How Ardius, LLC CEO Janice Orlando grew Ardius, LLC to $4M revenue with a 46 person team in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is josh lee he's the founder of artist.com which helps you automate r d tax credits for companies that innovate and he was the first m a deal that gusto did which we'll talk about josh you're ready to take the top absolutely thanks for having me nathan you bet all right tax credits is a really interesting space main street seems to be growing like wildfire boost ai in canada also seems to be taking off were you sort of in that same space yeah i actually started uh back at ernst young right uh was my first uh real job out of college and right into tax credits and incentives so yeah for sure we we started um way back uh in the early 2000 period and so this is now all coming to light with uh technology so you you're sorry you you did not launch in 2018 you launched earlier than that i was at ernst young which actually is where where i first started and so that's where the genesis of you know learning about tax credits uh and trying to automate the process started but but rds itself started in 2018 i see okay so you launch in 2018 how much did you spend getting the mvp live actually you know uh it was funny because right before that uh i was actually in the venture capital space and so we had invested in about 23 plus companies and so it was actually a function of servicing our own portfolio right that we actually came up with this because once people find out you're a cpa nationally they want free advice and so we actually took them to my former uh big four and they couldn't service us we were just too small some of our companies were pre-revenue and you know the you know the labor intensity and the bill rates were just too high for the startups to actually uh afford so that's why we actually came up with rds to help serve them so you spin that out and did the did your firm that you were with take a percent of the business at the spin out or did you own 100 at the start oh at the uh well the company itself it was me and uh another uh two gentlemen who helped uh the first mvp this is summer of 2018 right and so from there we you know serviced our own portfolio companies and it wasn't much about the revenue so much it was about hey can this work um and then we did take obviously a percentage of of the tax savings the credits itself so from a cash flow perspective it wasn't a burden for the actual startups themselves so it was a win-win in that regard yeah no that makes a lot of sense now now did you ever go i mean would you go full time on this in 2019 at some point and really say let's build a real business well that was the funny part so right after we we finished with uh this first portfolio um we had a couple of cpa firms approaches people i had mentored said hey josh we heard you're back in the game right the cpa game i was like no i'm just doing this as a love project honestly right and then from there we had a couple other venture funds who we had co-invested with at the time uh one in particular was mucker mucker capital here in la and eric and will solve this right uh who are the managing partners at my current were like hey josh what are you doing exactly and i'll tell them about these credits i was excited to share with them how much money we'd saved for each of our startup companies and they were looking at me and they were like josh we have you know we're working on venture fund number four we have three venture funds we'd love to run our portfolio companies uh through this as well and we think you should go full time it was actually based on their encouragement right that that we thought about it long and hard about hey why don't we just do this full time and start you know artists uh as not just a love project anymore but an actual real startup so did mucker invest they did they wrote me the first check uh it was it was more of them convincing my wife who at the time was like what you wanna you know become a founder again that's that's absolutely nuts right but now but they were great uh they wrote the first check and have uh believed in it from from day one so they've been what was that what was that check size uh they have an accelerator program so that check size was roughly about uh 200 000. were you in that same accelerator as alex at ordermark same cohort yeah alex cancer great uh good friend uh with mike jacobs and that whole crew so they actually were one of our first uh clients oh i love in the beginning yeah it's great and so having been in restaurant tech ourselves or having some investments in those areas it was great obviously a big fan of cantor's deli as well and and so we uh we helped them with their their r d credits uh you know not only in improving out some of the scalability right of the of the platform but also they were a big proponent they were working with techstars at the time got us in front of techstars we worked with their portfolio a lot and so kind of going instead of going door to door started looking at some enterprise value right with the accelerator funds the venture funds around town and even some other institutions that have you know a plethora of startups right that could actually use this and and that's a crazy thing right alex had never heard of it most of these startup companies have never heard about the r d credit so and what so your model what percent did you typically take of the savings right now we're averaging anywhere from 10 to about 30. and i say that with a grain of salt just because it depends on sometimes the size of the company the complexities uh we're also starting to you know discount further in in different cycles so that first cycle is kind of a beast right we're trying to automate create a framework and then once we get past the first cycle we can obviously have economies of scale right to go forward so we also will look to do that we're also looking into maybe tiering it right into maybe more of a fixed uh cost right depending on you know a variety of different variables you know raising a series a maybe being pre-funded uh pre-revenue things of that sort but trying to be flexible and again the goal end goal here is to to get more credits into the hands of of companies that need it so and do you remember in the first year i always like to ask first-year questions you remember how much uh like i guess tax savings you got for founders in 2018 oh wow i know it was i know it was a benchmark when we had our first million right when went the game yeah yeah it was uh well we started at the end of 2018 so this was in 2019. so we hit that mark and then from one to ten to yeah i think there was i mean we stopped losing shots it was almost like mcdonald's right how many hamburgers have you served and so i got to a certain point we we hit certain milestones we we celebrated and then you know from there we just kept going so so you broke 10 million the same year in 2019 in terms of tax savings yeah for tax savings yeah i mean we had companies that came to us uh that were in the three four million dollar range so it was yeah we had a huge client like just just one client alone uh nathan it was crazy yeah they were um in manufacturing had never thought they would qualify for the life of them and we were actually able to go back uh you know four or five years right because it is a refundable credit so we went back four or five years and it culminated to about you know three four million for federal and state credits so it was a it was a huge win yeah and so if you look at between your start date your first deal all the way up to today have you guys passed 500 million in tax savings that's a good question i said i should go back you have to know that number like that's like a magic moment yeah i you know actually if you had grabbed my colleague you know jenna she would actually be able to tell you she keeps track of all the numbers but i'm willing to guess yeah we probably would be pretty close just because we have hit some pretty big hitters right in the fortune 500 space and so their credits get relatively large yep right so i i do believe we're probably close i don't know if it exceeded it but we probably have come pretty close that's pretty cool okay great let's a little bit more capital history here did you only raise the 200 grand or did you raise more capital we actually raised one other note um we raised one convertible no this was at the time and you brought up you know main street there was another company that was just starting to to raise capital right we were always profitable from day one so we never really thought about raising beyond mucker's first uh you know investment but you know we were scaling and uh we were looking at you know a very you know linear growth like hey we can build this in you know twice the budget and half the time let's do it right that kind of mentality so we did go out and raise one other note um relatively small uh to that end and it was it was an opportunity to almost you know you know include and then integrate folks who who believed in us you know from from 2018 2019 so hustle fun came in you know operate studios...