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How many of you guys want the big fleet accounts? You know, the whales, the one with all the vehicles. Would your shop even survive or even be able to fulfill that project? And I'm not referring to like I'll figure it out when I finally get it. What are you doing today to ensure that when you finally get a chance to get an at-bat on a massive project or opportunity? Are you ready? Have you been preparing? You know, when I ran a 250-mile ultra, I didn't just show up and say, I'll figure it out as I go. I practiced, I put in the work weekly, and then I had one very long day that I pushed myself to put my brain in a sense that, okay, this is what that is like. Your business is very much the same. You must put yourself in a situation where you understand what it takes in smaller increments. If you currently are lacking deal flow in your business, then the reason why you want the really big fleets is because you don't want to fix your deal flow. And what's interesting is you find out everything that you need to learn to get the big fleet in practicing the reps, acquiring new business. And so that's why in this video today, we're going to be going over the real reason that vehicle wrap shops owners lose the fleet projects before they even get to start. Now, this is a topic of mind that is currently occurring in my business. And the reason why I'm going to give you guys my story is because I'm very much like everybody that watches these videos. There is nothing special about my shop at all. It is possible for you to grow a business that is a legitimate business that is operationally sound, and there is a very straightforward way of going about it. Now, what makes it difficult is the leadership duties and dealing with people by all means. But it I'm not saying that it's easy, what I am trying to say that it is possible. So I just want to remove that limiting belief. But if you think that a fleet account is going to fix your business or that a large account is going to save you from having to do more sales, and it's going to just make everything so much easier because oh, I can just print the same thing over and over. It's hard, it has its own friction points that is very difficult. And I am currently in a situation where we are literally negotiating right now at a table for let's call it 400 units in the next three months. And they're making a decision one month prior. So there's liter literally zero lead up time. And then I started thinking, I was like, you know what? If we get this project and we got all 400 units, what is that actually going to cost us? Like, are we even ready for this? And I started thinking about it and I started running the numbers. And if we had all the projects, I don't know how the rollout occurs, but effectively we're going to run at$64,000 in expenses every single week. And this is a case where you for sure are not getting paid half uh upon uh you know invoice and half upon completion. It's a 45-day net terms for this particular project. And um, this is our first really, really big big boy um project. We've done some 50 vehicle, 60 vehicle, uh, we've even done 100 vehicle fleets, but 400 is a complete step up, and especially in the time frame that is allotted for. And uh there's been massive learning lessons in this, and so I just wanted to share it with you guys, share my experiences, try to make it in a way that um is relatable uh because all of us are in different stages, and this story and or situation could be applicable to you as let's just say you're at the$300 to$500,000 range, totally fine. But what happens when somebody with 20 vehicles comes to you and tries to buy? What do you do? How do you make sure that you're ready? So the very first thing that I highly recommend is it is so much easier to have a line of credit or financing or credit cards and everything else that reports to your EIN that separates you from the business to where your business actually has credit history in advance. If you do not have a line of credit, stop what you're doing, shoot me a DM. I will send you a guy named Paul, and he is a complete turbo nerd on helping you get business credit. He understands this to a T, he loves it, like he likes it the way we like to wrap corners. And um I met him, and it was insane how much we don't know about business finance. Well, currently I had a hundred and fifty thousand dollar line of credit, and I thought it was big enough. I was like, yeah, I never use this thing. I literally never touch it, it's just sitting there. I've literally had this line of credit for like three years. Um, I used it to put HVAC in uh one of my shops, and since that I haven't touched it, right? And um, I kept asking for uh more and more, fortunately. Uh so it went from$75,000 to$150,000, but getting this job or potentially getting this job, uh, you know, I started looking and I was like, I don't even have a large enough line of credit. I don't have line of credits with Grimco. I don't have line of credits with Fellers, I don't have line of credits with Ranger, I don't have line of credits anywhere. And so I'm going to be the one personally financing that 45-day term when I actually purchase enough materials to go ahead and start at least, like if you're in the 300, 500k range, getting a line of credit of like 5K or 10K to where fellers will put you on 30-day terms to where when you get that fleet account, and let's just say it's 10 or 10, 20, 30 units, and for some reason it's not from the customer and it's from like enterprise, right? And they do have terms because they're just a national entity. They're that they have systems and processes too, and you can negotiate sometimes, but sometimes you just can't. Then you can kind of lean on that line of credit to help with your cash flow and not remove the cash out of your bank. Now, there is a second component to this, and this is the reason why I never felt that I needed the line of credit. And it's because I always kept 10% of my revenue in my business as a float. So if you're at a million dollars in business, then I would have$100,000 in cash reserve. So if you're$2 million, you'd have$200,000 in cash reserve. I've always ran my business this way to where I had this cash float that I treated as a zero dollar um point to where if I needed to hire somebody or if I needed to lean on the business a little bit, it didn't come out of my pocket, it came out of the business pocket. A lot of wrap shop owners are not running their business like a business. You're treating it kind of like a piggy bank. You're not paying yourself a salary to where you have a constant income that's fixed, that's coming out of the business. And then whenever you get a spike of cash, you take it all from the business. And I am so grateful that my mentor trained me this literally from day one: that you pay yourself a salary, that's all you get unless there's surplus. And that way you get a feedback loop of, am I doing good? Yes or no. So back in the day, my my surplus would be like$20,000, right? And we would keep the zero at$20,000, we would get up to$30,000 in let's just say funds in the bank after all the expenses cleared. And my mentor would be like, Hey, you have$30,000 in the bank. Do you need to buy anything? No, sir. Okay, cool. We're gonna distribute$10,000 and bring it back down to zero next month. If that's our report card, did the bank go down or did it go up? And running that process month over month allowed me to accidentally see, like I didn't realize that's what I was seeing at the time, but I was basically seeing the health of my business and what my efforts were actually doing. Um, because I was paying myself like$40,000 a year salary. All of my staff were on a some form of you know salary. It wasn't$10.99. And um we we effectively could always see, okay, last month was net positive. Sweet. And then was it net positive enough? So we had a ceiling. So if we would hit like$30,000 or$35,000, then we would bring it back down to$20. And if we had to$25,000, maybe we wouldn't touch it because it was too skinny. But then the next month it would be like$35,000. Cool, bring it back down to$20,000. And and then we'd even ask, start asking the question, like, hey, we're growing. Do we need to increase this to$30,000 zero? So we wouldn't take a distribution for that month. Like, are we forecasting any plans? Is winter coming? Do we need to go ahead and prepare for down months? What is the situation and how can we be prepared for it? So setting up a line of credit is massively important for your business, but also creating cash reserves to where even though my line of credit of$150,000 wasn't large enough, then I have the cash reserves. But even then, at$60,000 burn rate for 45 days, it's still greater than the total amount of line of credit and cash that I had on hand at the time. And so that's where it's really scary. Um, fortunately, I managed to figure it out between um getting Grimco on board with a line of credit, and then we also had um we already had a pre-procured American Express where um it allows for 60 days, and I have a pretty high spending power on it. Um and that in itself is scary because it's 20% interest if you if you don't pay um this the thing down. So, like, but I have fallback plans on multiple different scenarios so that I can make sure it happens. And then obviously, then we have to get really good at how we purchase our materials and how does that work. And and and the only way that you can do that is also by understanding your business to a deeper level. And knowing, like, okay, I need this many kits at this incremental time store. I don't just go and like buy all the materials at once, it's not that simple. You don't just buy all your materials at once, and you don't just print everything at once, and then and then sit on all this money that is coming through your shop. There's an art to scheduling and inventory management and everything. And that means that you're going to have to become a little bit less of a rapper and a little bit more of an accountant yourself. You need to understand your numbers of what is it going to cost you to do business? Do you have enough people? Can you afford it? Etc. Because if not, you will get a really big job and it will put you under, and you won't be able to pay bills and it could be a bad deal. If you are a shop that is not actively growing in the leadership role, then how could you ever expect to get fleet? If you're not willing to hire staff and not willing to delegate, because a lot of people they are their constraint in their business. If you don't have the ability to dispatch work, then how are you going to get a fleet either? And a lot of people don't ask themselves this question because they think that the fleet is the answer, but really that's cope. And it's cope because it's it in a it's cope, but it's kind of like shrouded as like hope in a way. You're ignoring the real problems and blaming the wrong thing. If you had, let's just say, an opportunity, and let's say you were a three to five man shop and you had a chance to do 20 units. That's a lot of that's 20 to 30 units is a lot. And you still had your normal work. That's the thing. When you get 20 or 30 units, you didn't lose all the other work either. You still have all of your normal monthly duties because you have to take care of those guys because the 20 and 30s don't come around every single day. And when they do, can you say yes? So, did you already have a backup plan where you've marketed for the installers in your area? Where there's a reason you should have a network of contractors in your area or at least a network of people that you know that you can call on and say, like, hey, if I ever need it, can you be there for me? Yes, great. And you start establishing relationships with everybody in your community. It it could not even be for a 2030 vehicle fleet. For example, let's say your installer calls in sick tomorrow. Who do you call? Or do you just tell the customer, hey, sorry, my installer called in sick today? No, but it should never affect the customer. You should have three or four or five contingency plans in place. And what's funny is it starts off as a contingency plan, but then it actually becomes a safety net for whenever the opportunity does arise. You can and you get a chance at bat, you can take the call. You can immediately start calling all these guys, hey, if I get this project, is you how's your schedule look, etc.? Instead of being incredibly reactive, where it's like, man, how am I gonna fulfill this? So uh start working on your bench. Do you see any professional team in any sport not having a B or C option for every position on the team? So you need to start having backup contract designers, you need to have backup contracted installers, you need to just know who is who. And that's the reason why staying small really isn't a safe play. Like it's fine, you can stay a small shop, but just understand that your frustrations and constraints are always going to stay the same. And the large fleet accounts that we desire, they're never going to buy from you. It's very obvious that you couldn't facilitate it in the first place, so you just get looked right over in many cases. Um the playing small is is almost like your business is aging. Like you see a lot of people say that, oh, well, I have 25 years in business, but they're like literally my my partner was just at a a convention and the guy wants to sell his business. Like, let's just talk about it for a second. The guy wants to sell his business, he's been in business for 25 years, he's doing upfitting and wraps. And um, so my partner uh Brad Rapone asked, Well, how much is your business doing, or how much revenue is your business doing? And he's like, Well, we're at like 1.5 mil. And like he was like super proud about that. And he's like, and I've never marketed and I've never done sales, da-da-da-da-da-da-da. But then also came all the slew of the other problems. Installers always leave me. I basically built all my competition around me. Um, you know, and he he failed to see, like, yes, he built a great business at 1.5 million, but what opportunities did he miss because he was too scared and complacent to grow? How many people would have stayed under his wing if he had the opportunity and the vision that his place was the place to be? Instead, many of the installers didn't see him as their leader, and they just kept churning out. And the expense of that churn is much greater than the expense or pressure, in my opinion, of just growing the business, even at 15% a year. Um the worst part of all of that is now that he's old, his business has aged with him. And so the example that I kind of want to kind of like say is like effectively his business has a timeline as well, and it's as it's aging with him, it's also dying with him, just like you know, we we're all gonna die one day. So, like not growing and having a mechanism, this unit that can operate without you means that it will die with you, right? Which also means that it's not sellable, and this is kind of a tangent, but uh it's hopefully a reason for you guys to grow and work towards earning these big fleet accounts. So, what does ready look like? You know, basically, if you don't have a QuickBooks and you don't have a way to track all of your numbers, like we hear that word a lot, like track your numbers, track your numbers. That's very generic. But the first step is to get QuickBooks. Second step is to hire a CPA that does your bookkeeping too. Not your mother, not your cousin, not Suzy Q, not your friend, a legitimate CPA. They're kind of hard to find. CPAs are hard to talk to, but if you need one, reach out to me. I got a guy named Jordan, he's a prior athlete. I've sent about 10 rappers to him so far. I use him personally. What I love about him is he is somebody that you can talk to. He's a little bit younger, so he's a little bit riskier on his strategy or a little more aggressive, if you will. Um, but when you talk to him, it's not like talking to a wall, which is phenomenal. So um I can highly recommend that. But the point is to get a CPA, somebody that can look at your stuff every month and say, hey, based on this, like why are you even offering this service? Like you're losing money over here. Like he can literally look at my numbers, see that, and tell me he will save you more money than he will cost you, period, or whoever that is, or a good one should do that. Get a line of credit now. If you think that you won't need it, then fine. Worst case scenario, you get your line of credit, you get your business credit, and you never use it. That is an awesome situation. At least you have it there for if you ever did have the need, or you had an emergency, whatever it may be, you have the line of credit. Um, start treating your business like it's a real person. Start allowing it to um have its own bank, like its own fund. Don't finance your business through your bank. Don't like so instead of taking all the like you're living in your business, like you're literally just robbing this thing of all of its funds, and it can never grow. It has an EIN number, which is effectively a social security number. It needs pay, it needs to be paid. So you need to constantly be putting funds into your business. And it's really weird at first, you're gonna get taxed on funds that you're not touching. So, like when I first started doing this, and let's just say I had$100,000 in the bank account, even though I didn't touch it on my K1, I had$100,000 in the bank. So I got pre-taxed on the money that I don't even have in my personal finances. Now, what's cool about that is next year, if I didn't raise my float, then that$100,000, like if I absolutely needed it at any point, like for some reason as an emergency, and I did use it as a biggie bank and I pulled$20,000 out, I've already been pre-taxed on it. So it doesn't count as income. Um, so sometimes we get caught up in now. Sometimes we make decisions today for tomorrow, but we're not making decisions for three to five years from now. And, you know, if you were to look at how far you've come in the last three to four or five years, would that person three to four or five years ago be proud of where you're at right now? And if yes, fantastic. If no, let's make some changes. But um, you know, make sure we honor that person in the future that we're doing the things that we need to do. Uh, the second thing that you need to start doing is setting up your systems and processes. You definitely need systems and processes before you scale. Let's say you ordered, or let's say you did land a big national fleet, and all of a sudden you have all these contracted installers. I'm just using a random scenario here, but this is real. And then the the contracted installer messes up a panel. And instead of telling you that they messed up a panel, they they say, Hey, it wasn't in the box. They'll do that, and that's fine. Well, I know of people, I haven't even gone this far. I know of people who have cameras above their table and They have timestamps on their work orders of when that job was getting done, and they can go back to their video recording feed and see that it got put in the box. Like there's levels to this, but can you imagine? Hey, I don't have this panel, and then it's like, oh crap, that panel is uh five foot by ten foot, so it's 50 square foot. That's$100 on just one unit. Now let's say that happens 20 times across that project. It's no longer$100, it's$2,000 that came out of your pocket due to the error of somebody else because you couldn't prove that it was the error of somebody else. Now it couldn't really not be in the box, but at least you know, and then you can talk to the right person about why it needs to go in the box, obviously, and refine your systems there. But you cannot delegate what you haven't documented. You must set a standard that is understood, crystal clear, to where people can meet it. I feel like more people want to work for you, but most people don't know what to do and why to do it. Um best thing you can do right now is get a Loom account, loom.com, and it's like$10 a month. And you could literally just on your phone record a SOP right now. And don't even think about it in like SOP format. Literally just talk and work. Let the transcription work, put it in the Chat GBT or Claude, and say, hey, help me outline this process. Bang. It'll it'll almost make it perfect every single time. Um you need to start building checklists in your business on to where now that you have this nice large document, the check checklist is a very simplified version of what to do. And you will um be able to hold people to the standard of the checklist without being so uh scary of this big document. They've already been trained on the document, so now they have like the checkpoints in which um they are to do the work. And if something gets missed, then that becomes an act of mistake and we can coach them up around that. Um now start eliminating single points of failure. Do you where do you only have one thing? Like, do you only have one printer? If you only have one printer, you need to be talking to all your friends. Who can print for me if my printer goes down? Contingency plan. You need to build a plan for each and every single thing that you only have one of that's critical in your business. And you don't so that you're not reacting whenever that one thing doesn't show up, whether it be your designer, your installer, your admin, your printer didn't show up, your cutter decided to break. There's so many things that could falter, and you need to have a backup plan in every single thing. If you don't have a CRM or some way to track your data, stop. A lot of people know that I'm with Torque CRM. I don't push it ever because I don't like to solicit myself. But I can tell you without a doubt that you need to track your data and you need to stop looking at certain expenses as an expense. It's a lever, it's leverage if used correctly. And if you feel that it's an expense, that means that that thing is not valuable and it doesn't actually do anything for you. So a lot of people are like, oh, software is expensive. Software is not expensive. Software gives you a multiple of your efforts. It allows you to make things crystal clear, it allows for you to not have to print out a piece of paper that gets lost over and over and over. It allows you to follow up with customers without even thinking about it. Um, it allows you to nurture customers without you thinking about it because you can set something in place once and it'll do the outputs for you. And um I'll give you a really great example of why software is really strong. And in this really large account, if we get the project, we will have to bill every single job independently. So that means that there will be 400 invoices just for this project that need to be highly detailed with the VIN, the unit number, the this, the that for all of the paper trail for everything else that's going on in the project. And if I don't do it in a certain way, then I don't get paid and it delays things even greater than the 45 days. And the only way that you can reduce the administrative drag on that is to have a great software in place. So um it doesn't have to be complex, it just needs to be consistent, and your best software is the one that you use the most. So um highly recommend Torx CRM. However, use whatever you got. Trello's amazing, Monday's amazing. Uh those are only two that I'd really, really recommend right now. Understanding your pricing, pricing with conviction. Um, story time again. We we have this huge 400 vehicle fleet in front of us, and we're negotiating at the table in person right now, and um they come back to us and they're like, Well, the other people are this price and this, that, like everything of value they try to throw out the window, and they went back to price. And then we started like completely ignored it, kept focusing on value, and then it came up that the other price was print only. And so we're like, So you're comparing us to somebody that hasn't even given you the labor price yet, and you're going to believe it? Or are you gonna take the shop that's already done all the due diligence and provided the entire platform to you of who we have available, why we are the place, like what's the network, what's the strategy, what's the angle, why is this valuable to you? What will you receive? What's the advantages? What's the cons? What's the weak points? What needs to be worked on, etc. To where in that meeting, immediately the tone shifted once we realized that something was missing. So my 90-day challenge to you is what are you going to work on? Put a comment below. Uh, let me know what you are feeling that you have a constraint or a weak point on that if you were to double your business tomorrow, what would break your business massively? And you need to be fixing that first. And you need to apply that same thing every 90 days for the rest of this year. And I assure you that that this isn't just built overnight. The reason why my shop has so much momentum right now is because this has been a two or three year play. This has been a very long vision. It took a long time for us to earn this earn that fleet through building those systems and processes and the network to that that's needed. You guys are also a massive part of why we are even at bat for that. Because we have a massive network of people that are willing to go to war with us, and you need the same thing. So start working on whatever it is in your business that you need to work on. If you need help identifying your constraint, reach out. I love having that conversation. Um, don't feel shy. Literally, so many people do not reach out. It's not even funny, that have problems, and then they finally reach out and say, This went so much better than I thought. I didn't realize that was even my problem. Just remember that there's a five year version of yourself that's hoping right now that you do the things that you need to do in your business to get where you want to go. So thank you all so much. Like, comment, subscribe, and uh, we'll see you on the next one.