, about 50 plus percent of even physicians, but not just physicians, it’s really a lot of higher compensated individuals, higher compensated or higher income households are struggling with the question of how do we bridge the gap between the 401k, the IRA, the 529, all the things that they were sold on or into at some point in their lifetime.

They don’t quite understand how they truly fit towards what will future look like. When we say integrative strategies, we’re talking about how do we take what’s already there, ensure that it’s optimized, ask the question of put it through a SWOT analysis to figure out where are the opportunities and then also understanding what is it, how is it that the client sees money, sees growth, sees the different types of investments and are they aligned to the things that matter to them?

when it comes to even just growth alone. We know, for example, lot of physicians would love to get into real estate. We know a lot of physicians that have gotten into real estate and it was a very burning story. Money lost, capital calls, investment properties down in Florida that are requiring money cashflow towards them. They don’t produce cashflow. And so at the end of the day, those to us are not investments. They’re big.

hot burning platforms that need to be fixed because in order to actually have that future where the income becomes or work maybe becomes work optional for a lot of the professionals that we work with, we need to make sure that the solutions are addressing their specific needs, that they’re designed in ways that are comprehensive and they’re truly integrated in the way that not just.

not just to build and protect the wealth, but in a way that is meaningful to them. So then when they rest at night, they don’t have this burning question, this constant burning question of, gee, what am I missing? Because once we’ve addressed that, everything else becomes a focus. And as you probably know, that which we focus on is that which actually grows much faster. And that’s what happens when we start working with clients.

Steven Schwartz (06:49)
Very nice. Obviously, without giving away anything confidential or any specific details, can you share any high level stories of how you’ve helped families recently? I know before we started recording, you told me one story which was fascinating. But do you have any kind of high level stories you could share with us?

Eunicia Peret (07:13)
Actually, I’m happy to share that story with you because that’s a client that I literally spoke with earlier today. So it’s it was a beautiful reminder. We’ve been working together with this particular family and business for over five years, four years now, I’m sorry, over four years. And one of the questions that I had as we I went into this particular conversation was, let’s let’s look at all of the value that we’ve delivered. And I’ll never forget four years ago when we looked at.

one specific strategy that had been put in place for the husband and wife by a friend of theirs. It was so messed up, Steve, in terms of the cost within that specific product that we, I literally had multiple experts take a look at it just to make sure that I’m not missing anything, even though it was pretty darn clear that it was really, really, really messed up. And of course, the answer was very conclusive. It’s messed up, all right.

When we redesigned it and we showed the client, OK, this is what you have. And this is a design not to talk about shifting or anything like that. But this is a design that will give you the good, the bad and the ugly. What we show the client in terms of what ugly looked like. Steve, it was it would have been utopia to this particular client. It truly would have been. And so when we shifted things around, we did end up how

helping them and gotten them out of that particular situation. The additional growth that they’re going to benefit from within the next 25 to 30 years is somewhere to the tune of $1.2 million and change. It was close to $1.3 million. So when we’re talking about what are the things that are keeping physicians, business owners, highly compensated individuals, what are the things that are keeping them up at night? Unfortunately, this issue of how

are your financial strategies even designed? It’s a problem, but they don’t even know that there’s a solution to it because they don’t even know that the problem exists. So one of the things that I started doing early on was to show the clients the good, the bad, and the ugly. And because of that, of course, I’m not very popular among the financial community. But the reality is the benefits to the clients are huge.

And that’s what should be. It’s not about titles. It’s not about a CFA, CFP, CF anything. It’s about, or financial fiduciary. It’s about if you’re a fiduciary, are you showing the client how, by the way, your commission is probably cut out by as much as 50 to 75 % because the financial services industry has a really bad rep. And a lot of physicians especially have been so burned by the industry. I see them all the time. I am married into a family of

a lot of physicians, by the way, and my husband wanted to be a physician. And I grew up with physicians all around me and I’ve seen their lifestyle and I’ve seen how they’ve been taken advantage of. And unfortunately, the financial services is one that has done that to them. And so our mission is to say, okay, how do we go about looking at, you talked about strategies, do we have the right strategies? Are they designed correctly? And if not, what’s the solution?

Steven Schwartz (10:31)
love that story and just the fact that if you really dig into what your client has and using your own experience and knowledge and then you brought on additional experts for second and third and fourth opinions and verified that the vehicle that your client had was not a healthy vehicle and showed what could be done and what needed to be done to fix it.

And you did it. And again, like you said, that’s going to save that family or help them earn an additional $1.3 million over the next couple of decades. That’s fantastic. And I applaud you for your work and the diligence that you have taken to really dig into that and find this opportunity for your clients. So way to go.

Eunicia Peret (11:21)
That’s what we do every day. That’s when I wake up in the morning, the big question in my head is, what problem are we going to solve today? And I’m happy to say that we solve really big problems for our clients, but it also gives me huge peace of mind in knowing that they will be better off tomorrow than they would have been otherwise.

Steven Schwartz (11:40)
Nice, love it. Are there any other alternate strategies that are maybe not typically available or accessible to folks unless they’re at a hundred million dollar level and above? But are there other things that you can offer in addition to what you’ve already talked about?

Eunicia Peret (11:59)
I love that question. And I love the fact they piggyback off of our prior conversation. The answer is yes, there are. And as I had mentioned to you, Steve, a lot of individuals, when we talk about high income, high net worth, they go, hold on, I’m not high net worth. So if you’re on this call, if you’re on this podcast and you’re thinking, my God, this is it’s beyond me, right? I don’t have the kind of money to hire an expert team to help me with this. Here’s what I’ll tell you.

The reality is you shouldn’t hire anybody that doesn’t demonstrate hardcore value. But the reality is what we found is that, there are strategies that are typically only available to individuals that are above $100, $200 million in net worth. What we found is that there is an opportunity to bring some of those strategies to our clients. They don’t have to be in that range or in those ranges. But because of the relationships and because of the teams that we work with, yes.

Clients can absolutely take advantage of them. Now, could we just send on a client to some of our strategic partners to say, just handle them? It’s not gonna work that way. Why? Because they know that at the end of the day, there needs to be an integration. If things don’t get integrated, it’s not enough to just send somebody as a referral. It’s passing them on to somebody else. It’s gonna be their problem. The big question is how do we actually integrate them? Because it’s not just about a strategy. It’s about the broader.

the broader end-to-end design for that individual or for their business or their household, whatever it is, and it requires all of the experts to be at the table, not somewhere outside of the table or outside of the room.

Steven Schwartz (13:37)
So because of your relationships with these other companies, you’re able to help your clients utilize the services, products, solutions that these bigger companies offer. And basically, those companies aren’t interested in dealing with lower income, lower net worth clients, but working through you, then we have an integrative approach. And then your clients can be served through you.

utilizing their tools and solutions. Is that correct?

Eunicia Peret (14:08)
Correct. Correct. And the reason for that is because, listen, we work with a lot of very, very successful business owners. We have clients that are in the 30, 40, 50, $60 million range. But we also deal with the family practitioner, with the business owner that might be earning a million dollars or $2 million or $3 million in revenue. Does that mean that those individuals shouldn’t take it, shouldn’t have access?

they probably wouldn’t have access, but because we serve a wider variety of clients and we’re positioned to bridge the gap in those conversations, it makes it a lot easier and it makes it a lot more real for individuals to actually have access to some of those strategies.

Steven Schwartz (14:53)
I love it. So it’s partially who you know and who they know that can help you get what you need for the best result at the end.

Eunicia Peret (14:59)
Well.

I love that you said that because at the end of the day, one of my favorite books is Who Not How. And I grew up in a communist country and it was not necessarily about what you knew. It was all about who you knew. because my parents understood that very well and people in our environment understood that very well, it was a big difference between the kind of lifestyle that some had and some didn’t have. And it very much applies to here as well.

Steven Schwartz (15:32)
Interesting. We could dig into that in another podcast episode and learn more about your background and what you learned growing up in a communist country. trying to stay on target with me today because this has been fascinating. have one final topic that I’d like to broach with you. So often a physician gets into a concierge medical practice because he or she wants to provide amazing health care relationship.

time and focus to their patients. And they don’t want to take more than let’s say 300 or so patients in their panel. They want to have that good quality time. And obviously they need to charge the appropriate amount of money per year per patient in order to not just cover the expenses of running a medical practice and the insurance and the building and the staff and all. There’s lots of expenses. But here’s the deal.

At some point, a physician is going to get to a point and say, you know what? I’d like to retire. maybe when I’m 60 years old, maybe when I’m 70 years old, maybe when I’m 50, everybody’s story is going to be a little bit different. And this may be a really a topic for another podcast episode, but my question is about what comes next. Right? What comes next? What are some.

things that a concierge or direct primary care physician should think about, have on their radar, and start, I don’t know, thinking about and working towards so that their business is as valuable as possible by the time they want to sell it 10, 15, 20 years down the road. Can you answer that?

Eunicia Peret (17:26)
Absolutely. So let’s let’s start with with another question first. Did you know that over 80 percent of practice business owners or practice owners do not know that they have options in terms of how they actually pay taxes or don’t pay taxes on the sale of their practice?

Steven Schwartz (17:46)
That wouldn’t surprise me.

Eunicia Peret (17:48)
So if we’re starting even there, right, with the question of, hey, you could potentially, and this is all according to the tax code, if that planning is done ahead of time and you could take more money, keep more money out of the sale of your practice, what would you do with that? You can invest more, you can buy more, you can invest right back into the economy, you can maybe be in a, just do whatever you’re gonna do from a philanthropy perspective.

But when it comes to actually selling the business and exiting the business, what I see a lot of individuals don’t do is they don’t even allow themselves to think about what if and what could it be. So what ends up happening is they get to a point where they’re so burnt out or an unbelievable, an unbelievable, unbelievable offer, quote unquote, comes across their desk and they go, my God, I’m going to sell. And then they get burnt by taxes.

No, by the way, they also get burned because they sold their practice without it being ready to sell. What do I mean? Their operations are not where they should be. Their systems are not where they should be. Their team is not where it should be. And because of that, what might seem like an amazing price for a practice, I had this conversation actually during the conference with someone who said, I have a friend and they sold the practice for, I think was something like $2 million.

I said, $2 million for a practice that was so robust and doing so well in California, that seems low. And the response was, yes, it was low, but in the time, at the time it came so fast and the closing was so fast that they didn’t realize that they could have had alternative options. A practice like that, what if they could have gotten $3 million or $5 million for it and optimize on their exit? It would have made a world of difference to that physician.

as well as to whomever was on his or her staff, but they didn’t know. And too many people get caught in this crossfire of emergency at a time when it’s not anything but convenient to have that emergency, not that it’s ever convenient. So what we advise clients to do is to start thinking about, and we’d actually do this at Excel, think about what that access strategy looks like. Are we thinking about selling the?

Are we thinking about maybe keeping it in the family, the main practitioner or the main business owner retires? What does that look like? Are we thinking about what retirement income will look like? Because it’s not just about retiring. It’s about how do we maximize that? And when we start looking at this exit strategy, legacy plays another big one, right? When we start looking at exit strategies from all of these angles, what we realize is that historically,

that particular business owner might have spoken to someone, a him or her or some somewhere about maybe one of those things. And even that is not necessarily optimized. Well, what if we could take a step back two years, three years, five years before we’re even thinking about selling and we start truly optimizing things, not just on the business side, but also on the personal side. There is a lot that goes back and forth between the business and the personal finances to optimize on both sides. That in itself could make

huge, huge differences in the way people truly exit a practice or a business with grace versus with regret at the end.

Steven Schwartz (21:20)
I love it. And I assume you’ve helped several clients with exit planning and exit strategies and have helped them through to a successful exit, correct?

Eunicia Peret (21:33)
100%, as a matter of fact, we were on a call with one of our clients. He’s a surgeon. He recently retired from medicine. And our head of BD, our business development executive, was on the call. And he said something to the effect of, he said, if we hadn’t done that one particular strategy, I would have kept wondering if I made the right decision. But he said, when I look back at everything that we’ve done, not only did we

significantly reduced taxes and tax exposure because he was a business owner and everything else, it was conducive for that. But also the redesign of his overall portfolio and then this one particular strategy that gave him so much peace of mind. He said, listen, where I’m at right now, I know that if I never work another day in my life, if everything was to go to a screeching halt, I’m going to be more than OK.

And our business development director went, wow, like that’s a testimonial. It’s like, I wish we would have recorded that. Well, listen, it wasn’t recorded, but that’s what we seek out to do with every single client. And yes, we’ve helped a lot of executives, a lot of physicians, a lot of business owners go through that journey and get on the other side with a lot of success.

Steven Schwartz (22:32)
Nice.

Well, Eunicia, this has been fascinating. And I’m just so grateful that you’ve taken your valuable time to come speak with me today on the podcast and sharing so many tidbits and a lot of things that people just need to think about a little bit, say, you know what? I’m not sure. Hmm. Let me ask you this. If someone listening to this podcast has been pondering an exit.

or pondering how can I save more money? How can I reduce taxes? How can I make more money? How can I preserve wealth? How can people get in touch with you in order to consult with you or to engage with your firm to assist them in these goals?

Eunicia Peret (23:41)
I love that the easiest one’s answer is www.excelstra.com. That’s Excelstra.com. And I will also opine on what you said, Steve. If somebody just has the question of what am I missing? Or if someone has the question of what do I need to do to not continue working harder just to maintain lifestyle? What does that look like? If they just have these questions, book a call.

Go to Excelstra.com and let us at least answer some of the questions that you have. We may not be the right for you. We’re not a good fit for everyone, but at a minimum, we can hopefully set you in the right direction. And who knows, perhaps direct you to someone that can provide that level of support for you.

Steven Schwartz (24:28)
I appreciate that. And this has been the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast. And part of our efforts here is to share lots of great information for concierge medical professionals and direct primary care physicians to help them grow and succeed in their businesses, but also succeed in their lives, their finances and their health themselves, their wellbeing, their mental situation.

I really appreciate it. Again, you taking the time to dig into this with me, just as also a free resource, concierge medical marketing is here to help physicians of concierge practices or direct primary care practices with their marketing to effectively grow their businesses. our website is conciergemd.marketing and we’re offering a free ebook.

that you can download from the website, over a hundred pages of very helpful, actionable information on basically digital marketing strategies to help these practices grow, thrive, and survive in this crazy times that we find ourselves living in. So if that sounds good to you, please just visit the website and download a free copy from our homepage. It’s called the definitive guide to winning with digital marketing for concierge medical practices.

Again, Eunicia Peret, thank you so much for your time. This has been Steve Schwartz with the Concierge Medical Marketing Podcast, and we’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks so much.