Welcome to AwarePreneurs, the world's longest running social entrepreneur podcast. I'm Paul Zelizer, your host. If you could take a moment and hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, it helps our guests help more social entrepreneurs. Thank you so much. Today our guest is Brian Thompson and our topic is leaning in rather than leaning out. Brian is the founder and financial planner of Brian Thompson Financial LLC where he helps LGBTQ and mission driven entrepreneurs build profitable businesses that reflect who they are and support the impact they want to make. As a financial advisor, business strategist, and host of the Mission Driven Business podcast, Brian works with service based founders who are building more than just a business. They're building movements, communities and legacies.

He helps them bring clarity and structure to their finances so they can grow with confidence and stay rooted in their purpose. Before launching his firm, Brian spent nearly a decade as a tax attorney. That background, paired with his own entrepreneurial experiences, informs a planning approach that's inclusive, strategic and grounded in real life. As a black queer financial advisor, Brian is especially passionate about creating space for diverse voices in business and finance and showing the profit and purpose driven. You don't have to be mutually exclusive. Brian Thompson, welcome to AwarePreneurs.

Thanks Paul. Happy to be here. Excited to talk with you.

You've been doing awesome work and as we were talking before we hit record, this isn't the easiest time in the spaces that you and your clients work with. So just thank you for being here. I've got so many questions, but to start with Brian, give me the origin story. How did you get into doing this work and before opening your own firm, you spent almost a decade as a tax attorney. How does that background influence the foundations of the work that you do?

Yeah, so it actually started back in law school. My second year of law school, I took a tax class and just fell in love with it. Something about how the tax system works, the rules, the exceptions, the exceptions to exceptions, that just really flowed with my mind. So I knew that this is something that I wanted to do. I wanted to deal with finances, I wanted to deal with tax. I almost quit law school because I thought I was going to just quit and become an accountant. And then an advisor told me, no, you can do tax as a lawyer. So I stuck with it.

And also during that time, my dad had just died and so he left my mom a lot of money and she had a financial advisor in quotes who ended up taking a lot of money from her and putting her in a bad place. So because also that's the way that my mind works. I stepped in and tried to help out the best that I could and really fell in love with personal finance. So fast forPaul Zelizerto my law career. I found a great tax firm. I, I loved the work, but it was always stressful. Right? Everybody came to me in trouble. Everybody had the IRS breathing down their neck.

So while I liked work, I didn't like the stress. And I, I did it for a while. And then I realized I could help people be more proactive rather than reactive. I could set up my own financial planning firm where I could help people really build something that was helped with both impact and profit, but also wasn't as stressful and really helped them flourish and thrive rather than just deal with stressful situations. So I started Brian Thompson Financial in 2016, and I first focused on LGBTQ couples because at that time, marriage equality was coming to pass, and it was a really big thing for us. And I knew that I wanted to help people with the 1100 benefits that they were going to get. But then I realized that I was just too spread out. There was doing too many things, working with too many different clients.

And there were a lot of businesses coming to me because of my tax background. I represented businesses, small businesses, and individuals before the irs. So they knew that I had this background, and they knew that I had the knowledge to help them build something. And so the more business clients that I took on, the more fun it got. I loved the, the puzzle piece of trying to put everything together and getting things organized. Like, it just fits my personality. So 2020, I sort of leaned in, was like, all right, so this is, this is my client base. This is what I want to do.

And really just went from there and built the mission driven business aspect from there.

Nice. My dad was a CPA and a tax account growing up, and, yeah, we didn't see him a whole lot from about January to the end of April, you know, so I can, I'm kind of smiling, like, yeah, I kind of have a sense of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It gets busy and I try to make sure that I'm not just doing tax preparation. Right. We're doing tax consulting and tax advisory, making sure that people are prepared for the things that could come. So I, I, it's, I still am busy March through April, but also like, like to spread up my time during the year to make sure that people are prepared and, and ready for whatever's to come.