Yuko Tsuchida is the Founder of Hito, LLC, a Newport Beach–based tax consulting firm specializing in strategic tax planning, credits, and incentives for multinational corporations. With over 15 years of experience, Yuko has helped clients, including Fortune 500 companies, save millions of dollars by navigating complex tax credits and exemptions. She brings a global perspective to her work, having studied and worked in the US, Spain, and South Africa. Yuko is also an advocate for solo motherhood by choice, openly sharing her personal journey to inspire and support others considering a similar path.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [02:54] Yuko Tsuchida shares how growing up in an entrepreneurial family shaped her drive and discipline
- [04:43] What Japan’s 90s economic downturn taught Yuko about risk and resilience
- [08:46] How living in LA, Spain, and South Africa expanded Yuko’s global mindset
- [10:13] Lessons from navigating cultural differences, partnerships, and business challenges
- [16:44] Why specializing in tax credit consulting became the foundation of Yuko’s success
- [24:29] Leadership lessons from balancing maternity leave with running a company
- [29:22] Why Yuko is passionate about sharing her story to encourage women to lead on their own terms
In this episode…
Building a business in a foreign country is never easy — but what if you also choose to become a solo parent along the way? Many professionals dream of creating a fulfilling life on their own terms, yet cultural expectations, financial pressures, and fear of judgment can make those dreams feel out of reach. How do you pursue both entrepreneurship and motherhood when neither path comes with a clear roadmap?
Yuko Tsuchida, a solo mom and entrepreneur, demonstrates how resilience and self-trust can rewrite even the toughest stories. After immigrating to the US, she built a niche tax consulting firm helping small and midsize companies claim valuable credits and incentives. But her biggest leap came outside business — choosing to become a mother by choice. Yuko candidly shares how she navigated adoption as a non-citizen, found unexpected support from her traditional Japanese family, and learned to balance leadership with parenting. Her journey reveals that success isn’t about following convention but staying true to your values.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Yuko Tsuchida, Founder of Hito LLC, about forging her own path as an entrepreneur and solo mom by choice. Yuko talks about building a business across cultures, making bold life decisions with confidence, and finding community in unexpected places. She also shares lessons on resilience, redefining success, and embracing the freedom that comes from authenticity.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “Having that hard conversation first — what is your core value, what do you want from the work — is such a critical discussion before partnership.”
- “Moving to Oklahoma made me more curious about the world and taught me how people can connect across cultures.”
- “Although I don’t have family here, my friends are family and always watch out for my son.”
- “I wanted to give back; maybe telling my story will help someone make that decision or talk them through what I went through.”
- “I never thought about going into business myself — my parents always said, ‘Just don’t go into business yourself. It’s hard, mentally and physically.'”
Action Items:
- Have open and honest conversations before forming partnerships: Discussing core values, goals, and expectations early on prevents misalignment and ensures long-term partnership success.
- Build a strong support network: Maintaining trusted personal and professional relationships provides essential guidance and stability during major life or business transitions.
- Specialize and differentiate your business: Focusing on a niche area enhances competitiveness, establishes expertise, and attracts loyal clients.
- Stay adaptable and open to new experiences: Embracing change and learning from diverse environments strengthens resilience and broadens perspective.
- Pay it forward by sharing your story: Sharing both challenges and achievements can inspire and guide others facing similar experiences.
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Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:00
All right. Today, we’re sharing an inspiring story of an entrepreneur who decided to become a mom by choice. I’ll share her story in a second. Her name is Yuko Tsuchida and I’ll tell you more about her when we come back after the break.
John Corcoran: 00:15
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:32
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And every week we have smart CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out the archives, we’ve got great episodes with companies and organizations like Netflix and Grubhub and Redfin, Gusto, Kinko’s, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, lots of great episodes for you to check out. And of course, before we get into this, this episode is brought to you by Rise25, where we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast with the easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast, and we do three things: strategy, accountability, and full execution on the production side. In fact, we’ve invented what some are calling the Wix of B2B podcasting.
It’s our platform podcast, Co-Pilot. So if you want to learn more about this, we’d love to tell you more about it. You can go to our website at rise25.com or email our team at support @rise25.com. All right, a quick thank you and a shout out for Paul Brissenden of 454 Creative.
He is a past guest on this show, and I always like to ask my past guests, who else do they know that would make a remarkable guest who has a story to tell? And he said, you got to talk to Yuko. And Yuko is a CPA by training and founder of Hito, LLC. It’s a tax consulting firm based out of beautiful Newport Beach, California, just south of me. I’m up in the Bay Area and she has 15 years of experience in tax consulting.
She helps clients, including Fortune 500 companies, how to save millions of dollars in tax incentives and credits. So very niche-specific types of business. So I love to talk to business owners like that, that don’t create this kind of generic business, but get very specific about the kind of business that they create. So we’ll talk about that. But she has an interesting background, was born and raised in Japan, and as I alluded to earlier, decided to become a solo mom by choice.
So I’m definitely going to want to get into that and hear about her son, who is Kazuki in a moment or two. But Yuka, before we get into that, such a pleasure to have you here today. And as I mentioned, you were born in Japan and you grew up with your father had a painting company. Your father is now actually visiting you coincidentally, right now had a painting company. And you, like many children of entrepreneurs, children of business owners, were put to work on the weekend.
So tell me a little bit about that. What you had to do for the family business.
Yuko Tsuchida: 02:54
Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me on the show. I’m so super excited. So my father came from like my father and my mother like, came from like, you know, very modest, like, you know, background. And he became like, you know, painting company CEO, like, you know, heydays.
I think he had like, you know, 30, 40 workers and, you know, because of their humble, like, you know, background, like they always told us, like, you know, hard work. So whenever we were little, like we had to like, you know, clean their work cars or like, you know, work vehicle like on a weekend and they will give me like, you know, dollar and like now I think about it that was like very like, you know, small amount. I should have negotiated a little bit more like, you know, whenever I was like in California, not California, I went to Oklahoma for my undergrad, I actually. Cleaned people’s houses like, you know, because I couldn’t legally work back then.
John Corcoran: 03:53
And how old were you when you were cleaning the cars for your dad’s company?
Yuko Tsuchida: 03:58
I will say 6 or 7.
John Corcoran: 04:00
Wow. Put you to work early?
Yuko Tsuchida: 04:03
Yeah. And on a weekend, I think, like they volunteered for us to, like, you know, go get, like, a recycling from the neighborhood.
John Corcoran: 04:11
Wow. Okay. Really putting you to work? Yeah. And, you know, sometimes that happens, and I interview people on this show that grow up a little bit resentful, or they run the opposite direction.
Some people that teaches them the value of a dollar and they decide, you know, I really want to be like my parent. I want to own my own destiny. I want to own my own business. What kind of an impact did that have on you in your, you know, early years, say, in college or so? Did you see yourself as owning your own company one day, like your father?
Yuko Tsuchida: 04:43
You know, I didn’t really think about owning my company. You know, my parents being, like, construction company, like, you know, it was always rocky, right? Whenever, like economic downtime, like, you know, their company or their industry was like, you know, hit first. And I don’t know, like, you know, you remember this, but back in like, you know, 1990s, like back in Japan, like, you know, bubble bursted and like, you know, he or like we saw a lot of businesses, small businesses like Go Under and now I talk to like, you know, my father about it. And like, you know, he told me like, you know, probably 80% of his friend’s company went under and like, you know, he helped, like, you know, some of them like, he helped like, you know, maintain their family together or like, you know, how to get out the debt.
So he and like, you know, my mom, like, you know, always said like, you know, just don’t go into business yourself. It’s hard. It’s mentally hard. Like, you know, it’s really physically hard. So I never thought about, like, you know, going into, like, business myself, to be honest with.
John Corcoran: 05:48
You and you. So you’re born and raised in Japan. You come to the US for college. You come to Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Not a city I’ve heard of.
How did you end up going from Japan all the way over to the heart of the US? Oklahoma. And what was that experience like?
Yuko Tsuchida: 06:07
Yeah. So I had like, you know, my mother and like, my father, like, you know, got like kind of coordinator back in Japan, like, you know, because we didn’t have that much like money to come in, like tour all the colleges. So they said like, you know, hey, here’s our criteria, financial criteria. And like, you know, you give them your criteria, what you’re looking for and find the like college you want to go to. So this coordinator was like, oh my God.
If you want to like, you know, real true American experience here is a college for you. So that was in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
John Corcoran: 06:40
Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
Yuko Tsuchida: 06:45
Yes.
John Corcoran: 06:46
That’s what they recommended to you.
Yuko Tsuchida: 06:47
Yes. And I was like, you know, in my mind, all us were like, you know, Beverly Hills. 90210. So whenever I landed in Oklahoma, I was culture shocked, like I grew up in like, second-biggest city in Japan. So from there to, like, you know, middle of nowhere, like, you know.
John Corcoran: 07:07
I would be culture shock moving there and I’m from I would have been from high school in Los Angeles like moving to Oklahoma. So I can’t imagine what it was like for you.
Yuko Tsuchida: 07:17
Yeah, it was a culture shock. But hindsight, like, you know, the southern hospitality, like, you know, everybody was so nice. They took me under their wing. So like any holidays whatsoever, like I had places to go. So now I think back, like, you know, the reason I’m here today is probably because, like, I went to school in Oklahoma.
John Corcoran: 07:38
Wow. Did you were there a lot of other Japanese people on campus?
Yuko Tsuchida: 07:44
Yes, about like 50 Japanese students. We are the first year to come from Japan, so they had like some like, you know, international students. But Japanese students, we were the first one and I think it was like 20 people in our class.
John Corcoran: 07:59
Wow, wow. So I moved around a bit as a kid, but I didn’t move from country to country like you did. I moved from coast to coast. So I, you know, was born in Washington, DC, moved to Southern California. Big culture change between those two moved to suburban Massachusetts.
Again, big culture change back to Southern California. Very different parts of the country. Nowhere on the on a par of what you experienced. But I do think that it made me more open, especially when I got to college to new experiences. I imagine that there must have been something that did the same thing for you, because you then later in your career, actually, you ended up moving to Spain and even to South Africa at some point.
So it sounds like there’s probably a bit of an openness, a willingness to, to have those international experiences after that?
Yuko Tsuchida: 08:46
Yeah, I think like whenever I moved to Oklahoma, I don’t know, like I had that however like, you know, moving to Oklahoma, like I witnessed like, you know, people or people but like so different culturally. Right. And how we were able to connect in a deeper level that made me like more curious about different parts of the world. So I moved to like, you know, LA for my work. And then the reason I wanted to go to like, South Africa or like Madrid was like, I wanted to see the world and like, you know, how people are different or how people are the same.
And it’s being like, you know, amazing to like, you know, create friends around the world.
John Corcoran: 09:24
So you moved to Los Angeles after college, so it made you a little closer to Beverly Hills. 90210, yes. And what was that experience like?
Yuko Tsuchida: 09:34
It was great. Like, you know, my LA life was all about big four accounting firm. Like, you know, I worked in KPMG, so.
John Corcoran: 09:41
A lot of.
Yuko Tsuchida: 09:42
Work 7 a.m. to like, you know, 12 midnight. I was in the office. But I learned so much in those 2 or 3 years I was there.
John Corcoran: 09:50
And you go, you end up going and getting your MBA. Well, first you started a CPA firm focused on tax credits and incentives, and then you went through a tough partnership breakup. Talk to me a little bit about what you learned from that experience and what you took from that experience that you would maybe advise others on to think about before going into a partnership.