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

And today, this month of entrepreneurship month. And in so of honor of that, all podcasts are focused on entrepreneurship. Not that the premise of the show isn’t based on the same idea. But, these weeks, we’re just going to take a little bit more of a deep dive into different entrepreneurial things and speak on it.

And then today’s podcast we’re going to talk about some entrepreneurship trends that are in the news or things that are like that we’re trying other businesses are trying to incorporate into their marketing and day-to-day operations. It is also a hurricane, what is it? Nicole! Nancy? Nicole, whatever.

So, this is a special storm edition! This special storm edition, yeah. Live from inside of Hurricane Nicole. It’s a category one hurricane looking like it’s going to head up west a little bit. It’s going to probably breeze right past us again, thankfully. Yeah, everybody else, if it’s in your path, be safe, be vigilant! 

I always tell people, I’ve been through a lot of hurricanes. You need to just keep your, eye on the news. Make sure if they say you need to evacuate, make sure you have plenty of time to evacuate. Get yourself some water! Yeah, make sure you have your supplies.

I always tell people, like with hurricane supplies, you have to plan way before hurricane season and have a special go box! Yeah, I just ran to Publix right now just to get a couple of extra gallons, like gallon jugs of water to cook with just in case. We have tons of water, but my wife was like, could you just go get a couple your dad?

My dad asked me, so of course, why would I say no? But other than that, yeah man, we got canned goods, we got propane, we got water. Yeah, protein bars, and Gatorade! Everything. You just got to make sure you have, don’t wait till the last minute, have a plan. Yeah, cause the shelves are empty now. I’m just saying, you have to have a plan before hurricane season starts and you just take that stuff and sock it away. 

Make sure you check your battery. It’s one of those things I feel like. I don’t know if you really live in South Florida. I know, I’ve been here almost six years now. And it’s not forever.

I know, but when I first got down here, I was like the guy that would be like headed to the store and then spending three grand at the store. Yeah! And then realizing that we didn’t use any of it. The storm went right past us. I spent all of this money for no reason. And so, then I started, I would ask a few questions, and then I started realizing, oh, okay, I can stack this stuff up.

I can put this stuff in the reserves. I don’t need to use this stuff. Yeah, you need to have three to five days of food, non-perishable stuff. I just put it in the, I have it in a box, and at the end of the hurricane season, I either donate some of it or eat it. And then, the next year, the same, right before, hurricane season, and I just make sure oh, there’s cases of water! Right.

I get those big five-gallon things. That’s what I was getting at, like just being aware. That okay if the lights go out for a couple of days, am I okay? You need to be thinking about that, not during hurricane season. You just need to be thinking about that in general. Yeah, you just have a plan and that’s it. Yeah. 

One thing is people think that you could just, there was a lot of negative stuff with the last hurricane. They think oh, everybody could just get in their car and drive. There’s nowhere to move. You can’t a couple hundred thousand people. You can’t, and you can’t do that, you got to.

Because they just close them, everything gets closed down. You can’t enter the on-ramps. It’s not that, there’s nowhere to go on beyond that. Yeah. 200,000 people. Even if you try to, even during this super evacuation thing. You got to be smart about that. Exactly. Because you’re going to hop on the road and then you’re not going to be going anywhere because there’s going to be so much traffic. I don’t know, I’m not an expert at bugging out.

No, like I live. But I would say, I wouldn’t be taking a direct path that everyone is taking, create your own routes, be safe, and make sure you have your family stuff in order. I put a nice first aid kit together that I never touch. The first aid supplies are good for, I think till 2028. That’s, I just have that in my mind because I know that’s, expires. Oh, I have to do that! But I got a fishing kit there. I got some water in case you’re dehydrated, like the flavored and electrolytes water, some ponchos, a first aid kit, and a few weapons.

Oh, I’m just saying you want to be safe, right? Yeah! And then some, and then we have our like a small safe for our important like social security card, we got that in plastic, and we keep that honestly in that box. One thing, but you haven’t been down here long enough, but after one really bad storm, several years before you moved to Florida, they made it a law that the gas stations all have to have generators.

So, we don’t have those problems anymore. All grocery stores must have generators. Oh yeah, I remember hearing that. So, that really cuts down on what you really need to have, because the store is not going to like what happened was, we had Wilma and then everything got knocked out.

Then all the gas stations you couldn’t pump gas. Because there was no electricity and no generators. Terrible. And then all the grocery stores, everything that was in the freezer, the refrigerators all went bad. I’m sure Publix, Wind, Dixie, etcetera, etcetera. Whole Foods and Costco lost all their food, so there was no fresh food. 

So, now they changed all of that. After, that was probably like more than 10 years ago. They changed that, so now the power goes out, no problem. All these gas stations have, and I remember like when Wilma happened, I had no gas in my car. My neighbor owned a gas station and I had to go there, go to the gas station at night because they didn’t want anybody to see.

And they actually had a hand pump, and they were hand pumping out gas. Friends and family because he said you, they legally whatever, they weren’t supposed to be doing it, but they did it at night. Shout out to that man! The cops didn’t care. No, but I’m just saying that was a big huge problem.

Now we don’t have to deal with it anymore, because they fix that. That’s good. So that’s that. So, let’s dive into entrepreneurship trends. Covid really helped, I don’t want to say it helped, but it accelerated a lot of things in the world of business, accelerated a lot of things that were going on, but it made a lot of big shifts in our society and the business landscape, of what was going on.

And it also increased the amount of people that maybe had a side hustle and then turned it into a business. And people who. They didn’t have a side hustle, created a side hustle. People who worked at businesses that were closed went back to school and learned new skills so that they could get a, they could start a business.

So, it really accelerated that. And I think Covid motivated people just to figure out a way in general. But I’m saying people got used to their entrepreneurial spirit and figured out a way to make money by working at home. So, here’s, let’s talk about some trends.

The first one is the top reasons why some startups fail. So, some of these are cost issues. A lot of things people don’t realize, one of the most expensive things, the two most expensive things that you have when you have a business are your rent, and then labor. So, if you’re a solo entrepreneur, obviously labor’s not an issue.

But then rent used to be frowned upon to have a home-based business. Right. Now, it’s not frowned upon at all! I would say that’d be one of the bigger trends. Except for maybe if you’re a restaurant. I don’t know. I know some people in the neighborhood selling plates and they’re making a killing.

No, I know, but I’m just saying that’s maybe a little bit further off. They’re almost. I know some people back home that are like, they’re using that, they use their kitchen, and then they’re stashing the money away to open up their real restaurant. But a lot of people do these popup restaurants now, stuff like that. Oh, yeah.

So, you’re able to do that if you get a license, to do it properly. So, another reason is if you. Yeah, the people I’m talking about they got no license, bro. They’re cooking out of their kitchen. Hey, listen I give it to them. They going to try. Nobody listens. The cops probably don’t care.

No. They’re buying their plates from them. I get upset. I know, but I get upset when I see the cops bust some kid with a lemonade stand. No, don’t do that! I was watching Gary V one day he went to a garage sale. You see the one where he got pulled over? Yeah, he went to this garage sale and there was a kid selling lemonade.

He gave the kid 20 bucks for the lemonade. For sure. Yeah. He got pulled over by the cops more than once. There’s a lemonade stand by my house it’s alright, man. Shout out to you all. But it’s not the kids. Okay. You can tell it’s the parents running. So, here’s the other thing where people get into a situation when they’re starting a business out-competed.

So, can you compete with whatever in the business that you’re in? Now we’re in a business merchant service, and there are mammoth companies that we go up against, but we don’t need to do as much business as they do because we don’t have the overhead that they have! Right. So, we’re able to compete, but not maybe at, we can’t get the amount of accounts that they get.

So, you have to remember, “there are ways to do it.” Yeah. You just need to know how much you need to make to pay your bills. Not the right people. Maybe you’re not the right person. If you’re, if you start a business and you have to make, somebody’s making sales, right? So, you have to become a salesperson.

They should really teach that in high schools, like sales. They should, I don’t know, principles, something better. Entrepreneurship in general. Yeah, but they need to teach people about sales! Like money management. Yeah. Basic money management 1 0 1. That’s also a big problem. Economics. Because the next one is no more cash, right?

You don’t have enough cash for your business. So, service businesses are always good if you don’t have a lot of cash because you’re providing a service and you’re not providing, you don’t have to go buy a bunch of stuff to sell! Right. So, if you have to go buy inventory and then sell the inventory, that becomes a cash flow problem!

If you don’t have, if you’re just doing a service, like making a website making a bunch, shooting videos for somebody’s business and doing their social media, or doing dog walking, it’s a service, you don’t really have a lot of inventory. You don’t have any inventory to deal with in most cases.

Nope. And here’s one which I don’t get, no market need. Maybe you came up with a service, nobody that nobody really needs, or it’s too niche. Or you just picked a terrible location. Yeah, so it’s a terrible location. Everybody, when it gets down to it, everything’s location. If you’re, I don’t know, like a restaurant, any type of those types of businesses, you got to be very aware of the neighborhood, what’s around the businesses, the competition, the poverty rate.

Yeah, you got to know your product must be priced right and competitively. That the neighborhood can actually afford. So that the people can afford it. Because you got to remember when, if you have a store, a physical location. Gucci won’t open a shop in the middle of a bad neighborhood. Right!

But what I’m trying to say is most of your customers are going to come from five miles away and then maybe 10 miles away. And then beyond that, unless you have some special things. They’re going to be very loyal. That people are going to drive for, then you have that’s.

Well talking about that,the famous sandwich shop in Chicago closed one of its original locations. And the owner says I’m moving 10 miles away. It’s 10 minutes, they’ll come and get the sandwich and they have a that’s their other location is 10 minutes away. Okay.

He’s Forget it, and that’s loyalty though, right? You must build what I am trying to do and your loyalty to get there. Right, yeah! Some products people are not going to drive. They’re not going to drive 20, 30 minutes to go get it. No. Unless it’s something special!

Or the price is right. Yeah, or the price is outstanding, or you have a great selection of clothing that nobody else has, it’s unique. Then that’s good. The entrepreneur’s age profile is interesting. So, who’s most likely to start a business? So here we go. Let’s start with the youngest age 18 to 29-year-olds.

Only 4%. I think that’s a little higher. I would say it’s more than that dude. And I find that a lot of the tech stuff is young people, so I think that’s higher. There are just some, we see some facts online from different sources. And then the next age group, 30 to 39, 14%, 40 to 49, 25%.

That does not seem right to me. What if you would start a business at 40, maybe, a second career? You got to remember, work-wise, I can tell you this. 50 to 59 though, is the number? Yep, 50 to 59 is number one. Do you know why? Because at 50 maybe you get to. People retire? You get panned out of your job! Oh, right.

Because they don’t want to pay somebody. Well, that makes sense. What do you have to do? You got to start a business in order to make money. So that’s set. And then the 70-year-olds are tied with 4% with the 18 and 20. Yeah. Maybe they have a side hustle. 18 to 29? It could be that low! It just seems.

Maybe somebody does, but you never know. I don’t know. Yeah, so I was out there hustling before 18. Top industries for businesses, entrepreneurs. Business services, that’s what we talked about, having a service 11%, food, and restaurants 11%, health, fitness, and beauty 10%. Because when you think about it, you can go to a, let’s say a barbershop or a beauty salon or a nail salon.

They rented a space. Yeah. You can rent a space and a lot of those places, you don’t have to be in an employee situation. You could be a. No, they’re most of the time they’re all their own boss. Yeah, your own entrepreneur, fitness. Like they just rented they’re just renting a booth at the barbershop, that’s how that works. 

Like a lot, one of my friends during Covid was working for a company. They cut back a lot of people and he was a big fitness buff. So, what did he do? He started a personal training business. Now he’s happier! He is making, about the same amount he was making before he built it up.

Yeah. And he is doing well with it now, he is in a couple of gyms that he goes to where they, he gets clients at the gym and stuff like that! Smart. I was just talking to my bud, my guy, Chuck High Tower back in Milwaukee. He’s got a training called Getting Cut with Chuck. Get Cut with Chuck! Yeah, man. He’s like this guy who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. He should get a picture next to Charles Barkley because you don’t want to look like that.

Chuck Norris. Oh, Chuck Norris okay! And then general retail, 7%. Retail’s probably one of the hardest businesses unless you have a lot of money for inventory. I say a restaurant is the hardest business, I don’t care! Probably both. The restaurant’s inventory is perishable. So, if you don’t sell it and it goes bad, it’s going in the garbage. You’re screwed.

Home Services 6%. That’s one thing that needs to change in the United States. One of the guys, I like to watch all the time is that guy, 30 to 30 jobs guy. Oh yeah, he’s hilarious. He always talks about, people fixing stuff and everything. There’s just not enough of them. They took that out of the school, man.

I know that. There’s no tech, we had, man, growing up. I know you had it cooler than I did. Yeah, we had an auto shop. But I wood shop, they took away the auto mechanic shop before I got there, but my dad had that. They were like by the time they got out of high school, he could change his oil, check his spark plugs.

Oh, I wouldn’t want to ask like a young kid today. Oh, you got a flat tire? What do you? My daughter literally asked me yesterday. Yeah! Dad, do you know how to change a tire? I looked at her and I said, What? Yeah, my son. Yes! Yeah, my son didn’t know how to change a tire.

I was like, Dude, you better learn quickly! Like how to use a jack. Because what are, man, I’m not going to be sit, like sitting outside waiting for eight hours for AAA, for a tire? Yeah, exactly! No. My dad would, if he would literally, find me and choke slam me, like the undertaker. If I ever told him that I called someone to change my tire, I’m telling you like that.

Like he gets mad. No, but that’s it. If I can’t change my oil. That’s the same thing like we’re talking about, like basic skills need to be brought back to school. How to change a tire. Yes. Driver’s ed, wood shop, like you need to learn. Welding, carpentry. Yeah, all of these things. The services, what is it that we’re trades. The trades.

The trades need to come back there. There are not enough tradespeople. Yeah, the guy, you got to call 30,000 numbers to get a hold of somebody to come and fix something at your place, man. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. It’s nuts! Yeah, you got to find. Not everybody is a rapper. Not everybody is a dancer and not everyone is a social media player or influencer. Or an NBA player.

Yeah, stop telling everyone that they’re going to be pro athletes. Or they go to college. Listen, it’s okay to push someone to be in a trade, it’s okay to say, hey man, I see you struggling in school. Have you thought about carpentry, plumbing, and electricity? That might be really good for you.

Air conditioning. HVAC and you don’t have to go to school for that stuff. You do, you got to go to get it certified, but it’s not like this huge thing, you aren’t got to you improve, you might excel at that and like it, and then learn how to do it and make a lot of money.

These guys are making 15 to a hundred dollars an hour. I went to school with a guy, Julian Coleman, shout out to you, bro. And we went to school together ever since, I don’t know, third, fourth grade, whatever. Yeah. We went all the way up until eighth grade and we stayed in touch. We were, we were all friends.

Even when we were like, I forget, we had one of those, like the trades, come to the school and talk to you about the stuff. Yeah. He met the guy who was a plumber. Right! He owned his home plumbing company, and he said the word, I swear to God, word is born. When we got back from that thing, we were in the classroom talking about what we were going to do.

He said I’m going to own my own plumbing company. It’s going to be Diamond Plumbing Inc. Or whatever. Yeah. 10 years later, what do you think he did? Started plumbing! Starting a plumbing company and it’s one of the largest plumbing companies in Wisconsin. Okay, it’s awesome! Like the dude is black and owned straight out of the slums of Milwaukee.

Like everything that you thought would be put against you to not succeed was there for him and he did it, man. So, shout out to all the entrepreneurs that are going through adversity like that. Yeah, that stuff needs to come back. There are not enough tradespeople when you want to go fix something in your house, it’s very stressful to do that.

Listen, before I started doing what I’m doing, I was a power engineer like Homer Simpson. Like I controlled the temperatures and made sure that it was hot and cool and not like the press, the button at the nuclear plant, like power engineering. But that’s what I did. That’s a sex part of Power Engineering.

That’s a trade and you got to go to school for that. I didn’t have to go to school long. I got, took some license and that was it. But I got hurt on a job and I had to adapt. I had to pivot, which is something that you learn in entrepreneurship that you have to do a lot. Having gone through that helped me through my, entrepreneurship career as well. 

That’s why I always tell you, one of the most important books that somebody ever gave me when I first got into payment processing was Who Moved My Cheese? Yes, that’s a good book. And basically, the concept is, you have to look at that all the time, every year, twice a year.

What’s changing in your business? What’s changing in the economy, what’s changing that you can adjust your business to do? How are you changing? Right! How are you changing all the different factors of changing? So here let’s get into a couple of different factors that are going on with business.

So, we talked about business from home. That’s like really growing and very, and also, becoming more acceptable. Yeah, people are doing drop shipping from home. They’re doing customer service from home, they’re doing scheduling. Yeah, tons of companies hire people to work at home!

And that was the next one. Globalized business. What does that even mean? Oh, they’re, people that are getting hired to do jobs from all over the world to work at, they’re working for companies remotely, remote work. Yeah. Now, one thing me and Justin agree on is that we should be trying, if you’re living in the United States, to employ people in the United States, please.

We’re for that. We’re not, for going and getting these people. The main reason I’m for that beside like I understand who those people are. They’re going through it over there in their country. They’re that’s, I feel, I don’t know if I feel bad for them, you know that. They got to earn a living!

They have to work just like we have to work. But, so like the thing that really bothers me about that whole situation is, and I, being a business owner, also understand that there is an overhead of running a business. So, stuff gets expensive. Yeah! You know what I mean? And you don’t always want to pay what it costs for the work that needs to be done.

Unfortunately, when you’re sending all that work overseas, you’re taking the value away from everyone here. Because we can’t buy or pay our rent off an eight-hour check. With what they would get down there, they could pay their rent for a whole. Oh yeah, it’s crazy. You know what I mean?

So, I didn’t even understand. It’s really hard to, I didn’t understand that. My friend was explaining to me, he goes, oh, you pay some guy like 200 bucks, like in one of them, like in the Philippines, he goes, 200 bucks. He goes, That’s 50 grand. Yeah. For, It’s crazy. I was working with, I had the several of the ties because it’s like, they get, I don’t want to say greedy, but it’s, it is just, they knew that it was, it’s like I’m a cash cow to them.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And so, they could always, hey, I got this. You should do this. Let me do this for you, let me! And I started catching myself like, hey man, wait a minute, I need to send this work to someone else, man. You got to sprinkle it around a little bit. You got to figure it out. But there are a lot of businesses from other countries and they’re hiring people in the US to do stuff for them.

Programming and all that! For sure. It’s a lot of. That means one hand washes the other. But at the same time, like. That’s at a higher level. Yeah. We’re talking about the low-level stuff. Yeah. The guy higher the local, the higher the local web developer, instead of going on fiber. Or hiring your own employee to do it.

And that way you can do more and change stuff quicker and move faster. Okay, here’s the thing, mobile commerce now that’s been around forever, and I always talk. What would that be? So mobile commerce is like you’re on the road. And you go to somebody’s house to fix stuff. Oh, okay. Having a device so you can take the credit card from the person is important versus just key entering it. You really want to have the device make your business look like, hey, this guy’s got a real business. He’s got the swiper. The little swiper thing hooks up to your phone.

You’re going to save money on the rates and fees anyway. Don’t be cheap. And do get a good mobile commerce solution. Same thing, or let’s say you’re selling something very expensive, you want to have like actual credit card machine maybe. And they look at it, you want to make your business good and efficient! Make it look as big as it can be. 

Like the same thing we talk about like with invoicing, right? Don’t be cheesy. Have a good invoicing solution. So, if you’re sending somebody an invoice, it’s detailed, click the link and make the payment. Don’t just send them the amount, do the details, the work, to make your business.

Make some notes, put a note in there like I always add a note at the bottom of an invoice. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you for doing business with me. I appreciate it. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you. Yeah, ask for a referral. If you haven’t already, say, Hey, blah, blah, blah. Make it personal. 

Like with our new website, Nationwide Payment Systems. Yeah. What’s really cool is you send the person an invoice and then you can actually have a conversation with them. Yeah. So, you can put a link in there. Hey, would you mind giving me a Google review? Oh, do you have a referral?

Is anybody, you could refer to me? So, you can actually keep in touch with your customers! It’s a cool feature for invoicing. Social commerce. Now, this is something that’s really on the rise, selling. This doesn’t mean selling stuff on Facebook and using the Facebook marketplace means you figure out how to post a specific item and then sell it through a link.

Got it. And we have that in the new software. We give you the option to create these cool links. What he’s saying, what he’s trying to say is like, when you’re scrolling in your Instagram feed and you see a T-shirt and it clicks this link and you can just buy that T-shirt, that’s what he’s referring to.

That’s social commerce, not, you don’t want to send them to your website and then they have to go find it again, or they have to go to the website and go through the shopping cart. You can actually enable social commerce! It’s the least click-through amount the user must do. The least amount of clicks, it’s going to get the sale done. 

And then the gig economy, this is growing, but I won’t, Justin always says, I talk too much about bills in Congress and everything. But the gig economy is very important, but they’re trying Congress. What’s the gig economy? Gig Economies like Uber, and Door Dash. It’s like the gig economy.

Okay, You’re, you might be a DJ gig economy. People who get a DJ. DJ is considered a gig? Yeah, gig. A band is a gig. Wow. They don’t put you on the, let’s say you have Allen and Justin. As a DJ I would, but see I’ve, I know so many DJs. Yeah. That they run it like a business. They’re not gig-working though.

They’re like, they’re sending out contracts. I know, but I’m saying the new law we saw that Congress wants to make, they would say, oh, let’s say you’re hiring the Allen and Justin duo to come out. I’m going to play the banjo. You hire. And Justin’s going to play a fiddle. You’re hiring B2B vault. What? To come out to your event to podcast the event.

To podcast at your event. They’re trying to say, “You have to hire us and make us an employee and pay us through payroll instead of just writing us a check and we deal with it.” We swear that whole thing. It was, it’s crazy. It’s so crazy. When you just put it like that in the way you explained it though, we didn’t explain it that way. But I know. but I’m saying. You did a really good job of explaining it that way.

We go and what? They’re saying like. How long is that going to wait? I have to wait two weeks. That’s what I’m saying. They’re trying to say Oh, we’re going to come in and DJ at your bar now. They can’t, we can’t send you an invoice for the half hour. That’s on, Yeah, that’s what they’re trying to say.

Now they want the business to hire us as employees even though it’s only for the day. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know. That’s what I’m saying. Whoever complained or got fired from somewhere that’s trying to pass this man, you guys suck. What it is that you have people in Congress that are very out of touch with small businesses and they’re basically making a lot of rules just to screw small businesses.

And I don’t like it. I was reading about something the other day. I don’t like it. Not to talk about it. Let’s not get into that. Yes. Increasingly niche markets. This I love, here’s to all the time I hear about new types of businesses and new things people are trying to do. Like being a niche market. Okay!

So, I, this guy that wanted to have let’s say your iPhone let’s say your cell phone company has a hundred dollars deductible to cover your phone when it breaks. Okay. And you don’t have a lot of money. So, I saw this, there was a guy, and we tried to get an account, I couldn’t work with him because he just does, he’s not funded well enough. So, he wanted to charge people $5 a month. And then if your phone broke and you had to pay a hundred bucks, they would cover a hundred bucks.

Cause you’re paying the five, this is $5 a month to them. But I said to the guy, this, you’re not the guy like five grand in the bank account. I’m like, Dude, do you think the bank is going to let you collect payments from thousands of people, and then you have no money in your bank account? No, that’s not going to work.

I said, he went to Stripe and PayPal, but they declined it because it’s too risky. Sounds super risky. Yeah, but a niche market would be. Like they would replace your whole? Yeah. No, they would give you a hundred bucks to cover the warranty, that fee you’d have to pay to get your phone replaced.

With all the phone companies, you don’t just get it for free unless it is. Their deductible. Yeah. There’s a hundred dollars deductible now on these phones. Used to be free. Unless it’s complete, like the equipment just fried out and it’s their fault, then they would just give you a free phone.

But if it’s not. Yeah, no, you got to pay for them. Then it’s a hundred dollars deductible for the fixed to the screen and all that. You got these things like cars. Yeah. It’s nuts. Yeah. I read this article about cars that I did not like the other day. Like it’s one of the things that I see people complain about Tesla. Yeah. I read about Carvana, they’re going to go bankrupt. Their stock went to a dollar. That’s rough. 

No one is buying cars right now. No, cars are way overpriced. Yeah. Cars are a big problem! They’re going to, I don’t know how these car dealerships are going to survive because now. They’re not. They’re moving into this thing where the car dealership, whatever, two, two years ago, three years ago, you would go to the car dealership, there’s one by my house.

Have a six-story garage. Yeah. Full of cars, right? There are no cars in that thing. As fast as the car gets to get delivered, they’re sold. So, you even have to order your car and then when it comes, you come and get it. There’s no, they’re not carrying any inventory. And now these, what are these car places going to do with these massive parking lots and massive car garages they built and all that?

It’s nuts! They’re going to turn them into condos. Something’s going to have to be done. That’s what I’m I don’t know. Cause when I drive past these car lots now like. There are no cars! There are no cars, and the cars that are there don’t sell. Or they’re used cars. Yeah. A lot of that’s filled up with used cars.

How can these used car lots even afford the rent? I have no idea what’s going on. The car market is crazy right now. Cause where I live in Fort Lauderdale on State Road 7. Yeah, there are car lots everywhere. Every, yeah. Side of the street. There’s a car lot restaurant. Car Lot restaurant.

Car lot. Car lots everywhere. 441 that’s the car capital used cars capital of the world. Car capital of the world. Yep. It’s crazy. No. So, a niche business would be like, Oh, I only train Jack Russell Terriers. Oh, okay. So very niche. But there are a lot of companies coming up with like niche products, niche things and there can be a success with that if you have, if there’s a market for it.

Okay. You have to make sure there’s a market for that product. Yeah man, you got to research whatever it is you’re going to go into. We talked about that a lot. We talked about researching your name, the company’s name, and not just locally, but nationally on social media, making sure you can get those handles correctly.

But yeah, man, niche markets, it’s a cool thing to get into. I think that most entrepreneurs. You just have to be really thought out. Yeah. When you’re going to do something niche, there is a market for it. So, here’s the other thing. Just quick, like web design, it took me a long time to realize that my niche market was home renovation.

So I was, I had tons of clients that were home remodelers, tile companies, roofing, and landscaping. When you find your niche, that’s where you go. You just go stay in your lane. Don’t stray from there. Yeah, stay in your lane. Try some new stuff sometimes if you’re good at what you’re doing and maybe focus on interior decorating. 

That’s not far out of the, you’re still in the homeownership realm. Yeah, you want to develop a good niche when you’re doing something like that. Here’s the thing, continue. We’ve talked about this before, the continuous rise of subscription rate-based businesses where people charge a monthly fee.

I still think that enough businesses don’t do this. They don’t do it. I think they need to do it more and they need to, Businesses need to actively think about how they can have a monthly subscription plan for their business. I can tell you that, we have pest control. Affordably. Right! We have a pest control place that does it.

We have an air conditioning place that does it. We have a pool, and you can’t wait like this. Like we have a pool guy and it’s a friend of mine who started a pool company and I was like, what are you doing? You’re just like going to these people’s houses trying to collect money from them every month.

Just get everybody on automated billing. Yeah! You can’t just do that. You got to have everybody on automated billing for your service. That way you’re spending less time trying to collect money and more time making it getting new customers. So, it’s important to figure out like even with our new thing, nationwidepaymentsystems.com, it’s a subscription-based merchant processing.

You’re paying a monthly subscription month to month. You like us, keep us, don’t like us, and get rid of us. So, it’s. You’ll like us. You’ll like us, you’ll love us because the pricing is good and there’s excellent customer service. And the other tools that you get within it. It’s irreplaceable.

Yeah, the tools are awesome. So here we have the adoption of disruptive technologies. So, this is something that I like. Meta. The metaverse is disruptive Yeah, the Metaverse is a little disruptive. And FTS was disruptive. Crypto was disruptive. We’re reading crazy news about crypto. There’s one guy that had all these crypto ATMs, His name is Friedman Bank.

Yeah, Friedman with the FTX boss Bank Friedman, whatever his name is. I can, yeah, whatever. The guy, the FTX guy. Yeah. He tried to rescue all these companies that were failing. Shout out to you, bro. Yeah. Shout out, man. He took, whatever. That guy took a, he took a shot at trying to fix stuff. Oh yeah.

He got assassinated. Voyager, he tried to bail them out. He’s on life support right now. He’s on life support right now. Now he’s hoping that Bance is going to come in. Which is his adversary. Right! Like they ate each other, which is crazy. So, he’s hoping they’re going to come in, and buy his company for 16 billion.

Then he’ll walk away with 16 billion. But I think he was worth like over a hundred billion not that long ago. Oh yeah. Yeah. So good luck, Sam. Yeah. Sam, that’s his name. Sam Friedman Bank. I don’t know Sam. Yeah, I, they, whatever the guy that knows Fay’s name is hyphenated at the guy that owns FTX.

Then there’s another story that came out, which is insane, was some guy that had these Bitcoin ATMs everywhere and then they, I guess now he’s going to go to jail, and he was laundering all this money. And then I was talking to some guys that deal with trading. And they were telling me, they said, oh after that got, those transactions got flagged right?

Cause there was money laundering going on. Like this guy didn’t pay his taxes. The government’s going to, they’re getting him on everything. Like non-payment of taxes. If they can’t find him. They found him. Oh. They caught the guy already. Why were you still in the United States bro? So now they, so then my friend was telling me, he goes, oh, let’s say the people bought those Bitcoins and then they took them and they either cashed them out, let you know, cashed them out some way, or bought stuff with it.

Or let’s say they traded them to, traded those bitcoins for do coin. Right! And then they did something with that. But if they still held onto any of them, all those coins that were not used for anything are all flagged and now they can’t be used. Because of the blockchain, it would be like the equivalent of you stealing a bunch of money from the bank and they had all the serial numbers, and then somehow when every time you went to the store to use, let’s say a $20 bill, but it was stolen.

The bank and the pubs had a way to scan that money. Which they don’t. Yet. To be able to scan the serial number. And make sure “the feds do though”, to make sure that it wasn’t they don’t know all the time when somebody if there’s money in the bank. Well, that’s how they track those when you rob a bank, and you go start spending that money.

They track what you spent it. But my point is that with Bitcoin, apparently, every trans, everything as a serial number says they’ll go in the system. And this guy was telling me that runs a coin company that we’re working with was telling me that, oh, those coins, if we see a transaction come through and it contains those serial numbers, the transaction is blocked.

Wow. Because they can’t use those coins. They’re involved. How do they see it? Do they just have some sort of algorithm go through? Yeah, they’re flagged on the blockchain. Oh, okay. Like bad coins. They’ve already got bad coins. Now if you spent them already, somebody else has.

There’s nothing they can do about that because that person has the coins now. So, let’s say I got 10 Bitcoins. Yeah. Yeah. And then I gave, then I spent them at, I gave you the 10 Bitcoins to make me 10 websites. So now you have the coins. They’ve not flagged because you have them now. No.

But yeah, that makes sense. But if I still had them, at least, I would have three more. They’re no good growing importance of social responsibility. I don’t really agree with this. In fact, when I see companies that put social responsibility statements, like on their website, I think it’s a lot of pandering.

Whatever they, whatever social issue. What does social responsibility mean? A social issue that they want to put on their website, say, oh, climate change or whatever, that they’re supporting it. I don’t think it’s very. I don’t think it’s an important thing. So, there’s. To put on your website as a business. I would say the only thing that I like seeing is looking at websites that are trying to be carbon-free because some websites are really, really big.

It requires tons of servers to operate. So that’s what they’re, other than that. I’m just saying it’s a difficult thing to achieve. I don’t care if Johnson and Johnson support whatever ” I don’t care”. That’s what I’m trying to say. They shouldn’t be, that’s this one thing about this whole, Yō man its part of the woke thing.

I don’t care about your opinion, bro. That’s what I’m saying. Like I grew up in a place where, in time where your opinion, if not kept to yourself, could either get you punched in the face. Or in a big argument, you didn’t want to be in. I think that needs to be, I don’t know.

Yeah, they need that, man. I just think that doesn’t need to be part of the business. Didn’t your mom always say to keep your opinion to yourself? I don’t think it needs to be part of the business. I don’t think it should be a part of the social community. I don’t Your opinions are your opinion. Mark Wahlberg said, write a book as Mark Wahlberg said, Celebrities should be celebrities and they shouldn’t put their opinions on the public because they have a lot of money and it’s very easy for them to say, Go buy an electric car that costs 80,000 bucks. 

I’m saying not like this is these are our opinions, right? Of on B2B Vault. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a voice for that, but what I’m saying is I don’t want to be, I’m not forcing you to listen to this podcast, right?

But we’re also not telling people to be socially responsible on a particular issue. So, all I ever say is peace, be righteous. That’s all I was looking for. Peace, love, and happiness. That’s all I can say. The next one was on a couple of lists that we looked at increasing diversity. I think that it’s very important.

It’s important, but I think that there are laws like I worked for big companies when I was in the hotel business, equal opportunity employment, I’m just a believer that everybody, people come in for a job. You interview all, you interview everybody for the job! Right. You pick the best person.

You try to, I think this is more for when I’m reading about diversity and entrepreneurship, right? Yeah. I think it’s more for like when you’re talking about Women in like C-level roles? No, I understand that. I’m just talking about like diversity in general I think is important, but at the same time, we don’t work with each other, we work with banks.

We don’t try to scrutinize things like, where does the person live? No. What’s their economic background? I’ve had people come to us with bad credit. Okay, they might have bad credit and there are certain businesses, that have bad credit. We can get you still approved for your merchant account, as long as it’s some kind it’s a restaurant.

Somebody’s coming there, getting stuff there. It’s a retail store, you’re cutting hair. But if it’s somebody with like bad credit, who wants to sell electronics on a website, they’re probably not getting approved. So, you got to, you can’t like, take these things too far is what my point is. And we, and we try to work with everybody.

We don’t care what you’re, we don’t care what it is. We work with everybody. More specialized business education, which is what we talked about. Like different things. Also, basic skills need to be taught in school. Give kids Canva, right to you. Learn how to use, oh man, to learn how to use basic graphic design.

Learning how to use “WordPress”, Office 365, Google Docs, whatever you call that. Google. Google Suite. Google Suite, G Suite. People need to learn these things, but not after they graduate high school, right? No. In school, they need to be given these tools, like whatever the tool is that they’re given, but they need to learn how to do Excel spreadsheets. Shout out to Google for you all the work that they do for the schools too.

Yeah, Google and Apple give away a lot of computers to school Dell. A lot of companies give away computers to schools that try to help, give people those Chromebooks, and all that. And as parents, men, I’m a parent of six daughters, I advocate for technology, but be aware of what they’re doing on technology, man.

Monitor the screens. Stop playing around. Steve Jobs didn’t give his kids iPhones, iPads, or any of that. Think about that one. And then, so also when you’re talking about that, my daughter is a meteorologist. So, she goes to school all the time. I think she missed it during Covid, not sending her to schools.

But she goes to school all the time and she talks to kids about the weather. She talks some about stem now they also call it steam, but, and she judges science contests, and she promotes that, people, kids should learn about science, technology, engineering, and math, right? Science, technology, engineering, and math.

Cause all of those things are important. You need engineers and engineering can be all sorts of engineering, electrical, if you’re an electrician, you could be an electrical engineer too. So, it just depends on how far you want to take all that. So specialized business education is good. We’re getting to it a long time in the podcast, so let’s not get crazy younger entrepreneurs we’re seeing.

More internet media outlets. I don’t know Media is just crazy. There are too many pay channels. That’s, there are just way too many mobile businesses that will adapt and evolve. I think we’re going to see more mobile businesses in the future, a lot more because rent is too expensive. Shout out to all the mobile barbers out there.

I think that’s a really cool thing! Yeah. Mobile barbers. I’ve seen it. The guy, this one guy I know has a truck now. He redid a school bus. Oh. We had a short school bus. We had a lady for a while, and she took a school bus and a motor home and turned it into a retail store, and she used to do a popup retail store.

It’s very smart. All over Miami. I don’t know what happened, but I think that they had a problem with something, and they ended up going out of business. No, that sucks. But it was a good idea. I just think that they. I didn’t have enough places to go take it. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Where to go to park the store and kind of fits into the next Yeah. Hyperlocal specialty shops, we see that popping up a lot. Seems to be very trendy, like donuts with all kinds of weird stuff on them. Or ice cookies. Or ice cream. Egg rolls. Yeah. Weird egg rolls or things like that. Different kinds of like Korean food, like food that you don’t normally see, and I think we’re going to see a lot more like fast casual restaurants with like takeout for where you can get, meals for your house. How come there are not so many places to sit down? I know there are a lot of places on the beach to sit out and eat, right? It’s outside seating.

How come we don’t do that, why is that not a big thing down here? It’s a problem. Space is expensive. So, a lot, I think that I think a lot of businesses need to rethink where they’re putting their business. I think Covid also accelerated businesses to start thinking about, hey, do I need to be in a freestanding restaurant building?

Do I need that? Do I really need this building? Do I need this building? Are we going to see more ghost kitchens in the future? Do I need, if I have a restaurant, I need to have a patio outside? Do I need a food truck? Do I need a food truck? I don’t know. A food truck is like a weird thing to me.

So, I think if a restaurant is as really quick, I think if a business is big enough, a very popular place. Yeah. And, they purchase a food truck to extend their reach, like to go to events or stuff like that. That’s how for instance, Burger Fi does that.

That makes sense to me. But like food trucks, if that’s your only thing, and no one can always find where you are. Yeah, that’s, I feel like you’re setting yourself up for failure. Like you got to it’s a difficult kind of business. Yeah. And also, it’s difficult.

How does the health department deal with that? People want to feel safe. There are so many different rules for that, right? So many, like, when they have an event outside, then they’ll have, then the health department will show up, oh, there are 10 food trucks, and they inspect all the food trucks. But you must also be registered for that event.

You got to go get your licenses for that event. You got to, That’s, they’re making it expensive. The city’s making it expensive to do that. Down in Miami, in Wynwood, they have a big parking lot, and there are a lot of food trucks in there. They’re not even trucks. A lot of them are just like a trailer.

They don’t, they never move. They never move. So, that was pretty cool that they did that! There’s a place like that over in Flagler Village. In Fort Lauderdale. Yeah. I saw, like they, It’s cool. They just started that recently, right? Yeah. But it’s already done. They already, I don’t know what they, it’s like the businesses around there pushed all of them.

Pull stuff out already. Yeah, it’s, we’re very, yeah, the city has to stick with it. Green businesses, I’m not like a big fan of that because I’ve been hearing different things like, oh, if you put solar panels on your house, you got to take out extra insurance Cuz it’s not covered under your insurance. I’m paying $25 a month.

To FP&L for solar panels and I don’t have several panels, so tell me how that works. That’s weird. No, it’s the service fee. It’s because that’s what everyone asks. If you look at your bill, you’re paying it too. Oh, I noticed that my power bill went up recently. Yeah. Also, because of the price of gas, everything.

It is everything just nuts. So that is our thing. So, we talked about entrepreneurial trends today and if you’re an entrepreneur and you need credit card processing, check out our new website, nationwide payment systems.com, where you can answer 10 questions and get approved in about five minutes.

Then you have an active m I d you can send out invoices, and you get a free WordPress plugin for your e-commerce site you can. A bunch of fees that you usually have to pay in reference to having an e-commerce merchant account. So, you don’t have to pay a hundred dollars a year for the plugin. You’re not paying 20 bucks a month for the gateway and additional transaction fees.

So, we can save you a lot of money in that way. So, it’s a great way to get what you need for your business. Indeed. And we take all types of business, you don’t have to talk to anybody. All the pricing is there. It’s very straightforward, and transparent. We’re the alternative to the big three. And as a bonus, there’s actual customer service

So, there’s a 24-hour chat through the dashboard. You can always chat with somebody. There are phone numbers to call up, open a support ticket, and so on and so forth! So, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot that can, you can do, or you can text BOOK. Text the word B O O K to 9 5 4 8 2 7 9 8 1 8 to schedule an appointment with Allen and he’ll answer any questions that you have.

Great. So that’s our storm addition of B2B Vault. Everybody stays safe with Nicole. Try to stay dry and celebrate entrepreneurs. Hit me up if you’re having any hurricane parties, please. Rocky wants to go too.