Payment Processing During Hurricanes

Hey, what’s up everybody? It’s Justin Live from B2B Vault, the Payment Technology Podcast, sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, with your host Allen Kopelman, and we’ll be providing you educational information about small business. FinTech payment processing and the technology businesses use in today’s world.

And in today’s podcast, we’ll be talking about what businesses should be doing before and after a hurricane or tropical storm. We’re down in south Florida, sunny Fort Lauderdale, and fortunately we were blessed and did not get much weather from Hurricane Ian. Other parts of Fort Lauderdale are in some serious trouble.

In Florida. In Florida, sorry. Yeah. They’re in some very sad state Fort Myers, Tampa, Naples pretty much the whole West Coast. Yeah. Sarasota. Yeah. Every major city along the West Coast felt the wrath of Hurricane Ian, unfortunately. We feel I don’t know. The pictures are like horrific.

My daughter’s a, it’s terrified neurologist. Yeah. And I follow a lot of storm chasers and they were posting video Yeah. And pictures. And I’ve seen pictures of some of my friends that live on that side. Houses. Your house can be replaced. So positive vibes to everyone who’s been affected.

Yeah, our prayers got our condolences to anybody who has lost any family members in the storm. Again, I don’t, you can’t really prepare for these types of things in a sense you can, like water is water and mother’s nature is gonna do what it does heads, yeah. I don’t even know what to say. I’m at a loss of words. You, No, listen, they, It’s a natural disaster. They made the evacuation zones much larger Yeah. This year. And people, even though they evacuated, or most of the people evacuated, then even though you’re not an evacuation zone, Or your business is not in the evacuation zone.

You’re dealing with the power outages, right? The internet outage. I want to hand it to the state of Florida. This morning I was watching tv. The governor, Ron DeSantis got on there. They got helicopters into the areas right away. Yeah. To go look for people to deal with. There was like some three or four barrier islands where the bridges totally are out.

Only accessible by boat were helicopter. There was also. They brought in starlink over there. Yeah. That’s another really cool thing. Big shout out to Elon Musk. Because I was also listening. They were talking about setting up starlink and giving people access to starlink and also they were bringing in special mobile cell towers.

Into the affected areas. So they could restore cell service very quickly, by bringing in these special equipment. And I guess they must have strategically mapped it out oh where they’re gonna put it to bring back cell service because definitely You I can already tell that they’ve done that in some areas because some people are posting, so that’s the only, cuz they wouldn’t be able to post otherwise unless they had some kind of like satellite connection. Being in payment processing for over 20 years, we’ve been through where we have, cuz we don’t just have merchants in Florida, we have merchants all over the United States.

So we faced all types. Different, disasters. I remember one year there was a snowstorm that hit the northeast, and then I remember seeing pictures where the snow was like 20 feet high. . And we had stores that were in the malls there up in New York at the time. We had a client that stores all over the Northeast and those stores were all basically out.

And then they got. The stores open, but then there was no there was the, couldn’t get the credit card machines working cuz the internet wasn’t working in the stores. In the mall. Cause a lot of malls supply, like the internet to the home mall. . So we told them to go get a Hotspot and they got a hotspot and then we, they got a, a tablet and a little swiper and we got them up and running.

So there’s creative ways, one thing businesses should think about when you have to evacuate, is, , you can replace everything, but if you need your data and all that, get your computers out of there. I, if I was, if I had a small business and, there was a hurricane coming, regardless of what type of insurance I had, as long as I had the amount of time, I would definitely remove, the important stuff.

Your cash register if you got. Yeah, but at least get it unplugged. At least get it unplugged. Move your atm, to high ground. Usually if you can, right? Yeah. Some you can, Yeah. Some of them get the money out, at least if you can. Yeah. Try to get the money out. There’s definitely gonna be like destroyed a, there’s gonna be, I saw this morning.

I went by the bank and there was a guy out there fixing the ATM and he said, Oh, it rained so hard and there was a newer, a brand new atm, and it got shorted out. There you go. So from the rain. So that’s just from the rain. , and it was a brand new ATM at the bank, but the, Yeah, you have to make, you gotta protect your electronic equipment, your electronic, your records, it’s important.

That’s why like now, like having your payment processing or your point of sale up in the cloud , God forbid anything happens like that, you’re, you’re protected. You can pull it right outta the car. Yeah. You can access the information. , so you know, before the storm, it’s important.

Make sure that you’re, protecting your place of business, protecting your equipment, protect your investment. Best way you can. A lot of times there’s no way to do that, . There’s just no way. You can’t predict the weather. I, you can try and you can, make certain steps so that you’re not caught, with your pants down.

And we had merchants that were in whole bunch of different storms. The one that was then, that one that had pen cola, the one that had New Orleans. The one that, the one where everything. Messed up in Houston. They had the big flood there, other storms that hit Florida. So we’ve dealt with, hurricanes before and, we’ve had merchants contact us and they’re like, Hey, what can we do?

And then we discuss, what are the possible solutions. Sometimes they’re not even clients of ours and they say, Hey, what do you what kind of technology do you guys have access to that we can use? For our business, and get it up and running right away. Because who know we don’t know is FedEx UPS delivering into the area?

How can we get it dropped off, off? Amazon was , right? No, but I’m just saying like, how can we get things, sent to a merchant or send them somewhere where they can go pick. Whatever it is that they need. There’s definitely ways to get your business up and running, get a virtual terminal.

But some of the other things that, I didn’t hear them mention on TV is, be very careful about the people who show up at your business or your. House and they say, Oh, I want to help you fix stuff. , don’t give people money. Make sure cuz this is when all the scams start happening.

You wanna make sure that the contractor is licensed. Get somebody that you know, or somebody knows. It’s very important. If you need your contact, take pictures. Even the, they were talking about that on the news today. Take pictures so you of the walls so they know where the water line was.

Makes sense. It was, we saw downtown, I don’t know if you saw the videos of downtown Fort Myers and Naples. There was some serious, I mean there was cars underwater on internet. I literally don’t know. High school friend of mine lives in. . Yeah, Tampa got, He’s all right though.

Yeah, there was a little bit there, but not as much as they’ve said there was gonna be. The water got pretty bad on the coast, but other than that, where he’s at, he’s pretty fur far in, in the coast So there’s definitely ways to get your, to get. Merchant services up and running quickly, even if we have to get you like a virtual terminal.

So we’ve done that. We can get a merchant account set up in 30 minutes, get a, you get a phone app on your phone. For those who don’t know, what’s a virtual terminal. The virtual terminal is so that you can either text somebody or email them an amount of money you want to pay them or key enter it on your telephone.

So that enables you to do that kind of functionality and we can get that set up. Have you approved in a half an hour? It is also the on the go option too. Yeah, you’d have to get some equipment. The one, the mobile one, right? You’d get the on the go option equipment that has either wifi or 4g.

That way you can do a card present transaction. But if you needed to get something so you could take credit cards right away, you could take, be taking credit cards on a half an hour. You can run that a device off your phone. Can. . You can, yeah, you can run it off your phone or a hotspot. That’s what I mean.

Yeah. Yeah. The wifi version. , it’s, it’s very important cuz a lot of places, they’re, they might have power and then they don’t have. Telephones. Or they don’t have internet, then you need wireless internet. So it’s very important to be able to have the options to get your business up and running.

I remember during one really bad hurricane here, we had a couple of clients and they called us on the phone and then we were able to get some called up a vendor, got them. Equipment. . So they had wireless, 4G internet on a little box so they could a hook the credit card. We hooked the credit.

We had it back in those days, it was before the wifi credit card machines. So you’d ring in a, ethernet cord to, from the credit card machine over to the actually a phone or a phone line onto. Onto the little router. And then the router was using the Ford, the, the wireless internet from the cell phones.

So sometimes the phones aren’t working, but the the cellular data is working. One network is off, the other one is on, . So it’s important to be able to, That’s why we call, this is the Payment Technology podcast. It’s important to understand what technology you could use in your business to get your business, back running quicker or running before.

Regardless, yeah. Running before, a lot of times people don’t have a plan. Like for the hurricane, they didn’t think about it, and they don’t have virtual terminal set up. Or even during the hurricane, like if you’re a contractor how are you getting paid? There’s way you can simply send a text to the owner of the home that you’re working at.

He can just input his, debit, your credit card right there through his mobile device and then pay you on the spot, cuz they might not have access to go to the bank to get cash. Probably don’t. You might not be able to. What bank is open in Fort Myers right now? Pretty sure, probably not many.

Yeah. And I wouldn’t be taking a check during this type of situation. I, not to be mean or anything, but hey, I, my kids gotta eat too. It’s not that you might not have access to go to the bank, to deposit, to check. Just there’s a lot of different reasons, yeah, exactly. So it’s, before we get back into the next step segment of the show, we wanna say thank you to all of our followers, to subscribers. The people in the community on the B2B Vault page. Thank you so much. Thank you to the sponsors Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS printer. If you need some printing, nps printer.com, they can hook you up text book to 9 5 4 8 2 7 9 8 1 8 to get in touch with Alan.

He can. Talk to you about how to get your business back up and running through the storm. Please follow us on YouTube, B2B vault, subscribe to the channel. We need to get those numbers up so we can start making some mui baby. Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple, iHeart, Stitcher, Pandora, Amazon, whichever one that you wanna listen to the podcast.

We’re there. Head over to B2B vault.info. There’s a form there if you’d like to get in touch with Alan and or myself in regards to the show. Any questions, comments, concerns maybe you want to be a guest on the show. Fill out the form. It’s ready right there for you to go ahead. And if you are looking for a merchant account, there’s a button that says Apply now.

On the top of that, Of B2B vault.info, you click that and you can hit the ground. Run it. All right, perfect. Yeah, so you know, it’s important to figure out, technology and what you can use during these times because this kind, these kind of events happen all over the United States where things can happen and you get your power knocked out.

It’s gonna become more common. In my. Okay, we don’t, It’s definitely becoming an, something that’s happening every couple of years for some re, for what climate change is real. I don’t know, I don’t wanna talk about science on the podcast anyway but yeah. What else can they do before, or or after?

What should they do after the storm? After the storm, definitely. If you’re gonna process payments, you need to get in touch with your payment processor so they don’t think that there’s fraudulent transactions running through your account, cuz you might have access to a virtual terminal now or maybe.

You’re key entering some transactions for whatever reason. Like we had a merchant, I’ll tell you the story. They got a contract with F p and L after one of the big storms here. And they were key entering like a card for 20 grand twice a day, feeding all these f p and L workers. Wow. At their restaurant.

Right? Cuz they were the only restaurant open cuz they got a generator. So many business. All over Florida put in generators, like the gas stations were all required to put in generators so that people could get gas after a storm. And even the grocery stores put in generators because after the one storm we had here, Wilma, I think it was, the grocery stores had no food.

All the food went bad. Yeah. And then no refrigerated food. No frozen food, no vegetables. Terrible. It was horrible. I. The grocery stores right now, I bear well, People went cra, people went crazy before the storm bought stuff. People need to stop. No, listen in Florida, I tell all my friends, when hurricane season starts, you gotta go out.

You gotta buy some food, put it in a box and to hide it, in your house, some whatever it is, canned tuna, canned whatever that you want to eat. And some they say have at least a seven to 10 day supply. I think that’s a lot, but seven to 10 days. Get yourself some good canned goods. You got some kidney beans, some tuna.

Yeah, some I don’t know. I don’t eat corn, but Chef Boyard. D if you really want chef, you get yourself some, What are those things called? SpaghettiOs? SpaghettiOs. No, but you can get some protein bars, get some stuff like that. Some trail mix nuts, some stuff that doesn’t expire right away, and. I have a bug out bag. I don’t, it’s not a bug out bag in a sense, but like it’s a bag full of that type of stuff. Yeah. You know what I mean? The first aid kit. Some nutri nutritional items. Yeah. I even, I have a radio that has a bottles of water that has a crank on it. Yep. I think that has the one where you.

You shake it or a crank and make sure you have flashlights, batteries, candles. Candles, a grill. I’ve seen a really good idea online too. Besides this one for, I’ve seen one for him. If you got a dog, go kitty pool and go out to your backyard or wherever and dig up a nice section of your grass and throw it in the kitty pool.

Put it in your garage so your dog doesn’t have to go outside. That was a great idea. I thought the other idea was, A woman said, Go to Family Dollar and get a bunch of those garden lights that are solar powered. Yeah. And then instead of using candles in your house, charge ’em outside, obviously, and then you could use that inside of your house to light up your house. And it was, she took a picture of it. It was just like, it was way brighter than what a candle. Yeah, I definitely, I have some lanterns. Yeah. And then you could charge ’em up outside. We had a hurricane a few years ago and every, all everybody was laughing at me at my house.

They were like, Oh, what are you gonna do now? The power went out. So I had the generator, had gas. Fired up my generator, ran extension cord into the house, hooked up the refrigerator, so all my food stayed good and then I took, But if you don’t have a generator, one thing you can do before the storm is buy cooler is.

You could buy a cooler with ice. But the other thing is get your wa, get water bottles. Put ’em in your freezer. Yeah. Or get Tupperwares and fill ’em up with water. Put ’em in the freezer. And then when the power goes out, take some of those, put ’em in the fridge or the water bottles, put them in the refrigerator.

Somebody even said put a quarter on top of a cup in the freezer. And then put it in your refrigerator if the power goes out. And then let’s say you had to leave and come back. Or if it’s in the freezer and then as the quarter stayed on the top, you know your food stayed frozen. Ah. If it was all the way in the bottom, you just toss everything out.

Makes sense. That was a, I thought that was a pretty good idea, but. I’ve been through Storm since 1968. I tried not to, like when a hurricane comes, I don’t know if this is a logical thing, but I tried to not shop for a bunch of stuff that’s gonna perish, right? Yeah. Eat all of the crap that I have in the refrigerator and freezer so I don’t know, three weeks ago, Hurricane Ian, not just Hurricane Ian, the one before that was sitting over here.

Her’s, Yeah. Whatever. And I was like, Yeah, we should probably be careful about stocking this fridge, right? Yeah. Let’s not, cuz two years ago when the big hurricane came to Fort Lauderdale, we were sol for days I had to send my wife and kids to a hotel. We didn’t have water. It was terrible.

But yeah, man, I try to get all that stuff out of the refrigerator, one so I don’t have to deal with it. Two. I don’t have to deal with the anxiety of losing all of that food. If you lose three, $400 worth of food, that’s a big problem. Yeah. So I don’t know. Those are just some things.

And then obviously you have to have your canned goods, man, and I don’t, some people don’t have the hand, the can openers, people depend on technology. Of course, this is the payment technology podcast. But yeah, sometimes you gotta go back to basics. You gotta go back to the basics, man.

Food, clubbing, and shelter. Basic necessities. Yeah. And have like propane. Propane for your grill or charcoal for your grill, or little butan stoves, like Coleman, like camping stuff, that kind of stuff. Can, you just buy it one time. You have it stored in your house, you check your stock.

Yeah. Once, like I do it all the time before hurricane season. I go around, I go, Okay, there’s batteries. I check all my flashlights. I. Lanterns. I try not to buy this stuff during the storm because don’t price try to buy it during the storm. No. That stuff’s gonna be priced through the roof.

That, and you aren’t gonna find it. Yeah. Buy it during the regular part of the year. And I’m the advocate of having your water delivered. If you’re a water drinker like myself, I have an account through Crystal Springs, they, I get seven, five gallon bottles delivered to my.

I still had, we just, when the hurricane started, we had five fives, so that’s 25 gallons a water. That’s, I would suspect that would be, plus the other bottles that we have in our house and stuff like that, we would’ve definitely done. Okay. A couple of things that I also do during the storm is I’ll have empty of those five, empty five gallon bottles of water, and if the storm, if I feel like it’s really go, I’m gonna fill those up.

The other thing I’m gonna do, I’m gonna fill. The tub. Yeah. And the reason you want to fill the tub up, especially, it just depends where you live, but if the power is out for a few days, you might not be able to flush the toilet and you will not. Why was so if you don’t wanna waste your water on the toilet.

Yeah. So you know, even fill up like a kid pool outside. In your yard, fill it up with a hose so that, because you might not be able to get water out of the hose as the water, they shut the water off. Yes. Sometimes they shut the water off. And I remember one time during one of the hurricanes, I was like, Oh, the, my son came.

It’s Oh, the toilet wouldn’t flush. So I was like, Oh, thank goodness we had a pool. So I said, Just go. I went outside, got a bucket of water outta the pool and poured it into the back of the toilet so you could flush the toilet and then filled it back up again. You gotta definitely, you gotta definitely think.

These things about getting like empty five gallon water things so you don’t have to go out. Like all of a sudden Costco goes outta water. Don’t worry about it. People drink water from the tap every day. Public had no water like yesterday when no, there was no water. But I’m saying like you can fill up those five gallon water.

I. I was looking for water to see if there was, And I also, I didn’t need any water. And I also have those tablets like to put in a water. And that’s just in case. Like people take and my daughter does like a lot of camping. Yeah, man. Water purification tablets. I’m just, I have a bug up.

Like I said, I’ll say, I can’t say it enough, man, like bug out bad if you can’t, you. I would just say get prepared a little bit. Yeah. Everyone in the world, like even if you don’t live in a place where there’s hurricanes, I mean you don’t know what’s going on and just a little preparedness for your family.

Look what happened in Texas last year. They had that. Crazy. They had two crazy things. One was like a winter storm that came outta nowhere and then all the electricity went out. That was horrible. That was bad. People were not prepared for that. And then they had another storm where it was like in the summertime and all the windmills or something, and the electricity went out again, and the electricity went out again.

And so there was. Air. Air conditioning. Yeah, no air conditioning. And it was like a hundred degrees. Its bad. It was very bad. And they weren’t prepared to tell the public, Hey, leave your air, don’t run your air conditioning. Try not to run it all day, man. Yeah, it’s wow, California.

They go through that all the time. If you have a problem and or you want to figure out like a disaster plan for your business, I even tell businesses all the. We add, I’ll tell you a story. One of the things I tell business is like, you have this big point of sale system in your restaurant and you depend on the internet.

And if the internet goes out, what are you gonna do? You can’t, It’s not you can’t process. So I tell them, you get a router that has a 4G. Prepaid card in it and you have that in there, you’ll never know if the thing went off or not, unless you get a notice that from, you ran outta data, you ran out data and you gotta put some more money on it.

You just do the prepaid, so you’re not paying every month. You buy a prepaid, you put 40, 50 bucks on it and you’re good to go. And one time I was told this, we put that in one of the businesses that we used to have on Miami Beach. And the guy owned like three restaurants and then one, one on around New Year’s Eve.

One year some guy hit a pole on South Beach and he knocked out the internet for almost the entire. South Beach. Wow. Only the people who had those 4G backup routers had credit card processing. Everybody else had no processing because there’s on, at the time, there was only one company that had internet down there.

Or you brought in your own like fiber optic line. Some of the hotels had their own, their own internet, that they brought from, from a different company. But everybody who had that one company had no internet except this place they get. And people were calling me, Oh, what did you sell those guys?

What did sell those guys? Nice. And I was like, now you gotta order it. And it’s the. But being happen, so you gotta be prepared. You gotta think about being prepared in your business that, for all kinds of things. Have a hurricane plan. We mapped it out. We were, we could have came to work yesterday, but we decided to err on the side of coffee.

No, you should have stayed home the day before . It was worse the day before. Yeah, the day before. Yeah, the day before. Actually when it. After it got dark on Tuesday, then it went hog wild over here. There was tornado warnings. I had to shut off Alexa in my house. I had to shut off the, I had to turn the volume down on the tv.

Rocky was going crazy. Every time the emergency broadcast network, that thing was going off. There was so many tornadoes down here and there was a little bit of, there was some damage around. That’s today’s podcast. We’ve talked about what to do before the storm, what to do after the storm, what you can do now if you’re without without ways to take credit cards.

You can contact us or contact whoever does your merchant services and figure out, what kind of technology you can use. To get your business up and running, and if you’re tired of contacting your merchant provider and you can’t get in touch with them, like PayPal, Square, Stripe, all those other places, maybe it’s time for a change.

Yep. It’s time. Yep. We should get you approved in under 30 minutes. Get you up and running, ready to go. So piece out Carpe DM from B2B Vault and Nationwide Payment Systems.