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What is going on? DTC Pod Today we are joined by Christian Rivera who is an expert ECOM accountants. So Christian, I'll let you kick us off.

Why don't you tell us a little.

Bit about your background, your business, how you work with different brands and then we can jump into it.

Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me. I own a firm called the E Commerce Accountants name kind of says it all. We work with E commerce entrepreneurs. We do accounting, taxes, sales taxes, you know, tax planning, tax compliance. Basically an accounting firm catered to E commerce businesses specifically.

Sweet. And so how'd you get your start there? Like how did, how did you end up in the ecom world? And I'm excited to kind of unpack. Like you know what this stuff looks like specifically in the consumer, brand and commerce world.

Yeah, so it depends how far back you want to go, but basically I'm a corporate America guy. I used to work for Ernst and Young, which is a big four accounting firm. And when I was there I got a ton of experience. My background's in tax, so I was a tax guy there. My clients were some of the Biggest companies in the world, you know, Hess Corp, Barnes and Noble, Squarespace, these massive, massive corporations. And basically one day I decided to quit my job and start a business. And surprise, surprise, I decided to start an accounting firm. You know, it's the skill set I learned and new in a business I kind of knew how to operate within.

I studied accounting in school, all that good stuff. When I first started my accounting firm, basically I was an accountant to any type of business. I really struggled in the beginning because you know, there's a lot of different types of accounts out there. And then I stumbled upon this idea of niching down into a specific space and really specializing who your clients are so you can fully understand their business and compete a little bit more effectively with other accounting firms. I stumbled into the ride sharing space. I try to be the Uber accountant and do accounting and taxes for Uber drivers. And I found out kind of the hard way that although they are truly entrepreneurs, they don't really make a ton of money and they don't really have a lot of budget for accounting and tax planning. And you know, it's just not a complex business model.

So I had to go back to the drawing board and around that time I stumbled across my first E Com entrepreneur client and this guy was killing it, doing really well. And I started looking into the space because as an entrepreneur I was like maybe I should be doing ecom, you know. And I was, I started looking into it and that's when I discovered that there was a lot of accounting and tax related issues with e commerce businesses. And when I started looking into accounting firms at service E Comm entrepreneurs, there really wasn't any out there at the time. So we rebranded and, and kind of the rest is history. Sweet.

So I definitely want to cover, you know, the way we can structure this conversation. We can kind of talk about it from like the basics up, like what brands need to know from like an accounting and like cash flow management sort of perspective. I think that would be really awesome as well as some stuff on like tax optimization, ways to save, ways to like be smart. But you know, maybe before we just like kick off with the basics, could you just give us a quick high level overview of like what's the difference from like a tax and accounting point of view? Like what's the difference between like a commerce or consumer brand versus like you know, any other sort of businesses?

Right.