VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
Hey, everybody! What’s up! It’s Justin from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast with your host, Allen Kopelman. We’ll be providing you with educational information about business payments, FinTech, these centralized finance, and the technology businesses use in today’s world.
In today’s podcast, we will talk about five things that every small business should know or have already when they’re starting their business. We’ve talked about this a few times. About small businesses and things. It seems to be popular, and people like it Yeah. So I thought we thought it’d be a good idea to have an entire podcast focusing on some of the five more important things that we thought that not just five, but a general list of five really important things.
And then things inside of those things that every small business should have. I’ve had a small business for 10 years. Allen Kopelman has been running businesses for over 20. So we have a lot of experience, knowledge, wisdom, understanding a lot of other things, we’ve been through it all, I guess you could say right when it comes to that, yeah and people wonder what’s a small business, it’s just every kind of business that you could think of from somebody who’s running a business out of their house, running a service business.
Running any type of business under 5 million a month is basically considered SMB, small-medium business, small and medium business market. So small businesses can be doing, a few hundred thousand, a few thousand dollars a month, or a few million dollars a month. You could take your business as the other day.
We’re talking about shark tank, and we were talking about how there are some businesses, that started off in a garage. And then they blow up. So any business can do that. I’ve had companies come to me. I had a friend of mine, Tom, and he was selling those blades that spin around, and they cut everything, tile, pipes, this and that he started in the corner of his second bedroom, and he had a little bit of inventory in the closet and he grew it to a huge business and then later sold it.
Very cool. So anything can happen if you put in the work, you got to have the infrastructure, so if you gotta start off having the right infrastructure or be ready when you’re growing to, switch that infrastructure up so that you can grow your business because you want it to be professional.
You gotta know when to pivot. Yes, and know when to pivot! So let’s talk about, the first thing we’re going to go over is the legal entity. So people can start off very simply, and file a DBA. What’s a legal entity for people who don’t even have to, that’s what I’m going to get into. So the most simple legal entity is to be a sole proprietor.
And then on top of that, you should be filing either what they call a doing business as. It just depends on your state DBA. And in Florida, they call it a fictitious name and it’s $35 for five anymore. Not, anymore! Some may call it a fictitious name? No, it’s way more expensive than that, it was like $95. We just did it from my wife’s cleaning company.
Okay. Last time look at it. So that’s still not expensive. No, it’s not the same price as the LLC though. It’s weird that there’s no. No, because you could be a single-member LLC. If you’re not planning on having any business partners, any investors, that’s the two simplest things, a sole proprietor with your fictitious name, or do a single member, LLC, either way, you still need to get a federal tax ID.
And you can that, you don’t have that way when you do it the way you were talking about you don’t have to file separate taxes. You can still file your taxes and personal tax, and then there’s an addendum. Yeah. And then you just add the money that you received from your business onto those taxes.
So for people who are like, oh my God, I’m freaking out. My taxes are so crazy. You should have. Listen! Yeah, this saves you money too, because that way you can open up a separate bank account, have a separate credit card, and keep track of your business expenses away from your personal expenses and your sales.
So then you can show oh, I did this much in sales and I’ve had this much cost, and then this was my actual. So it’s important, that an LLC is good if you’re going to have investors and or business partners or an S-corp, those are the important legal entities. But some people, I tell them, hey, start off with a fictitious name, and a federal tax ID. You’re just trying to get your nephew’s lawn care service going. You don’t need to set them up with a corporation. Right! Not yet! Let the guy get some experience first, do a sole proprietorship, and get the name registered. So then that way competition can’t register the name and that same state, that’s something that we got to talk about to you’re registering your name.
Then when you register your name, make sure you’re getting your domain name is available. Your social media handles are available. Yeah! Do research. Do the due diligence on it. You don’t want to name, Allen’s cleaning service, and there are 47 Allen’s cleaning services are within 10 miles of the community you want to serve.
You want to really, sit down, brainstorm, come up with some ideas, and run them across your family members. Talk about it, put them inside people that you trust in groups, and then find your name right. And your corporate name, and you’re doing business as don’t exactly, have to be the same.
And especially, let’s say you’re opening up some kind of a higher-risk type business. You definitely want to pick a more generic corporate name, like ABC, Inc. as an example, let’s say you’re opening a CBD store. That way, it’s not going to preclude you from getting banking or make it harder for you to get banking. Right!
Like you’re not going to call it Justin’s pot shack. You know what I mean, you’re going to want to call it like Justin’s incorporate smokehouse or something. I don’t know! Yeah, Justin’s incorporates Corporated. Exactly, make it simple. Keep it simple so that you don’t have these problems. If you’re in a broad business, like a shoe store, and it’s not going to really matter, you can call it Justin’s shoes, right?
No, one’s going to really bother you. But if you’re opening a smoke shop, a CBD store, you’re going to be selling hemp or you’re going to be having some kind of strip club, the more generic. It’s very important and all of that. And then your DBA can be whatever you need it to be. And then that’s what you should be buying the domain and the social media.
It sounds a little confusing for people who have never done this before. When you talk about it, it does get confusing, but it’s not right. So you pick one name you’re going to call this is going to be the main name. So B2B Vault, for instance. It’s the name of the podcast. We could start a media company underneath that.
What would we call it? B2B, pottying, whatever. But that would be underneath the main B2B Vault umbrella. So that’s right. That’s how you. Yeah! You have your company Nationwide Payment Systems, and then one of the DBA’s we have is NPS bank, so right. The best way to explain it. Yep! Then, and this next one today I was, somebody that I know called me on the phone and they were having a little quandary and they didn’t,
we’ll get into the story in a second, but where’s your business going to be located?
So are you going to work out of your home virtual meaning, you’re just going to be virtual, or are you going to go get a virtual office where you pay these places and you have an actual mailing address there, and sometimes it’s for additional money, they’ll answer the phone, and receive your packages. Many people do that!
Or you use the UPS store for receiving packages, or you’re going to rent an office or get an office suite inside, one of the virtual offices. Sometimes you can just have the virtual office and if you need an office, you can go there.
And for a small fee, you can have an office for the day. Those coworking places are amazing, or a conference room to have a meeting, or do you need a warehouse? Cause you have inventory. You don’t have to be on the main road to get like a little warehouse. Are you providing a service?
Are you going to get, and the one thing I wrote on the bottom, or make sure to read your lease! Cause this morning somebody is a client of mine, called me on the phone and they go, I don’t know what to do. I got a 30% increase on my lease from the landlord. Wow! So I was like, what is your lease say?
They said they signed a two year, and there is no renewal clause. So the landlord basically can do whatever they want. And I know that’s happened to a few people recently. Everybody’s raising the rent, I got. It’s not that you gotta have a, like you make sure, like when you’re renting that there’s a renewal clause and it has a left and it has a limit like two or 3%.
We talk about this way too much! What? People not reading, they’re not reading the contract. Yea, they don’t read their contract, wait, they didn’t read the lease. Somebody else told me they didn’t read their lease, and the landlord said if you want to stay, it’s going up 10%. That’s a lot, their rent was like three grand.
They got a three, $300 increase, so I’m just saying that’s a lot 10% that’s, I made sure my lease, it says 3%. So you gotta make sure you have that in your lease. So you want to make sure like someone can’t price gouge you, or the, at the same time, if the market let’s say you’re in an office complex, like the one we’re in several years ago, back 2008, 2009 is about 30, 20 something offices.
One of the buildings we’re in, we’re in a big complex with five buildings, there was nobody in our building. We went to the landlord; we negotiated a discount. There you go! Because nobody was here they gave it to us. If you don’t ask, you don’t know, but you also got to make sure that you can’t get taken advantage of. A closed mouth doesn’t get fed.
Yeah, listen. Now I always say every to everybody, that the stupidest question you have to ask is the one you didn’t ask. It’s not, it doesn’t hurt to ask questions. You can ask them, they can say no. The next thing is just, the advertising basics, so we always talk about, we’ve talked about these before for businesses. Business cards and a lot of people don’t know, young people are not into the whole physical business card thing. So real quick about the business card thing, we were just talking about business cards. We went to this event and I’m all about embracing technology.
Like I’m the guy that handles everything with the tech here, right? Yeah! So the whole, like the fad of scanning your business card with my phone to phone. That’s great. Until you go back and you realize, oh, I scanned five business cards, and who are these? And then you got to find it in your text messages because it doesn’t automatically download to your contacts.
Or I don’t know if all of them are that way or if it’s some of them that do and don’t, I’m not sure. There are people who just have a QR code and then they say scan for my info, and then you lose it. I’m like, cause we went to the Alternative Products Expo and Allen asked me about, Hey, do you got that contact from that woman? Blah, blah, blah.
And I went to look through my phone and it took me hours to go through all of the text messages to reading like phone numbers. I didn’t have it saved on my phone. I don’t know if I’m pro or against, pro or con against. I think it’s good. If you’re doing networking on LinkedIn and you want to send somebody your contact info, it’s not going to send them a card. You can send them a link tree or a V card, and now the person has a link and they can go see all about, a little mini-website of what you do. That’s fine. But if you’re in person it’s hard. And also LinkedIn, one of the features I really hate on LinkedIn is the messaging, because let’s say I’m messaging somebody.
And I think that’s an important message. They don’t have a mailbox on there where you can put urgent. We can go, oh yeah. Just this is like mark this one for follow-up. They don’t have a way to do that. No, I think that star it or something. LinkedIn’s listening? Put that in there! Cough up a buck, get some business cards printed.
You can get like 10,000 of them for $10 nowadays, don’t quote me on the price, but if you want to quote on a price with printing, go to NPS printer.com, and they can fix you up real quick. No problem!
Before we even get going into the next section, I just mentioned one of our sponsors, so let’s mention the rest of them. NPS Bank, The Payment Advisory Board, Nationwide Payment Systems, and that’s everybody. That’s everyone, we love you guys! Thank you for everyone. If you want to sponsor the podcast, go to B2BVault.info., there are a couple of forms on there. You can fill out a form to sponsor the podcast, or if you want to talk to Allen if you have any comments, questions, or maybe you want something, you have some ideas of what we should cover on the podcast is also a form for you to fill out there.
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B2B Vault subscribed to the channel and leave some comments. So we know what you like, like comments share, smash the subscribe button for us so that we could get our YouTube followers up and we can get our custom name. We were at a hundred, but we still can’t change it.
So on YouTube, I don’t know what’s up. You got to fix it! I’m trying to change it to B2B Vault, you won’t let me, whatever. Catch us on Stitcher, iHeartRadio, Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, and Spotify. There were Apple podcasts, and Google podcasts, overcast. Yeah, we’re everywhere!
Everywhere. You’re never there. B2B Vault in Google you’ll find us. Oh yeah, for sure! Google B2B Vault, you’ll find us. If we are not on your favorite podcast network. Let us know. But last please go to YouTube and subscribe to the B2B Vault. Please! Thank you! Pick it up, Allen. So then we, this is Justin’s favorite one.
Google my business. Yes. You got to have this Google my business. It’s free. Yeah, you gotta have that. And so real quick, you do have to have that, and don’t let someone bamboozle you or swindle you out of some money to set it up. You can do it for free, take 20 minutes out of your day. Google my business, like literally go to Google and type in Google my business.
And the link is going to pop up. You put your logo in there, your description hours of operation, name, address, phone number, and some photos. If you’ve got any videos of the products or your store upload them and you’re done, it’s literally, you’re done and you send it, they send you a little postcard in the mail.
Once you get the postcards, you go to the website link that they provide you on the postcard. And you verify your business from there. After that, you can literally set up appointment times, and set up automatic phone calls straight to your business line from there, like you from there from that point, you could be making money.
Yup! It’s the most important thing for your business. And then, it’s figuring out the social media and where you want to be, where you think you’re going to find your customers, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, those, but you gotta do your research, right?
So if you’re a maintenance guy and you’re going to want, think about, okay, maybe I’m going to look for older homeowners, single moms, stuff like that too. Also, a lot of apps, like next door are all great things for you to set it all free. Yeah. And the other little Facebook, you can sell your product straight from the marketplace of Facebook and Instagram is now allowing you to put your story there.
Pinterest is also a great thing. So for your business or your product or service. Here you go, having a LinkedIn profile important, if you’re looking to do business with bigger companies, at some point you want to establish your LinkedIn profile early. Because that’s where people will go to check out your business, and then we always talk about having a website or e-commerce, we’ve talked about that a bunch of times on the podcast, owning your domain name. So when you’re making up your, when we talked about the legal entity, when you’re doing all that search first, through GoDaddy or whoever you use.
Oh, it’s that domain available? Oh, I didn’t pick out a name and do all this work. And then the next thing you know, you find out, oh, the domain’s not available. And now if you’re like, oh, I spent all this money forming my corporation here, and you’re screwed, then your name’s not available.
So do your research. Yeah, those get your domain name first. Yeah. When you write, when you’re, before you even name your core, you’re going to want, because you’re going to want to be like, okay, now you came up with your name and then you were thinking like, oh, I’m going to go and buy this, but then you didn’t look to see if somebody already had a website.
For instance, Supreme Clean is the company that cleans our office. Yeah, the office and shout out to them. Supremeclean.biz, but so that’s an example. She went to go, she granted the name, blah, blah, blah, went to go purchase. The URL realized that.com was taken and she had to, she had to pivot.
She had to see whether or not this was something that she wanted to keep, so she chose Supremeclean.biz, it is a business. So it’s, it is what it is. Right, now let’s talk! But it can’t be really disappointed though. Sorry, I’m just saying like you don’t, you spend all that money on your, or your company name, and then you realize that you can’t have the website.
You can’t put up your Facebook, you can’t put up your Instagram. All of it, you want to make sure that all that’s available before you do the whole Corp and the DBA. This is very important, link it all together. Yep! The next thing, number four. How do you get paid cash checks? Checks are hard to deal with.
Credit card processing cryptocurrency, that’s what the out there. There are other third-party services like Venmo, and PayPal, but now those companies are issuing 1099. So don’t think like you’re going to be that those are like, and cash that those are cash. Like they used to be, they are not cash, anymore.
Never really was though, right? No, but they were not given out 1099. I guess PayPal was a little bit different. If you did have the personal accounts set up, always, it just stayed that way. But I never had a personal PayPal account, I always had a business account. I always got 1099. So a lot of people were not, they did not do that way right now.
But then now, they monitor it. So if you do over 600 hours of transactions a year, they come and they go, Nope, you’ve got to switch to a business account unless you got some kind of. They actually have been shutting people’s accounts down. Oh yeah! Tons of them because they were using personal accounts for business. Yeah. So it’s very important that you figure out how to get paid.
Sometimes I tell people, Hey, you’re just getting started. Go to square, go to Stripe. Once you start establishing yourself, you’re doing 10, $15,000 a month. Now it’s time to get a real merchant account, go to the bank, and get it set up. No, call Nationwide Payment Systems. We’ll get you set up with the actual merchant account.
Did we mention getting the business account in here at all? We’re talking about making sure you go to the bank. That’s why you pay a federal tax ID number. So once I get your tax, federal tax ID number, that’s you get your bank account. Then you can get my payment processing center. You can get payment processes set up, right?
Bam! They’re all down in a row. Pow! It’s all connected! And here’s a subject that we didn’t talk about before, but I wanted to go over, is how do I pay myself? And this was something that keeps coming up in the last couple of years, should you take a paycheck? Now I tell people even you’re a 1099 sales rep, let’s say for our company, I tell them, listen, go form a Corp or single member, LLC.
Get the money sent to that bank account. Get a separate credit card for that, a separate bank account, track expenses, track your income and get tax deductions and should you take a paycheck? The answer is, Yes! Take a paycheck. I know somebody right now, I’ll go through a few scenarios. So I know somebody now that’s close to retirement age, and they worked for their husband in a business, a husband and wife had a business, they got divorced. And she found that her husband never paid her a paycheck, even though she worked there, they just took distributions from the company. Now that’s like some people think I’m not going to pay so much tax.
You’re really hurting yourself because now because when you’re older, you’re not going to get any Social Security. You’re going to get the lowest amount, the Medicaid. Do you even qualify for Medicaid after that? Qualify them? Yeah, you qualified. I’m just saying, but you’re not going to get, you’re going to get five, 600 bucks a month.
That’s it. It’s not going to cut it. So it’s better to pay yourself a paycheck, every single, even if it’s once a month, and if you have a wife pay your wife, that’s why we got kids. You pay your kids, you put them on a payroll, you pay your kids, you set them up and give them a credit card.
Now you building them credit. That’s a whole nother, you got a podcast. Yeah. Building credit. But I’m just saying in business. And the other thing that hurt people was, and a lot of businesses had this hard lesson during the pandemic here, we went into the shutdown. Would that ever happen again? I hope in my lifetime, we never see that shut down like that.
Thank God we were in Florida. So we were like two weeks after two weeks. They were like a pandemic. Honestly, I don’t, it last two weeks man. I don’t know. I remember when the mask mandate came, when the mask they dropped it, it was like, yeah. Mask. We would go to the grocery store; nobody was wearing a mask.
No, I’m just saying it’s just crazy. Like the lockdown thing, all of a sudden, the businesses closing down things were closing down. So you had all these businesses closed down, which I did not agree with, especially okay, you’re going to let Walmart and Costco be open, but the local theaters are closed.
It’s no good. So thank goodness Ron DeSantis. I’ll tell you what the shout out to my, to the owner of the local bodega by my house, he didn’t take that crap. He said, I’m staying open and they could come and find a lot of people stayed open and they didn’t care. Listen, I was in the office. People gotta make money.
I was in the office one day and the cops knocked on the. And I was like, yeah. And they’re like, oh, we’re just checking, ’cause nobody was in the old building. Oh. To see what was up, they go, who are you? I showed them my ID, and they were like, okay, whatever dude, Fort Lauderdale police. I was like, okay.
No, I guess they just were checking for burglary. Maybe somebody’s alarm went off that I’ve, silent alarm or something. They want to see who’s in these who was in here, but they learned a lesson because they couldn’t apply for the paycheck protection program until something came out about 1099.
Then they weren’t really 1099, some of those people weren’t 1099, so then they couldn’t get any money. And a lot of businesses suffered from that, cause they’re going to get money for, they got some money, but because they weren’t the owner wasn’t on the payroll, they couldn’t really take the money for themselves.
Cause it comes only to be used for people who are on the payroll. That’s crazy! So it’s important to take a paycheck for many reasons in case there’s another pandemic in case you want to retire someday and you want to get Social Security, so it’s very important, and then here’s another, this is like the last thing on the list.
So I get all the time people were asking us during the pandemic. Oh, how to do the PPP program. And we helped people get PPP money. We helped people go to the SBA and get the EDI L money and apply for that. And we showed them how to do that in the restaurant, there was a restaurant revitalization fund. So the EDL money, that’s all gone.
EDI L that’s done! No one can get money from that. SBA, you can get that. Now there are two ways to get SBA money, either A go directly to the SBA, or B go to your bank and they can help you with the SBA loan. Now, the thing is to read the paperwork because they basically they’ll it’s very strict. And the PPP, there was a lot of fraud with that.
Be careful there was a lot of fraud, and there were a lot of companies that we’re telling people, oh yeah, we’re going to get you this PPP money. And then they would take part of it. And then there were a lot of people going to jail for that right now. Now there is some money going on that around now, this employment employee retention credit, E R C do not go.
Huh? I have to go I gotta be back. Do not go to an outside company and get the employee retention credit. Okay! This is not what you want to do. Do you want to go directly to the SBA website and find out how to apply for it through them? And the only way you can get the money is you have to show that you lost money.
During the pandemic and that you took your personal funds or whatever business funds and you paid your employees. And that’s how you stayed in business because they’re asking you to show that you had a loss. So it’s very important. So we went over today in the podcast, and we talked about how to set up your business and what kind of legal entities there are.
We talked about getting a federal tax ID number because that’s important to set up your payment processing and to set up your banking and get set up for credit card processing. We talked about where are you getting? Where are you locating your business? Make sure to read your lease, and read any contracts that you have to sign.
Believe me, a few hundred hours spent at an attorney will save you money in the long run. We talked about advertising basics and social media and making sure those names are available before you go do your incorporation and everything. So that way all your names line up, how to get paid.
I always tell everybody, how to get paid. The technology for that, it’s what we talk about on the podcast all the time. And it’s changing rapidly! We’re seeing the most rapid change in payments that I’ve seen in 20 years, the changes are happening. Probably every quarter, whereas years ago we would go years.
We went, I started in 1998. Okay. I remember we had to change out pin pads to different encryptions and all that. Yeah. So figure that 1998 to October 2015 was when EMV started. That’s a big gap. Now the acceleration, since 2000, probably 19 has been tremendous. And then we talked about, paying yourself and listen, QuickBooks has quick has payroll, and there are other payroll companies like online.
So they were not very expensive. You don’t need a big payroll company, right! Unless you got a lot of employees and then you want someone to manage, manage all of that. And then we talked about what funds are available through the SBA and make sure you’re dealing with somebody reliable. Cause people were given SBA loans to you.
They’re not supposed to be taken out any of that money. No, at all. So thank you for listening today to the B2B vault podcast. Check us out on all the social media. We have a new Facebook group, the B2B Vault group. You can find us on the B2B Vault, there’s a button to join the group, and also. Watch out on our social media, and we’re probably doing a podcast about our new, small business shout-out program that we’re getting ready to launch, where we’re going to give small to medium-sized businesses.
For each episode, we’re going to feature one business, maybe two depending on how the level of response we’re going to get. And then we’re going to send that business signed, a tee shirt and you guys just have to send us back a picture. And then we’re going to plaster you all over our social media. So make a great program first, small, any biz.
Awesome. Any small business, even though we’re in Florida. Does it matter where you are in the United States, all over the U S we’re going to get the word out with a nice social media following on all the social media is a really great program, is that we want to give back to the community and we’re going to be doing more for, that’s the one program we’re launching a small business, a shout-out!
So peace out Carpe diem,we’re outta here! Rocky says, bye; he is taking a nap right now. Everybody, have a great day!
