SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Quit $100k+ Private Equity to Move to South America, Does $1m Tax Business Now with Vincenzo Villamena of Online Tax Man EP 216
01 Apr 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Daniel Al-Soudini. He's based overseas. He's an employee at a current company and can't wait to break free. For your chance to win 100 bucks, Top Tribe, simply subscribe to the podcast now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you did it.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Vincenzo to leave private equity for South America?
Coming up bright and early tomorrow morning, Top Tribe, you will hear from Fritz Heffinger.
Chapter 3: How did Vincenzo identify a tax opportunity for U.S. expats?
His action marketing agency did $2.5 million in revenue last year alone. Okay, Top Drive, good morning.
Chapter 4: How did Vincenzo's revenue grow in the first year of his business?
You're gonna enjoy our guest this morning.
Chapter 5: What challenges did Vincenzo face when starting Online Tax Man?
His name is Vincenzo Villamena, and he is known as the online tax man. We'll get to that in a second. He was born in New York, grew up a hustler, aka entrepreneur, and first started selling candy at school and a soccer t-shirt company.
He went to university, came back to New York City, did the whole corporate baloney thing for, again, for really four years at a public accounting firm, and then landed the private equity dream job that he thought he really wanted. After doing that for a couple of years, the economy obviously got crippled. He decided finance was not the life that he wanted.
He picked up, moved to South America, discovered a niche for US expatriate taxes and created an online company. He's never looked back since. Vincenzo, are you ready to take us to the top? I'm ready, Nathan. Let's do this. So first things first, first things first. Tell us just real quick. OK, selling candy. What was the economic model? How did you make money doing that?
No, I mean, it was funny because, you know, you, you see like, like people selling candy for, for like, you know, their sports teams, et cetera. And then I just decided to sell candy for, for myself. Where'd you buy it? How much did it cost and how much did you sell it for? This is when, uh, when Costco is, was, was just coming up. Right.
And you had all these like, you know, big like candy bars and, and, and bags of candy that you get at Costco. And I mean, roughly the, the economics where it would be, you know, under 50 cents, I'd get a candy. Then I'd sell for like a dollar. Unlike the, how old were you when you did this? I mean, this is, you know, 13, 14. And over the time you do this, how much did you say you made total?
Like 100 bucks, 1,000, 10,000? I mean, I'd say, you know, a few thousand. A few thousand. So you were like the elementary school or the middle school that all the girls wanted because you took them on the nice dates. Yeah, exactly. Cause I was the one that had some cash. I love it. All right. So you grew up, you grew up, you went to university, went back to New York city.
You got the, it sounds like you got a job at a public accounting firm. Is that right? Yeah. I worked at the big Ford, uh, at PWC price one house. And what was that like? So first off, give us some sense of opportunity cost. What was your, what was your salary there starting out? Starting out, it was around 55. 55. Okay. And so you did it for four years.
When did you decide to say, you know what, screw this, I'm out? Yeah. Um, you know, I mean, the thing about PWC is it, I mean, and really the big four in general is like, you know, if you want to be an accountant, it's a, it's a great place to start off. I mean, you know, every, it's really young organization. It's kind of like a frat party.
Everyone from college just kind of goes there after college. No one really knows what they're doing. Um, so it's awesome. I mean, it's, you know, really fun kind of those initial years. Well, PWC is not going to be sponsoring this podcast anytime soon. All right. Yeah. There you go.
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Chapter 6: How does Vincenzo describe the experience of working at PwC?
you know, the company's already there, but we're going to make it way better with this sort of broad strokes ideas. Yep. Yep. Makes perfect sense, Vincenzo. And you're sick of talking about this because you quit it. You hated it. You got out of it. So let's move forward. Let's move forward. You got the hell out of there. Dude, I'm talking about my nightmare right now. I know.
You got the hell out of there. Went to South America. What happened? Yeah, I mean, long story short, like I said, the fund, we weren't raising money. I mean, it was, it really, and at that point, the deals also were not as prevalent and I was doing a lot more operational stuff and candidly, I hated it. And I just said, hey, I need to get out of here.
And it was very much an epiphany where I hated my job. My lease was up and I just broke up with my girlfriend.
and a few months before i i actually did go back to uh or i had gone to to south america i went to brazil for carnival went to argentina on that trip and uh just said hey you know what like let me go to south america like that place is awesome and so what are you what are you doing now in south america how do you make money so went down argentina um had a few friends down there just kind of
of whim and then um you know i'd always been in accountants even when i was working at the private equity fund and through pwc i was you know doing some side uh some side business doing taxes and got to south america and boom just saw the opportunity for uh for expat taxes specifically you know met all these us expats No one did their taxes. No one knew how to do their taxes.
And there's a lot of very specific rules for Americans abroad about how to do their taxes. They don't have to pay tax on their first $100,000 U.S. dollars in income. They have to disclose foreign bank accounts. all these crazy rules, et cetera, and just saw the complexity and like the lack of, of, of, of, of service that, that, that, you know, there was no one was serving this market essentially.
And so, you know, obviously decided to kind of focus on that. Wait, so Vincenzo, tell me specifically the last dollar that somebody paid you that came into your bank account, like in the last 24, 48, where did that come from? Like, what are people, tell me about the last customer you, you helped.
uh last dollar actually i got this morning was from someone in malta okay i mean um you know essentially uh i have clients around the world um you know obviously they they come to us they need their taxes done we have a whole process where you know we give them a questionnaire they upload their documents on our client portal and then uh and then you know they pay us just with their credit card etc and we file their taxes and so in january 2016 just in one month about how much revenue did you do
January of 2016 last month um probably 20 30 000 something like that maybe more and will that revenue be can I just multiply that by 12 months to get your annualized revenue or that would be spiky based off tax seasons no it's definitely it definitely is is pretty spiky okay so what will you do in a year in 2016 what will you do Yeah.
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