You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

On Episode 25 of Decision Dialogues, Mark Willoughby talks to Modera’s own John Ceparano about the importance of sound, expert advice. John discusses decisions he’s made throughout his own career as well as decisions he’s counseled his clients on. John’s overriding theme is that the more expertise you can muster, the better those decisions are likely to turn out.

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Transcript

The summary below has been created by a professional transcription vendor upon review of the recorded presentation. Please excuse any typos as well as portions noted to be inaudible.

Thanks for joining us on Decision Dialogues. We’re thrilled to have you along. My name is Mark Willoughby, and I’m a Principal and Wealth Manager here at Modera Wealth Management, LLC, in our Atlanta office. Today, I’m joined by my colleague, John Ceparano, who’s also a Principal and Wealth Manager at Modera Wealth Management in our Central Florida office. The two of us will be chatting today about a number of items. John, welcome to the show.

Well thank you, Mark. I look forward to having a good conversation, and hopefully, everybody finds it interesting.

And so am I. So let me set the landscape for our listeners for this particular podcast. You know, we’ve been focusing this year on Decision Dialogues and having conversations that feature business owners and the decisions and the challenges that they faced, and the financial lessons they’ve learned.

And let me give you a little bit of background on John: John founded a CPA firm in Central Florida decades ago. And along the way, he morphed it into a firm very similar to Modera Wealth Management, and then ended up merging his firm, Joseph Capital Management with Modera, back in 2014.

Now, John, I know, as a business owner and a practice owner, you faced some big decisions along the way. And there’s going to be some learnings we’re going to flush out this morning. And uniquely as a planner, you’ve not only have you been a business owner, but you’ve worked with business owners, because that is your area of specialization. So I think we’re going to offer our listeners an interesting dual angle perspective on this, this morning.

So let’s just dive right in and sort of learn from John briefly initially, about how he started in business—the business he started off with—and where he brought it from there. So John, at a high level, why did you start your own firm? Why didn’t you just, you know, work for somebody else?

Well, I grew up in a family that had a lineage of entrepreneurship. So I was always surrounded by my father, his father, my uncle, having their own businesses, though, I was always intrigued at the opportunities that presented themselves. I also saw some of the decisions they made that either helped them flourish, or actually held them back.

So when I went to college, I decided that I wanted to go into business, and I didn’t know that I was going to wind up getting a degree—I knew I’d get a degree in business, but I didn’t know that I’d turn out to be a CPA. And as it winds up, it wound up being a financial background for me that has helped me in all my business decisions, but what I really enjoyed is trying to solve the puzzles of how you create something, how you can help it flourish, and as much as you could take advice for a lot of people, sometimes you gotta go down the road of hard knocks, and learn on your own.

Yeah.

So when I was starting out, came out of college, I immediately worked for a very large firm, a CPA firm, Price Waterhouse. Had a fantastic experience there, and learned a lot of the basics about what successful businesses that I was exposed to, had to do to get where they were. Key ingredients at that time, especially, this is back in the late 80s, early 90s, it was about infrastructure. But you know, when you’re starting out your first business, you’ve got to try to bring on clients and take on things that otherwise you might not do if you’re a mature business, that actually helps you grow. You look back in hindsight, and you realize that if you hadn’t taken those stones you wouldn’t have made the better decisions later in your career.

So as it winds up, I’d just started to move to Florida, with my wife and our three children, so they can grow up around their grandparents. Had no business, no job. I got here, my wife knew that I was determined, and within about six months, she kicked me out of the house because I kept telling her, “Keep the kids quiet!” and it wasn’t working. So it forced me to open up my own business because when I moved to the area that I’m in Central Florida, there were not a lot of opportunities and everybody wanted to pay me a lot less than I needed to make a living.

So we went through a lot of savings, which means that I had to be very prudent in our financial decisions. And I decided to open up my accounting firm back in—I think it was 1995 in Central Florida. And then I realized that I really enjoyed the consulting aspect of working with business owners and individuals. Sometimes it was working with a lot of retirees during tax season, but quite frankly, my business owners took up the girth of my time, because their business is ongoing throughout the whole year.

Yeah.

And that’s when I really focused on the taxation and the knowledge about that.

Coming down to Florida, in order to have my CPA license get transferred, I had to go back and get my Master’s in taxation. So that happened in midlife, so to speak, in my 30s

With three kids.

With three kids, trying to run a business. And I remember studying on a cruise ship, and my kids were going “Let’s go play dodgeball!” And I was like, “No, I’ve got to pass a test.”

Yeah, you had plenty of free time, right?

Yeah. I mean, it’s just the human nature of what you got to do to try to balance life. And that’s what I’ve been doing with children and running a business.

But as it happens, I’ve been blessed throughout my whole life, and just through, due to putting my nose to the grindstone, the CPA firm took off, wound up merging with a number of people, it wound up, after realizing that I wanted to do more planning than just pure accounting and CPA and tax work during tax season—I wanted to help people throughout the whole year.

So we decided to sell off our business back in 2004. Just got it set up for you know, sale, and I think it was by the end of 2005, we sold it. But we’d already started going into the wealth management business to make sure that we were going to enjoy it, and we did.

Well, as it winds up, the business, because I dedicated myself to this, and I really enjoyed it and a lot of passion for it, had a lot of great introductions through networking—we wound up doing extremely well within a very short period of time. And within about five or six years—I wasn’t just working with my clients that I found in Florida, but I started getting referrals up and down the east coast, from colleagues that I knew and networks that I have for when I was up in the New York area—and in 2013, on a trip to go see about seven of my clients are up in Long Island, New York City area, I wound up calling up a colleague because I was and I was with another colleague that I brought with me, and I said, “I can’t keep doing this Newell trip by myself going back and forth.” That term, I wasn’t the technology guy that I’ve—I don’t want to say I’ve become—but I’ve had to become more astute at. And I was hauling files and this and that, and I go, “There’s got to be a better way.”

And I reached out to a couple of firms, one of the people that I ran into is Tom Orecchio at that time, and I called him up and I said, “I’m going to be here for a couple of days, would you mind if I stopped in if this is something of interest to you—I need somebody to work with up in the New York area, in New Jersey, the metro area.” And he told me, he goes, “We’d love to have a firm down in Florida because a lot of our clients, you know, migrate to a non-tax state, or just want to get away to the sun.”

So all of a sudden, eight months later, we were merged. I don’t wanna say we perfectly aligned, but it’s gotten as close as possible. And then the operational side, actually Mark was involved in. And within about one year, we had merged, and Mark had already gone through this only like three years earlier with another firm that they had put together to form Modera. So this one went a little bit smoother, and they’ve been going smoother since.

So let me pause you there for a second. And I knew as the moderator with John Ceparano I wouldn’t have to work too hard as a moderator, because John has got so much passion for what he does, I knew this would be an easy job for me this morning. 

But let me recap then. So there wasn’t, you know, to recap, the first, let’s say 15,20 years of your career, you kind of found accounting, or accounting found you. You built one CPA firm in Florida. You then transitioned that into a more consulting-based firm with changing it to a wealth management firm. You sold your CPA business, and you know, within ten years, you had essentially merged your new wealth management firm into another wealth management firm that had offices in New Jersey and Boston.

So this kind of sets us up nicely for what we really want to dive into for the rest of the chat this morning, which is two areas that John has particular expertise in, is in retirement plans for businesses, and as you’ve already heard, he has a passion for the tax code. “Bless his heart,” as they say, down here in the South.

So I wanted to kind of take a deeper dive into those two areas, because John, as you folks had just heard, has a lot of experience in creating, growing, selling and maintaining businesses. And along the way he’s had to make some big decisions, both for himself as a business owner, in the tax planning and retirement plan arenas, but also for his clients this past couple of decades.

So John, let’s just dive into retirement plans. At a very high level, what are the things that you’ve done right in the retirement plan arena? What are the things that you might have done a little bit better? And what’s the best advice you’ve given your business owner clients when it comes to their thinking about installing a retirement plan for their growing business?

Well, just philosophically, a retirement plan is really just a form of diversification—it’s setting aside money for your future. And as time has progressed, the IRS has created different opportunities to help business owners save for themselves, as well as trying to not discriminate, and be able to save for their employees.

When I first started out and was going to college, you know, we knew all the basics, but we didn’t know where they applied, and how they apply to different businesses and situations. So there is no one size that fits all. You know, the basic person who maybe doesn’t have a retirement plan at work, and works for a very small company, their best choice, you know, is some form of IRA—which is limited in how much they can put away. But as they get involved with either growing their own business or working for a company, they can move up past that and get to other types of accounts for themselves, such as SEP plans, and 401(k) plans.

Now, SEP plans are typically designed for small businesses that are mostly family-oriented. Because of that, they wind up getting out of them when you start hiring people outside of their family, because they’d have to give them the same percentage as they do. So then a 401(k) plan typically has worked well for a lot of people as the first foray into being able to put away more money and the amounts that you’ve been able to put away have grown, you know, with inflation over time. Currently, they’re in excess of I think it’s like this year for a single person under 50. And then you can add another 6,500, if you’re over 50, to start to catch up. But if you’re a business owner, a lot of times it’s also used to attract and retain employees.

But for those that start to do very well in business, and want to be able to put more money away, I had to do a lot of homework and research to find out the different ways you can use these plans. Historically larger plans, like maybe my parents, and Mark’s parents, you know, they may have been exposed to, if they were lucky, to have pensions in their corporations that basically, they were called defined pension plans and basically said, over a certain number of years, instead of us giving you pay, we’ll retain some of that money, invest it, so that when you retire at 65 or so you can get $1,000 a month, $5,000 a month, depending on your status with the company and your pay and everything else—you get that but you wouldn’t get a lump sum. 

Over the last 20-plus years, the government has created these other opportunities for businesses to save, and get away from the companies having to put away these large sums of money, which in many cases has put some of these companies underwater because they had to allocate so much of these resources. So instead, they created contributory plans where the employees contribute, and employers have the option of matching them. And if they do match them, the owners themselves can put larger amounts in for themselves.

And that led to components of adding a profit sharing plan, and then other new types of plans, which are called hybrid plans, such as cash balance plans. These plans, depending on the facts and circumstances, can significantly increase the amount of taxes that people save currently, and basically have what they call a tax arbitrage. So if a business owner is very successful, and they’re in a highest tax bracket now, when they go to retire, they may be in a bracket that’s at least 10 to 15% lower. So they can get these large deductions now when they’re in their peak earning years, and then when they go to retire, it’s taken out at a much lower tax rate. And during that whole period, this money has been deferred and has not been taxed.

So depending on the facts and circumstances, and the census of your employees, and what the individual owners want to try to accomplish, there is a plan out there that can be customized to meet those goals. And the key, in many cases, when people are asked about what is best for them, it also depends on cashflow and whether it’s consistent enough. Some businesses have cyclical nature to them, and they need more flexibility on one you’re putting in a lot the next year, putting in nothing, or a little amount. And there are plans now that can help you do that without the rigidity of some of the old defined benefit plans that people would not sign up for, because there are penalties if you did not meet these minimum funding (requirements). So it’s been very interesting to see how this landscape changes.

So let me jump in there, John.

Sure.

Yeah, let me jump in there and sort of put you on the spot by going for the two extremes. Can you think of, you know, I’m thinking of best case / worst case. Can you think of a situation where a client can really miss the boat with the opportunities that exist in the tax code to put together retirement plans? Think of a best case and a worst case, like what’s the worst case scenario for a business owner in terms of just missing the boat on the opportunities that exist?

Well, the real question isn’t when they missed the boat, the reason is why they missed the boat. We don’t know what we don’t know. So if you don’t surround yourselves with informed people that have experience to give you these options, if you don’t know that you had an opportunity, they will be missed, and it happens very frequently.

Small business owners in trying to be frugal and driving your business to high success, sometimes may be, you know, “advisor foolish.” And it’s not about just us, I mean, just in general. If you’re working with a consultative CPA that understands the different types of plans that are out there that I had to dedicate myself to know, that’s where the true value comes from working with the right professionals.

It’s kind of like you find out that you need brain surgery, you’re going to go to the general practitioner, or you’re going to seek out the best one? And if you go to find the one that has the experience, has the knowledge, they can help you vet out the pros and cons of each type of plan to pick the one that’s worked for you today.

Now, what’s really important is this: As businesses grow, their retirement plans need to change and/or grow. So having the right advisor to know when those times are is critical. There are fees, you know, to be an advisor, there are fees to set up these things. But if the tax benefits, and the long term diversification of your resources, are going to help you in the long run, let alone your employees, then you need to know about that. So I find that the biggest mistakes are that people don’t get this information early enough. And they need to seek out somebody, you know, this is not the time to be, you know, foolish, you know, try to be cheap here, because it’s only gonna hurt you in the form of higher taxes, or lost opportunities.

Yeah, so a couple of things there, then, I would summarize by saying. And I know to the listener, this probably sounds self-serving, coming from two advisors. But be careful about making sure you get the right guidance at the right time, as you’re growing your business—whether that’s a CPA, an actuary, a lawyer, you know, an insurance agent, financial advisor. Make sure you don’t shortchange yourself, because as John says, you don’t know what you don’t know.

And by the way, when people are focused in their businesses, they are typically very optimistic people. And sometimes, because of their optimism, they keep reinvesting all of their earnings back into the business—which at the beginning probably makes sense, because you don’t have a lot of savings. So as it’s earning, you’re trying to build this thing up. There’s got to be some point where you try to diversify your risk that businesses inherently have. You have a concentrated risk in your business, and if something goes wrong, you know, divest some of those resources, the earnings that you have, to other types of investment opportunities, whether it be real estate, whether it be stocks, and bonds, whatever it is—it gives you that resource to pull from in the need that you do.

So typically, I recommend that people save some of the money in taxable accounts outside of the business, leave resources in the business to continue to grow it, then also have the retirement amount. Because mentally, most people, they think that if I put that money in retirement, I’m not going to take it out. So then they’re not relying on it. But that allocation of how much you take out based on their cash flows, is very critical to have somebody looking at it and see where this thing could go over a period of time, to do some simulations.

Now we all know that businesses change and can change very quickly in a year or two years. And the key is, you know, retaining talented people to help you. Not only the outside advisors, but internally, because they’ll make you aware. Some of my earliest staff said, “John, you got to take a paycheck.” They … wanted me to actually diversify, they wanted me to take a chance on myself. So I listen to my own employees sometimes, and that’s very helpful. So diversifying these opportunities is very critical and trying to spread out your risk.

So we’ve talked about, you know, the missed opportunity. Let me put you on the spot, John, and talk about if you can think of a favorite story of one who’s gone ahead and, you know, put in a retirement plan at the right time. And can you give us like a quick synopsis of what that looks like for the business owner, when they followed the guidance of installing a retirement plan and sort of putting the right one in and growing it? What does that look like? Give me your favorite story.

There’s a couple, but I’ll narrow it down to one or two. And I’ll try to think of just one here.

About six years ago, two doctors wound up beginning to do really well. And you know, in the doctors’ world, which has been squeezed by insurance, you know, smaller reimbursements, they had to work longer hours and everything else. And with that, they were like, “There’s got to be a way, if we’re working this hard, that we don’t have to pay in as much.” 

At that time, they had a very small practice, and they treated their employees like family. And with that they had a SEP plan. And they didn’t mind giving a larger contribution so they can do it. But I said, “What if you could give,” you know, when I found out their circumstances and following up with them on the accounting about a year or two later, when I found out how they were growing, and they finally opened up to me and said, “We really need your help, you know, in terms of real world financial planning, so we can get there and be able to retire in the next ten years.”

Well, I said, “How do you want to grow your business? You can have more employees.” And they said, “Yes, we don’t want to be overwhelmed, but we do want to do that. But we have to start to be able to and we believe our practice is going to thrive.” So I helped them design a building, I helped them develop it so they’d have more space. And with that came more employees. And now all of a sudden the 25% that were giving to the two employees they had was now up to seven employees, and it became a substantial amount of money.

So they wanted to limit it to the amount that they were giving in dollars, but wanted to increase their share. So I looked into the perfect design for them at the time, and it still is, has been to add a profit sharing component, combined with a cash balance plan. And as it winds up, they had to have, for discrimination testing, they had a safe harbor amount there, and that amount wound up giving them the ability to put upwards of $200,000 each. 

Okay.

So instead of putting away just $58,000 a year each, now they were able to put an excess of $4 and $500,000 a year each. And since that time till now, the numbers have grown significantly from there.

But the real point was that accumulating this can be for anybody in the situation. If you’ve got a five or ten year runway, you’re able to make these tax savings in the 35% or higher bracket, which these people are, and have been, I calculated the significant savings after they go to take out this money, the numbers between the growth and the savings on the taxes from 35% to let’s just say down to 20, or even 25%, were going to be in excess of close to a half a million dollars saved.

So with some planning, some forethought, that’s the sort of opportunity that presents itself with the right advisors in the mix. As Albert Einstein said, the eighth wonder of the world is truly the power of compound interest.

So now I’m going to, given that we have a limited timeframe here, I’m going to switch gears because I did want to give you some opportunity to give us some high-level philosophical thoughts on the income tax code, John. I know that you know the code as well as anybody I know, You’ve been working in tax compliance and planning for decades now.

In the short time that we have left: what are the things that you’ve seen people make really big mistakes in, on the tax planning side? And what’s your philosophy on the right way to approach tax planning and tax compliance for small business owners?

Well, one is looking at all the opportunities that we discussed about, on finding the right plan at the right times and making those changes with retirement plans. The second one is making sure that your accounting is kept up to date. A lot of times, you know, the small business owner says “I don’t want to spend the money,” and they wind up dropping off the shoe box to the accountant after the year is over. And they say, “Had you come to me back last year, or let me do your bookkeeping or at least do your financials once every three to six months, then we know where we are and we can plan for saving on taxes.” So that’s number one.

But once a small business owner is towards the end of their career—I’m not talking about things by the way, like you know, go buy another car and get a writeoff and things like that. Those come very standard and those kinds of suggestions. You know, you have cash businesses and accrual businesses—cash businesses, they get a deduction when they write the check, so they all of a sudden try to write up all these checks in December 31 and things like that. That’s not really a lot of planning there. The real planning comes on when you realize that you want to sell your business one day; you’ll have a transition, and you have to think about that long before you’re want to put your business up for sale. You have to make sure that he’s taken out personal expenses in the last two or three years. CPAs on the other side of the coin, the buyer side, are going to be saying, “Let’s see how their business is done. Let’s see the trends. Let’s see the profitability.”

So when you want to plan for your exit strategy, whether it’s to existing employees, or you want to sell to a third party, they’re gonna always want to see objective financials that have been prepared, typically by CPA, they want to see that your trend lines are either consistent or growing in most cases, so that you can get the most out of your business—it doesn’t matter what that business is. So you have to always be preparing your business for a sale, and quite frankly, you should be doing it for yourself anyway, from the profitability standpoint. Look at your numbers, see where the trends are, manage those things.

In terms of taxation, when you get to the point of actually selling it, you should have competent parties on your side, and the right attorneys that have been dealing with sales of businesses in your industry in particular, and work with the CPA that can have the numbers up to speed and work well. So that’s just while they’re working.

But the other thing is, is that a lot of these business owners have to think about what they’re going to do after they make the sale and they have their big liquidity event. They have this money dropped in their lap, and if they haven’t had those conversations, sometimes they get sucked into the latest person selling them something else, or they re-put it into another business that they’re not even familiar with. Or they think all of a sudden they’re real estate people and they can do it, and it’s easy. And I think that they have to sit back and realize that, “Let me work either with the people that have the strengths that I have confidence on and have a history with, or learn about them and find out about them,” or to simplify your life and reserve yourself to “How can I maximize the enjoyment of life afterwards?”

A lot of businesspeople, one of the biggest problems is they don’t know what their hobbies are going to be when they retire. They try not to retire—they push it off. I’ve even asked myself that, you know, so I’m trying to do different things myself, you know, as life evolves here and saying, you know, what’s it going to be like in 10 or 15 years from now?

So from a tax standpoint, I think they have to prepare for the sale, I think they have to know what they’re going to do with the money after the sale, and how to invest it, and know the timeframe from let’s just say when they’re 60 to 70 years old, or 72 years old, all the different choices they have to make along the way, which will impact the taxability of this big chunk that they just got or how they got it. Are they getting paid out in notes? You know, over time? Are they getting a big amount down? Are they getting it all paid up front? All those things will have factors on what they have left after that deal is done. And once that deal is done, they’ve got to make a lot of decisions, which now they may be considering they’re early retirees, or waiting for their next thing to lend, because not everybody who sells their business is 62 or 65. Some people do really well and sell their business in their 40s. And they go “What am I going to do with you know, the next 20 years while all my friends are still working?”

Yeah.

So I literally get off the phone this morning with one of my close friends who just sold his business for millions of dollars. And he’s saying, “I want to leave some money on the side to do this, but what am I gonna do with all this other cash?” So he wants to know about liquidity for opportunities. He wants to have a long term plan for retirement. He doesn’t want to make his kids trust fund babies, so he wants to know how they’re going to get it, and spread it out. He wants to know that he still has the liquidity to be able to reinvest right now. But I said, “We need to see how these all work.”

So I’m meeting with him in two weeks to say, “Let’s look at your life now, at sixty years old, in five year increments.”

Yeah.

So your health is a big factor in a lot of these decisions. And when you take Social Security, when you make a decision to do Roth conversions—which a lot of people miss, because they’re not talking to somebody—and how they’re going to take that money out and what they’re going to do. And then you even get into the things that sometimes they don’t think about because they’re just so focused on accumulating. Am I charitably inclined? And can I do it now? Or do I need to just be charitably inclined to help my family that need it, maybe, without making them dependent on them?

So there’s so many issues regarding taxation, and every single client that we face, Mark and I, you know, have unique circumstances. They can have the same amount of money and same age, but they have different kids different, you know, spouses, second marriages, first marriages, health issues—there’s so many issues that make our planning so unique, and a big puzzle for us that really drives our passion to solve these problems for people or at least alleviate their concerns, so they have peace of mind that they’re in good shape.

Alright, so John, we’re getting close to the end here. But I do have one last question for you before we start wrapping up. Talk to our listeners about, when is the right time to start thinking about these issues and start talking to the right people.

You know, Mark, it’s kind of funny, it’s like, you know, people call up and say, you know, “Should I invest? The market’s up,” or this or that and said “We should wait.” The reality is, every day is an opportunity for you to take hold of your planning. And I think this is an exceptionally extraordinary time to address these issues with so many things going on that are distractions (for) people—listening to the media, trying to see what the government’s going to do with taxation, what’s going to go on with our country, around the world. And quite frankly, a lot of people become frozen, and they don’t do anything.

This is the best time to take a very positive attitude about this and say, “Whenever other people are fearful is when opportunities are created, and when these opportunities are created, you need to make sure that you’re around the people that can give you sound, objective, independent advice, to try to help you achieve your long term goals.” You know, what are your desires? What do you want to see come out of your life for you and your family, and be able to enjoy everything we work so hard for?

I love what I do. I love using my experience and learning from other people’s circumstances to try to improve people’s situations. And one of the reasons I really merged, was to be around more talented people, and get away from actually, some of the administration of running a business that I’m not as qualified to do. Thank god our firm is not asking me to make any decisions about technology, but they’ve taught me how to use it.

So I think that every day is a good opportunity to learn something, and if you could find a couple of advisors that can help and coordinate work with your other professionals, people would feel a lot more ease and feel very comfortable knowing that whatever comes up, they can pick up the phone, have a virtual meeting, or as we unravel COVID, get back together hopefully soon. And enjoy the comfort of knowing you’re not alone.

Thanks, John. That’s a great way to end. I would echo everything you’ve said there.

We like to end these with a kind of a non-standard, fun type of question, John. So I’m going to throw this at you: What was the last non financial decision you had to make? And that could be as recently as this morning?

Well, besides personal things, helping my wife pick colors for our new bathroom that we had to redesign because we had a water leak. Not exciting, but it was non-financial, because we did get reimbursed by the insurance company.

Good luck with that one.

Thanks a lot.

Okay! Thanks, John. Really appreciate you spending time with us today. Great conversation, and I really hope that your perspectives will resonate and be helpful to some of our listeners. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We hope you’ll join us next time on Decision Dialogues for more stories from successful business owners like John. So long for now.

About John

John provides advice to high net worth individuals, families, businesses, nonprofit organizations, and fiduciary clients in all areas of their investment and wealth management needs. He’s spent his career helping people to organize their priorities and simplifying things that are complex, to give them confidence when making decisions for their future, making them aware of the things they wouldn’t have thought to ask, let alone need to address.

He is a Certified Public Accountant/Personal Financial Specialist™, a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, and holds a Master of Taxation from Florida Atlantic University. John serves on the Board of Directors of the Boys & Girls Club of Citrus County, is a member of the Citrus County Rotary Club, and serves on the Trinity Catholic High School Strategic Long-Term Planning Committee.