Joshua Tharby - I Started With Nothing

Join this week's episode with our first guest  @JoshuaTharby An International Tax Advisor, uncovering how he started his business, moving to Dubai and his 10 year vision on making $10mil.

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Transcript

did you start your your own company from from scratch or was it something that it was a family business and then you took cover yeah yeah fantastic question so I know 100% All For All from scratch welcome back to another episode of f cast my name is Dennis Jos and today we have a special guest a UK Tax Advisor from from the UK all the way to International tax expert we're going to uncover all the things you need to know today so please welcome Josh Josh pleasure to meet you yeah absolutely thank you very much for having me today no problem at all I hear I I looked out that you were in Dubai right now is that is that correct that's right yeah we're live in from Dubai right now that's nice what abouts in the bay uh I'm in Business Bay yes is a right near downtown vertically okay um yes we got office here I living in there as well brilliant brilliant so what made you move over to Dubai because you were originally from Peter pet in the UK uh so yeah I moved to Dubai two about two years ago and the main reason for it it was taxes um had a good business in the UK but in the UK of course you pay a lot of tax corporation tax income tax everything else um and really it was just a kind of new new challenge as well a new opportunity moving to the B of that two years ago um better quality lifestyle year round Sunshine there's so many reasons to move to the buy um you know there's just there's just a couple of them absolutely okay yeah that's that's brilliant uh to be honest with you I was thinking about moving to Dubai myself but I don't think I'm in the right financial situation to be able to make that next step um and one question that I really had for you since I already know that you we in Dubai right now what is the number one thing that someone needs to know before moving to Dubai if they're thinking of moving to Dubai yeah well literally it's your point that Dubai is very expensive um you know you to have a good life here and especially to replicate the quality of life that you're probably used to in the UK it is a is very expensive so a lot of people if you move to Dubai it's a apartment in life you probably could be paying 20 30 40,000 a year just for a one-bedroom apartment in many areas of Dubai um you know if you want a decent Villa or a large Villa somewhere in a good area that's not 45 minutes away from all the the main attractions in Dubai that you want to go to that is going to cost a lot of money £100,000 a year rent isn't uncommon really and then you add additional living expenses everything else more expensive cars more expensive food and drink actually du buy can get very expensive so it's just about that's definitely the first thing that's the main thing I'd say is take into account just how expensive the buy is to maintain the quality of life that you're accustomed to in the UK um you can come to Dubai you can live cheap but ultimately you will be having a lesser quality of life you be living in a small apartment which from a lot of people moving from a you know large free four five bed house that's not what you want to be doing so you're think uh people who are moving to Dubai uh purely because of the lifestyle yeah or purely because of the type of environment yeah the people that we work with and the the clients that we've helped move over here there's I probably say that 99% of the time tax is definitely the main motive it's the case if you've got a UK business and you're currently paying 200,000 a year in tax well actually in Dubai you probably save most of that and then with that you have the increased lifestyle as well but tax is definitely the main motivator I find okay and now that you mentioned about the taxes I really wanted to cover a little bit about that specifically since also you're kind of expert in that yourself so if someone who's about because there's so many young entrepreneurs Sol preneurs right now and moving forward we're looking to see about 48% um increase uh for someone who's just thinking of starting a a business right now so when someone's really starting out what are the key factors that they need to be aware of when it comes to taxes because this is something that we uh we we Overlook and we not really you know thinking through and and we don't really um focusing on earlier on the beginning and until we find ourselves in that situation where it's like oh man what do I need to do right now I have so many expenses like what is your advice yeah I'd say one of the best bit of advice is obviously you need to know this stuff but get a good accountant from day one because the way mosters work you pay the same amount of money whether you join them at the end of the year once you've tried muddling the waters you know mixing up expenses and income figuring stuff out over the course of a year as you do if you join them on day one and say you know what Josh this is my business you know it you're the accountant you helped me do this for n for 90% you actually do it for them the bookkeeping and the accounts and the V returns so definitely get an accountant and someone on board as soon as you can because most of the time the cost is the same but then in terms of what you actually need to be aware of well most people limited companies are the way to go just because you've got the limited liability now with the increases in corporation tax the actual amount of um profit after tax cash as tax that you will have it's quite similar between being a sole Trader and a limited company but for anybody doing business you want a limited company it makes you look more professional you have limited liability um and with a limited company it's basically just about making sure that you have a good separate bank account that's the first thing that we say to people rather than meddling with expenses using your personal account for some income some expenses you need to have a separate bank account all of your income goes into it all of your expenses go out of it that way nothing can get missed make sure you're issuing invoices you're keeping the invoices for all of the expenses that you're incurring keeping receipts and keeping invoices that's what would say the very minimum just to make you've got good financial information but then it's about budgeting for tax as well because it's quite easy as a business owner to actually you know you see the money in the bank account okay we've got 202,000 that's all mine let me go invest 202,000 in this new training course some new Machinery well actually if your vat registered that 20,000 could easily be due to the vatman or even just for nonb business that money isn't all yours you've got corporation tax to pay which is due nine months after your year end so you need to make sure that you don't get caught short with the cash flow side of things and you do have some money set aside for paying the taxes okay that's brilliant and how can someone if if I had a limiting company how can I pay myself through that so there are a number of different ways to pay yourself I guess the first one will be your director's own account so what will happen is is when you set up a company quite often you'll put money into the company for initial expenses and what we do with a lot of our clients is we actually sell their assets so at the minute if you can start a business chances are you've got a telephone cameras laptops that you own personally you might have brought them a few years ago actually now you're using them for the business so what we do we transfer them over at their current value and all of this stuff will form part of your director's own account and what you can do with this amount is you can either charge interest on it or actually take out completely taxfree so if we add all this up all the money that you put in say you put £10,000 worth of stuff in there your company owes you that now a couple of months later you've sent some invoices you got cash in the bank you can take that full £10,000 out taxfree so that's the the first and easiest way to get money out as a new business anything over and above that you probably want to be paying yourself a salary so everyone in the UK you get your 12,570 tax-free personal allowance pretty much most people it makes absolute sense to pay at least that amount out as a salary and anything else above that you probably want to take his dividends if you've got the profit in the company to do so that's brilliant that's brilliant uh I think I think um a lot of people will actually benefit from this conversation because this is the number one thing I'll you know start realizing myself because um I'm a I'm a new sort of sort of preneur myself I've been doing this for around a year now and I start to realize that taxing and legal activities is the most important thing other than you know operations of your business because you really need to be able to uh have some sort of proof of what you do and how much income you have and all that uh so there's not like any Shady uh activities or you have you know if you find yourself in trouble with the government uh I think a prime example from that was Andrew Tate you must be familiar with absolutely because he has so many he has so many issues with the government um but also the things that he said on the internet because also there's so many things you need to be aware of and yeah that's it's almost it was what caused him to get so big in some respect then it's also caused his downfall we just said a lot of stuff and yeah too many people got offended and ultimately that's that's kind of what led to his not downfall but his Mass censorship which has kind of almost had him different respects unfortunately yeah I I did see a clip from M TR where he was on a on a podcast or somewhere um he and he did say that it's nearly impossible to touch the re the reach because no one owns anything so what's your prospecting on that yeah absolutely yeah that's that's a fantastic way of especially for a lot of people in the early days they might focus on this but really to protect your wealth to have trust involved you need to for one not be UK tax resident because as soon as you have offshore trusts that own your assets the tax ramifications in the UK are very heavy if you can benefit from that trust so this type of stuff doesn't typically work if you're a UK tax resident the second is you need to be really wealthy to be able to afford to put this structure into place quite often especially with a lot of people kind of promoting this stuff on the internet we have people that come to us and say I'm just starting having business I've you know not even made any money yet but I want to set up a trust overseas to protect it and it's like no don't bother doing this stuff because for one you can't afford it right now your main thing at the minute should you be focusing on building something worth protecting um building that wealth to start with then the rest can happen later on um but yeah absolutely if if you're wealthy and I put a number on that I say if you've got net assets worth you got to be worth at least two or three million really to justify the net assets as well but if you are in that position then yeah absolutely your assets your businesses is boats Jets should be owned by offshore companies and offshore trusts so that they are protected so they are tax efficient and that you know if somebody sues you personally your assets are completely out of Harm's Way and protected is that similar to LLC what uh the Americans have in some respect yeah an LLC it's kind of equivalent to a UK limited company in that it's limited liability Corporation so it's just a way of having an entity which is exist legally independent from you okay so that LLC could own assets it could be a business and then that LLC could by another company or it could be own by a trust so it's just another layer another legal entity so it's actually well if the LLC has a private jet in it well actually you don't personally own that private jet the LLC does so if somebody were to sue you personally well that private jet doesn't belong to you so they can't take it it's owned by the LLC LLC so you're protected that's right that LLC if you own this if you owned that comp if you own the company well actually then they could take the shares in the company so what you would do there would be have an overse trust which it owns a company that trust exists and says well actually you know what you can benefit from the use of the assets but you don't actually own them so nobody can take those assets from you because you don't physically own them absolutely what is the one thing that you've seen uh amongst people have a lot of money especially in Dubai um you must be surrounded with lots of different people with influences and all that who has have quite a lot of things um what how do they structure their own business are they following the same sort of method that you just described or is are they doing something else yeah quite often that that method we described is is what they're doing various degrees so quite a lot of wealthy people at least have some kind of offshore trust whether it's for asset protection or actually just to pass their assets onto the Next Generation in the most tax efficient way but yeah absolutely even the wealthy that we speak to in Dubai they've all got International companies which own UK real estate own property elsewhere where the the Yachts are the Yachts are owned through so yeah absolutely this type of company structures with the trusts involved as well and even family foundations as well that can be another structure um yeah absolutely it's when it comes to tax planning and wealth protection it's basically the gold standard so many of many of the wealthy to follow that approach absolutely I want to change a little bit the sub towards directly to you and and how did you start through this whole journey of becoming a Tax Advisor and then moving towards Dubai and become an international expert what led you to uh make the first move really and how did you how did you make your start yeah absolutely so um as we account you know you can't teach yourself this stuff to some degree so so we really started was it probably about eight years ago yeah well I suppose it started even earlier than that with you know University getting the formal qualifications and then actually you know getting the experience in so working for saffre is a very large firm they do a lot of international tax planning work with a lot of high value clients get some good experience there and moving on to a different firm as well basically just just to build myself up get the real experience get exposure to actually see how this stuff works um did that for a number of years then 5 years ago set up my own practice so set up JSM five years ago in the UK okay primarily initially working with high net worth individuals and property investors and then off off the is that the same yeah yeah is that the same company that you have today still got that company today okay in the UK fantastic company um still got a team in the UK that managed that and then actually two years ago moving out to Dubai really we had because we've been working with high net worth individuals for a number of years the crossover was was already there so as soon as we moved out to Dubai the service is kind of LED on because prior to that we were just referring people onto our partners out in Dubai when then I actually made the move we built up the team out here so actually we just um started bringing that in house and offering the whole package when it comes to the UK and UAE tax planning okay that's good um what was the biggest challenge that you fa so far whether that was your in your personal life or in your in your business career um yeah I guess the biggest challenge supp with this stuff it's very very technical so you've got to make sure that you can kind of stay committed to you know being the best staying updated lectures networking um reading all the case law and everything else uh basically because it's such a technical area there's no margin for error so the biggest biggest challenge is making sure that you're doing enough to stay updated to give your clients the best possible service I I see yeah it sounds like a very technical kind of role and you want to be uh knowledgeable all around you know cuz uh if someone comes to you with that money the last thing that you want to be is find yourself in this in the situation of I don't know what to do in this kind of stuff um which is which is amazing not going to lie um do you think the role that you have right now satisfies you to the Limit that you want to be is this your is this the ceiling at the moment to where you are what what is your motivation like what's next yes so absolutely in terms of what we're doing yeah we're continuously growing so over the five years there's never been a year where we we haven't grown by double digits so there yeah there's absolutely no ceiling it's just a case of you know drilling down deeper and deeper and deeper and keep mining out those diamonds so that's what we're doing is we're we're going to keep growing each every year so absolutely that's that's the plan is just to keep growing see how big we can take JSM see what investments we can do along theide and ultimately as of most things most businesses most people the objective is to build that generational wealth absolutely I think this is a term that a lot of people are actually using um but me personally I haven't really had the opportunity to meet any of these people so if you had to put a number into a perspective as in terms of your your goals in the next yeah I don't know five years where would that number be yeah I five years we're probably it's probably too short I'll say 10 years 10 years we're looking for 10 million 10 years yeah 10 years 10 million that's time 40 I personally I'm looking to have at least a 10 million net worth that's amazing that's amazing because I don't you don't really get the opportunity to actually meet people who um have this kind of Vision on everyday basis well unless you you live in Dubai po person in Dubai what what's the average that you've seen uh on net worth individuals yeah the average prob especially in the UK probably the average we work with is probably five or six million but when we're networking speaking to people out in Dubai um yeah you probably looking upwards to 25 million net worth and up okay I saw this clip actually from from Joe Rogan that said the um the Saudi Arabian uh they don't really actually stay to their actual net worth because they own everything is that is that true I don't know that to an extent I can see how that could be true is I know I know they mentioned that they've got the world's rich list you know um Elon Musk and everyone on there but then you've actually got the secret wealth the rth child Saudi Arabia all you know the royal families are so every night and yeah obvious they're not on Sunday 's rich list they're not on the Forbes but those guys do own and control a lot of stuff they've got significant business interests so yeah absolutely I can definitely see there being some Merit behind you the rulers of Saudi Arabia being the richest people um in the world not just the CEOs and founders of these fore 500 companies absolutely do you think like money is the number one motivator CU if you if you come from money I don't think that money is what you really passionate about it because if you if you have it you're not really sicking you always want what you've not got and if you if you grow up you grow up with uh if you're fat you want to have a sixpack it's always a case of whatever you don't have is typically what you want until you get it and then you realize most of the time it's not as good as what you want how you thought it would be to start with but yeah obviously I think with a lot of people the self-made people money is probably always the motivator it's the case of a lot of people like what they do they like the feeling that making money gets you know in terms of what it does when you make money it's probably it's a dopamine rush to some extent almost like winning at a casino having a cigarette it just it feels good um and for a lot of people that's do it continue doing it and then money almost becomes a scorecard in the game of business as just to how well you're doing compared to everybody else around you I think money is if if if it's from someone who hasn't come from it it's the number one thing that everybody wants to achieve purely because the way at least I see it is the option that gives you the freedom that that gives you to do a lot of things that otherwise you wouldn't be able to do you think that is do you think that's that's that's the one reason that um or any other reasons that people are actually saying how money actually want yeah yeah AB yeah absolutely money for the freedom that's definitely one of the main motivators um yeah if if you come for money you don't need it yeah you're not inclined to you know make a lot of people aren't inclined to make more money that's why typically when it it comes to generational wealth you've got the founder generation actually make the money and then within two or three generations because they lose the the knowledge and the hunger to make more money and grow more money they just spend it because they're not hungry for the money typically that's how how long generational wealth lasts maximum two or three generations because when you have money you actually don't have the hunger for money so you lose it and as a result the wealth diminishes but a lot of people that aren't born with money they do want money so that's why the self-made are the majority people if you look on the Sunny Times richest or the forbs 100 a lot of I think is% are actually selfmade first generational millionaires um as it stands do you did you started your your own company from from scratch or was it something that it was a family business and then you took cover yeah yeah fantastic question so know 100% all all from scratch in terms of grew up yeah grew up in poverty free School meals single mother household um three sisters so yeah in terms of growing up you know we weren't weren't Rich weren't wealthy in any way shape or form um we wouldn't surprise me if my mom was probably living on a couple of hundred good a week um at the time so yeah absolutely grew up with yeah no no money at all and what was your what was your hunger what was your hunger then and what was the number one thing that you you had I'll do this no matter what yeah just I was always interested in business it's just the case of I I wanted money I saw what money did I knew that I knew how not having money felt and how it impacts your life or you want to do something but you can't because you don't have the money so I always experienced that as a kid so growing up it's the case of no I I will have money um finding out how how to get it just so that I don't have to basically not I don't have to go about I can do anything I want yeah absolutely and that is very interesting because school doesn't teach you exactly that that's the number one thing that you really want to know to succeed as a business owner how they how you actually doing the things that you know uh that you're doing right now on daily basis even if you study business uh most cases it's not actually to build your own business but it's actually to go and work for someone who has a business yeah that that's always the case that's that's how the holds that's how the whole system is structured and it really has to be that way if School taught you to start your business do this and do that well actually get to the stage where everyone's got their own business you can't get any staff you kind of there's so many in terms of society there's so many cogs to the machine that you have to have enough people in all different cogs if they school to everyone to start a business well then nobody would be working the McDonald's nobody be in the warehouses nobody be a lorry driver and all these key things that you actually need for the whole of society function absolutely and come going back to when you started yourself how did you scale at the beginning because when you when you when you first open your own business and especially if you don't have the the capital to hire people operations and all the things that you really want to run the business yourself how do you manage as a as a one person to do pretty much everything yes so early stages of course it's it's a juggling act it's been in many different plates but just a case of finding a way to really hire as soon as possible so to either get rid of the jobs that you really don't enjoy um or that you're bad at um and the good thing about most businesses is you can just basically charge customers up front so the way we do it is most accountancy businesses well typically they used to do the work then get paid by the client a month afterwards of course you can't scale that business because you're doing the work and then you're going to get paid 30 days afterwards it's it's it's a bad way of doing the the structuring the business what we do is as soon as you join us you pay up front for the accounts that you're going to do basically so positive cash flow before we have to do the work and because that's the way we structured it we could instantly take on take on take on more clients and we might not actually have to really do any work for a year but that we get that cash over the year so we could hire a lot faster and the same in most businesses if you can start issuing payment up front before you start working with somebody say you know what pay me in advance for this job actually you've got the cash in your bank which you can then go use to hire member of Staff who will then go and fulfill that order or do that job for you that you've already been paid for so it's with scaling it's just about from a practical Finance point of view it's about cash flow of course you've got the HR issues the operational issues all that stuff that comes with it but from a cash point of view if you can get a positive cash flow where as soon as you acquire a customer your business's cash flow positive that will enable you to scale it because you can use that cash flow to hire people who are actually going to do that work for you so it's uh so you buy really leverage at the beginning with someone else's money without investing your own money to do that yeah I get to some extent you're going to get as long as you can acquire the customer for cheap or low cost you're going to use that customer's money to actually go and hire somebody to do the job for them of course it's a lot more technical than that they're going to be working for you and everything else but in the long and short of it that's what you'll do and that's the best way of scaling do you think people is it's easier to to gain uh to get people to join to what you actually sell or is it more difficult to retain those kind of people to to the type of the business that you run yeah depends what you're selling but yeah in terms of retaining stuff yeah it's it's all finding stuff is difficult retaining stuff is difficult as well so that's that's the hardest probably realistically the hardest bit I found about scaling a business is actually getting good Staffing to help scale the business getting customers that's pretty easy that can almost become a bit mechanical and that you know if you can get 100 sales calls booked 50% of them are going to show up 50% of they're going to become customers so you know for every hundred people you get booked in you got 25 customers coming through and then you can just scale that with ads content Outreach whatever it is that's the easy side of it but then actually getting a good process for technical staff that is almost is very difficult to do because they're so far few in between whereas if you're scaling and you want your sales staff or stuff where you can kind of do some kind of In-House training that's a lot easier because they don't have to have 5 years experience and accounting their tax to do the job you could just get them off the street put them through your training process and then within two weeks they can start working for you and making you money do you think is it's easier to have in-house people or remote people cuz they tend to be less expensive always inh house in terms of what's best um we've tried you know we had workers in Philippines India everywhere and I know everyone's working from home in a minute but in terms of as a business owner having everyone in the office talking to each other that is the best way to get the most product even a lot of the CEOs of these large companies agree of course there a few cies that say working from home is more effective but absolutely not when it comes to running and scaling a business the best way is boots on the ground everyone in an office working together absolutely I think that that is very true um I've tried hiring some professionals especially with video editing um and to the whole sort of media type of world of editing I believe is the number one thing everybody should uh be focusing on right now if they don't know where to start yeah what business to make because the demand is so is so high right now because everybody is doing this um so the best advice I give to the people to the young men that they come to me and say what can I do right now you know I'm I'm at the age where I have a lot of time how can I leverage this uh that is the number one thing that I I say to them because they can learn pretty much everything for free nowadays from YouTube um and then they can leverage that and yeah there so many business owners out there that for a lot of people don't NE know the specifics don't know what subtitles to I to capture attention don't know how to L it's it's a very quick and easy skill to learn video editing social media you know you can know nothing about it within a week you could be you know not an expert but pretty well versed to actually gets get some good content out there looks good gets customers engaged builds momentum and there's so many business owners that they just don't they can't invest the time they're not sure um they're a bit older maybe 50 40 50 60 years old and they look at Instagram and they don't know what they're doing and all of those people they've got businesses they probably know that they need to be on social media marketing their business and they're just happy to pay somebody one or two 3,000 or whatever it is to just handle it all edit the videos post the videos so yeah absolutely agree with that it's a fantastic skill to learn a great business yeah absolutely um so just to wrap up quickly I really wanted to ask you this particular question I think you are the right person to ask if you had to move to any cing the W where would that be and why um I probably give almost two answers so I suppose from the UK the UK honestly is a fantastic place to do business um the you got great infrastructure easy banking so many different businesses out there is a very good economy to be doing businesses there's lots of talented people where it's easy to hire people in the UK which is obviously very they kind of lead on to the next B is even the UK just because it's a great place to do business we still do business there or Dubai Dubai is a fantastic Place growing city f favorable tax regimes but it's a little bit harder to hire staff a lot more cash flow needed just because with the buy everyone here obviously you've got your mariy population but everyone else is an immigrant you need to have a work visa so actually getting good staff here is a lot more expensive you need to basically sponsor them as employees helping get their own Visa just to work with you and if you go through all of that process in three months time you find out they're useless you spent a lot of money very laborious process to scale with staff on the ground in Dubai whereas in the UK you can actually put a job adver out and indeed hire somebody and they can be working with you as long as they got a passport right to work in the UK that's it it's it's very easy so it depends what type of business you're going for if it's just you on your laptop making money I'd say go to Dubai if you're from the UK MH and you think actually we need an office we need specialist people in the office boots on the ground the UK is probably the better option do you do you prefer mixing the both hiring someone from the UK and move them to Dubai yeah yeah we've looked at that but that that's yeah that's that's an option yeah that's where a lot of people have success because you've got the UK knowledge people love to buy um yeah ABS that's an option you still got the same hurdles of the Visa costs but yeah it's definitely an option brilliant well it was a pleasure so if you guys enjoyed this episode make sure you like the video and subscribe where can they find you Jos yeah AB so best place to reach out to me is um our UK accountancy Business website so jsmp partners. co.uk you can book a discovery call if you want to reach me personally Joshua jsmp partners. co.uk and my name is Joshua th that's on Instagram YouTube Facebook um X everywhere you can find me at that handle brilliant brilliant thank you very much for your time today and I hope to see you again soon absolute pleasure thanks for having me