How Real Estate Investors Can Use AI to Find Hidden Tax Savings

Tommy Thornburgh (00:00)
I yeah, so we’re I I kind of joke, we’re we’re like an In-N-Out menu, really. The whole time we’ve done this, we’ve just continued to hone our craft on the services that we’ve offered for the whole time, which is entity, business credit, tax, estate planning. But what I’m most excited about is about nine months ago, we launched a new service called the Decoder. And it’s really amazing. What you can do is you can upload your previous year’s tax return.

So you take your 2025 tax return, upload it into our system. There’s plugins with the IRS and everything else. And what it does is it dissects your tax return and pulls out all the different boxes and areas and gives you five to 20 different strategies that you could be implementing that you’re not currently.

Meghan Escobar (02:20)
Welcome back to another episode of Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host, Meghan Escobar. And one of my favorite parts about hosting this show is getting to sit down with incredible entrepreneurs and to be able to learn more about their business, what they’ve built, the person behind that is really the the incredible part of this.

Because every story has a business. Every entrepreneur has a turning point that shapes them on how they think, how they lead, and how they grow. So today we’re dividing into ex diving into exactly what that looks like. And I’m excited to welcome to the screen Tommy Thornburgh. Thornburgh. Okay, thank you so much for being here, Tommy. I’d love you to start with.

Tommy Thornburgh (03:03)
Thornburgh.

Meghan Escobar (03:10)
I’d love for you to start with someone meeting you for the first time. Who are you? And how did you get into this industry?

Tommy Thornburgh (03:19)
Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I my name’s Tommy Thornburgh. I’m the president here at Prime Corporate. First and foremost, I’m a dad. I’ve got two little girls that are amazing. One of them has more attitude than the other, but that’s for another day. I like to golf. I like to play tennis. My mom was a real estate agent. My dad owned a real estate brokerage. They got divorced when I was three.

And the one thing they had in common is that they wanted my sister and I to be self-employed, and I’m forever grateful for that. I knocked door to door when I was 18 years old selling pest control and got hit with a big tax bill and was kind of bouncing around on going to college and working for different companies. And we started Prime Corporate back in 2012. And with four of us, we have grown the company to 450 plus employees, nine figures a year in revenue. We’ve helped set up close to 200,000 businesses and file about 40,000 tax returns a year at this point. So that’s the cliff notes of my story and I’m sticking to

Meghan Escobar (04:30)
Mm. What drew you to this kind of work?

Tommy Thornburgh (04:33)
I think that having parents that were both self-employed growing up, there was always a desire to be self-employed myself. But I also realized that they were self-employed in the real estate sector. And I noticed the tension in the house. My stepdad was also a general contractor that was self-employed as well. And tax season was never the most exciting part of our household family’s family’s year. So a lot of you can probably relate with this tax and entity formation. This is certainly not the most exciting part of anyone’s business, but I think it’s one of the most important taxes are one of the largest expenses that you’re gonna have throughout the course of your life. So, how can you come in and make a big difference for someone by keeping more money in their corner that they can grow and scale and help and employ more people? It’s something I’ve been able to really hold a strong passion for for the last thirteen years.

Meghan Escobar (05:31)
Yeah, and I can feel that kind of shining through the screen, the passion for it. And I’m curious to know where that comes from. I know you grew up in that household, but was there a moment in time where you felt like, you know, like take me back to where that journey really began for you?

Tommy Thornburgh (06:35)
Yeah, I growing up, all I wanted to do was play sports. I wanted to golf and play baseball and basketball and football. And in 2008, those of you that haven’t heard, it was not the greatest real estate year in the world. So my parents were all in construction and real estate, and we went from a pretty healthy middle class family to no longer a healthy middle class family. And I realized very quickly that the financial security is not what I grew up thinking that it was. So as opposed to being a spoiled athlete, I transitioned and the passion that I had for sports and wanting to just get better every day at my craft, which was sports at the time, and transitioned into business.

I think I’ve always kind of just been a driven, optimistic, passionate person. Yeah. So I don’t know that that is anything more than what I get from my mama. But as I was a as I was growing and as I was able to help more people, that care for people and the desire to help people better their situation ended up in pretty cool financial success. So I I don’t know that it was anything more than just putting my pants on one leg at a time and continuing moving forward to build and grow, scale something bigger than myself. Wow.

Meghan Escobar (08:00)
Incredible. And was there any specific thing that like made you take that leap that we haven’t gone through already or?

Tommy Thornburgh (08:09)
Yeah. So I was working with a company prior to starting Prime Corporate with my partner Steve Harward. And we had helped them build a revenue stream of an additional $12 million a year. I was 21 years old. Wow. And what I was told of getting cut in on that, they ended up selling the company and I didn’t make a dollar. This is on a Wednesday. Fast forward to Saturday. I’m at a celebration of life and meet my partner Steve Harward. And he said, Hey, I just barely started this company. And I’d love for you to. I bought his parking, which was three dollars. And he’s like, Why did you buy my parking? I’m like, dude, you drove. I’ve got a great mother. That’s what you do. If someone drives, you pay for their parking. So we end up going in and going to this celebration of life and hitting it off. And this is a Saturday night. I legitimately quit my job on Monday. And went and have been with Prime Corporate ever since. It’s been about thirteen years.

Meghan Escobar (09:03)
What an incredible story. Did you know Steve prior to that?

Tommy Thornburgh (09:06)
I didn’t. That was the first time I ever met him.

Meghan Escobar (09:08)
Wow.

Tommy Thornburgh (09:08)
We are we are good friends. We’re business partners and he’s actually with my sister now, believe it or not, and they just had a little baby. A nephew that’s also come from this relationship. So it’s been a really cool one.

Meghan Escobar (09:18)
Congratulations. That’s incredible. That is really cool. And you know, that’s the prime example of you hear people say, I mean, I I know I from mentors and just being in the entrepreneur world, you you constantly hear the saying, one door closes, another one opens, right? And that is a prime example of what literally happened to you. Like that door closed for you on Wednesday and you could have potentially used that as a pity potty and went into a downhill spiral and used all kinds of excuses, but instead you opened another door, another opportunity and and look where it’s led.

Tommy Thornburgh (09:58)
I for the record, I did go into a pretty significant pity party, but luckily it was only for three days. So it was the biggest blessing that could happen.

Meghan Escobar (10:07)
It’s a very short pity potty, but it’s short.

Tommy Thornburgh (10:10)
Yeah. It was a pity party, but it was a short one.

Meghan Escobar (10:12)
Love that. And when did things really start to change for you?

Tommy Thornburgh (10:51)
My gosh, that’s a really good question. Because it wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns. So 2012, we started growing and scaling the business. We primarily work with a lot of affiliate partners, and we had lost our biggest affiliate partner at the time. So I would say it wasn’t until about 2015 or 2016 when we had started partnering with people that had a bigger mission than just sending people our way to help them with entities and taxes.

Another big turning point for us was COVID. When COVID happened, we didn’t really know what to do. We had a bunch of people in office. We’re an in-office culture. This office that I’m in right now, we’ve got about 130 employees in this one location. So we didn’t know what to do, but a lot of people realized that their life wasn’t as secure as they had thought with their W-2 job. Yeah. So COVID, we saw a massive spike in business and it led to different challenges. It led to great successes. But I would say 2015 and COVID, we had these weird spikes in business that said, let’s reinvest this back into the business. We never brought on investors, we never took a dollar of debt. We live below our means and really bootstrapped the business from the very beginning. Wow.

Meghan Escobar (12:09)
That’s a that’s an incredible thing to have to go through. I’m curious to know like what you were personally feeling at that time, Tommy. And and also twofold here, like what belief what belief may have changed for you?

Tommy Thornburgh (12:24)
So I have been doing this for 13 years and I have been with my wife for eleven. My wife was very, very supportive. Her dad was an extremely hard worker, and so she understood that it was gonna take time, energy, and effort from me. So my wife was always very supportive of my work schedule, whether it was me working six or seven days a week. I don’t know that I let myself feel anything more than I’m gonna work my way through this. So every day there are trials and tribulations that happen, still right now. And having someone that was supportive of me being able to put in the work, the time, the energy, the effort was more important than my feelings. I don’t know what I was feeling. Every day was a little bit different, but hard work and a little bit of luck goes a really long way.

‘Cause I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I told you earlier when we were talking, there’s people in this building that fortunately are much smarter than myself. And having a really good team that you can continue to build around, putting the dollars back into the business instead of buying a new Ferrari or whatever else your desires are, delayed gratification, work your tail off. I don’t I don’t know that I have a magic wand to answer that question on how I was feeling throughout all of it.

Meghan Escobar (13:44)
Well, I think you answered that. Yeah, I think you answered it in the most authentic way that you can. It was it was real, you know, and and I appreciate you so much for saying that most people in your position and in your business in business don’t typically think about the employee or the client. They typically think about how they can win or when they can purchase that Ferrari. So I think it says a lot about you as a you as a person and character, just by stating that you said something really powerful, I believe. You didn’t live beyond your means. You know, even when things were spiking, you guys reinvested every dollar back into the business and probably says a lot about why you are where you are today and able to employ 450 people and still growing. So thank you for that.

Tommy Thornburgh (14:35)
Yeah, of course. Thank you.

Meghan Escobar (14:37)
And what makes we probably just talked a a little bit about what makes your company different, but in your words, what makes your company different?

Tommy Thornburgh (15:26)
Yeah, I I would say one word and that’s care. One of these awards right back here, actually. My partner Steve surprised me probably about seven years ago and called it the Thornburgh Cares Award. And we give that out every year. It’s kind of like an employee of the year award of people that actually care about people because you said it really well just a second ago. It’s amazing how when money is the byproduct and you focus on the client experience and you focus on what you can do to better people’s situation, the money just happens to come. And that’s what we’ve done.

If I have a superpower, it’s wanting to be engaged in this conversation with you right now. It’s the next conversation of whether someone’s just getting started or making seven, eight, nine figures a year, being just as intentional and just engaged. So care about the people you’re doing business with. Make sure that it’s a win-win-win. We call them grandma’s deals around here. No one wants to no one wants to screw over their grandma. So if you can make doing the right thing at the right time for the right person, the money somehow ends up ends up coming when when the intentions are pure.

Meghan Escobar (16:36)
Yeah, that’s no matter what you believe in, but believing in something, right? Like having having that that belief system. I I think it’s incredible to have we don’t want to get any political or religious talk here. But what are you most and I I think we we touched on this a little bit before we got into the actual podcast, but I I I would love for our listeners to know like what you’re most proud of building right now.

Tommy Thornburgh (17:02)
I yeah, so we’re I I kind of joke, we’re we’re like an In-N-Out menu, really. The whole time we’ve done this, we’ve just continued to hone our craft on the services that we’ve offered for the whole time, which is entity, business credit, tax, estate planning. But what I’m most excited about is about nine months ago, we launched a new service called the Decoder. And it’s really amazing. What you can do is you can upload your previous year’s tax return. So you take your 2025 tax return, upload it into our system. There’s plugins with the IRS and everything else. And what it does is it dissects your tax return and pulls out all the different boxes and areas and gives you five to 20 different strategies that you could be implementing that you’re not currently. Just a couple of weeks ago, we had a guy that owned a marketing agency out of California, some random tax code that none of our accountants had heard of, was able to identify with AI, this one strategy saved him $280,000 in taxes in one year. Wow. Like incredible stuff.

So it’s pretty rare that when something like that happens or when you build something, it exceeds your expectations. But we’re using AI for efficiency purposes. We’re using it to be able to cut down time and spend more client facing time. And that is what I’m really, really excited about is helping people proactively plan for their taxes throughout the course of the year, not reactively file those taxes by the time April rolls around.

Meghan Escobar (18:40)
Wow, incredible. So these systems are able to find these hidden little little pieces that the human eye probably doesn’t catch, clearly, right? I mean

Tommy Thornburgh (18:52)
Yeah, I mean the the tax code is a joke, right? Once again, we’re we’re not getting political here, but hold it’s over 70,000 pages. Like it’s a joke.

Meghan Escobar (18:58)
Holy cow.

Tommy Thornburgh (19:01)
So a lot of these tax codes, every year there’s tax code changes. This year we had the big beautiful bill. The year before we had inflation act adjustments. So every year there’s major tax code changes. Which ones are applicable to your situation? Whether you’re a real estate investor, an ice cream shop, there’s always gonna be something. Yeah. And there’s not an accountant in the world that is going to be an expert at everything. Yeah. So I think that’s a really good use of AI is the tax code was built for the playbook to be used, but if you don’t know how to play the game, how do you win? And I think that’s an area that we can really help a lot of investors.

Meghan Escobar (19:46)
Yeah, that’s a really, really way, an incredible way to put it. And with things ever changing and evolving in the tax code, it’s like even if you’re the biggest analyst in the world, how do you keep up with that? And how are you doing the best for your client when things are constantly changing as we know they are, right? Awesome. Awesome stuff. And what challenge, which again, we we kind of talked about that too, and maybe just kind of dig a little deeper on it, like what challenge are you solving for your customers right now?

Tommy Thornburgh (20:18)
Yeah, I mean, I if I was to go through this, I think entity formation. So one of my mentors said, What’s cool about your business, Tommy, is you get to help people understand it’s not a matter of if you get sued, but when you get sued. And I was like, I don’t like that. That’s pretty I’m a glass half full kind of guy. That’s kind of depressing. So I think entity formation is one of those things that once you know and you have the peace of mind that your assets are protected, the peace of mind is worth quite a bit of money. You combo that with I’ve never met an entrepreneur that says, I wish I had less money. Right. If we could help them build business credit to grow, scale, and help more people, now it puts you in a greater position. You know that with tax saving strategies on how you can keep more money in your corner to reinvest. And then last but not least, protect the legacy through estate planning. Our goal is to become the one-stop shop so that people have everything under one umbrella that they can make a phone call and they can make a decision on the pros and cons of what’s best for their situation. Wow.

Meghan Escobar (21:23)
It sounds like you have a pretty good handle on a domino effect of positiveness pouring into others, right? And when people feel like they’re being poured into, then they feel like they need to pour into their business, into their clients. And so it sounds like you’re doing a lot of good in the world out here with entrepreneurs knowing that they have a trustworthy company behind them doing the things that need to be done to actually help them excel to the next level, which then in return, ’cause the way that the world or the universe works is like you give what you get, you get what you give.

Tommy Thornburgh (21:58)
Totally. Yeah, that the very first lawsuit that I found myself in, I was twenty-two years old. It was the very first investment property that I ever tried to purchase. I have 76 doors now today. I had 77, but last month one of them burned down from an electrical fire. That’s a whole nother story. But the very first property I knew, like, and trusted the builder and ended up handshake agreement, lost. Lost hundred grand plus. It was like 120 grand. And it stung at the time. But to your point on the pity party earlier, I’m so grateful I get to share that story and have for the last 13 years. I I get to think you’re a bad person. I’m not. How can you move forward and just put yourself in a better position and make sure it doesn’t happen again. So I’m almost grateful that it happened earlier instead of a later deal that was probably worth more money.

Meghan Escobar (22:50)
Right, right. And so jumping into the kind of that subject here, like what has been the hardest lesson that you’ve learned as a business owner if it wasn’t that?

Tommy Thornburgh (23:00)
I am a handshake kind of guy. And I think that people for the most part have really great intentions, but sometimes you run into people that don’t, and sometimes you run into people that don’t execute on what it is that they told you you’re gonna do. Having a contract in place is great, but sometimes it’s only worth the paper that it’s written on. So having proper due diligence on deals, getting into business with proper expectations. Some of the weirdest arguments that I’ve heard over the last 13 years I’ve been doing this are with friends and family members because a lot of times people get into we’re cousins. We’ve known each other our whole lives. We’ll never, never let a couple bucks come between us. Money makes people act pretty funny. Yeah. So that handshake deal that I like to think that I was 10 years ago, it’s changed. I want to put things on paper to more so hold each other accountable and create more of a long lasting relationship. When you first get into business, I call it the honeymoon phase. It only gets worse as long as you have expectations that are going to make it better. You can create a stronger relationship long term. So that’s been a big lesson.

Meghan Escobar (24:11)
Incredible. And I think that a lot of our listeners will be able to take some take some knowledge from that. I I’ve also learned that’s not the best way to do business. And it’s through the experience that, you know, you learn the best from. So I I can resonate with that. How has your leadership evolved over the years?

Tommy Thornburgh (24:33)
That’s a really good question because for the first 10 years, really, it was just lead by example and I’m gonna outwork you. That’s that was my superpower was being willing to sit in this chair for an extended period of time and be happy to do it. But as I’ve had children, that has really, really changed. I really want to spend more time with my girls. So my leadership has changed from just leading by example to leading by experience. Fortunately, I’ve done it for 13 years and I can continue to build a really good relationship. On Sunday, I went golfing with 12 of my employees just to spend time with them. A, I like them. B, I had a great time, and C, I beat them in golf. So make sure I I’ll send this to him as well. But it’s it’s changed definitely over time to I am their peer. I am not their boss. I wouldn’t ask them to do something that I wouldn’t do myself, even though at this point I may not be capable and they probably are. I want to work as a team. I don’t want to work as a dictator. So I think those are the big things that have really helped over the years.

Meghan Escobar (25:41)
Incredible. And again, I think that’s that’s a great style of leadership that most people don’t carry. So if your team, if you had to guess how they would describe your leadership style, what would they say?

Tommy Thornburgh (25:53)
My gosh, you’d probably have to ask them. But I know that the first thing they’d say is that I care. I care about them. I care about this company. I care about their family. This week we had a big prime retreat. We have a house up in Park City and we had our entire company up there and had the kids singing karaoke. And I care about this business as much as I care about their families and their kids and everything else. And when I think about the 450 employees, I think about the amount of meals that that puts on plates on a daily basis. Some of them have kids, some of them have significant others. And it means a lot. We had our first employee retire. That was a really weird feeling. I I didn’t expect that to hit as heavy as it did. But when someone came to me and said, you know what, I think I’m gonna hang it up, I’m gonna retire, that meant the world. So I think that they would say that they know that I care, I’m here for them. And whether they want to get beat in golf or they need me to help them move, I’ll I’m happy to do it.

Meghan Escobar (26:51)
Hence hence the Thornburgh care award.

Tommy Thornburgh (26:54)
That’s right. That’s right. That’s that’s that is my superpower. I care a a weird amount and I get it. We can thank my mama for that one. I get that from my mama.

Meghan Escobar (27:03)
And what belief do you have today that completely changed the way that you do business? Or what do you think people can get wrong about success?

Tommy Thornburgh (27:14)
If you asked me this five years ago, it would have been different than it is today. Five years ago, I would have told you that working harder and focusing on the client experience is the absolute most important thing, which I do still believe. Fast forward to five years. I’ve got two little girls, and it’s really softened me up from what it was five years ago. I think being able to see the world through your kids’ eyes and being able to see what gets them excited, it’s reinvigorated this light of like, how can I now help educate people on how to benefit their kids? I’ve got, I pay my girls, they work for my business. I’m helping them build their credit. I’ve got accounts that are going to set them up so that they can start a business, go to school, buy their own properties while benefiting my own situation tax-wise. So work hard. Care about people, better your services, continue to better your process. To your point, we’re not perfect. We’ve had situations where we’ve had to refund people because we fell short of what the expectation was that we set. Have extreme accountability to where if you make a mistake, raise your hand and say it’s your fault and just go fix it. But as I have kids now, I my compassion’s a lot different than it was before I had children. If someone called in sick because their kid was sick, I was like, come on. Now I’m like, my gosh, does your kid need anything? So continue to give back to people, the youth, children. Teach them how to create their own path through self-employment. I’m a big fan of self-employment. I think that’s why I love what we do so much around entities and tax. But leave someone better off than you found them, whether it be through information, the way that they feel. I don’t know. There’s there’s a long winded answer.

Meghan Escobar (29:06)
And and there there’s a lot of like key points and and pieces of advice that you just you just laid out there. And I’m curious to know here, Tommy, like someone who might just be starting out in the entrepreneur world, like what is one solid piece of advice that you would leave them with?

Tommy Thornburgh (29:23)
When I was 18 and I was knocking door to door in North Carolina selling pest control, I knocked on a door and a gentleman answered the door with a gun and said, Get off my property. And I share this because we ended up having a great conversation and shaking hands by the end of it. I didn’t sell them. I’m still upset for this story that I didn’t tell. But we had a great conversation. We ended up he he was having a bad day. He’s got ants going all over. I ended up actually.

Meghan Escobar (29:50)
He didn’t buy the pest control.

Tommy Thornburgh (29:52)
I did I didn’t sell them the pest control, but like people are having a bad day. People are people are concerned. When you when you make a dial to buy a property, people nowadays think that they’re getting scammed. They think that it just make a friend, create a better experience, sale or no sale, leave someone better than you found them. I think it really goes a long way. And for you as the entrepreneur and the investor, it makes it a whole lot more enjoyable. If you call someone and they tell you get lost, you got two choices. You move on or you can try and make it a better situation. So it’s cliche, but you’re one more no away to a yes. Keep trying and keep making it happen and pick up the phone, make the dials, whatever the business may be.

Meghan Escobar (30:35)
That is one solid piece of advice, and I cannot agree with you more from somebody who’s been an entrepreneur for the last five years. He is telling the whole truth on that, right? Nobody likes to hear no. However, you’re one more no away from a yes, and I cannot express that enough. So thank you so much for sharing that, Tommy. I appreciate everything, the connection, the conversation, all the things. Now, if someone wanted to connect with you and learn more about, you know, what you guys are doing over there, Prime Corporate Services, or continue this conversation, what would be the best place or way for them to reach you?

Tommy Thornburgh (31:15)
What we’ll do is I’ll I’ll get you over a link so that I know that they’re listening to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. And anyone that has interest, you can click the link. And what it’ll do is it’ll go to a scheduling page where you can schedule a free 45 minute to hour consultation with one of my team members. If we can help you with entity business credit development, tax planning, tax strategy, tax filing, estate planning. It’s a free call. I’m willing to do it because if you can take something away from it, hopefully I can earn your business. That’s the catch. What’s the catch? My services cost money. But if we can bring you value in your business in your life, I’m I’m hopeful and thoughtful that we can end up earning that business over time. That’s how the business has been built, and that’s how we’ve done what we’ve done over the last 13 years. So I’ll get you a link. Make sure you use that link because not only will you get the free consult, we’ll also do discounted services for anyone that’s listening to the Investor Fuel podcast.

Meghan Escobar (32:18)
Perfect. Thank you again so much for being here as one of our guests. You did an incredible job and I believe our audience is going to get a lot out of this. So appreciate your time, your story, and of course your perspective. We need more people in this space who are doing things the right way, the human way. So thanks again for being here. And for those of you that are tuning in, if you did get any value from this, please make sure to hit subscribe. We’ve got more conversations coming in with owners and operators just like Tommy. Thornburgh care here. And we want to make sure that we’re out here spreading this awareness on what it takes to build real businesses in real time with real people. We’ll see you on the next episode.