Business Unscripted - Triumph Business Solutions
Welcome to Business Unscripted, the podcast where real business conversations happen. Hosted by Dave Worden, founder of Triumph Business Solutions, this podcast dives into the raw, unfiltered realities of running and growing a business. Each episode explores the struggles, strategies, and accountability moments that shape the journey of entrepreneurs and business owners.
With a mix of solo episodes, co-host partners, and guest appearances from other business owners, Business Unscripted offers diverse perspectives and actionable insights. Whether you're navigating challenges, seeking strategies, or just looking for honest conversations about business, this podcast has something for you.
Join us weekly as we tackle the unscripted moments that define success, all while fostering accountability and connection with our listeners.
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Business Unscripted - Triumph Business Solutions
Smart Business Owners Think About These Hidden Financial Strategies - Profit First
Have you been approaching networking all wrong? Most business owners attend events hoping to sell their products or services, yet only about 10% of attendees are actually looking to buy. That fundamental misalignment explains why so many walk away feeling networking is "pointless."
In this candid conversation, we dive deep into how platforms like Alignable are revolutionizing the networking space by creating more intimate, meaningful connections between business owners. Unlike LinkedIn's connection-heavy approach, Alignable's restricted connection limits and in-person alliance meetings foster genuine relationships that lead to long-term business partnerships. We share practical tips for making the most of these networking opportunities, from putting your face on business cards to strategic QR code usage that eliminates friction in the connection process.
Then we tackle a game-changing financial strategy that most business owners—even those with accountants—have never heard about: the Profit First methodology. Rather than hoping for profit after expenses, this system guarantees profitability by allocating percentages of income to dedicated accounts before expenses are paid. We break down exactly how to implement this approach, even if you're currently struggling financially, and explain how it forces discipline in spending while ensuring you always have reserves for taxes and business growth.
We also reveal how transaction fees from payment processors like Square and Stripe silently drain thousands from your bottom line annually, and share practical strategies to recapture that lost revenue without alienating customers. These aren't theoretical concepts—they're battle-tested approaches we've personally implemented and seen transform businesses.
Ready to strengthen your network and financial foundation? Listen now, then connect with us to continue the conversation about implementing these strategies in your unique business.
Hey, hey, good morning everybody. It is another beautiful morning and I'm here partnered with one of my favorite people in the world, Dwarin, and we're here for another episode of the Business Unscripted Podcast. It's episode 19. And today, just like every single week we bring it to you every Friday we're going to be talking about some topics related to business, things that we've gone through, experiences we've gone through in our own business, but also things that we've helped our clients with. So if you're a business owner, or maybe you're thinking about getting in the business and you're just looking for great conversations to help you grow level up, this is your place to be. So grab your favorite cup of joe, let's jump into the show. Favorite cup of joe, let's jump into the show. Dwarn, welcome to another episode, another week. I know things are crazy. We were talking pre-show about how uh busy of a week you had, not only you, but me. Um, you know a lot of fun things going on in life, but also in business, you know, you know. So. So what's what's new, my friend?
Duarne:well, mate, it's uh, lots of calls, lots of new opportunities, lots of internal conversations about improving our processes in some areas, setting up a new office out the back of the house so I can actually double my space and not actually bump chairs with everybody else in the office. You know that sort of thing. Also an interesting positioning. Uh, also with an interesting positioning, I'm going to be placing myself strategically at the back of this office. Uh, face it, with my camera facing a wall, so I can have people coming in and out of the office without affecting things like me doing a podcast right now. I locked the door behind me. Warn everyone on a podcast live shoot happening.
Dave:Don't come in um, and obviously that's not the all the time either nice well, especially when you got, you know, you got your son and then you got two babies you know around the house right, so definitely absolutely.
Duarne:A little bit of separation never hurts, right? So we're repurposing a storeroom or a stock room that we haven't used except for just stock. Um, it had a good leak in the roof, so it was a good opportunity to fix the roof and repurpose the room. So it's good times.
Dave:I love it. How has business been this week? I know you're in the middle of some interesting things right that are going on.
Duarne:Yeah, I've got a couple of clients who've been coming through from a referral system I set up. Obviously, we've been doing some good things back down in Australia. Some great things happening Got a few clients who are coming through. Clients are liking what they're hearing and you know we're getting some meetings, which is great. So they're turning into real opportunities, which is what we like to see. Some you know, lots of website sales coming through and some conversations around digital marketing and all that sort of wonderful good stuff. How about yourself?
Dave:uh, things. We actually signed a new client this week. You know, um, for accounting, yeah, yeah, it's always a good thing, you know, when you get some, celebrate the wins, exactly, you know, and it's, it's good. I mean, I think you know, ultimately, when you focus on support, you're not focusing on. You know like, uh, when you focus on support, you're not focusing on. You know like the fluff kind of stuff, right, you're focused on strictly support. Hey, how can we help you?
Dave:And if there's a need, right, not, instead of actually being generally interested to have a conversation, to even understand if there's a potential problem, that's needed, and you know, yeah, and so if you just focus on just, you know, having meeting people, having a conversation, we had our you know I do, and the ambassador for alignable for my local area here, and we had our Alliance meeting and we had about 30 people and you know, in there I don't go to that meeting with a focus of trying to sell or do my services by. There is, hey, who can, who can we connect? Right, how many people can make quality conversations? Cause, the more people we have, the more potential. You know, if you have a meeting that's always the same five people there's no potential there. But if you have a meeting that is constantly growing but then also has some rotating people that are coming all the time, you know it's going to be more beneficial for everybody in the long term.
Dave:So that's kind of the things that I'm looking to do. As well is not only just my business, but also growing my network, and I think as a small business, medium-sized business owner, you are truly only as strong as the strength of your network, right? So if your network is weak and small and it isn't filled with power players per se, then you're probably going to be lacking and your growth is going to be a lot slower. But when you start to expand your network, follow more people who have already gone through the journey that you're looking to go through, experience the pain points that you're experiencing right now. That's when you can begin to exponentially make that leap forward in your business, when you can kind of begin to, you know kind of exponentially, you know kind of make that leap forward in your business.
Duarne:So, and for those who are listening who may not be aware, dave, can you just explain what the um alliance is for?
Dave:alignable yeah, so alignable for one, the first to start there and actually I'll, before I get into that, um, if you have questions at any time throughout the show, drop them in the comments. Whether you're watching us on YouTube, facebook or LinkedIn or wherever, you're kind of listening to this as well, if you ever have comments, feel free to drop it in the comment of the podcast. Dorn and I will be, you know, kind of out there checking it and we will get you answers. Whether it's live if you ask a question live during the show, we'll answer them live or if it's post-show, we'll make sure to answer it for you. So if you ever have questions, don't hesitate to drop it below.
Dave:But with that, so Alignable is a platform kind of similar to LinkedIn, but it's really it's focused on business owners, like B2B, and it's more personal. And the reason I say that, right, you know LinkedIn, you know, especially cause we do a lot of outreach on LinkedIn you can send 200 new connections every single week on LinkedIn, you know, and probably, if you, if you're listening, you're probably like wait, well, I can do what, yeah, and that's on free accounts, like that, you know, you don't have to pay to send 200 connection requests a week and grow your network. That's 800 potential people every single month.
Duarne:Now you know why you can spam so much from india well, yeah, or or people there.
Dave:Well, people can still message you with email if they're paying for it, but this is like you making connection and, like we talked about earlier, like making a genuine connection with people. You can reach out to 200 people and just be interested because they're your potential partner, etc. But out of but out of the lineable. What's different there is that if you're on a free account, you can only send 10 connections a month, which means if somebody does send you a connection request, typically it's more, for they saw something in your profile that they're interested in and they might be interested in your service, especially if you're on a free account. A lot of people I would say the majority of the people on Alignable are probably on a free account, so you know that it's more personal, intimate kind of settings on Alignable. The other thing that I like about Alignable as well is that they have these things called Smart Connects, which you and I have done, where they're like speed dating for networking. So essentially, for an hour you get in and based on how you fill out your profile. So your profile has tags in terms of what your client, your typical clients, are, what your typical partners are, and you create those tags and then when you get into these smart connects, it actually matches you up with people that match your tags.
Dave:So if your profile is done correctly which some people aren't but if your profile is done correctly you're meeting six, seven, eight people in these smart connect events that are your potential ideal client or your ideal partner. And so what you do in that seven minutes is it's not, you're not trying to pitch your service to them in seven minutes. What you're trying to do is you're just trying to say, hey, what do you do? Where are you from? Do I like your personality? Can we have a conversation? All right, great, let me write down your information, let me connect with you, and then, after the meeting, the whole point there is. Now you get to set up your, your follow-up conversation, your exploratory call, your introductory call, and so that's what I really kind of like about Alignable is it's more intimate, personal, you know business to business, sort of you know growth.
Dave:You and I met on Alignable, you know way back way back in the day, every single person that's a partner or a client in. You know, the majority of my clients in Triumph Business Solutions has been from Alignable and so, and so it's definitely a crucial tool in terms of my networking and my outreach. Now the alliance is we're trying to get back and Alignable's focus is that relationship building, and part of that is in person, and so what Alignable has been doing is they've always had kind of communities. That's kind of how they focus, like when you log in and create an account you pick a community that you're a part of, so it's typically around your main city, that is, you know where you're from, and what they did previously was each city. They tried to make an individual alliance, which is really hard because, you know, in small areas, small cities, you only have a small number of business owners there. Yeah, so they I believe it was last year they revamped the program and they reached out to me for the Cleveland Ohio area and they said, hey, we're trying to kind of revamp the alliance area. Would you be interested in kind of leading the the cleveland ohio, which is a pretty vast big area as absolutely like like.
Dave:So we started I believe it was july it might have been july or august of last year and we obviously started from nobody, like we had people in the area that were part of the um platform, but nobody actually in the alliance. And now we just we're just shy of 500 people in the alliance. Our event we just we're just shy of 500 people in the alliance our event this past week had, like you know, just over 30 people. Um, so it's great, where, you know, people get to come in, they get to have conversations, they get to meet people and then they get to build the relationships with local business owners. And that's the key.
Dave:You know, when you're a small business unless you you're, you've got a product that can go out, you know, across the country or across the world, typically you're. If you're a service based business or you know home services, it's that local community that you're going to be impacted, which the majority of people are, and so you really need to build those relationships. And so that's you a long winded way of explaining Alignable, but then also the alliance. And so if you're interested, just go to Alignablecom and sign up and create your profile and if you ever have, you know, make sure you connect with me. Dave Warden, right Drive Business Solutions. Find me on there and I'll meet with you. I'll give you a 20 minute. I do with everybody. I give everybody a 10, 15 minute kind of overview of their profile with a fill out and you really begin to make it impactful for you as you're using this new system and platform for you to grow.
Duarne:One thing you mentioned that I thought was really interesting is the fact that, unlike other platforms like LinkedIn, it's actually encouraging face-to-face meetings and catch-ups. You mentioned 30 people. We're not talking about 30 people joining a webinar. We're talking about 30 people physically driving their cars, bikes, wherever they got, taking a bus. However, they got there, going to a physical location and actually talking to real people. That's old school networking and that's really important in business, right, and it doesn't happen enough. So I think it's great that they're really pushing for that and they're growing that and right, 500 members um, that's great.
Dave:I mean it's free, like it's, yeah, like the alliance. Alliance is free yeah, events you don't have to pay to attend. Like you know, some other events you got to pay to be a member or pay for life. You just pay for your coffee, like we have it at a local coffee shop, local mom and pop kind of coffee shop, you know.
Dave:For now, and supporting local business while catching up too, and so the ultimate goal is to kind of rotate it to other you know areas have one a week, like right now we just meet on the third tuesday of the month. Um, but that's because you know we're, we the the way cleveland set up. You know you have cleveland in the middle and then you know, and then you have like the east side and you have the west side. I told them what we're setting up. I said we're like uh, we're like uh, what was it? The the west side story or something like that, where, where we don't go over the track, so our east side they don't go to the west side, the west side hates going to the east side.
Dave:So luckily there's been a couple of other members. We can have, I think, four or five different ambassadors across the area, a couple other people that have reached out and have conversations with about becoming other ambassadors to have other meetings. So the goal is that we have one meeting a week. I'm even going to, you know, with so many people possibly mix in like an evening sort of virtual you know mixer, like I was just talking about the Smart Connects and then just talking this last week is how do we just do like education and the guy who is presenting his name is Dustin and he's obviously a local sort of marketing um, individual, and we are talking, like you know possible, like education series. You know just ways to just make our alliance stronger for the people that are part of it.
Dave:Um, and for me, my big thing is is I have a block on on the alliance and the only people that can join it are people that are within cleveland area and that are going to attend live events. Well, I've, I've turned people away because they're from out of the area and some of these other alliance members and ambassadors they allow anybody from anywhere to join their alliance and I I understand why. Because they're like, oh, people could just do business with anybody. It's like, but yeah, but that's not the point of the alliance. Like there's hundreds of other groups that you could be a part of and connect with people. Like the alliance is supposed to be specific, localized group.
Duarne:Right localized group. So the idea is Like-minded business owners that want to potentially get to know each other, share contacts, do business together. Yeah, I like it.
Dave:It's a community effort and it's just when you start bringing people in from anywhere and everywhere, they might as well go join one of the other groups right, like the regular groups that are available. The biggest group on Alignable, I think, is the Ask Small Business Owners and I think that has easily in the mid six figures. In that group of members of members, I think almost any person who's ever signed up, you know, goes to that group to have a conversation or to meet people and you generally see the same names popping up in the feeds all the time on those who do the general conversations, answering questions and stuff.
Duarne:I get it. I really like the idea of having the alliance and an active alliance, um, and I think it's really cool. You guys are actually doing physical catch-ups again. From what I understand, you've actually had some of the Alignable staff actually come to some of your group meetings at some points in the past?
Dave:Yeah, yeah, she was.
Dave:I think she is an employee of Alignable, but her goal is to.
Dave:She travels across the country as part of this and meets these different alliance groups and, you know, just explains the power of networking, you know, and how to do it right, which is again we and we may have talked about this a few times networking isn't about selling. Networking is about, you know, just having a conversation, building a relationship, understanding needs and and building that strong sort of chain of network individuals. The problem is I think we talked about it 90% of people go to a networking event hoping to sell their service and only 10% of people go there because they need a service. Yeah, so you know, you're basically going there and you're going there with the wrong intention, and so that's when so many people you know, you hear it people go to a networking event and after the first or second time, they're like oh yeah, this is pointless because they don't get it. If that's you and you've gone to a networking event and after the first or second time, you're like I don't see why I'm doing this. It's because you have the wrong mindset.
Duarne:You. It's because you have the wrong mindset. You're going into it with the wrong approach. Yeah, it's interesting too, I think.
Duarne:The other thing I see a lot, especially in physical catch-ups and like written person catch-ups, is you get um people who come who don't necessarily. They kind of sit on the edges, they don't really want to get a mingle, they don't want to talk, they don't want to get involved. I think the key with these is if, when you run these in-person events, you've, if you can encourage everyone to like, at least meet and one new person. For me, whenever I do an in-person meeting or I go to a conference or something I always try and meet at least you know one or two or three new people, um, exchange some details, business cards. It's not necessarily about doing business with that person, but it's about letting them know who you are, what you do, building that relationship right, and maybe they know someone who can be referred to you for something in the future or just getting your name out there. So when they see you in the future, they see you do something. Maybe they follow you on linkedin and then they see you post something.
Duarne:Oh well, I met this guy. He was at this conference. He was great. I had this conversation with him. I'm gonna like his post. I'm gonna I'm going to reshare it to my network. There's all these different benefits for it. But try, and if you are going to take the time and do the effort of going to a physical event, even an online event, try and meet at least one new person. And this is my biggest concern with online events is, you don't get that opportunity all the time to meet new people. Um, so an in-person event's great, because you're not going there to listen to one speaker, you're going there to, you know, meet new people as well, right?
Duarne:and who doesn't like to meet people while drinking coffee. I mean, that's awesome. Coffee's some good food, right um, so yeah, that's awesome.
Dave:Coffee is some good food, right? So yeah, so that's, you know, kind of the alignable. I know there's the unscripted part of our podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we had no idea we were going to talk alignable, talk networking today, and you know, we make one comment and we ended up with a 15-minute conversation.
Duarne:So I think it's great. I think for people, because because I mean, alignable is a bit of a beast when it come, when you log on, it becomes a bit of a thing you're not sure what to do. You've explained great, like the fact the credit system, you, and that there's all these alliances, so a lot. I think a lot of people don't realize. When you log on to alignable and you set your region, you, whenever you post something, it goes to your collective region.
Dave:Um, if you're a free member, right, your community, yep, your community, and so it's all about. So what you want to do, what you want to do, is, if you live in like a small town or, like you know, you may want to pick, like one of the bigger towns around you that may have more members, and select that as your home community, because you're right when you do, initially it's just going to go to that community. Now, once you build your network, then you have the option to post to anybody within your network, so whoever's connected with you we'll see your post. So that's the thing that you know. There's always there, there's still growing, it's still a platform. That's, you know, know, kind of developing um. So there's multiple different ways that, like you can post right, like you can post to your community, if you're a paid member, you can actually post to bigger uh, you can have up to, I think it's, five communities, depending on your level. So not only your home, but then five additional um, and then then you post your network, which is another one.
Dave:But the other way that I encourage a lot of people to get the most out of Alignable is to get involved in groups, and what I would do is not like every single group, you see, I say pick five.
Dave:Pick the five groups that you feel your ideal client is going to be in or your ideal referral partner is going to be in, and get involved in those groups and engage, educate, add value, ask questions, because what the alignable sort of the thread, how it works, is that it's not a time-based thread where you know the thing. You know after a week things aren't seen anymore. It's a thread that's based on activity. So if you like my post, three weeks after I posted it it bumps it back to the top and it keeps things up there, which means if there's a comment, there's a like, anything, it keeps your name at the top. I think when I first started at Lineable, I asked an open-ended question in that big group and it was one of the biggest ways that I was able to kind of grow my network is because people were continuing to like it. They were continuing to comment on it. Now here's the thing when you you find out.
Dave:But my simple thing was tell us what you do in five words or less and we've seen that, oh my god, so many people commented with, like this big paragraph and they they didn't pay attention, right, they just wanted they're in that wrong mindset if I need to sell, sell, sell. So they're putting you know their entire life story in the comments. They weren't and it's like, come on, like. And so what was nice is it kept my attention up, but you know, I kept her. Hey, can you simplify this? Tell the simple, let's simplify it. Uh, so I was able to engage with a lot of people you know in that way instead and fashion as well.
Duarne:So it was nice and I'm I'm pretty sure you'd find there's a few guys that the old, the ogs of the platform, who got in there and schooled a few people who for not answering the question correctly, which would have helped keep your you know ranking up there for a while too. But, um, and if you and look, if you are going to open it, do an open-ended question. My suggestion is don't come out and open-ended question straight away. Go in and answer other people's posts initially for the for a little while. Get a feel for what questions are already there, so you're not asking something that's been asked 10, 15, 20, 30 times and that this is this.
Dave:This applies to facebook, to linkedin, whatever. Like, don't just apply. You reply to somebody's question and be like oh yeah, dm, I'll talk to you. Like, respond in the comments, because what you're doing is not only you're answering their question, but anybody. You don't know who else is going to be reading that post, reading those comments. They might also have that question that they're going to see your response. So give yourself a chance to have that extra sort of eyeballs on your experience, your knowledge. So always put an answer in the comments. You don't have to go in a complete in-depth, but give them a high-level answer. And hey, if you have any more questions about it, hey, feel free to message me, but give that first message in the comments.
Duarne:Yeah. Or if you've had a situation where maybe you've written an article on your LinkedIn account or on your website that's actually relevant to it, go on and say hey look, I actually wrote something about this a little while ago. Here's the link if you want to check it out, and then you can try and drive a little bit of traffic towards and make sure it's relevant. But if you put anything irrelevant, be aware you are going to have trolls. You are going to have people who are going to call you out for it are going to have trolls. You are going to have people who are going to call you out for it. And the dm thing. I mean honestly, are you that important that people are going to want to reach out to you just to find out if you really have something of value to offer? No, add the value straight into the chat. I used to do this all the time. I'd sit down on a sunday and I'd spend two hours on a sunday and I'd put a bunch of comments on different things, answer a bunch of questions Sunday and I'd put a bunch of comments on different things, answer a bunch of questions, and then I would go and have conversations with people in the chat and I generally fill my calendar up pretty quickly with conversations for the week and it was a great way to meet new people. So I definitely I think it's a great platform.
Duarne:For that regard, I did have a paid account. I found that the free account was a little bit painful. The limitations, uh, you can't reach out to people. The amount of people who would put a comment saying, hey, can you add me or something like that in the comment, because they don't. Obviously they're on a free account, they don't have the credits available. Um, yeah, I think that's an.
Duarne:I think there's a whole bunch of things and if you you want more information about Alignable, like Dave said, go and friend him, have a chat with him. He can go through and talk to you about all that. He's been on there for a long time, a bit of a guru on the platform. He is an ambassador for the platform. He's got a bunch of great certifications. I think on his account there You'll be able to see where you know top business in the area for a few years now, um, to go with it. So a lot and lots of reviews and peer recommendations, which is a great thing about the platform. You can actually see what people think about the people on the platform and there's real feedback you can go and read and I'll talk about that.
Dave:Let me talk about that for a minute, because that's another pet peeve of mine. I never even met that person. Why are they leaving that? Oh my god, it's. It's so funny.
Dave:Like you know, so many people you know, and I get it like, I like, I like, I like the platform. So the idea here is that you know, you give a recommendation and you the I. The point is that you're supposed to leave you space. You're supposed to respond on why you're recommending this person. So typically, if somebody doesn't leave text, I don't accept it. The only ones I will accept is if it's somebody that I know from a networking event or you know that you know I've worked closely with in the past, so I'll accept those that there's no text with it.
Dave:The ones that really get my pet peeve are the ones that I just accepted their request and they click the button to recommend and I'm like I don't even know you. How do you know that you can recommend me? So I simply here's what I do I declined the request and I send them a message. I say, look, john or Jane, whatever their name is. I appreciate you wanting to click the button and give me a connection request, but I reserve my recommendations and my requests for people that I have either worked with personally, had a conversation with and added value to them, or actually did something for them, or I know them in real life. So I'm more than open to having a conversation with you and at the end of that conversation, if you feel like a recommendation is warranted, at that point I will more than happily accept your recommendation.
Dave:But right now I went ahead and I declined your recommendation and I actually got a response from somebody. This is somebody I just connected to recently who has like 3000 recommendations, right, and they're all there, no text, and so this guy responds to me Look, hey, I just go through and I just recommend everybody. I've recommended over 3000 businesses and I'm like and how many of those do you know personally? Or were you just clicking buttons because you want people to respond to you? Like that's the thing, like the mentality is that if I recommend you, well, you better be clicking my button and recommending me, and so that's where I guarantee all of his recommendations came from.
Dave:And now that's also a great way to get started with recommendations is find the people that you know. I think you and I had this conversation early on. Go to the people that you do know, that you have worked with before, and give them the first recommendation, write them a good review and what typically is going to happen is they're going to feel inclined to respond to you. But it's meaningful at that point because it is a specific recommendation and you're not just going out nilly-willy recommending people. I only give recommendations to people that I've talked to, met, have worked with, and I don't just give them out and people want that.
Duarne:I think one thing to note there is you can have a meeting with someone, get a good and build a rapport with them and then go and give them a recommendation. Hey, I had a great meeting with this. Guy really knows what he's talking about. I think he's a great guy. You could say like hey, he gave me great advice.
Duarne:Yeah, give me great advice on that particular call, but you don't have to done business with them literally. So if you're sitting going, well, I haven't done any business with anyone on the platform yet don't stress. Um, you can get around by just having a meeting book yourself a couple of meetings and you might have a couple of recommendations in the first week. But one thing I was just thinking when you're talking about just I recommend everyone is that the sort of guy who jumps on google and starts looking up businesses and just giving five-star reviews to every business he comes along on google as well, just because I would say probably not, because there's nothing in return.
Dave:Oh well, isn't that interesting, isn't that interesting?
Duarne:nothing in return. And look, I that advice you just gave it. I do the same thing when I um talk to people about linkedin. Right, and you do too is go ahead and give recommendations. People on linkedin recommendations are great, but have some uh morality about it, you know. Don't just keep giving. You wouldn't go to linkedin and just give recommendations to everybody. It's your reputation.
Dave:The other here's the other thing that, like you, you should be doing, and I think I don't remember who we got it together like we got it during a presentation. I think we were in a presentation about linkedin as well, but yeah, I don't know if you know this, but like your referrals is its own link. So, like your referrals, as well as on alignable, it's its own link. So going and taking those links and putting it in the signature of your email and I did this right where it's its own link. So going and taking those links and putting it in the signature of your email, and I did this right when it's like hey, check out my reviews on LinkedIn and Alignable, and it's hyperlinked to those two sites so that people can go and see your reviews. It's another one and another way of showing your social proof, isn't?
Duarne:that great advice.
Dave:Yeah, it's hard, obviously, to try to incorporate everything, but when you have the hyperlinks, people you know, when you put it right down. I haven't read writing where it's like, hey, go check out my you know references or referrals on LinkedIn and Alignable. It's just another area, another way for you to show yourself some proof for your expertise.
Duarne:Listening to that. I've got a great idea there. I was thinking one of the things you see on a lot of websites these days is you see the, my team and they've got links to their LinkedIn right. Well, rather than sending to their individual LinkedIn, why not link that to the recommendations on the LinkedIn so that when people go there, they get to read all the good shit and they don't have to sift through all the boring stuff to get to the good stuff? When people sit there and read it, they're going to go. I want to know more and they're going to click that extra button to find out more about you. They're probably not going to go scrolling and clicking to find your recommendations initially, unless something catches their eye, but they may be at the bottom of the profile linkedin, for sure yeah, they do.
Duarne:They put it towards the second, probably the two-thirds of the way down or something like that. It's like way down. It's kind of frustrating. And if you go and do a newsletter, that goes in first and that pops it out even further, if you're regularly posting, that goes up first. So they've got to go through all of that first. If you've got 50 roles, it's going to show all those roles there before you get to it, before you get to it. So definitely I think it's a great advice. I think that's really clever and I had forgotten that, so you just reminded me. Steve did share that with us during that session and there's a lot of value for doing that. And I love the email signature part because you're basically giving people everything you want them to go look up without forcing them to go find it themselves. And people are notoriously busy and or lazy, so giving them those links directly so they don't have to go looking for it themselves for that social proof, now that's really subtle and helpful.
Dave:What is interesting, too, like and this is another way where we talk about like making it easy for people and again off unscripted the question came up in the Alignable event about whether or not QR codes are overused now or if people shouldn't be using them. And, for me, the advice I give to people when it comes to QR codes is how do you make it simpler for your prospect or your client to get a hold of you or to get the information that they need? And I think what a lot of people don't realize is that QR codes aren't just hey, send them to a website or send them to a landing page.
Dave:Qr codes can do so many things. They can open up the messaging app on your phone. It can open up WhatsApp, right. It can open up the call button. So, for example, if you have a magnet that you're giving away let's say you want to give away a magnet at a trade show you know, put the qr code on it's, just call us, and then that qr code opens up the phone with your phone number already in, right, and then all they have to do is hit free dial. Yeah, they don't have to type all nine or twelve, ten digits, whatever it ends up being right, and so it's one less step.
Dave:Which people are lazy, as you just said? So, or a text hey, text us. And then it's a predetermined text that says, hey, I need your support, can you reach out to me? Or something like that. Whatever it ends up being that you want to send, but you can do so many different things than just sending them to a landing page or just sending them to your website with a qr code. Um, so me, think of ways. How do you eliminate all the steps that people could potentially fall off of your process and then use a QR code to circumvent all of that?
Duarne:That's a really good point Because I mean, look, there's another heavily used option with QR codes these days where it links to a link tree or something similar with all your contact details on it and gives them the option of how they want to get in touch. I find that one's one of my favorite go-tos for it. Um, the other one is pushing them off to a promotional landing page where you want them to take action or fill out a form. Another one that is very common these days is where it downloads automatically the contact card straight to the phone. I personally don't like the contact card straight to the phone. I personally don't like the contact card straight to the phone because I think I find that a little intrusive. I don't want something downloading to my phone straight away. So I like the idea of a QR code so that it connects scanning and going to a link tree which gives me the option to have buttons like call now click initiate the call. Email me now click initiate an email. Join me on WhatsApp Click initiate. So you've got all these different options you can put in place.
Duarne:But, listening to what you said, one really cool thing is I know there's websites out there which are completely free and if you type in strings into search parameters, into something like Google, you know, like create a um, create a pre-made message on WhatsApp, I'm sure it'll give you some sort of free website. You can go and type in what you want and it'll give you, like, the string you need to put in for a URL to actually call that action. You can link that to your QR and every time you come up and they click on it, they scan it, it'll come up up whatsapp and pre-load a message for you and then we have to do is hit send like hey, I was at this. I saw your booth at the uh expo trade show, blah, blah, blah, or you know, I met you at the um alliance group. Um down there in cleveland wanted to know if you. I wanted to share my details right something like that.
Dave:Like you know, there's so many different ways to potentially do it. And you did mention the other thing that I don't think a lot of people know you may or may not know, like link tree right, which I think is an interesting um sort of concept too, where you can take all your different links and all your different sources and create it on one landing page for yourself, you know. So you could have your exploratory call, your website right, your offer, all your different links on one landing page, instead of having it in multiple different places, and actually I've been meaning to kind of look into that and set it up for myself. So thank you for reminding me of that. But you know, it's something that I didn't know. Obviously, I knew there were some things out there, but I never actually, you know, got down into a specific company that I was going to look into. But Linktree is the one that I think is one of the best right now.
Duarne:Fun fact, BeSavvy has a bunch of template sites within the template system, so you can just go in and create a new website, use an existing template and you can create and type link tree as your search parameter and you can use it as part of your account. Then what you can also do is go into the QR code generator and create yourself a QR which runs analytics on and link that page to it so you can see how many people Okay.
Dave:So within there's go well, you say you and you're B savvy. So or if you're listening to this and you use any sort of like, go high level right any go high level platform, any go high level. You can essentially in the templates.
Duarne:It has like a link tree type template where you can under the website so if you go to the site section website, create a new website type in link tree as a to search the templates and there's about 50 templates in there, so you can pick an existing template and it'll just go in and fill in the blanks, change it to style the way you want, throw your logo on there, all sort of wonderful stuff. You're already paying for a subscription. It's going to be free for you to use. And then you can go in on the same site section there's a qr code tab. Click that and generate yourself a qr code. That qr code can be downloaded. And here's a big tip If you're getting business cards printed these days one of my pet peeves is oh, I had to change my phone number or oh, I had to change my address.
Duarne:I don't include those on business cards anymore. What I do is I put my face on a business card so people remember who I am, and I put qr code on the back typically so that I can actually they can scan it, go to my link tree and get all the information and it's up to date and current yep, so absolutely, it's one of those things.
Dave:Again, you're taking the information you're taking, you know the steps out and you know you're making it easier for people. I think that's you point out. Another one you're putting your face on your business card. You know it. It adds to, especially if you're going to a lot of networking events. It just adds to that memorability of your, of yourself. You know not only what you say, but you know they're going to remember your face.
Duarne:Oh, absolutely. And the other thing I do is I actually like to now include my face on my email signature so that when I emails go out they can recognize oh, that's that guy. He spoke to me at that event the other day, right? So when you email them after you've got their business card at the event or their details, or after one of those quick connects like you referred to earlier on alignable, you can make a memorable impact. Yeah, yeah, that's a guy with the beard, that's that guy with the Aussie accent that I remember, whatever it may be, but that way it helps you become more memorable from those networking events, because don't forget 30 people. At a networking event, you've got to do something to stand out and be memorable, and for most of us we barely remember what we had for breakfast, let alone the name of 30 people we may have spoken to it in networking that's funny.
Dave:Uh, it's funny, um, all right, well, hey, so definitely a good good thing there. So linktree, you know, to kind of wrap that up, you know, obviously, if you have a bunch of calendars or you have a bunch of information or websites or landing pages or offers, like linktree or or go high level is another way to to create that website, track it, as you mentioned, you know the analytics is. Another important piece is understanding you know how many people are seeing it and then how many people are actually taking action on it.
Dave:Yeah, but, to wrap up the first part, which has now been 40 minutes, which we don't not even like chat wasn't even scripted to be a part of it.
Dave:So alignable networking, all that fun stuff. But I know one thing that we wanted to get into today and before I jump into that, if you like the video right, or if you like what we're talking about you know the podcast please make sure that you do all that fun algorithm stuff right. So subscribe to the channel, hit the notification bell, but also like this video specifically. Whether you're on Facebook or LinkedIn or you know YouTube, just give it a like Right, because obviously it helps. You know, show, show it more. You know, I've gotten the notification from Facebook a few times. Hey, we notice you're posting your valuable content. You know we're going to increase your reach, whatever that may be, but we have noticed that the views have started to go up on the podcast here, specifically on YouTube.
Dave:So we appreciate you all. We hope we're giving you at least one or two tidbits of information every single week. And if you want something like interesting, like you know, watch the replay too. And you know, if you want, put us on 2x speed. I talk pretty good at 2x speed. I listen to everything at two times like I can't. I can't like. Even if it's just a video, I watch it at two times speed, it's just, I get more content.
Duarne:But like, depending on who's talking. If it's alex amosi, I can only do it at about a 1.5 max. That guy talks so fast. But uh, yeah, I mean you do have the option. If you find that we are talking a bit too fast at two times, you need to do it at 1.25, 1.5 if you need to. We'll forgive you for that, but you could, by doing that one thing that dave just suggested, you can shave 20 to 30 percent of your listening time off very, very quickly, up to 50 for two times, which means a 20, 40, 50 minute video which you might have shrugged. That's a lot of work. You can listen to it in the background or at two speed and get it done in half the time.
Dave:For sure, and that's why I love doing it, like I can go on a 20 minute drive and get a 40, 30, 40 minute, you know kind of podcast or video in um and listen to it in the same amount of time. So all right. So what we wanted we mentioned last week about the idea of profit first and the methodology behind it and we said, hey, it's really deep, we got it towards the end of the episode. So profit first, if you don't know what that is, is a book that is written by and I'm going to probably fudge this last name, but it's mike, I think it's mccallowitz or mccallowicks, I don't know it's. It's, you know, m-i-c-h-a-l-o-w-i-c-z. So definitely at the z at the end throws it off but mccallowick. We're just going to go with that.
Dave:Um, but I'll drop um in the comments. I'm going to drop his, the link to his website, um, where you can, you know, kind of grab a free copy of the book as well, as there is a bank account, and so if you read the book so I'm just I'm looking at his website over here it just says that you can grab a free copy of the book, which is compliments of relay, and so relay is a banking system not system, but a bank that actually allows you to implement this methodology within your bank account and so you can do all these things within the actual banking system. Not for me, how I've always implemented it is, you know, with a spreadsheet outside of the bank and then I do transfers. This bank, relay Bank, will actually allow you to do all that within the actual bank account, when you were saying that you actually had me going there.
Duarne:When you said in a bank account, I was like holy cow, he wants you to transfer your money for after he gives you the book for free. I thought that's where you were going with that. I was like you, like you don't like that.
Dave:If you like buy me a copy that all your money goes to to him, all your profits can now be transferred to my bank account.
Duarne:Here it is online yeah, sorry that was where my mind just went there I'm like whoa okay. And then you came in with that. Oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense so, uh.
Dave:So I'll drop the website here in the comments, but I'll also drop it, you know, in the description of the video. So if you're listening to it, you know, go ahead and go there. If you're listening to it, you know, go ahead and go there. If you're listening to the audio version, it'll also be in the description there as well. But the the high level, you know, idea here is that you are using multiple accounts to basically allocate your money when it comes into your business. So many people pretty much, when money comes in, they're like oh, I got cash, I'm going to spend it, or I have an expense I need to pay, I'm going to pay it, and they forget that there's other areas of your business that you have to focus on, and so the idea of profit first is that you set percentages for the following areas. One is profit. So you're setting profit aside from every single exchange into a bank account. So let's say you want to set it 10%, boom, 10% goes to your profit account. You don't touch it. Next is taxes. Right, we all have taxes, no matter what, you're going to have to pay taxes. You're going to have to pay the government or wherever, or payroll, whatever. So now you have your tax account. So let's say that's 5% to 10% typically to start, because you're paying tax not on the gross, you're paying it on the net. So let's just say we do another 10% to taxes, so now 10% is going to the tax account. You then have your owner's salary compensation. So this is what are the percentage income do you need to live off of, depending on how you set it up in your business. Maybe it's 25, maybe it's 40, maybe it's 50%, depending on your type of business that you are. But you can work with your accountant or your bookkeeper to kind of help you with that. But for our purposes let's say it's 40%, and then the final allocation is your operating. So what is left that you're going to use to pay expenses? So, for example, let's say you just go 40%, so you have 40% operating, 40% owners pay 10% profit, 10% taxes. That's 100% of any money that comes in.
Dave:So the idea is that if you get, let's say, $1,000 deposit into your income account, you would put 400 to operating, 400 to owners pay, 100 to taxes and 100 to your profit account, and so now the money's allocated as well as you have separate accounts that are limited in terms of access as well. So all of your money isn't sitting in one account. We used to do this in the corporate world, right? So with our payroll account we would have a separate payroll account that all the money would come out of, because all the checks were cut against that account so that somebody couldn't go and use the routing and account number which is at the bottom of a check to take all your money out by stealing your account and writing bad checks. So that's kind of off topic there.
Dave:But here is, you would set up five accounts. You'd set up an income account, you'd set up an operating account, you set up your. You'd set up an operating account. You set up your owner, pay your taxes and your profit. Those are five accounts that you set up that you can transfer between and if, or if you use Relay, it'll help you with all of that and then you reallocate and the idea is that again, at the end of the year right, let's say you did one hundred thousand dollars of income you should have ten thousand dollars sitting in your profit account, which means you for sure made ten thousand dollars. So you're paying yourself first, you're paying the business first by doing these allocations.
Dave:And what it does is it limits your operating so you're not overspending, right. And what it does here is is you know you only limit yourself to the money that you know is going to be in operating, not what the money is is coming into the entire organization. Yeah, now you can obviously play. You know there's different in the book. You know there's different examples. There's actually one extra layer that he suggests that if you're like really into it, which is, um, every quarter you set up a separate tax and profit account at another bank. That is only like withdrawal only or only deposit only, except like if you have to come in and make a withdrawal, because what it does is then you take your tax money, you take your profit money and you put it in this other bank every quarter and then you're not thinking about it Because it can't easily be transferred back into operating, it can't easily be transferred back into owner's pay, and that's just like an extra layer that you can do in there in terms of the profit. First.
Duarne:But I know I covered a lot, just try not to forget which bank it was you put it in.
Dave:Correct. Hopefully you're still getting statements um, but the idea is online statements these days.
Duarne:I mean so with a. With that bank setup that you're talking about, does it have the ability to automatically relay and do allocate that for you if you put the rules in, or is it something you should have manually be doing?
Dave:so if you're using relay, relay does it right, because one of clients, actually, he has this account and basically he goes in and he says hey, anytime money comes into the income account, I want you to take 10%, put it to profit, 10%, put it to taxes, 40% goes to owner pay, 40% goes to operating. So he knows exactly where all of this money is going. Thanks for that comment, you know, and so again, I will put the website in the comments here and then, as well as if you have any questions, you can reach out anytime.
Duarne:But yeah, that's the idea. There's one other thing you mentioned there too as well is having a separate bank account for income that's separate to everything else. I think that's really important, and you know another one they're having one for payroll. I think separating out your accounts is something that most banks don't charge much extra, or any extra to actually have multiple bank accounts um set up right within their current online uh, some of them.
Dave:Some of them do, you know, depending on the actual bank, like they might have a minimum deposit requirement or minimum activity requirement. So you know, obviously, make, make, do the research, your best decision for your business, right, you don't want to be paying, you know, ten dollars a month for five accounts if you don't need to. But definitely check out like relay I don't know what their costs are. I don't use relay, I just, like I said, I just use my bank and then I just have um spreadsheet, um allocation of when money comes in. I kind of review it, you know, and in the book it's not like you're not doing it like every time money comes in, unless you really want to. But you know he says, like at the end of the week, like your friday afternoon hey, what money came into my income account this week? All right, let's allocate it. And then you do it at the end of every week or every other week, depending on how much your frequency of transactions going into that income account.
Duarne:And this advice, too, is not coming from you just as a business owner. This is coming from you as an accountant as well, right? So from an accounting perspective, working in the corporate world as well as a business owner, this is something that you've lived and breathed and you do, and I know for me. When I first heard about it, when we talked about it a few weeks ago, I was a little bit surprised and I thought maybe I'm just ignorant to this. So I went and spoke to a few business friends of mine and found that it was a very most of them are doing the same thing One account with everything going into it and everything coming out of it, and that's just how we thought it worked. We hadn't really considered it and we got a second account. It was another bank. That was how we generally felt about it, so it was news to me. It was actually surprising and it was news to me.
Dave:So I actually think this is great advice just like Darlene was saying yeah, it comes down to right. It's like how much oversight, right, do you want to have on your activity? And I think what it comes down to is people. You're not taught these things. We're not taught these things in school. We're not taught how to operate right For sure. We're not taught how to operate a business in school. And we're definitely not taught how to operate, manage even our personal finances. We're not taught that in school. Taught that in school. Um.
Dave:So for you, you want to make sure that you're always managing and knowing where all your funds are going, and so this is another way to do that, but it also helps you, um, you know, segregate and make sure you have profit, but the other one is make sure you're making sure that you have tax money set aside. So many people don't you know. They come to tax time and they're like oh shit, I forgot about taxes. Well, this allows you to actually set it, put it aside. You know your quarterly estimates. You know pay your quarterly estimates every quarter, especially if you're a full-time business owner and and you're not even thinking about it.
Duarne:Yeah, I guess some of the some of these accounts you set up too can be high interest accounts or, you know, not that high, but they can be interest accounts. They can be generating you a little extra income potentially, as they start to grow as well.
Dave:Right and so like, for example, like the other accounts, like you could turn those into money markets at the other bank, Money markets where you're only allowed a certain number of withdrawals or they charge you fees.
Dave:So it's an incentive for you not to withdraw, but then it's getting paid and it's invested right, you know, short-term investments or whatever.
Dave:Now you're, you're making some extra money off of the money that you put aside, and it's all ways of just, you know, managing funding better, giving you better insights into your finances, but then also ensuring that you're never caught off guard, Because one of the things that they say too is, at the end of every year, that profit account we always say have a reserve account, rainy day fund. That profit account becomes that at that other bank. So at the end of the year you're not taking all of it out and then spending nilly willy. You just leave it in there and maybe take out 25, 30% of it. Now you have a bonus at the end of the year, but you'd leave the other 70% in that reserve account so that if you have a big expense comes up or you have something that goes wrong that you weren't expecting, and the repair or the investment to you know, for a new marketing campaign, you have it there. It's already money that you know has been allocated from profit, and now you're just able to reinvest that back into your business.
Duarne:And that's ultimately what the idea behind the profit first method is the other thing is I mean, that's a great point you might look at getting a new staff member, and you know that you can afford a new staff member because the profit's sitting there now, um, you might want to do an expansion on your workshop, or you might want to get new equipment. There's so many different things you can utilize it for. I just love the idea, and if you know that it's always a percentage base and that's always the consistent, it gives you a quick rundown in your head of what your pnl is too. Well, I know that there's so much profit I'm you know I'm averaging over here. Um, after everything, after all the other things come out of it, you know. So it gives you a good running tally for the year as well.
Duarne:Um, so, and you're right, even one thing I thought was interesting is one of the clients I have back in australia. He has a full-time bookkeeper and a full-time accountant and he had not been given this, any of this sort of advice, in the past. He was running a single bank account and when I said this is not something your accountant had suggested to you or your bookkeeper, yes, no, no, they've never me any advice. So, yes, we don't learn this in school? Yes, we don't learn this in college. This is something that even business accountants don't go out proactively telling you about.
Duarne:So where do you find this information? You come and listen to our podcast and find out. Of course, you work with someone like Dave who's offering financial accounting, business financial solutions etc and consulting around that niche. But it's pretty scary, in a general scheme, that professionals we rely on are not giving great advice like this and are not offering up options to help with this sort of thing. So I probably wouldn't pick up a book called profit first, first thinking that it's going to give me some accounting solutions and ways to improve my business. I'd be looking at it going oh, it's like a, you know, some sort of sales guru book.
Dave:Right. And so, ultimately, like you said, right, listen, go to yourself. Like I'm not, like I'm not trained in it. You're right, I'm not trained in it. I didn't write the book, I didn't write the concept. Go to Mike Michalowicz, the link is down below. Go get your free copy of the book. I listen to it on Audible, but go get your free copy of the book. Check out Relay.
Dave:If it's something that you want to make major changes to, to your banking, um, and you want to. You like the bank that you're using, like you know, we can have a chat. You listen, um, use a spreadsheet and how to allocate it. Create a simple spreadsheet, create the process for yourself, um, but the first step, go to the website, go to the book, get the book, understand it, see if it's something that might be impactful for you and your business, and then let's have a conversation.
Dave:If you're in a spot where, let's say, you are caught up in that sort of spiral where you're paying all the money that comes into your business out, whether it's to yourself or whether it's to expenses, and you're maybe not able to pay yourself, this is a method that can begin to kind of reallocate, even if it's as simple as like 2% to the profit account, you know, 4% to taxes. The idea is that you start getting into right that consistency and then you can start upping it as you go along and you're you're, you're guaranteeing. So you may be at a loss right now, you may be losing money right now, but you could begin to guarantee yourself small break-even, small profits, and then what it forces you to do is only pay the expenses that you have money in the operating account. Now, if you have liabilities and you have things like this, your owner pay may start out at like 5, 8, 10 percent and you're operating maybe 90 percent. But what you do with somebody like myself, or with your bookkeeper, you know, is you look through all of your expenses, what can be cut. This helps you with that mindset, too, of how are you analyzing all of your expenses and your trending and everything on a regular basis? So you figure out what expenses can I cut?
Dave:If it doesn't relate solely to a client service or acquiring a client, more often you should be cutting it, especially if you're struggling. Cut out all the fluff. You may be paying for two or three different programs that you're not using, costing you a couple hundred dollars a month. Get rid of them. This helps you identify those areas. Then you can begin to shift your allocations as you make these adjustments within your business. The idea is just to start, even if you have to do 1% profit, 1% tax, 5% owners and 93% operating. Idea is just just to start, even if you have to do one percent profit, one percent tax, five percent owners, you know and you know 93 operating. Like, just do it. That's the idea I like it.
Duarne:I like it once you start doing it. I guess it gets you into that habit and gets you wanting to increase your percentages. You want to increase those, to become bigger, better. So it gives you that drive to want to do that, towards that as well, and I love, I love this advice. I think it's great. It's something that I really got excited about when we spoke about it a few weeks ago and I'm glad we're talking about it in the segment here and again, I you know, mike, mike mccall, we're gonna go mccall, mccall wick or mccall witts I don't remember how he says it, um, but it's been kind of like the monster z book for the name, right?
Dave:yeah, I think so. Yeah, mckalawitz, yeah, from the the big purple guy, right, um, but it's a great book, great read, um, it's on audible too. So if you, um, you know, are more of an audio fan like myself, like listen to it, um, but if you have questions on it, like drop it it down below, reach out. He's got a whole support system too. So, you know, I'm also like take, take advantage of him, but it's a great sort of plan to help you manage your finances better. So I know we wanted to talk, we mentioned it, you know, solely a little bit last week and we wanted to jump into it this week, one of the other things that kind of goes along. We talked about it pre-show because we were kind of getting into the profit. First thing was you know when was the last time? And we talk about expenses or overspending.
Dave:This is a hidden fee that you may not be kind of paying attention to, because you're paying attention to the money that hits your bank, but what you're not realizing is how much are you losing before it even hits your bank, through like transaction fees et cetera. And so this is where the importance of who your payer is can really pay play a big piece into your business success. So, for example, if you're one that's using Square a lot, you know, yes, they offer some great systems and things like that and if you're a smaller business, it could be taking a significant three, four or 5% of your your business from you, which, when you're on a small if you're in a small margin business, that could be huge. Um, so how do you renegotiate? How do you find out new, new terms? You know Stripe is another one that does charge a lot, a lot of fees, et cetera. Um, so how and how often? Right, darlene? Absolutely how often are you looking at these contracts or looking for alternative ways for you to save on fees?
Dave:For example, for myself, I looked into Melio. Melio is a B2B. If you're B2B, it's a great B2B sort of invoicing service. What's nice is that the fees are small as well, as, for me, you can have the option to charge. The client can pay the credit card. So either they can pay by, like bank transfer, and have limited fees, or they can pay by credit card and then the fee can get charged to them. So, instead of you paying a 4% fee on a credit card, you have to stripe 3% Plus. I think there might even be like a-.
Duarne:I think there's like a one transaction, yeah, 20 cents or something like that yeah right.
Dave:So three percent on a hundred thousand dollar business is three, three grand a year. You know, if you cut that down to one and a half or two percent, that's a thousand dollars in your pocket because it's going directly to you.
Duarne:Um, same thing with you, know like when you start doing currency conversions like for me I do us, australian and also philippines peso. Now, when you start doing currency conversions different apps, different banks, they all charge differently. Paypal charges very differently, and what my bank does my austral Australian bank and my US bank charges differently. All of these different processes really do hurt.
Duarne:One thing I found was interesting that if you've got clients, instead of asking them for the convenient option of paying with Stripe, offer credit card payment after they say no to a bank transfer. If they say, look, bank transfer is really hard for me, it's too complex. Whatever that may be, we could offer a credit card, but there's going to be a surcharge for it, and offer it as a secondary solution. We all get into this part, but we're going to make it easy for them to pay. But you know what, if you do a bank-to-bank transfer, generally there's a very minimal cost to do that. But generally there's a very minimal cost to do that and you don't lose out. You don't lose a percentage, so you get to keep more in your pocket. So it's worth trying to get people to pay through the means of doing that, especially if you're high ticket.
Dave:If you're high ticket where people are paying $1,000, $2,000, $3,000 a month, it catches up quick it does.
Dave:And even something as simple as maybe you don't want to charge them the full 3% you know, right With Darlene, example of 3% stripe but maybe you you cut it in half and you say, look, if you're going to pay by credit card, we have to charge you an extra one and a half percent fee. Well, now that, again that one and a half percent in your pocket that you didn't have before because you were just paying, you were just accumulating that money off. And especially if you're building your business off of, let's say, a hopeful 5% to 10% profit margin and maybe you're not planning on all expenses, maybe you're spending a 50-50 split in credit card versus cash in terms of your projections. And here it comes in that 80% of your transactions are credit card. Well, those are extra fees that you weren't projecting and now your margin is like one or two percent. You're like what happened? You're probably gonna look and you realize my bank fees were ridiculously high, so we'll turn the mask on that for a second.
Duarne:You're a numbers guy, dave. Hundred thousand dollar income for the year, all credit card transactions coming through from stripe with a three percent charge. You go back and that's how much is that? Three grand.
Dave:You're going to lose three grand yeah.
Duarne:If you charge your customers half the fee, you just saved yourself $1,500.
Dave:And because you're already profitable, that's good. That's $1,500 into your pocket.
Duarne:That's right. It's an extra 1,500 that goes into that profit account for you that we were talking about before. One change. Now, if you were to change them from being strike payments and putting them to direct to bank payments, you get to keep the whole 3%.
Dave:Right, Maybe it's like a half percent charge, so you're getting 2500. So the idea here is that you're being proactive and you're reviewing your numbers. You're reviewing your data to make better financial decisions for your business. But what happens is so many people because it's not in their comfort zone which is perfectly fine, I get it these things just get overlooked or they never look at their P&L. They look at their P&L when it comes to tax time. They don't question anything, they're just like oh, it's just a cost of business. When in reality, the power as a business owner in making decisions comes into actually making and reviewing the data that goes into that decision, not just making a decision based off what you feel or what people have told you.
Duarne:So really having a good idea of your numbers, Stripe, for example, you might find if you go and take your Stripe report for the year to your local bank and ask them for a payment gateway, they may say, well, you've got a lot of transactions going through. You know what, we'll give you a lower rate and they may give you a lower rate. We used to have clients in Australia do this all the time where they would take the. They go and shop their banks and to get better rates and they'd get better rates on their card machines and get it down. And this was very, very common.
Duarne:We used to have to do it because we used to be dealing with fractions of a cent per minute for phone calls for a wholesale company I worked for back in Australia, so every single percent counted, every fraction of a percent counted, and we managed to get, like, with the transactions we're putting through transfers down to something like you know, 1.6, 1.8% for regular credit cards, which made a huge difference. And then when we pass that fee along to the client, we're able to pass the full 1.6, 1.8% across to the client and they weren't putting up a bit of a barrier because previously it was 3%. So we're able to get all get that saving from them and pass the fee across to the customer. So you know there's options here, especially once you've got an established payment method, and sometimes it's easier because there's the recurring payment just to leave it on the on the platform you're using. There was a lot of different platforms out there now offering that the client pays the fee and you can even split it.
Dave:Like I said, just split it with them. So, like you know, and even if the platform doesn't allow you to split it, just add the one and a half onto the invoice price or something like that.
Dave:Whatever it ends up being Like, there's ways around it Credit cards should be on your invoice Exactly, exactly, credit cards are charged, et cetera. Exactly, exactly, credit cards are charged, et cetera. But so that's kind of the overview. Profit first, and also, like just I know we talked about, like some hidden fees that you may not think about, that are cutting into your profit margin, cutting into the income that's coming into your account. Are these transaction rails for the first 30, 35, 40 minutes on a topic we didn't think we were going to cover. But hopefully, if you made it this far we love you, we're glad you're here. Hopefully you heard one or two things that you're able to kind of take away from the conversation. Implement your business. Uh, please like the video, share the video with your network. We appreciate it.
Dave:We're trying to get the word out about the podcast. It's episode 19. Um, I'd love to see the viewership up. You know, higher than you know, maybe a hundred per episode by episode, a hundred. How about that'll be a goal for us to run, a hundred by a hundred? Uh, I think it'll be there way, way before that. But that's what we're going to set it at and these stuff. Make sure you're following our profiles, make sure you're liking the video. You hit the notification bell we post. We're going to go live every single week Friday mornings at 8.15 am ish on Eastern Standard Time, depending on our pregame conversation. But we'll be doing that and if you have questions, drop them down below. We'll make sure to answer them for you. Darlene, thanks for the interaction today. Hope you got something out of the podcast. We hope you all have a wonderful and amazing week, stay safe this weekend and have a wonderful and awesome rest of your week next week.
Dave:Thanks, we'll see you later, take care, bye, bye, bye, bye.
