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SNM230: Advanced Financial Strategies with Stephen Halasnik

• Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger

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Our guest in today's episode is Stephen Halasnik, a serial entrepreneur with a deep knowledge of finance, who has built 7 companies over 25 years. Through one of his companies, Financing Solutions, Stephen offers funding for new businesses with established viability and credibility. He is also the host of The Entrepreneur MBA Podcast. 

In this episode, Stephen offers pivotal advice on how to manage your finances as a budding entrepreneur, highlighting his recommendation for businesses to gain funding when starting, as well as other crucial considerations to keep in view during this early phase.  

Episode Topics

  • [00:57] Meet our guest, Stephen Halasnik 
  • [01:28] Why you shouldn't start a business with a personal social security number. 
  • [03:22] How patents work. 
  • [07:20] The right approach to your finances when starting your business. 
  • [11:56] How can business owners separate business finances from personal finances?
  • [18:42] Taking inventory of resources, especially time. 
  • [26:10] Growing a business with cash flow. 
  • [30:15] Connect with Stephen. 

Notable Quotes

-       “If you have a patent, you had better have $450,000 to be able to successfully litigate against your patent" - [Stephen Halasnik] 

-       "If you're going to start your own business, keep your day job" - [Stephen Halasnik] 

-       "All successful entrepreneurs are heavy-duty learners; self-taught" - [Stephen Halasnik] 

-       "100% of the profit equals my salary; that's the mistake I think that we want to really avoid" - [Jonathan Green] 

-       "If you can't measure, you can't manage" - [Stephen Halasnik] 

-       "Every hour I'm paying someone for is an hour I can invest in my business" - [Jonathan Green] 

-       "You've got to build your business based on existing cash flow" - [Stephen Halasnik] 

-       "My experience is when there's a lot of capital to start a business, it gets deployed poorly" - [Jonathan Green] 

-       "The only way you're going to get any type of angel funding is if you come up with an idea that has incredible scale" - [Stephen Halasnik] 

-       "As you continue to run your business, you're going to learn things that are going to help you either in that business or in your next business" - [Stephen Halasnik]

 

Resources

"Profit First" bookby Mike Michalowicz [09:01]

“Rich Dad Poor Dad” bookby Robert T. Kiyosaki

Connect with Jonathan Green

Jonathan Green: Advanced financial strategies with Steven Lesnik on today's episode of the se no master podcast. 

Today's episode is brought to you by script every book podcast in YouTube video that I publish is transcribed by script. I've used all of the competitors and nobody comes close to their quality and the price is the lowest in the business as well.

If you wanna speed up production and grow your online business, go to serve master.com\script Right now. 

Announcer: Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams. Now then you've come to the right place.

Welcome to serve no master podcast where you'll learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep presented. Live from a tropical island in the south Pacific by bestselling author, Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. 

Jonathan Green: Hello, went and welcome to another amazing episode of the serve master podcast.

We have a very special guest today. Steven is gonna talk to us about finance. He's built seven companies. He's very, very advanced and has a deep knowledge of finance. I know for a lot of us starting an online business, we make some really critical early mistakes that, um, can get bigger and bigger over time.

So we're gonna talk about a lot of those issues so that you. Being a stronger financial position, even if you're a solo printer, you don't wanna wait. I remember when I first started out, I was like, why do I need a business account? Why do I need a business tax ID? I'm just a one man operation. And I think that's what I'd love to start with is a lot of people start off using their, um, personal, um, social security number to start their business.

And they say, oh, I'm a, you know, a solo business operator. And I'd love to start from there. Is that a good decision from the. beginning 

Stephen Halasnik: I, I never did it. No, I, you know, you should sit there and make, get incorporated. I mean, you're a business and you wanna get the write offs too. You can't get those write offs if you're, if you're, if you're not incorporated.

So, I mean, it depends, uh, also, I mean, if you're talking about. You know, if you're a small organization, you have to say to yourself, okay, what is it gonna cost me to? It's not much money to incorporate it. I can't, you know, I it's been a while since I've done it using my business partners done the last two businesses.

So I, I can't imagine do you know, $200, $200 to incorporate it $99. 

Jonathan Green: I know that. Something like that. Yeah. If you go through like a company that helps you, they charge you hundreds or thousands of dollars. If you do it, it's like a couple hundred. And that's another really good. 

Stephen Halasnik: Yeah. It's online. You just, that's a great thing.

You brought up. It's pretty simple. 

Jonathan Green: Is that a lot of things, if you go through like a company they're very expensive. When I, um, got my business name, when I finally said, oh, I need to lock this down with the, um, the patent agency, trademark, my business name. I filed it. It cost me $50. I got emails from 50 lawyers who like, every time you submit, they email everyone who submit.

They go, you made a ton of mistakes. You need to pass $5,000. I got approved right on right at the gate. I was like, there's no way I'm not getting it. It's name my podcast, name, my website, best selling book with that name. There's no way I'm not getting this trademark. I'm the only one in every Google search result as me.

There's no way that I'm not gonna get it, but I got it's scary cuz you think, oh, I need to spend a lot of money to get these things done. Same thing. My friend was like, oh my accountant will set up your LLC for you. And then he was like, oh, that's a couple thousand dollars. I was like, what? I'm definitely not paying that.

Cause I know it's a five minute online form. That's a great place to start. So often we spend money in the wrong places. I always see those people that have like, um, like trying to raise capital. They go, yeah, we spent $25,000 on patents, but they don't know if anyone likes their product yet. And I'm always wondering about those types of financial decisions.

They're so worried about their ID getting stolen. They don't, haven't checked to see if it's a good idea yet. 

Stephen Halasnik: Yeah. I mean, I, I filed for patents too at one time. And what, and my, my business partner, I, I I've had, although I've had seven companies, uh, two of them, and let's be clear too. Someone says to you, they have seven companies where they've built seven companies.

You gotta look at it skeptically. Okay. You say, okay, so why seven companies? And, and, and we're not gonna belabor this, but so every single one of those companies has been between five and 25 million. Right. So there's some credibility rate there. Two are in, in 500 fastest growing companies in the United States all started from scratch and buy any companies.

So, uh, so, and it's been over a 30 year period too, so, and now I still have, uh, uh, uh, four of those companies. So anyway, anyway, uh, so, uh, what you don't realize is just because you have a. patent And let's say you did spend quite a Mon bit of money. Uh, you know, filing for a patent could be anywhere between 25 and $50,000.

If it's done right. Okay. Should be done. Right. You don't understand. People can still infringe on your patent, you and just to, and my part, my business partner had three patents. He's a lawyer and, and successfully had to litigate against. So just so you know, if you have a patent and again, I don't wanna blame this, but you, you had better have $450,000 to be able to successfully litigate against your patent.

So you are not going to say you have gonna right to somebody and say, oh wow, you infringed on my patent and they're gonna be like, oh, okay. Right. So, and I have this from firsthand experience from my business partner successfully litigating against people who went against his patent. In fact, he got so good.

He became a patent attorney. So, uh, now he's not, that's not his, uh, that's not what he does for a living, but, uh, you know, anyway, so just to give you a heads up, most people think, oh, I get a patent. And that means something 

Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that's really important. It's the same thing for my trademark. There was one company that was infringing on it.

They make. Motorcycle gang t-shirts that say served a master on em? I was like, no, one's gonna think that's me. Is it really worth fighting over them? They probably sell 10 t-shirts a year. And it honestly kinda, 

Stephen Halasnik: that's a different scenario. They kinda look cool. Yeah. That's that, it's also a small business and yeah.

You know, that's different. We're talking about, you know, someone really. A big company going, using your patent. 

Jonathan Green: So exactly only a really big scale. Is it really worth it? I know someone who did massive patent lawsuits only because it was tens of millions of dollars. So that's the thing I think sometimes.

Stephen Halasnik: Yeah, well, he won, he won, he won 3 million, so, you know, 

Jonathan Green: so, but so many people worry about the patent too soon. I think they're worried about the patent and it's like, yeah, yeah. It just gives you the right to Sue. So that's really, really good. Another, I think common mistake that people make when they start their business is, is that they mingle their finances, either their personal fans or their business finance or, and this is what I don't really like the term side hustle it's become so popular now.

And I think side hustle means we think of it as a game. And what we think of as entertainment. And so people will buy a course or a book, a business book, and they'll think this is an for my entertainment budget. Like if I go to the movies, I don't expect to make the money back. But if I invest in my business, put a hundred dollars in ads, I expect to make the money back.

And I think that. That's the beginning of a bad financial mindset. I see that that's a really common mistake. I had a friend who had about $65,000 worth of personal development DVDs in a bedroom, and they were all unopened. And I said, I don't think it works that way. If you don't open it, you don't get the benefit.

But we, and he goes, well, it doesn't count because it'ss for my entertainment budget. And that causes us to start, um, Kind of doing our accounting wrong. So what, what's the right way to approach like your business finance? You go, I'm gonna start a business, whether you're a solo printer, whether you're starting cupcake business or starting a blog, what's the first steps to take to, um, kind of treat business money like business money.

Stephen Halasnik: Right. Well, so I I'll add a couple things. First thing is if you're gonna start your own business, keep your day job. So you keep your day job and you work on your business on the, your hours. That's number one. Number two is, um, you know, you don't don't expect to get money from . Any angel funder venture capitalist, uh, get cash flow positive.

Before you start going in that direction. You wanna work on the model, you wanna make sure it's working. You wanna make sure you're getting paid. Um, number three is once you start getting cash flow, uh, you, what that means is once you start billing, you wanna have a business account. You wanna be incorporated and you wanna have a personal account.

You wanna have those two things. And, and then the fourth thing is you wanna start looking at what you can put on the business versus the personal account. Um, so, uh, computers you buy, um, You know, anything that you can take justify. And there's, there's two really good books I would recommend to everybody out there.

Um, by the way, you could all successful entrepreneurs are heavy duty learners. Just there's. No, they're self-taught. No one teaches you stuff. You can't read a book to be a business owner just doesn't work. You can read parts of, you know, writing a business. And, uh, but the two books, one is a, I actually rent to him.

He's actually really, really a big author. He's had six books out. I rent to him in one of my commercial buildings. He saying he is Mike MCZ and he, he wrote, he wrote a book called profit first. And what he talks about as your business continues to grow. That you should have several different accounts, bank accounts.

And, um, and hi, his philosophy is they're ones for taxes, one's for, uh, paying yourself one's for another one. And I, I, I think as a smaller business, if you're under, you know, 3 million, 2 million, 1 million, I think that's a really good idea. Um, the other one is, uh, rich dad, poor dad. What the rich teach their dad, their kids about money.

And it, you know, the big idea is, but most people don't understand that you get a 30% tax break when you have your own company. So you, you basically are whenever you have expenses that can be categorized as businesses as business expense, you get to put it on. You're you know, you write it off your tax return.

Now it doesn't. When I write off, this is the most miscon people don't understand. When you say it, write off means, oh, I get it for free. No, you get, you get, you get to write it off your income tax so that you get, you pay less taxes. So you're in essence, if you're in a 30% tax bracket, you get a 30% discount.

So if you buy a computer and you put it on your business, Right. You get, you got a 30% discount on that. Now what else could there be? Uh, I, this is less controversial, but like the room in your house that you use for your business, a portion of your house that used to be more controversial because it was my, my accountant had said, it's the number one thing that triggers an audit.

But I think now with COVID, I think that's changed quite a bit. And my, in my, my accountant had said anything that you could possibly justify if they asked you, you know, you say, yeah, I work in one of my rooms in my house and I don't go to an office. I, if I didn't have that office in my house, I'd have to go pay somewhere else.

You know? So there, there are other things like that. Uh, if let's say, if you sometimes go see clients. I mean, you're supposed to only write off the, the gas that you do that with and you maybe the portion of your car, but maybe you do it a little more often, so you can decide how aggressively you want to be with that.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. I think that there's this like gap between where people go I'm too small for it to matter. And I see this a lot of ways they go, oh, I don't need to worry about business access. I don't need to worry about piercing the veil. Like when you're doing client work, they don't think about those things. Um, or like I'll use my business credit card to pay for our personal expense and vice versa.

There's this mingling. What's the, how can people like really delineate and separate their two money? When should someone start? For example, start paying themselves like a fixed salary out of the business.

Stephen Halasnik: Well, uh, that's, that's something that people usually don't take into account. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's even more, when should they do it? Uh, I, I, at revenue, uh, you know, it depends on the business. Uh, you know, I, you know, I, I think as a small businesses, I don't, you, you tell me, I mean, you know, more about than I do.

I mean, my business is right off the right off the get, go, got to be a million dollars pretty quick. Within a year. I think a lot of your listeners maybe are small, a lot smaller than that. What do you, what do you think? 

Jonathan Green: Yeah, I think that it's more about having like a clear sense of where the money's going and this is the problem I have.

So when I first met my first accountant, um, 12 years ago, she goes, how much money do you wanna make? And I told her how much she goes, what? And I was living on my friend's couch. I said, my friend's a millionaire. I just sit next to him and pay attention to what he does. And I'm learning from that. And she goes, well, how much do you spend?

And I go, I don't know what happens when we run outta money. I just make more. So I'm my problem was my core problem is that I'm a really good Rainmaker. So if I'm having like a problem, I'll get a client or I'll close a deal, I'll bring in something or I'll do like really well on a project. I'm really good at roller ING money.

I'm really good at controlling the in, but not so good at controlling the out, like controlling the spend of the same way I'm always working on. And so I just find that there is this point where, um, if you don't watch your money and I'm so guilty of this is why I like to talk about it. I'm like the king of this, because I'm so good at making money.

I'm really bad at tracking other stuff. And I just go, oh, I'll just make more money. If we need to buy something, wanna buy something. Let's just make more. And that's most people can't do that. And it's, so it's kind of like an unfair thing to say, but I think that it's really important that people like, like you were saying, if they're not doing the different bank accounts, maybe they do the, I think it's called envelopes where you go, this goes to this expense.

This goes to that expense because. Most people don't know their overhead or don't know their costs. And so they can't figure out how much they can pay themselves. And I know a lot of small businesses, they go, well, a hundred percent of the profit equals my salary. That's the mistake. I think that we wanna really avoid

Yeah. That's that's the decision. They go. Every, I pay the company, I pay the bills. The rest is mine and we don't factor in exactly. There's like surprises. When my family rent a hotel for two years. You have to factor in 10% of stuff is gonna get damaged. You have to factor in, you gotta change the sheets.

People will do things you could never imagine. Like the rules we had to make for the hotel are things you would never imagine you'd have to come up with. But basically if you destroy it, you buy it and people could like, you never think, well, what if someone rips a sink in half? And this one guy just, I didn't even know a person could do that.

And I was like, I gotta figure that out. Right. So, but people don't factor the pitch as one thing. 

Stephen Halasnik: Yeah, here's a, yeah. Here's another thing. My business partner taught me this, um, too, like, uh, so, uh, I'll give you, I'll use my sister as an example. So my sister opened up this business selling lots of, uh, uh, holiday decorations on eBay and all those type of things.

So on a revenue standpoint, She, it was like a $500,000 a year. Right. So she's telling me about it. Right. And I, I know my sister, she's not a great business person. Um, so, so, so she's like, you know, well, I have this really good business that's doing really well. It's, you know, I'm up around $500,000. I'm like, Oh, okay.

I said, well, what's, what's the profit, right? She goes, oh, it's, it's really good. It's like, you know, it's like $50,000 a year. So I said, oh, okay. I go, where are you keeping the, the, the $500,000? Well, where are you keeping the inventory? She goes, oh, in my garage. I'm like, okay, are you, are you, uh, accounting for that?

Are you accounting for the space for that? She's like, no, she goes, oh yeah, I just have this space. So I'm like, okay. I go, are you, how much time do you put into this business? And so she goes, uh, you know, about 50 or 60 hours a week. And so, and I'm like, okay, so are you taking, are you, are you paying yourself?

And she's like, no. So I was like, all right, well, You know, how much are you really making an hour because you're putting your own time into this. And that's the biggest mistake. I mean, I, I didn't use the best example, you know, but maybe she was making, you know, 10,000 or 20,000. She's like, oh great. I'm making 10,000, 20,000, but yet, yet, maybe she was putting 40 or 50, 50 hours in a week.

Right. If you D divide that up, you know, $10 an hour, that you're making might as well work at Starbucks. 

Jonathan Green: That's such a good point. It reminds me, it happened to another friend of mine. She was an amazing jewelry maker. And I said, how do you come up with your prices? She goes, well, look at what the materials cost.

And I add 10%. And I said, well, that's already low. That's ridiculous. What about labor? And she was selling it like the really fancy stores in, in my hometown. Like the fanciest stores were like, you know, the places where you get like your suits customized, like the, that kind of store, where all the lawyer shop.

And I said, well, what about how can you scale and chose what I go? Well, you can never hire an employee because your employees aren't gonna do free work. So I said, how many hours does it make you pace of joy? And that's a really good point because we don't factor and we go, well, I'm it's like when people say, how much money did you invest in the business?

They go, I just invested my time and we don't think about, well, what's an hour of your time worth, which is such critical lesson because, um, if you factor in your time, yeah, I've seen sometimes someone's like, oh, I'm making 43 cents an hour. Like you get excited until you do account. And I hate accounting.

I hate accounting and spreadsheets, but every time I do it, I, I get better at business. It's like the, it's the most unpleasant part, but it's also the most important part that and process, and it is. That's a really good point. You have to factor in what your time is worth. How much time are you putting into the business?

Stephen Halasnik: Because so there's an old adage and it is, is if you don't, if you can't measure, you can't manage. As you continue to grow as a business person, you really start to learn some of the key elements of running a business. And one of them is you gotta be able to measure everything. So rather it be on an Excel spreadsheet, rather it be.

Quicken QuickBooks or some other accounting package. You gotta be able to measure everything. 

Jonathan Green: Yeah. When I started hiring employees, There's two mindsets about hiring employees. One is how much does employee cost me? And the other one is how much time does it save me and what is my time worth? So when I'm hiring an employee, for example, people are like, wow, Jonathan, you, you do so well, yours.

I'm like, I don't edit mys. I definitely pay someone else to do that because it's, he can do it in one hour. It would take me four hours. And I say, I love to have, I'd rather spend those four hours with my kids and I'll pay his hourly wage to have those hours. Um, and I think that's another scaling phase you have to know.

So I think of it as every hour, I'm paying someone as an hour. I can invest in my business. So if I have 10 employees working 40 hours, we got 400 hours and I wanna invest those to the maximum result in my company. And in the same way. Um, the most important thing to me is growing my email list. My entire business is built around how many emails I have.

So if I run a paid ad, I know how much it costs per lead. And if I have someone on my team run an organic campaign, I look at how many emails they generated and how much I paid them to see if it was profit, positive, to see, which is the better investment for my business, because then I can direct if this, if the person is making more, then I'm gonna stop the paid ads.

I'm gonna double down with them and the all goal in the other direction. But if you don't track it and we don't, it's so hard when you're starting out to know what to track. And I think that's a really, really good point you bring up is that we go. Because we get, I see all of these, I get hit all the time with emails and books about KPIs and doing your rocks, if you've read, um, uh, that book and all these other books about different earn harness.

Yeah. You know, try to track everything traction, you try to track everything, but it's gotta start with the smallest things. Like how much time do I spend, how much money is going into it. I find something really interesting is that people that, um, are doing like a side hustle, like they're driving for Uber, they're driving for Lyft.

They never factor in depreciation on the car. I'm like, well, you're putting, 

Stephen Halasnik: I know it's crazy. 

Jonathan Green: If you factor in the damage to the car, the devalue to the car, you're literally losing a dollar every time you take 

Stephen Halasnik: you're losing money. Yeah. 

Jonathan Green: And it's because the reason taxi companies work is because they buy a hundred taxis and they can pay one mechanic to work.

'em all, you don't have scale. I think. And that's the thing is if we miss one. number It can be devastating. I've seen that where someone is running a paid advertising campaign and they're so excited. And I, I look at their numbers. I go, you're losing a dollar on every single campaign and you just 10 Xed it, you went from losing a hundred dollars a day to $10,000 a day because you messed up your math.

That's why it's so important. And it. There's this thing, when we're we always go, I'm too small. Another example of this is when someone starts their first website, they go, I don't need any website security. No, one's gonna try and hack a small blog. It turns out that's their favorite type of site to hack cuz you hack a small site, steal their server resources to use that, to hack a big site.

So when I first put security on my website, I would get an alert. Every time there was an attack, I had to turn those off cuz I was getting hundreds of alerts a day and I was like, I'm too. I thought I'm too small. It turns. Wrong that you're never too small. So even when you start out the gate and it's like, he talks about rich dad, poor dad, it's the principles you start with that you grow.

It's like people say, oh, I'll donate. I'll donate to charity when I'm rich. But people that donate to charity don't do it when they're small, won't do it when they're big it, you don't switch and become generous. So I think. It's the same thing of, you have to start in a, like a business manner. And I think one of my big complaints is that so much of education has removed all this knowledge.

Like I saw commercial when I was in college that said P Y and, and I was like, I don't know what that is. They're talking about. I think a bank account and credit cards APR, and you don't know what they mean. And these are like really basic financial terms. Most people don't understand the difference between a fixed and a revolving interest rate.

So these really core things that we used, I think they used to teach 'em like in home EC, which was more than cooking was also economics part of home. 

Stephen Halasnik: It's well, they still do my, both my kids, they, but now it's a big, and it depends on what state you are. Some states make it mandatory and yeah, you take finance classes for kids, 

Jonathan Green: but wish it was mandatory for everyone.

Stephen Halasnik: Yeah, you, yeah. I mean, so as your business grows, you really start to L learn the world of finance, like. You know, a lot of smaller businesses, right? Think, oh, I can just go to a bank, show them my business plan and I don't have any cash flow to say, Hey, this is, this is a really good business and you're gonna go there and you're gonna get a line of credit or loan.

This doesn't work that way. You know, it's the whole world out there that's completely different than what you think it is. Banks. They all they care about. Collateral, which is something to back up your loan and your cash flow. Can you pay the loan back? They that's what they care and your credit score.

Okay. So I mean, if, if you don't, you know, most people who are running a small business, they don't have collateral, they don't have, incredible cash flow and honestly, their credit score usually kind of suck. If you think you're gonna get money from a bank, you're just not gonna get it.

Then there's other alternative lenders that are out there and, they might give you the money, but they're gonna charge you 200% interest. It's gonna be a fortune. You gotta build your business based on existing cash flow, not based on getting money. Now, do you, you know, the number way people build businesses?

Is is, is, is they typically they start a small business and they grow it from existing cash flow. And then the second way is friends and family. They borrow money from mom or they borrow whatever they borrow money from other people. And, uh, and then after that, uh, they do more existing cash flow. And then they start me going.

The big thing now is angel funding. That's been going on for 10, 15 years. And, uh, that's getting money from a venture. You know, someone who's like a venture capitalist. I never did any of that. I just built the businesses based on an existing cash flow. And then as I got bigger, then I used the finance world world a little bit bigger, more so.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. I think that with my experiences with angel investing or people talking about investing on projects, me, my experience is when there's a lot of capital, um, to start a business, it gets deployed poorly. I've seen that where people trying to start a similar business to mine and they're just spending.

And they don't know what things should cost for example. 

Stephen Halasnik: Well, that's, it's, it's a, I did angel funding. So I had, uh, for three years I had an angel funding group and looked at over 500 companies and it's a different mindset. They don't care about profit. They don't give a shit. Like if you're an angel funder, I don't want profit.

I want you to grow this business so that I can get out of it. So I want you to grow it. So it's 10, 20, 30 million, and then that it can either sell it or it can be acqui, you know, acquired or, or at some point go public. They want an exit. They don't want profit. So they want you to come up. The only way you're gonna get any type of angel funding is if you come up with an idea that has incredible scale.

That's what they want. They don't care about. So, that's what I wanted. I wanted a business that was gonna take off because I don't get my money out on profit. I get my money out as an angel funder based on an exit, which was either selling the business or when it goes public.

Jonathan Green: Yeah. And a lot of people think they need a huge amount of capital to start a business. And it used to be that way maybe 20 or 50 years ago, you had to borrow money to open a store at a physical location. Like I started my business with $500 on a credit. 

Stephen Halasnik: I started with 9,000. 

Jonathan Green: Exactly. And it's not a, that's not a crazy number.

It's not like your parents gave you a couple million dollars. Like some people sure that happens. But I think that's really important is that people, we think there's this misconception about what things cost. Cause people don't do research. It's very fascinating. Sometimes I ask people what they think things cost and their numbers are so far off.

Like I'll ask them what they think my cost of living is. And they're like, I dunno, a couple million dollars a month. And I was like, what, what kind of maniac do you think I am? Like, I'm not driving around in a golden. But they never look. They never go, oh, well, I live in a foreign country for a lot. My wife is foreign for a lot of reasons.

And then also the dollar's very strong here. That factors in, but people never look. They saw something 20 years ago. Oh, Hawaii costs this I'm like, doesn't cost that anymore long. You don't have to, we're not calling on a long distance phone call where we're paying like $4 a minute. Right now, things change.

But sometimes once we hear a piece of information we lock in and there's this thought of, I need a huge amount of money to start a business and you can start small and start growing from cash flow. My, when I started my business, I posted ad on Craigslist. Made $200 in four days, I got my first client four days later, then my next client a week after that.

And that's how I started from cashflow. And I used that money to invest in learning how to deliver the services. And that's the mindset I've always believed. And that's what I think of when I say bootstrapping is that you don't meet. Cause once you take an outside capital as well, you you're like have to please those people you have to exactly.

If they wanna exit, then you're gonna have to do an exit or there's this pressure. And a lot of people jump, I think too money too. When they don't need it when you can grow. Yeah. You grow a little bit slower, but you earn a hundred percent of it. So I think that's really important to understand that exiting is.

So if now, if you wanna do an exit, great, then it makes a lot of sense to kind of go that path. But I see a lot of people that I knew, some people, they sold their business and they were like really depressed because they missed it. They were like, oh, now we have nothing to do all day. We sold our baby and they, they got a million dollars each.

I was like, guys, Million is pretty good payday, right. But they, the business had really good cash flow and now that was all gone and that can happen. So that's a really good lesson. I think that, 

Stephen Halasnik: well, see, this is what the, the idea will determine the, what type of revenue, uh, avenue you're going to go. So if you come up with this really, really good idea, um, that has a lot of scale, you're gonna have to go to the angel funding.

But most people aren't gonna do that. You know, everyone, like, you know, looks at shark tank. It's very popular and you know, a lot of the business, a lot of the people are listening today. You just gotta have a nice little small business. And this is the other thing I would tell you, learn growing or learning about business.

You gotta, it it's all about experience. You know, the first business I had, you know, I got it to like $500,000 in revenue. Okay. I was making like $60,000 a year, $80,000 a year. Just started for the first couple. Um, I only had it for two or three years, but I still kept my day job. Okay. That brought me learning that business brought me to the next business.

And then I learned a lot and that was a really good business. That was a very powerful, profitable business to got to be, um, 6 million, uh, in revenue. And, and, and then I learned a lot with that business. And then the next one and the next one. Now I'm not saying everybody out, there's gotta have seven businesses.

I'm not talking about that. I'm just saying is you gotta be in the game to learn. What's really gonna work. And as you continue to run your business, you're going to learn things that are gonna help you either in that business or in your next business. But you're never gonna learn it. If you don't do it.

Jonathan Green: That's great advice. Thank you so much for spending so much time with us. I know your time is really, really precious. Where can people learn more from you and see more about what you're doing right now with your business? 

Stephen Halasnik: Well, I mean, I, I, the company that I, uh, financing solutions, uh, and it's, it's my website's financing solutions now.com is our website.

What we do is provide lines of credit to small businesses, but you have to have at least, uh, uh, $200,000 in revenue, a year to qualify for a line of credit with us. So financing solutions now.com is the. Perfect I'll make, and by the way, I have a great, I have a great podcast. It's really awesome. The entrepreneur NBA podcast, uh, I is the, the podcast it's been it's four years old, 150 episodes I bring in great guests.

It's really good. 

Jonathan Green: Okay. So the entrepreneur NBA podcast, and I'll put the links to both of those in the show notes and in a blog post below this episode. Thank you so much for being here, Steve. We really appreciate you giving us your time for having me. Yeah, it was great. Thank. You 

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