Video Transcription

Hello, everybody. And welcome to another episode of B2B vault. So today, we wanted to talk about how I started a business. So we’re going to talk about starting a business startup company. And so I’m here with my podcast assessment assistant and web developer, Justin Owings. Hey, what’s going on? All right. So you know, so I’ve owned several businesses, started my business, the current business nationwide payment systems in 2001. And before that, here’s like a good, cool picture of me when I was a chef, and I owned a restaurant and I, before that, worked for a hotel company. And then, you know, later I owned the restaurant for several years and a catering company. And, you know, those were my first, one of my first business ventures was doing that for about five, six years. And I decided to make a change, went into the credit card processing industry. And then, after a couple of years of working for somebody decided to start my own company, which I co-founded with my business partner, David. And we started the company 2001 this year is our 21st year in business. So, you know, and then within that company, we started an app company, a graphic design company, and a printing company along the way. So have a lot of experience and setting up businesses. And Justin, give them a little bit about your background with businesses. Well, over the past decade, I’ve been helping business owners get their selves situated online, whether it’s building websites or doing digital marketing for them getting their brand situated local optimization for their brick and mortar businesses. So people can find them if they open up a sandwich shop in the neighborhood social media marketing for the past ten years, I’ve, I’ve learned that I started just building websites and that quickly I learned that I had to pivot and learn more skills to help business owners, you know, get their obtain clients or sell their products. Yeah. So, you know, starting a business, you know, you have to put on all, all kinds of hats, you know, because you’re running the business. And then, you know, you know, if you don’t have the technical skills to build your website, you got to go out and get, you know, a designer, you know, in graphic artists as we have in the office, we have a graphic artist that makes the graphics and logos. And then, Justin builds the websites and helps me with the podcast. And, you know, you have to come up with unique ways to promote your business. So let’s get into how to start a business. So, you know, first, you got to choose your, you know, business idea. Maybe you worked at a company, and you know, you say, oh, I’m going to go out on my own. Or you have some unique business idea, and you say whatever, it’s going to be dog walking, making websites whatever, whatever it is. I mean, you can, you know, we can use the mystical widget, talk about that. The next thing you need to do is plan your business and determine what’s required. Do you know? So that goes into like a few things, you know, like, you know, what kind of resources are you going to need or does the business that you, that you chose? Are you choosing to be, let’s say, an insurance agent. Okay, well, you need a special license for that, you know, as an example. So, you know, you need to understand all of those kinds of things. You know, that you’re, once you’re getting into the business, you know, what kind of licenses are going to be required if there are any special licenses and we’re going to get more into that later, but that’s all part of, you know, planning out your business, you know. You’ve got to figure out the name of my business and where’s it going to be located? So is it going to be just now, you know, it’s prevalent. People have businesses doing a million dollars a month that we deal with, and they don’t even have a physical location. Everybody’s working at home, and it’s all remote. They’ve got all these servers up on the Amazon cloud or whatever. And you know, so you have to figure out how you will do this business? And choosing your name is important. It’s essential because people make a lot of mistakes and choose a name. So like choosing your corporate name, doesn’t the corporate name. And you’re doing business as the name does not need to match. So a lot of people don’t follow that rule. I tell people it’s a good rule to follow. Let’s say you’re starting a restaurant company. The name of my corporate was a J and a restaurant Corp. And, you know, we just kept it kind of simply because we, you know, if you had different restaurants, you were going to open, you wanted to put them all under the corporation. I named my restaurant Food Amongst The Arts. And if, if I named the corporation food amongst the arts, but then I opened a different restaurant or a different catering company with a different name, then it wouldn’t all match for like my banking and things like that. So you have to make sure that you’re doing the right thing or let’s say you’re starting to CBD company, and banks are susceptible. Maybe they don’t want to process transactions for a CBD. But if you just called your company, Allan incorporated, the bank doesn’t necessarily know that you’re selling CBD, so you’re not deceiving them. Still, you’re making it a little bit easier to obtain a bank account probably. The next thing people, well, You know, also like, w we’re going to talk about the, you know, the website later on too as well. But when you’re, when you’re setting up your, you know, you’re choosing your business name, you know, you’ve made a good point. You’re going to want to check to see if that domain’s available. Okay. Yeah. The domain, the social handles all of that. Yeah. People pick out the name all the time, and then they go, oh, I formed my corporation. I didn’t go check. The domain was taken, the social media was taken. And then what are you going to do? How are you going to you can’t get it from the Burt’s unless you’re going to buy it from them? So, you know, some people want 50 grand for a domain name. So, if you have a name, you know, it’s cheap domain names that cost like eight or $10 for the year. So it’s a cheap gamble to go on GoDaddy, you know, And the domain name doesn’t necessarily need to match your business. Right? So, like, we’re going to go into this again too. So, you know, you might want to put a keyword related to your business and your domain name, but it’s crucial that when you’re researching the business name, you at least look locally, right? Like you don’t want to have Allen’s sub shop. And there are 15 Allen subs shops in a 10-mile radius, right. You’re not; it’s not going to work out well for you. Right. You are confusing. You want to make sure, like, you picked out a good name and you can get the domain, and you get the social handles because I’ve known so many people. And then suddenly, they’re like, oh, now I’ve got to change the name of my company and all this stuff. So if you just use a general corporate name and then have to change, use a different DBA, no big, no big deal. But you want to make sure, like, whatever you’re doing, the name you choose that it’s available. You know you don’t want to pick a name. That’s trademarked. Once we had a client, they opened the restaurant down here on Fort Lauderdale beach. I’m not going to say the name. And when I went there, I was like, are you guys kidding me? Like, you know, like this, the name that you pick belongs to a famous restaurant up north, right. A huge company owns it. And you could be pretty sure that if they find it, you know, they find this you’re going to get a letter. Cause it’s a huge company. They probably spent the money trademarking, their name, you know, you can even get like Florida allows you to trademark a name just within the state. So you can trademark us in a name and the state. Yeah. You don’t have to go through, I could the national, the national level on that, you know? But yeah. So you can trade the market in the state so nobody else can go and copy your name. So some people do that, but you know, whatever. So ended up what happened, boom. That it changed the restaurant’s name that would get a new sign. They had chairs outside with their name on them. That can all of that. They probably wasted like into the six figures. Wow. It was crazy. I was like, you know, you got to do your research because we picked out a domain once too. And it was called NPS rent. And then we got a cease and desist letter from some company and a product called NPS rent. They didn’t know the domain. Right. We didn’t find it anywhere. It wasn’t even registered, but whatever. You’re not going to sit there. Somebody sent us a lawyer letter. I mean, it was as thick as this pad right here, you know? And we were just like, okay, whatever. They gave us like a few hundred dollars to stop using the name. We negotiated a little bit of money from that because we said, oh, we’re going to have to reprint all the postcards and marketing material. We’ll make a new landing page. Right. But you know, so, but you know, you have to do, you know, we did it. We told them, you’ll never be able to find out if that’s not there we’ve searched the internet. It wasn’t; there was nowhere on the internet. And then they showed us, oh, we have this product that we promoted for the last 15 years. Okay, great. Well, we didn’t find it. So there was a small negotiation, and whatever, that was the end of that. So, you know, it’s good too, you know, it’s like, do you know your market, you know, do your market research on the name, the product, everything, you know, business plans are important. Like, you know, we looked up Benjamin Franklin, if you fail the plan, you’re planning to fail. Right. So, you know, you got to have a plan when you start your business. You can’t just say like, wait a minute, run an office and move in. You know you got to have, you gotta, you have to have at least a basic, you know, you have to have like a basic plan. Even if you write it down on a piece of paper, you know, you have a plan and goal. You need to know like, Hey, I need to make, you know, this is my, this is how much money I need to make to pay the low, the rent. You know, how much do you need to pay your bills? I mean, you must know, you have to know what’s going on. You know, are you selling a product or a service? Are you going to have, you know, are you going to have a storefront? You know, we talking about location above, you know, you’re going to have a storefront and office, a warehouse, or you’re just going to operate out of your house and drop, ship Everything. You know, the, you can have any kind of setup you want, you know, it’s, there’s the availability to start a business today is pro is, is awesome. You know, it’s not, it’s not as hard as like, right, but it’s not as hard as it was years ago, years ago we started in 2001. Oh, you know, you got to go to an attorney, you know, or you had to call an attorney that formed corporations and get them to do all this stuff. Now you can get an online service to do that, you know, and you gotta, you know, do it yourself. Right. You can do it yourself, but you know, you gotta, you know, you must understand, like, what are you selling? Where are you going to conduct all this business from? Do you know? And, and, you know, most importantly, where are you going to get your stuff from, right? Where are you going to get this product from specialty? Now we have all this supply chain issue. You know you have to have, you know, a supply, you know, you have to know where you’re going to get your supply from. You know, probably in the last, I would say the last decade service businesses exploded like the businesses where people just provide some kind of service. There’s probably more service business now than ever before. I also believe that the, you know, businesses like the restaurant businesses business will have to evolve. People might come up with new concepts for restaurant businesses. Like not being in a shopping center and finding a freestanding building to create, you know, a whole different level of experience. you know, curbside pickup, ordering over the phone delivery, you know, pick up in-store, set up an area inside the restaurant where people can pick up like cooked foods and, you know, like that they could prepare at home. I think that innovation, yeah, there’s going to be innovation and everything coming up, this Coronavirus, that’s going to force a lot of you to know, pivoting and innovation and business period. You know, it’s going to be if businesses Don’t start to pivot and create new business models around their product or service, then Yeah. They have to change. You know, we change every year. I tell all my employees to read this book who moved my cheese. And the reason for that is who moved my cheese is because you got to look at, you know, okay, last year we made money selling XYZ the next year. Are we going to be able to make the same amount of money, more money? Or is there something new we need to offer? We always look for a new product every year that we can offer to our clients. That would be an additional offering that they could use at their business. And I think every business needs to do that. You know, if you can do it, restaurants do it. They go, we’re serving chicken, and we only serve chicken. Give a good example. Let’s give a good example, like the Boston market, right? They started, I think they just serve chicken. Yeah. Now they serve Turkey meatloaf. Right? All kinds of different entrees. Even you look at fast food, I mean, years ago, fast food places didn’t even have a salad. You go in; they have salad, right. Everybody has that sell salad. So it was, people want to eat healthily. So, you know, there’s like sub shops, what do they do? They got a sub in a tub, you know, or they have a salad. You have the unwell, or they have colluded and free bread. Everything’s changing. Plant-based food products are everywhere now. Like it’s all over the place, you know? So, you know, Everything changes, you know, changes, there’s always changes, you know, budgeting for your business, this is important. Where are you going to get the money from? How are you going to start up your business? You know, throw, you know, when I started up this bit, this PR when I started my restaurant, I tried to borrow some money, which I paid back. And then I had to, you know, that’s how I got the restaurant started. And, you know, I got the restaurant going, and I had to work hard, worked a lot of hours. I couldn’t hire too many employees. Employees did a lot of stuff myself, then a lot of cleaning and all kinds of stuff you don’t want to have to. But you know, you got to do that to save money too. So you can, you know, so it’s going to work out, but you know, some people just say, Hey, I need to buy 50 grand to inventory. Okay. Maybe you can put it all on a credit card, you know, and then pay it all back. You know, loans are not easy to get, you know, or you get 30 to maybe, you know, the people at the company who make the product and you can get, you know, 30 days credit from them before you have to pay them. Or, as I said, you put it on your credit card. And then you have 30 days to; have the product. You don’t have to pay the bill for a month. So you’ve got to have some kind of budget or, you know, you gotta, you know, maybe you’re doing a startup, and you’re going to do, you know, you’re going to crowdfund your business. There are all kinds of opportunities today that weren’t available, you know, to raise funds, you know, Kraft, funding’s very popular. You know, then you got to choose your business structure. So, you know, a corporation can be an S-corp. It could be a C Corp. Most people, if you’re just in business for yourself, people choose like an S-corp, or they choose an LLC or a single member, LLC. One of their reasons to choose maybe an LLC is if you’re going to bring in partners, but they’re not going to be decision-making partners. Then you choose an LLC. That’s the main reason for doing that because there’s not really like, people talk about like, yo, you have a corporation. There’s like this shield of liability, you know, you’re hiding behind a that’s all, I’ll tell you something. My attorney told me one time, he’s like, listen, he goes, someone wants to Sue you. They’re going to Sue. Do you guess what you got to do? You’re going to have to get a lawyer, and you have to defend the lawsuit. So there’s no hiding behind the corporate, you know, your corporate veil that doesn’t, that doesn’t necessarily work, you know, for, you know, work for everything. But some people choose LLC because they’ll bring in investors. And then those investors are not like managing members. They’re called to manage members. The only person who can sign for stuff makes decisions is in charge of the bank account. Everybody else is just a regular member. They’re going to get profits, but they’re not in the decision-making and the decision, you know, some people form non-for-profits. They start a not-for-profit, you know, it’s another, you know, big business that’s growing and growing and growing, you know, nonprofits are one time somebody asked me, so how many nonprofits do you think there is a Dade Broward and Palm beach county. Someone said, oh, five, six. I started laughing. I was like five, 600 now in Broward county alone. There are somewhere between eight and 10,000 nonprofits in Broward county alone. And that does not include churches, schools, or synagogues. Wow. That’s an insane amount of nonprofits. Okay. So, you know, and when you’re, then when being careful, You know, getting, you know, setting that up too, because you might think you’re a nonprofit, but it might not be enough, Right? Yeah, exactly. You have to be very careful because there are laws, and you have to file papers with the IRS, and there are qualifications. And then you’re going to have to show people if they ask that you have to file tax returns and you have to show like, oh, we raised this much money and we what’d you do with it. You can’t just give it all to salaries. And there’s also, you know, watchdog websites like a gold star or something like that. There’s a bunch of them. And they rate nonprofits by how much money they take in and what percentage of it goes out the door and what percentage of it is used by executives, you know, and paying salaries and overhead and stuff like that. So, you know, it’s essential. And you know, you got to get a federal tax ID from the IRS, you know, because you need that before you can set up a bank account, credit cards, accounting, you know merchant accounts, and you need to take credit cards, ACH, et cetera. You know, you have to have a federal tax ID number. You know, you need a sales tax ID. The photo Tax ID number is easy to get. Yeah, it’s easy. You just go on the IRS website or call them up on the phone. You might have to wait. But if you call first thing in the morning, you can get through boom, and you get it. Or the, sometimes the service that forms your corporation, they’ll do it for you because they’ll do it electronically. It just depends on how much of a rush you’re in to get the federal tax ID number. Because if you do it through the mail can take a couple of weeks, but you can just get on the phone or electronically get it. It’s prudent. What do you think about business banking? I think you, a lot of times, I, for myself personally, just jumped into the bank that I was already banking at. It didn’t look into like, you know, the fine print, you’d say. Right. And I found it later on. I was kind of struggling to keep up with, you know, what they required of the business bank. Yeah. Well, you have to make sure, like, do they require a minimum balance to avoid fees? Do they have what kind of, sometimes they have transaction limits on the account? How many deposits can you make? How many the pot, you know, because you’re receiving deposits electronically, plus you’re going to be going into the deposit in cash. So how many transactions did they allow? You know, what are their banks? You know, maybe you have a retail store. Maybe you want to bank with a bank that’s open on Saturday. Not every bank is open on Saturday. Some banks are down here, like a BB and T now it’s truest, right? That’s some branches that are open on Saturday. So yeah, if you have a store and you need some change, guess what? You better be banking with somebody like that. Because if you bank at Bank of America, they’re not open on Saturday. Guess what? You’re not going to be able to get changed. So you need to make sure you know who, where you’re banking, and you know that they, you know, they’re friendly to your business. You know what, you know, meet the bank manager, know the bank manager, know the fees that they’re going to charge you because it’s, really, really important to know the fees that you’re going to get charged and any minimum requirements that they might have at the bank. So the important to do that, you know, is to check, talk to different banks. Sometimes the bank, you know, Banks doesn’t feel like you have the bank with the bank that you’ve been banking with for the past 26. Yeah. Because personal banking and business banking are two separate, different things, but sometimes the bank you do for business, I say, oh, well, if you bring your account over, we’ll give you a free business. We’ll give you your account for free, or they’ll give you some other caveats or incentives so that you know because you’re doing business with them, you know? Right. So, you know, banking is vital to have an excellent bank, communication, and no people at the branch. No, the towers, no. The manager’s important. Do you say getting a traditional banking account instead of a PayPal or Venmo? Well, I think tradition, you know, if you’re looking to do serious business, you better have a regular bank account, serious of bank account because people are not going to, you know. Many people use these like correspondent banks that are like these online banks that nobody ever heard of. And you know, many times people don’t take those banks seriously that it’s like not a real bank. Cause it’s like an online is the online bank. For instance, PayPal and those other times they got all the fees. So every time you make a sale or a transaction, you’re going to get hit with the theme. Right. Plus, you know, this depends on what your, you know, what your banking needs will involve. Right. You know, like, you know, do you need to act, you know, listen, we have an occasion where every once in a while, guess what? We got to write a checkout. It doesn’t happen too often now. But when we first started, I mean, yeah, you got to know how to write a check. I mean, I know some young people like my son; he doesn’t know how to write a check. They never have a checking account. He’s like, oh, you pay everything online. But it doesn’t always work that way. You could have a supplier that says, no, we need a check, or a cashier’s check or whatever it is. That’s why you need to have a real bank and Everyone else not giving you a cashier check pal. Right? Exactly. So you never know what you might need to do. You might have a company that says, Hey, we need a wire transfer. Cause the check’s going to take three to five days. You know, you’re going to have to overnight it to us. It takes a few days to clear. Then we can release your inventory. Well. But if you wire us the funds, you can have this stuff shipped today. So boom, you need to have a bank. So you can go wire funds, to the wire funds, to people. And it’s important to establish business credit, not just use your credit cards, your credit cards, you know, try to get business credit, an actual business credit card. Get I; you would be very careful with debit cards, attacks to your account. I used to use them all the time. I don’t recommend using that at all today; do not use it. If you’re going to charge stuff, you need a car to get a business credit card. You’re going to get points, cashback, whatever it is you like, get it. Insurance is another thing. Like some people don’t think about it. They’re like a girl called some girls to call me when they are all going to start a business; we’re going to drive people to doctor’s appointments. Then they found that they needed commercial car insurance was so expensive. You know, the business never got off the ground. So you have to think about that. And there’s, you know, there’s like here in our business location, we’re in the city of Fort Lauderdale in Broward County, the state of Florida. So we have to have Corp. We have to pay the corporate fee every year to the state for our corporation is then we get a city license from the city of Fort Lauderdale, a county license from Broward county. And then you have a sales tax license from the state, all of which they all charge. So you know, and it’s not a lot. No, it’s not a lot to a few hundred. It’s probably altogether about three, $400 a year. It goes back to what the, in our first, the first slide, when we were talking about budgeting for your business, right? Because there are costs that you are going to Incruse And yearly The entire time, right? And if you have a restaurant, you might require additional licenses, like a food license, a liquor license, a beer, and wine license, and different businesses require different licenses. You start a convenience store. You’re going to sell cigarettes. You got to have a license from alcohol and tobacco. Right. Do you know? So every law, every business could have a specific license. You’re a contractor. You have to have a contractor license. So professional and business regulation, they regulate a bunch, a lot of businesses in the state of Florida. And you have to have a special license from them. If you’re an insurance salesman, if you’re a real estate agent, you have to have a real estate license. You have to renew it every couple of years. So you have to know what the licensing requirements are for you, the business you’re going to get? Right? Like a friend of mine, he owns blue magic pool prep down here in south Florida. And he was starting a business. I helped him start it, but he had no idea what to go through. Sunbiz the local, the city you know, the county, and all of that. To get him, just to get Alright. And then you’re going to put a pool in somebody’s house. Guess what? You’re going to have to go down to the city, pull a permit. Then they’re going to say, Hey, where’s your insurance, where’s your contractor license. Where’s all your stuff. You got to show him exactly What happened. That is why you can’t just dig a hole and install a pool. You got to do all. You gotta, you have to have all the proper licensing. And you know, let’s, you know, some people, a lot of people live in gated communities, and the community wants to know like, oh, are you, you know, they want to make sure you’re using licensed contractors. You know you are selling your house. The person goes to sell their house. And they use the unlicensed person to put in the pool. Right. Let’s just say they got away with it. Then you sell the house, and the city goes, oh, we don’t even have on the property records that there was a pool there. Now what? Now you can’t sell your house. I happened a friend of mine. He was buying a house, and the person used an unlicensed person to put the pool. And it wasn’t even part of them, the city. No, they couldn’t. No, no. So what happened was they had to hire an architect to draw, make a drawing, then that paid con a pool contractor to come out and like certify the pool. Then, to get it inspected by the city. And it costs like a few thousand dollars to get all that done so they could, so they could buy this. The seller had to do it so that he could sell the house. So you got to know what you’re getting into with your business, you know, what kind of licenses I have in my restaurant, it was all kinds of crazy licenses. You have to have people. That’d be one person in the kitchen all the time. That was a certified food handler. And there are all kinds of stuff. Every business is unique to itself. You know, then you got to, you know, have employees, you know, then you’ve got to hire people. You know, what are you going to do? Go to like, indeed ZipRecruiter, Craigslist, Facebook, Facebook, wherever, you know, to try to fire hire employees. It’s going to be your process to do that. Right. You know, you’re going to have to figure out, you don’t want to have to write a job description. What are they going to do? Salary, hourly commission only, you know, has that, are you going to have a contract with these people? Maybe you have to research all of that. How you’re going to get that done. Do they need any special require special education or skills to do whatever it is that you’re going to need to do, right? Like you’re going to put in pools, you know, you need an electrician and a plumber. You know, they have to have some skills. You’re not going to hire an uncertified plumber. Right? Exactly. You know, they have to have skills, you know, that’s the whole thing. So hiring, you know, it’s, you know, and then you have to have a payroll company, you know, to do your payroll, you know, QuickBooks. Yeah. You can do it through QuickBooks or zero or one of those. Some of them offer payroll services, you know, or you get an outside payroll company just depends on what your needs are. You know, you have ADP paychecks, different. There’s a bunch of different ones. There are probably ones online that I’d never heard of too. That you can just run your payroll. I’m sure there’s tons of payroll. There are tons of payroll processors today, you know, and then the next thing you got to get into is, you know, building your brand, you know, you know, so it’s always like logo. So like, you know, we remade our logo for our 20th anniversary. We changed it to; this was like a flag, you know, here’s the old logo. So we made a new logo last year for 2020, for 2021 for our 20th year, we decided we’re going to upgrade the logo. We made a logo for, you know, B2B vol brand branding. It’s all about branding. So you have to come up with your logo, build your corporate identity. That was one thing we did an inferior job with, but we’re fixing that, that we’re, we’ve been fixing that, you know, we had all kinds of different things going on, and now we’re trying to consolidate. So, you know, that’s because things have changed too on how you could do marketing. So you have to be careful today with your digital marketing. You know, having a good corporate identity, mission statement, and vision statement. Whatever it is you want to, you know, some people are concerned about, you know, being socially responsible, you know, and things like that. So it just depends on what kind of business you’re in. Maybe you’re doing pools, and you want to advertise, oh, we have some organic way to chlorinate your pool. That’s not going to mess up the environment. So whatever, what, you know, whatever that is that involves your, you know, your business. Listen, we had a deal with credit card processing. It’s not, it’s not funny, but we had to go through upgrades of machines over the years. So you can’t just take the credit card machines and throw them in the dumpster and the old ones. Right. You can’t just smash them with a hammer and throw them out right there. It’s an electronic device. So you have to, has to be disposed of properly. So you either have to take it to the particular dump. And they have like only a few times a year when you can do that. And at one point, we had thousands of machines in the office when everybody upgraded the old machines to the EFA, a garbage can. I went to Home Depot. I bought all these garbage cans and dumped all the wood. We’re getting all these credit card machines back in the mail. And then we found a recycler who came, and they took the stuff and recycled it all, which was cool. So they recycled, you know, so I asked them like, how did they do it? So I went to their place to see, and they actually like, you know, I gave the guy a few credit card machines. I said, show me what you guys do with it all. So they smashed the credit card machine, took the plastic, threw it in a bin, and melt, you know, they sell the plastic and then inside the credit card, machines are little circuit boards, you know, there’s silver and copper and gold. And then they take that thing and stick it on a conveyor belt that looks like the thing they make burgers on at burger king. That would be the best way to describe it. Right. Except without the flame, it was like an easy bake oven kind of thing on a conveyor belt. And then those metals melt at different temperatures. So it melts off, and it goes down into a thing. And because they’re different temperatures, they get separated, and then they sell it all. And then there were like a lot of wires. Right. And they had a machine, and they took the long piece of wire and put it on there. And it strips the rubber off, which they threw in with the plastic, then get the copper, and then they resell the GAAP recycled the copper. We had probably 20 garbage cans all over the office for these, those big ones, as you have outside your house. So yeah. You never know what you’re going to have to deal with and your, and your business, you know? So yeah, you have to make sure, like, you know, you’re building a website. Does it need to be e-commerce, or is it just a static website? Who’s going to build your website, you know, call Justin on the phone or, you know, a friend and get them to build your website or build it yourself, kind of website. And if you’re going to do that, a build it yourself, website thing, you know, use some of these companies that have services, you’ve got to make sure like, can they serve as your business? You’re going to build a website, and then you’re going to find that, oh, they don’t allow credit card processing. So We can make a whole podcast about the website, website building. When I say the Only thing about when you’re building your website, be smart about it. If you’re going to do it yourself, you know, take your time. And there’s enough stuff in, you know, there’s enough information, Google, YouTube, there’s enough for you to learn how to put a basic site together, you know? And what’s good is like kids today, right. They go to school, and they learn how to build websites. I can middle school. Like I didn’t, again, Middle they learning to code at least. Yeah. So the bare minimum, but you know, like with the website, keep it in; it’s a representation of your business. So it’s essential to take it very seriously. If it’s not as important as a business card, I feel like it’s more important now, like ten years ago, your business card was The thing. That was the thing you had to have a cool business. If you didn’t have a cool business card, you, it didn’t happen. It’s like a pitcher, right? Like if you weren’t there and didn’t take a picture, it didn’t happen. Right. So now I think the website is important for business. It’s going to get even more, you know, Important for businesses to have. Yes. It’s not just your website; it’s all your social pages. So you want everything to connect and look the same, have that same colors and the corporate identity. So you want to make sure, like you’re building all that out so that you, everything, when somebody goes and looks up your business, right. And they see it like, oh, here are the gods’ Facebook page. Here’s the Twitter, here’s your Instagram. And it all, you know, it all blends together. And when you’re putting all that at, you know, social media posts that they all, you know, you have your logo on that, and you’re using the same posts everywhere, just resizing them. You know, you have to make sure, you know, you’re well organized with your, you know, with your social media and your website that you try to make everything, you know, look, look the same, you know, and creating content. You know, you have to create content written content, video content. You know, I created a podcast, you know, I think a lot of, you know, maybe a lot of businesses are trying to do podcasts, but it’s a commitment, you know, it’s a, you have to be committed to whatever you’re going to do. You have to be committed. You’re going to write a blog. You’re going to post you’re going to do Facebook live or whatever it is you’re going to do. You need to commit to that, you know, and also skip over the printed material. Oh, printed material, printed material. You talked about business cards. Right. But it’s still important that yet, you know because you’re going to need, someone might ask you, you go to the bank that much, they want to know about your business. Like you need to add someone a business card. So you got to, you know, even if you’re going to get a cheap one at office Depot or something, free Vista print. Right. And we’ll still give them to you for free. It’s just not double-sided, so there’s no excuse. Yeah. You got to have a bit; you walk into the bank, you’re going to open a bank account. They’re going to ask you for your corporate papers, and it’s going to look a lot better. If you whip out a business card, you’re going to go, okay, the sky’s one of those babies across the table. Yeah. That person’s going to be, yeah. They’re going to look at you like, oh, that’s a little, this person is organized serious. Right. They’re organized, you know? And then you might make stuff to give away. Like we give people a pad or a pen, you know, you just got to decide, or you can give them, you know, we have water bottles. I don’t have one here, but we have water bottles with our name on them. The branding with the B2B vault podcasts on the backdrop, you know, Stuff is all very guys. Sure. Yup. B2B vault shirt on today. Cool logo. You know, you gotta, you have to think about that because you want people to take you seriously. Right? When you go into the, you know, you’re going into a bank to open a bank, I can, you know, even though you know, you’re going in, you want to meet the bank manager, you hand them a business card. Oh, what do you do? You tell them, you know, you have to have a 32nd. I always tell everybody. When I went to, I learned that we were talking to one of the things on the list, networking, BNI. I learned to like, oh, you have to have, you know, sometimes you only have 30 seconds or a minute to give somebody like an elevator pitch. Yeah. What did they say? I can’t remember if you can’t describe your business in 10 words or less. Some people say you know, have a ten-word description or have, you know, you, you need to have like a 32nd to one minute, you know? Boom. What, what is your, who, who are you? And what is your business? I had a guy once he had a big, it was a big account that, that we, that I got, I got introduced to several fitness guys on several businesses, was a client of ours for years, years, and years and years. First time I met him. He goes a couple of questions for you. I go, okay. He’s like, I want to know your name, who you are, you know what your, you know what your whole, you know, where you’re from. EV he wanted to know everything about me. And he goes, you got, he goes, you have two minutes. So I had to spit it out. Hey, my name’s Alan Kopelman. I live in South Florida. You know, I gave the guy the whole breakdown most of my life. I started this company. We started doing this whole thing. I was going after big businesses with a special way to do pricing that everybody wasn’t doing at the time and credit card processing. And he goes, okay, I’m going to give you the information you need, and you need to come back and, you know, show me what you can do. So I showed him what I could do. And he’s like, okay, because I have five businesses. I’m giving you one. He goes, you’re on a trial basis for three months. And after three months, they were delighted. I got the rest of their business, and I had it for years and years and years until they sold the business. But still, you know, you have to, you know, you have to know, you have to be able to spit it out. When somebody asks you, you know, you know, cause sometimes, you know, you don’t know what you’re doing. You know, you know, everybody, I tell everybody as you go to school for something you want to, you want to do something, you know, if you don’t want to work for somebody, just one word that nobody ever wants to talk about is sales. You’re going to have to be; if you want to start a business and you don’t want to be a salesman, don’t start a business. He’s not lying. It’s one of the hardest things that I struggle with to this day. And, you know, having that sales pitch is so, so crucial for the success of your business. If I could give myself some advice, ten years ago, it would go to take like a simple sales class. You know, even if it’s online or at your local tech college or something, just, just so you have the experience, you know, like, cause a lot of us to think we can sell salt to a snail just because, you know, we, we, we come from that, you know, whatever that background or, or whatnot. But once you get into the actual game, right, the business, it’s different. People change, you know, you have to learn how to spit that. You know that Like when I was a chef, my boss came to me and he’s like, listen. And he goes, you’re not just a chef. He goes, you gotta, he goes, I need you to go in here. And these people want to have a big wedding. They’re going to spend like 40 grand in the hotel. You have to go in there and sell yourself to those people. I was like, holy s**t, what the heck, man? I was like 30 years old. I know what the heck. You know, I don’t know what the heck I was doing. It was my first job as an executive chef of a hotel. And somebody had it. It wasn’t a wedding was like a, they were going to have a big meeting at the hotel, and they wanted to work out. They want to see it’s like, you got to go in there and make this sale. This thing, these people are going to spend a ton of money. Right. They’re spending like $30,000, you know, you know, to events plus renting out all the hotel rooms and stuff in the hotel. Right. And I had to go in there, and I had to go, you know, they asked me a bunch of questions about the food they wanted to have and how I was going to do it. And they wanted a buffet and what was I going to do? And then they wanted to have; they want to know, I’ll never forget this. I wanted to have 300 people eat breakfast, and they wanted everyone to have their omelet. Right. I’m like, see what I told them, huh? 300 omelets. Right? 300 omelets. How are you going to make 300 omelets? So I said to the guy, I said, well, I think I, I have a way I can do it. We’re going to give everybody a piece of; we’re going to give everyone a piece of paper. They’re going to check off what they want for their omelet. While they’re sitting down, the waiters will come out; I’m going to get every single cook that works for me with two of these butane burners. Yeah. And then we’re going to make all the omelets like really fast. Boom. We’re not T almost like, yeah, like, yeah, but they’re not going to come. They’re not going to come. They’re not going to have to wait in line. They’re going to sit at the table. The waiter’s going to come. The guy’s going to bang out two omelets, take them back, come back. He’s going to pick up 2, 3, 4 to four more omelets. And we just kept running them back and forth to the tables. Cause we knew we had a table number and the seat number for each person, and boom, they did it. And they, the people, were like stoked and happy. On the table with the muffins, Danish, potatoes, bacon and sausage and all that. So all we had to do was make these omelets like really fast. And we did it. We had like 15 guys picking omelets, and we did it quickly, and the guy was happy. So, you know, you got to think outside the box, you know, all the time I’ve had a cater, all kinds of crazy parties. When I was a chef, we did all kinds of crazy, crazy catering, but let’s just talk about like, you know, you’ve got to create social media content. You got to put your business; you got to have the Google, my business thing set up. You’ve got to verify it, which is a huge pain in the butt with Google. You know, go to networking meetings, join the local chamber. Verifying is not a big pain, but it can Be really can be. They want to call your phone number. Sometimes that doesn’t always work. So you’ve got to get them to send it to you in the mail. You got to have a real address. You got to have a real address for your business. So you got to make sure like you got it all together. Do you know? So that can happen. You know, like mine, one time it was missing like the suite number. And we had to go in there and try to correct it. And it took a while, but we got it done, but it wasn’t like doing that. They picked, they didn’t pick up the suite number. I mean, we don’t want to skip over that because it’s crucial right now everything’s connected to that. Google my business, Yelp ways; all these services are connected to that thing. So, you know, your Facebook-connected there. Everything’s connected to this Google my business, which is crazy. If you’re selling a physical product and you have a location, and you’re not verified on Google, my business, you are losing out on tons of potential clients, Right. Customer. And even if you just want people to find your website, it’s important to It is Google. My business, Google itself, has made itself one of the things, Right, Right. It doesn’t cost anything free, and it costs you your time. Right. And you know, that also helps with your local search engine stuff, you know? So you have to have, you have to have Google my business. So, you know, you’re working part of it is yeah, you got to go out and network. You know you got to do networking. Even if you have, even if you’re going to open a barbershop, how are you going to do promotions? You’ve got to figure out like, oh, how am I going to promote a barbershop? How am I going to? Maybe you’re going to make videos of cool haircuts that you do and post them on Facebook. Then people are going to go, wow. The guy can carve an A in the side of my head. I see that stuff. Or the guy’s good at giving like a special shave, you know, they use the raise that straight razor inside your mind. But I’m saying that they shaved the person. They make their beard in a cool shape. Some people could do that. Like, I don’t know. I never clean it or something. It depends on how your hair is. Somebody has a dark beard and white skin face, the person can make it like, you know, sculpted, you know, or people put their name on the side of their head. You know, I’ve seen all kinds of crazy stuff, drake Heart – certified Loverboy. Yeah. Like, you know, whatever it is, or maybe you’re open a tattoo shop, and you’re making videos of people getting a tattoo, whatever it is, or a nail salon. And there’s a video of people getting their nails done. Do you have to say, are you know, instances of making sure that your business is verified on Google, exact salon tattoo, shop, all that type of stuff. You must be able to get directions. You won’t be able to find your business schedule appointment. Call you, look at your website view. And we have worked with all kinds of businesses over the last 21 years. You know, we’ve worked with people with physical businesses, people working out of warehouses, people working out of their house. Now virtual businesses, probably in the last two years, have tons of us working with tons of virtual businesses, drop-ship companies that don’t even have inventory. Everything is dropship, you know, and now we’re getting into this whole digital universe. Right. Do you know? Right. We are starting to do credit card processing for this whole new group of businesses. Cryptocurrency exchanges, NFT marketplaces, and NFt exchanges. the multiverse people buying land and the better verbs people buying a house and the metaphors buying a car and the metaverse, I don’t know what you get the car for in the metaphors. Still, you’re going to be able to buy anything in the Metro versus businesses trying to establish like a store and the metaverse Dean authority. Right? Yeah. They already have big brands that are spending thousands and thousands of dollars to establish themselves inside our bed. So, you know, that’s another thing we’re ready to do. Credit card processes. Maybe you’re starting; we’ll do another podcast on that. So you’re starting a digital marketplace, a digital marketplace, and the new digital world. So NFTs, you’re selling it at T’s on your website. You want to set up an NFT marketplace, Right? So, today this is how do you start a business? We’ll probably do another one on the digital world. Thank you for listening to B2B fall. Thank you for Justin to join in on the discussion today. He gave a lot of good insights about digital marketing, digital presence, websites, you know, and, you know, follow a B2B vault, follow us on all the great podcast networks we’re on Amazon music. Now follow us on YouTube. You know, you can watch the video and catch us on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify. And, You can follow me at J R O rings on Twitter. That’s pretty much all I got. I don’t really like all those stuff, but yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. And I’ll talk to all the other super podcasters out there. I appreciate not you guys not busting our backs because, as Allen said, you know, we wanted to do it. So we, you know, he wanted to do this. So I helped him do it. We got it done. So I appreciate all the followers; the listeners continue to like and subscribe to the channels. You can catch us on Spotify, iTunes, iHeartRadio, YouTube; you name it. Yeah. Just Google B2B vault. You’ll find us somewhere, probably on whatever kind of place you’re listening to your podcasts. Like I said, if you like videos, go to YouTube. But you know, one thing, you know, we did with the podcast, which is a little different, most people do like a, they edit and all this stuff with the podcast, this podcast, there’s no editing, we just go straight at it, you know, boom talk. And then, and that’s it. You know, we try to give people good information about payment technology. We’re giving information about news that affects businesses. And you know, I’ve gotten feedback from people that tell me they enjoy the podcast. I love to hear from people. If you want to leave us a comment about a subject you want us to cover on the podcast, we’ll gladly do it, but you’re going to hear a lot more from us in 2022. We’re going to talk about all the digital, the digital, a world that’s being created, and what we will be doing with that. And we will be talking a lot about crypto because crypto is hot for 2022. So Carpe diem, everybody has a great day. Thank you for listening to B2B Vault.