5 Things We SHOULD Never Do Again! | Biz To Biz Podcast

You are now watching the Biz to Biz Podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Rocky Balboa of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, uh, Sean came up with the idea of 5 things that we'll never do again. Um, I had a few interesting things that came to my mind, but I can't say I'll never do them again. So there's that. But I have a couple that I kind of thought about, and it's also Mental Health Awareness Month, so it kind of ties into that a little bit as well. Yeah, man, how you doing?

I'm doing okay. Yesterday was actually National Dog Rescue Day, so I thought, like, I saw Dave Portnoy with his Peaches dog everywhere. He has some pit bull that he adopted. Oh, Miss Peaches. Cool. We have Rocky. Do you have Rocky? I have Rocky.

Yeah, you do have Rocky. The Nationwide Payment Systems mascot, right?

Rocky, you gonna make an appearance on the podcast? Come here, come over here. See, everybody can see you, how cute you are. Say, I'm cuter than Miss Peaches, or I don't know, there's another dog on the internet, Clarence, but I don't think he's a rescue dog.

Never heard of him.

Oh, Clarence, there's some black Labrador. We'll give them a shout out. My other favorite dogs are Luna and Layla. They're also on Facebook. There's a woman, she makes really funny videos.

Very nice.

I don't have time to make Rocky videos. Pictures, yes. Videos, no. Okay. But how's your week going?

It's going, man. It is what it is.

You ready to hop into it?

Yes, sir.

Okay. You want to go first?

Uh, sure, I'll go first. Um, the number 1 on my list, you know, I guess this isn't— I kind of heard this early on, uh, when I was starting my business, and that's, uh, doing work for family. Um, what I mean by that is like You know, I'm a web developer by trade. So a lot of times, you know, your family will, hey, you know, I got this business I'm starting, blah, blah, blah. Help me out with a website. That quickly gets out of hand unless you're really good at like setting boundaries and, you know, like putting contracts in place with family members. I myself, I didn't. I found myself working for free quite a lot when I, you know, not when I first started either. You know, it's kind of, it was like a, oh, I did it for him, so I might as well do it for him.

You know what I mean? Right.

Type of thing. So that would be, you know, you don't ask your landlord for free rent, right? Because you know the guy, right?

Um, we act— I'll tell you a funny story about that. We had, we had a landlord when me and Dave first went into business, this guy, uh, Mr. Booth, Phil Booth. And Phil Booth said to us one day, he goes, he said something because Dave was always— back then Dave's mom was not— she was in good health and everything. Now it's not so much, but she, you know, her stepdad and his mom were attorneys. And he said, oh, if you could get— you know, Dave would always say, oh, my mom has to look at this paper or whatever. Because, well, if you can get your mom to write a letter that says that you two are good boys, because I'll give you a month of free rent. Dave called his mom and we got a month free rent.

So, oh, that's nice. Yeah, I never really— nothing, you know, my uncle was the like the— shout out to Uncle Randy. He was the only one that ever like paid me.

Yeah.

So I mean, my advice for anybody, you know, stay away from doing work for your family unless you got some— unless you really want to stand on it. And, you know, I mean, I don't know. That's—

it's been It's kind of hard to do that. I mean, listen, I got somebody that was like a pseudo relative of mine, a merchant account one time. I said, listen, if it doesn't work out, just let me know. Send the machine back. Right, right. And I'll get your account canceled. Instead of doing that, they were doing like no business. I asked them about it. They said, no, we're trying to do business, you know. And then instead of calling me on the phone and like returning the machine, they called up and then they said like a bunch of bad stuff about me.

Well, yeah, that's—

and I was like, why did you do— and then I called them up, I'm like, why'd you do that? I told you, you— all you had to do is return the equipment.

Yeah, that never really happened to me. I mean, it just— I just end up being the asshole. Yeah, Justin's an asshole.

Exactly.

Justin doesn't want—

well, that's what they did. They said, oh, this guy said we could just cancel at any time and That wasn't what it is. You got to return your equipment to cancel.

Yeah, I would, uh, I would definitely pass that on to if you know somebody who, um, you know, whatever. If you can pass the business on, pass the business on. Uh, my second thing, uh, oh, you're gonna do all yours?

I'm not.

I guess I was just gonna run through them real quick.

Okay.

It's not, you know, uh, the rest of them aren't really life-changing or story-worthy, but number 2 would be neglect my body. For the past 20 years, you know what I'm saying? I didn't work out for shit. And I woke up one morning when I was about 42 years old and really felt terrible. So I've been at it ever since. Number 3 probably would be number 1 for me, but, you know, not giving yourself the love and self-appreciation, like giving yourself props for all the things that you do in life. You know what I mean? Sometimes we go through life and forget to really, you know, congratulate ourselves on the accomplishments that we have and how far we've came and the diversity that we've had to overcome. So remember to show yourself love, man. Number 4 will be never listen to a song with Puffy on it again. And that's for, all jokes aside.

No, no, I'm not laughing.

You know what I'm saying? But like literally like.

I mean, let's put it this way. The skeletons are coming out of this guy's closet.

Yeah, he's shit outta luck.

And apparently like there's.

He's up shit's creek without a paddle for real.

Apparently like he disappeared, right?

No, he's in Miami.

Oh, he's in Miami? Oh, I thought they couldn't find him.

No, he's, yeah, he's in Miami.

Oh, he's in Miami?

Puffy ain't worth our airtime.

Okay.

And then number 5 is, you know, not listen to my gut instincts about certain things. Most of the, 99% of the time, your intuition is correct. So. Go with your— believe in yourself enough. And you know what I mean? Go with your gut instinct and, you know, take those chances. It's definitely worth it. But so, yeah, man, those are my top 5. And I mean, for the bonus, I was going to say I'll never sell drugs again, but I don't know if that's going to happen or not. So I'm kidding. It's a joke. I'm a retired whatever.

Okay, char. Okay. Justin's a comedian today. So I probably got more than 5, but one of the things, like you said about abusing your body, I think that you have to, my mom is like a toothpick, okay? So she always told me, my brothers, we were fat. Even when I wasn't fat, I was fat. And I think that being healthy is very important and taking care of your health and having— be having a proper, uh, I don't try to use the word diet, but meal plan, you know, and eating healthy and doing healthy things for yourself is very important. And making time for that, that's something also that when I was almost 60, my brother asked me if I was going to live to see 60 and I dropped 50 pounds.

There you go. So yeah, I lost 130 pounds in the past 2 years.

I know that. And I feel better. So here's a few things I would never do. One, I'll never open another restaurant again. No one can talk me into that.

That bad.

I worked in the restaurant business. I had my own restaurant. It's something I would never do again. When I see people opening up restaurants, I feel, you know, unless you got a lot of money, you know, don't open a restaurant. Can quickly get out of hand. Justin said about doing business with family, loaning money to friends. You ever loan money to a friend? You might not get your money back. So if you give them money, consider it almost a gift. Or if you feel like you're going to help somebody out, or they said— like one time I knew somebody was not actually like a good friend of mine, but was friends with somebody else. And it was a single mom. She was going to get kicked out of her apartment. I actually contacted the landlord and I said she needs to stay in her apartment for at least another 2 weeks, what's that going to take? And I took care of that. And the girl said, oh, I'm going to give you back the money. I knew I was never getting the money back, so— but I did a— it's a good thing I did a good deed.

Uh, throwing money to friends is a Yeah, that's, um, got to be careful with that shit.

Exactly. It's a very hard thing to deal with. Another thing I wrote down, this: never get married. Since I'm divorced twice, I don't know, you know, it would take a lot for me to do that.

Never say never, buddy.

But the one thing is, is, you know, one thing you got to be— I learned one thing about myself over the, over the years, right? And one of the things I learned is I need to be me, right? Sometimes it's not— doesn't go, you know, I got to be me. And being Allen Kopelman is enough. Right? And, you know, you don't need to get— go spend a bunch of money and put on fancy clothes to impress people and all that. Just be yourself and it's good enough. And if you yourself and you work hard, you're going to do well. You don't need to go drive a Mercedes or some expensive car to impress women, and you don't need to be wearing, you know, $500 suit or whatever and $300 sneakers to accomplish things in your life.

Man, it's gotta be tough to be a young man these days, bro. Yeah. I mean, to, yeah, like I have daughters.

Yeah.

And there's the way, I just feel sorry for everybody they date, man. I've set like this standard for them, right? Like, and they're, geez, I tell them all the time, like, I'm like a diamond in the rough, you know what I mean? Like, I have like, I'm from where chivalry isn't dead, right? Like you still open the door for people and you say thank you.

Yeah, but that's being yourself.

That's what I'm saying.

Doing those nice things. That's more important than spending the money.

Yeah, but then there's also that, right? Right. And I've spoiled all of my daughters.

Okay.

You know what I mean? They're all spoiled to death. And that's—

I spoil my daughter. It's a big problem.

Um, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's an issue for real. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it's— it— they take it out on their other the significant others quite often. And I'll just ask my dad, you know, you know, that, that if I was a man, like a man dating someone, and they would— I would get pissed off too about that.

Like, yeah, I wouldn't want that held over my head. But I think that you have to, you know, relationships is just hard to deal with. So you gotta, you gotta be on the same page with somebody and, and all that. And, you know, you can't just spend money just to impress people. Spending money just to impress people, you're just going to put yourself in debt and you're going to end up not happy. Because if you don't have the money to spend, don't spend the money.

And if you can't put— there's something that I read not too long ago that made a lot of sense to me. If you see something and you're going to buy it, but you can't put the same amount of money into your savings account, then you can't afford it. So like, say there's something for $600 that you want to buy. If you can't put— buy that and put the $600 to the side, you can't afford it. And it made so much sense to me.

That does make sense. I wonder who said that.

It was just a random, you know, it's mental health awareness. So like, there's memes flying out the window right now.

It's a really good one.

It's a good— that was some sound advice, financial advice.

Uh, yeah, that's good Sam financial advice. Another thing that I wrote down, you know, so you just got to be yourself. Don't try to impress people. Don't worry about, you know, like, I— somebody told me, oh, I can't be on your podcast, you guys got to wear suits on the podcast. Nobody cares if we have a suit on. No one cares if you have a— I would tell you that, like, doing business today, it's not the same as doing business 25 years ago.

Right.

Okay, 25 years ago, you walked into somebody's business, you better be wearing a dress shirt and a tie, probably, at the very least, if not a suit jacket, okay? Today, people are doing business mostly on the internet. Even if you go meet somebody in person, most of these people— me and Justin were at a convention like last year, there wasn't hardly a person walking around with a suit on.

I mean, we've been at conventions all this.

Yeah, we've been at a bunch of conventions.

But yeah, no, the amount of people that have suits on it.

Yeah, most people are wearing t-shirts. They're wearing a logo shirt, a t-shirt with some funny saying on it. Right. We saw people with shirts on that said AF. No, I'm just saying, like, people are, you know, people are thinking about business in a different way. You know, it's a more casual business atmosphere. So what are you saying? Never do What you're saying, like, you don't need to— you don't need to be yourself. You talk to people and be yourself. Be— show that you care, you're honest, you know. You don't need to dress up in a suit because, you know, it's funny, like, when I first started in credit—

never fake the funk, right?

When I first started in credit card processing, I'll tell this story, it's really funny. So me and Dave worked at this company and the guy had this ad in the Yellow Pages and we would go people would call up and we'd go on the lead, right? So I go on the lead. Now, remember, I signed up this guy with a bartending school, right? And I bring the application back. I'm all proud of myself because I was brand new in the business, right? Signed the guy up for credit card processing, bartending school. And the guy's looking at the application, he's looking at all the information. He looks at me and goes, let me ask you a question. I go, yeah. He goes, was this guy wearing like gold chain and he had a nugget jewelry, golden nugget ring? Yes. Why? Because I could tell by the paperwork, it's a gold nugget guy. And I was like, that's crazy. And I was like, yeah, you can't be impressed. Like when you go meet somebody, my dad even told me, I saw a guy once with a Corvette. And I was like, wow, that guy's got a Corvette. My dad said, don't think that person's rich. That could be leased, could be somebody else's car. You don't know. So you can't just go by, oh, I went and the guy was wearing, you know, a Patek Philippe watch. It could be fake. It could be a fake Rolex. It could be a Rolex instead of a Rolex, right? You don't know because some people are doing all that. It's all show. It's a smoke and mirrors show to impress you, right? And then you get dragged into a bad investment or you get catfished. You know, you could get catfished in dating and you could get catfished in a business deal too. Because the person's not who they say they are. So, you know, you don't want to go— you can't go by like just somebody's appearance when you go see them. You know, that's one thing that I've learned. So you can get yourself in a lot of— you get yourself in a lot of trouble with, with, uh, things like that. But it's, you know, that's, that's, you know, that's life. You know, you make mistakes and then you hope not to repeat those mistakes, you know. And, uh, you learn from your— you learn, you learn from your lessons, you know. Like if one of my friend's kids told me they wanted to open a restaurant, I'd sit them down for like half an hour and talk them out of it. You're going to work all the time. You're never going to see your family.

I mean, you could, in all due respect, you could pretty much say that to starting a business in general. You're not going to spend a lot of time with your family. You know, the first couple years are gonna be tough.

No, that's true.

And if, and even after the first couple years, if you do survive, there's gonna be times when you have to make some serious sacrifices. I mean, you know, it's not just restaurants.

No, it's not, but yeah, but I'm saying restaurants.

But restaurant—

Time-consuming business.

Restaurants is just, Yeah, I mean, my wife's been trying to get me to open a restaurant for 10 years, bro. Like before the veganism shit was popular and was just getting, you know, the notoriety of like, this is how you should be living. This is how you should be eating. You know, I've been eating healthy for a long time, but yeah, she could never talk me into it. Ever. Never.

It's a hard, no, but it's like if you open a, that's why I said.

You gotta wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning to get ready for the day, yo. Yeah. And then you gotta work all day and then you gotta sleep for a little bit of time and then you gotta go prep everything again for the next day.

Yeah. It's not, not just that, you gotta go buy stuff. You gotta, you know, you gotta buy stuff.

On your off days, you gotta go to the grocery store and do more work.

Right.

And then you gotta craft your menu and then build your menu around the food that's available to you at the grocery store. Like, it's just, I don't know. I watched Anthony Bourdain, rest in peace, No Reservations for so long. Like, he would just tell horror stories after horror stories of working in the kitchen and starting different restaurants and failing and starting again. I mean, some people, the passion that they have for that is, relentless, right?

Like, you have to be a relentless chef.

They're like, I'm a chef and I'm gonna do this shit one way or the other. They don't care if they're rich or if they're dirt poor, you know. Every chef that I've ever met in my life is overworked, underpaid, uh, on the verge of committing suicide. I'm not making a joke.

Like, no, that's true. It's very stressful.

Like, every guy I know is like Yeah, man.

I mean, I worked in the—

I just don't think it's, it's a good look, bro.

I mean, I worked in a hotel, like, when I was a chef. I remember the first chef job I had, I worked in a hotel. We had a breakfast, lunch, and dinner restaurant. We had banquets. We had employ— we had to feed the employees every day. I mean, there's just a multitude of stuff going on all day long, non-stop. You got to manage your staff. You got to manage food. You gotta It's just a lot going on.

Yeah. Anyway, what else you got on there?

That was pretty much my whole list. Like, you just gotta, you know, the catfish thing that almost happened to me one time where I almost got catfished by somebody where they pretended to be a person and I believed that they were this person, you know, and it was when the internet first started. And then something clicked off in my brain because the person was asking me for money. Mm-hmm. And I was like, this is not a good idea. And I stopped myself. But, you know, it happens. Like today, I had a phone call today where some— where we got an application in. I was showing Justin the address went to a cemetery. I found the actual business and the real guy. And he goes, oh, actually, our, our business— he goes, is— he goes, there's a cemetery right next to where our warehouse is, like near where it is, right down the road a little bit. Okay. And he's like, yeah. He goes, I got a few other phone calls. He goes, what do you think I should do? And I said, well, you should definitely check your credit report and make sure nobody's dinged it or tried to— made an attempt to ding it or looked at your business credit. Because, you know, you can check— I told them, check Nav, check D&B and see if somebody's digging your credit. But, you know, there's all forms of different catfishing. Like, people are getting catfished on the phones all the time. I was reading stories about how all of a sudden these banks are saying they're getting sued by multiple people who describe, like, they got a phone call, the person said they were from the bank. I don't want to mention names of banks. We don't want to put, you know, they say, oh, I'm calling from XYZ Bank. Oh, we're trying to resolve some problem with your bank account. Oh, we're sending you a text message right now. Can you give us the code? Never give that code out. And then the next thing you know, these people's bank account is emptied for whatever, hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah, people would And, and, and then the people get mad at the bank, right? And they're like— and they say to the bank, oh, you're not protecting us. Well, you know, you're not protecting yourself. You gotta— you know, we're in this— we're— I just don't understand it. I was telling this guy on the phone today, I was like, man, these scammers, they're not even in this country. They're in India or Pakistan or in Europe somewhere, right? And you would think like with all the information we have and the AI and the this and the that and the computers and the NSA and the CIA and all this, we could shut these people down. I mean, I get crank phone calls, you know, whatever, scammer phone calls on my cell phone all day long. Yeah. Of people, oh, I wanna sell you this. So I'm calling from Social Security, the IRS, your son's been arrested.

My mom got a call the other day that she said the State Patrol found her Cadillac with a couple of keys, cocaine, something else. And they're like, yeah, you have a felony arrest warrant for you. My mom was freaking out, dude.

But yeah. Did you think it was real?

No, it was not real. Police, I mean, if they found some keys of cocaine and somebody in a car that was registered to you, the feds would be at your front door. Exactly. Knocking on the door. It's not— not gonna wait. No, they're definitely not calling. But yeah, I mean, never give information over the phone, um, that you don't find trustworthy, I guess. Anything involved—

anything involving banking, banking and credit cards, no, hang up the phone, right? And Yahoo and Microsoft and Google are not calling you either. No, they're not calling you up to tell you about some fraud on your stuff. And don't open those emails either. My favorite email is this one like, oh, I'm an expert hacker and I hacked into your entire— ethical hacker. No, not that. Oh, we have the one guy, the ethical hacker. He keeps contacting me. He's saying he found some hole on our website and he should get a bounty for that. I don't even know what he was talking about. And but I got this—

you know what was weird after I looked into that? Yeah, he was right and he was— but he wasn't right because there's the, the securities that I have installed on there was taken care of that.

So I don't know, he wants a bounty. He wrote to me like 2 times this week.

But a bounty for what?

He didn't, I don't know, did nothing that he, anyway, I don't know, man.

People are nuts.

No, but the other one is the people that want you to send them like a bunch of Bitcoin 'cause they said they have naked pictures of you they hacked onto your computer and they saw that you're looking at porn or something.

Before we end the pod, I just, you know, I mentioned suicide. And it is Mental Health Awareness Month. So I don't want to take that lightly. And I was just like, legitimately, I was saying everyone that I've known who has been operating a restaurant, they weren't very healthy mentally. And if you know somebody who's struggling with mental health, reach out, give them some support, you know. Suicide is not a joke. I'm not— I wasn't joking about suicide. Um, yeah, so take care of yourself, your mind, your body, and your soul.

Yeah, mental health is important. You have to give— take time for yourself every day.

But I'm not joking about not listening to Diddy. Diddy's done. Diddy did it.

I mean, they're just showing a video of him beating some woman in the hallway nonstop.

Yeah, no, that was Cassie, man. It's crazy. Anyway, that's the pod. Some things that we would never do again in life.

Tell us, give us your list.

Yeah, I'd love to hear some things that you would never do, especially involving business. I was really having a hard time trying to think some things that I would never do again, and some of them were just not suitable for work. So, yeah.

Yeah, I'm sure we could come up with some other non-suitable things that wouldn't be, that would be R-rated or worse.

Absolutely. So that's the pod. Hit the like button for us. Check us out every Wednesday and Friday, man. Thanks for watching. Peace.

Peace out.

Carpe diem.