Crazy Storyies of Entrepreneurship | Biz To Biz Podcast | Episode 236

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 Ashton Kutcher of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about some crazy customer stories that Allen has., gotten over the years, and I'll try to throw in one if I can remember any. I haven't got too many real crazy stories about clients, but how are you doing, man? Today is March 16th, 2024.

No, April.

April 16th. Sorry, I'm trapped last— I'm stuck in the last month. I didn't want to leave last month for whatever reason. I love that month, but yeah. All right, man, how are you doing?

Good. Survived April 15th, aka Tax Day.

Yeah, I paid my taxes this morning and it sucked.

So definitely sucked. So it is—

I don't understand how I owe taxes and I pay taxes out of my paycheck.

So I don't know, I've been hearing a lot of people like complain like online that they went to file their taxes and they never owed before, and this year they owed. Some people are blaming it on something they changed with the W-4 form. I'm not so sure about that, but that's just what I— I don't know. I'm looking into it.

Yeah, I don't know.

And how was your, uh, weekend getaway?

Not long enough. Not long enough at all. I did not want to leave Sunday. I definitely didn't want to leave. I wish I could have had at least the whole week up there. That would have been much, uh, much better. Disconnect from everything. No cell phone service. Didn't bring my laptop. I didn't check my email. Stayed off my phone as much as possible. Uh, yeah, man, just being in nature, just, yeah, I was Driving up to, uh, you enter the state park the way that I took, and you're literally surrounded by trees that are like 200 feet tall. Like, well, I'm exaggerating, but they're giant trees, um, and that's all that it is. And then you get into the little Chief Land, the city of Chief Land. And then the next thing you know, you're at the state park. It was Manatee Springs State Park. Shout out to the rangers, the park rangers at the park. They were very nice and helpful. And, you know, of course I had a campsite next to a little whiny nose-ass kid, and he got what he was— he was— messing around with that. I was watching him play with the fire all, all day Friday, and then Saturday he kept—

Why was it cold?

Well, I mean, it wasn't cold, but being in the woods, you want a fire going so you don't get attacked by mosquitoes.

Okay.

Um, I mean, it was, I don't know, in the 70s, low 80s, so no, it wasn't cold at all. At nighttime it dropped down to the 50s. It was a little nippy, but I was prepared. Yeah, he was messing around with that damn lighter fluid and you know how you put the lighter fluid, it doesn't ignite right away. Right.

And then it poofs up.

Oh yeah, it poofed up on his ass and he got an instant sunburn. He was crying. Oh, I mean, I'm not saying he got what he deserved. You know, I don't wish pain on any kid, but He definitely was poking the bear with that.

The parents didn't care?

I mean, you're camping. I don't even know if they were around for that.

Wow.

They might have been in their tent snoozing. I don't know what they were doing. A lot of people you could tell live there.

Live in the park?

Oh, yeah. Year round. I would definitely, if I didn't have kids, I would be so down to do that. Straight up. But yeah, I mean, the weekend was great. Manatee Springs was packed. Bunch of individuals there, a lot of people. There was a couple of church groups and whatever, but no manatees. I didn't see any manatees, but the water was a little chilly. So they were saying that they were probably down south?

No, they stay in— they like the warm water.

So the, the science is that they go further up north, right, to mate.

Okay.

And then they hang out in those waters because the water is warm.

Okay.

And then they head back down south.

Oh, okay.

Um, yeah, I didn't see any manatees, but I've seen some really cool fish under the water. The water was like I've never in my life seen crystal clear. Well, I have. Lake Superior's water is amazingly crystal clear. Like, you see all the way to the bottom. Been on a few lakes up north, but nothing.

Yeah, I've been to a bunch of the springs around in Florida before, like in those areas. And it's, you know, amazing. Some of them you can, uh, you know, get an inner tube.

Yeah, you could get a kayak.

Yeah, tube or kayak on them. I've done that before.

I wasn't going to get in an inner tube considering that there was active alligators.

So that's not good if there's active alligators.

Apparently it's not a big deal. They're kind of used to the humans, I guess. There is one large alligator that the park rangers make everyone get out of the water because whatever, if it's— it's aggressive, I guess, sometimes.

Um, so they're watching where people are swimming?

No, no, no, they're— they are not. Oh no. No, there's a ranger in the front and that's, I mean, I'm sure there's another park ranger driving around the park.

Right.

But no, they're not sitting by the water watching for alligators by any means. I think it's kind of more up to the people. There's always a lot of, there's like hosts and like people who literally, that's why I said people live there.

Okay.

So like, you know, you have like your camp host or whatever.

Oh, okay.

I didn't meet that person. But yeah, it was definitely just not long enough. I should have known better, but it was good. It was a good experience. I'm definitely prepared. I have everything that I would need to survive for a long period of time if need be. I was— yeah, I'm good to go.

I can get— You ready for the zombie apocalypse?

Or if shit hits the fan, yeah, I'm definitely able to, I'd be fine. My family would be fine. The only other thing I need to do is learn my foraging so I can like eat berries and— Well, I know kind of berries, you know, there's a lot of blueberries growing wild up there. I just don't know the type of greens right away.

Yeah, and you gotta watch out for like different types of like poison ivy and mushrooms that can make you like throw up.

Or you can go get trippy. Yeah, I mean, other than that, it's just not long enough, that's it. But it's good to be back home. I missed my wife. Okay. That was it. It's the only thing I missed was my wife. Literally the whole time I was there, I was thinking about her. I love you, Justina.

Take her next time.

She is not going camping. There is a glamping site that I found, uh, that's, that's inside of the park, so she might— I might be able to convince her.

What's in the glamping site?

Like, like, uh, they're just really nice tents. Oh, I think there might be a cabin or two, but they're like—

oh, nice tents like that.

They're like yurts.

You, you rent them from the place.

It's set up already. Everything's got like a couch inside of it. There's TV and everything, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, I don't know if there's TV, but it's, it's—

you're— it's like set up.

It's like a house, but it's a yurt. You ever seen a yurt?

Yeah.

You know what a yurt is?

I've seen what the glamping things is.

I'm saying a yurt. It's a, it's a tent. It's right, but it's set up for permanent living. Permanent living structure.

Yeah, permanent structure.

Yeah. So I mean, yeah, it had carpet.

So who rents them out, the campsite?

No, no, it's not a part of the state park. It's low— it's like, I don't know if it's in— it can't be in the state park.

It must be just on the side.

It's got to be on the border of the state park or however it is.

That's an interesting business.

I would totally do that. I would totally do that. And when Rec hits Florida, I would totally open up a camping site that is— you can smoke weed in. Adult— everybody was looking at me crazy when I was sparking up.

Oh, okay.

But I have a medical marijuana license, so you can kiss my ass.

Yeah. All right, let's talk about some crazy customers.

Well, yeah, I— like I said, I don't really I didn't— I mean, there's one story that I, that recently I just had. It's, I guess, it's kind of crazy. Um, I built a website for somebody 3 years ago, a little bit over. It's almost been 4 years, right? Um, they didn't want maintenance, they didn't want, you know, nothing. They just want me to build the site for them. It was from, from a, uh, I don't want to say a friend, an associate. From an associate recommended me to build this for them. So I didn't know these people for the life of me, you know, right? Um, we got on a phone call, you know, it seemed like it would be a good fit as far as, you know, communication goes back and forth from me into the client, you know, it's simple, whatever. So I built a website, boom, done, launch, whatever. Wait, I was waiting on them to send me, uh, the copy and any photos that they wanted to add onto the website, and it just never happened, right? Right. And, um, at the end of the, you know, COVID was just ending in 2022, right? Right. And so like, it was during COVID when I did this. So like, there's a lot going on. And then next thing you know, it's like, oh, it's 2024. Yeah, right. And they give me a call. I got a new phone, so I didn't have the contact information. And they wanted me, I guess, to relaunch the site. Yeah.

For free?

Yeah. That was kind of where it was leading to, you know? And then I said, you know, I'm like, why did the site disappear in the first place? 'Cause I never, you know, I put it on my server. I'm not a, I should be, but I'm not one of those people who like, if you don't pay, I'm shutting your website off. Like I just don't think like that. You know what I mean?

Maybe they didn't pay for the domain.

They didn't.

So remember we had a thing when you first started here similar to that.

So like they must have let the website go totally. And so they might have went back to check the site and all of a sudden now it ain't there. But yeah, so we went back on a lot of, a lot of text messaging back and forth. I ended up sending them a quote, you know, like I guess they got shocked.

Stick with it.

I mean, I kind of really didn't want to do it anyway. I didn't want to do it. I mean, I would do it for the money that I sent them, but not for anything less.

I get it.

And so, yeah, no, I haven't heard back from them.

I mean, I have like 2 stories like that. When Justin first started here, we did a favor for this nonprofit and made them a website that they were never happy with. The lady was constantly—

The website was pretty terrible.

Yeah, but they didn't provide—

For free though, I mean, you can't be, you know, you're looking in the horse's mouth.

But someone else made it, not Justin.

No, not me.

And then one day they call us screaming and yelling, flipping out, nasty emails, their site disappeared. So we go investigate, they didn't pay for their domain name, so the domain stopped working. And then they got really mad at us and all that. We don't control that. Yeah, always pay for your domain renewals.

Yeah.

And don't just sign up for a year, buy multiple years so you don't—

If you can afford it.

Right, I'm just saying, you know, it's—

I mean, most of the time when you're registering a domain, they give you the option to register it for at least 3 years and they give you a super discount. Right. Take advantage of that. Even if you don't know you're gonna— I get it, not everybody knows they're gonna have a business for that long, right? You know, it's like, uh, this is an idea, let's spend as little amount of money as possible.

Yeah, but when it's time for renewal, you know, you get the email, make sure you take care of it.

Yeah.

So, so their site disappeared, and then they just were not happy how long it took us. Once they paid for the—

they were definitely not happy with me.

No, but once they paid for the domain name, they expected like all of a sudden, like, we're gonna, we're gonna magically, magically fix it.

Snap the finger, right?

And it takes a while for it to, like—

GoDaddy has to propagate the site. They got to find the server that it was on, and they got to re— you know, you got to put in the name servers again and all that. And it takes a couple days for it to propagate. And for—

right. And they weren't happy. They kept calling and calling and driving us crazy.

Super emails.

And then they moved to something else. They got someone else to make them a website, and I was really happy.

Good for them.

So, because I don't want to deal with that anymore.

No, I definitely did not sign up to be managing that website.

Yeah, it was— it would be one thing if the people were nice and grateful that we did it for them, but it was just not a happy situation.

Yeah, they were really rude.

Yeah, well, that's what I mean, right? They're older people. Older people. Yeah.

Older people that felt entitled that their time was more important than everyone else's.

Yeah. Like, we're running a business and we did this as a favor, and they had to understand that it was a favor. But I had another guy— I remember this happened. This guy called me up. We used to make apps. We haven't made apps in like 7 years. I don't even remember. When we stopped making them, right? But it's been a while. And the guy just called up out of the blue one day. I tell Justin the story and he's like, oh, you made me this app like 5 years ago. And yeah, I want to finish it now. I was like, well, we're not in that business.

Sure you want to finish it? I don't care.

But we did like the work. I mean, we set the whole thing up for the guy. We built out all the pages. We put whatever pictures that they gave us or we got from their website, the logo, about us. You know, we built the whole thing out, but the guy, you know, he stopped paying for the monthly fee. And we sent him a letter, we called him on the phone and we're like, you wanna finish this, not finish it, blah, blah, blah. And then when we shut the business down, we let everybody know like, oh, we're shutting this down. If you wanna continue with your app, here's the phone number of this other company that was the supplier of the hosting of it. And you can transfer to them and they'll take over your app if you want to keep your app. And that was the end of that business right there. But I've had crazy customers call me. Like once I had this guy and I called him up and I said, I said, you know, you're not batching your machine out. And the guy says, yes, I batch it out every day. I'm like, no, you must be just running a report. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the guy's like, no, I'm batching out. And I thought he batched out. And back in the beginning, this is when we first started doing processing, we didn't really have access to all these systems. And then we did have access, but that's a whole nother story. So we didn't really have access to the system to see what they were doing. And then the guy calls me up, oh, it says machine full, machine full. So I had to go there and batch the machine out, and I put a fresh roll of paper in. But there was so— there was like over 1,000 transactions in there, and I had to batch it out. And it was crazy. It was going for about 45 minutes to an hour until it got batched out. Then the guy finally— I was like, you didn't notice? Like, you weren't getting money in your account? You know, if you have a credit card machine Either you put it on auto batch. If you have tips, you don't do that because you got to put the tips in and then you got to batch out at the end of the day. I had another guy recently, the same thing, call me up because I'm not getting my money. I opened up online, looked, and I go, you didn't batch. And the guy's like, oh, the man, you know, whatever, new manager didn't batch out for 2 days. So, you know, you know, But, you know, while I'm explaining that to him, the owner's like sending me a text message going, oh, where's my money? I'm going to call my lawyers. What do you call—

call your lawyer, man, and tell them how much of an idiot you are.

I mean, you didn't batch out. You're not going to get your— you know, you're not going to get— you know, you're not going to get your money. But, you know, recently I had another situation where The customer should have called me, but they didn't. One of the employees made a mistake and charged somebody's card. It was supposed to be $57,000— or no, $5,723.87. And the person didn't put in the decimal point, and they charged the person $573,000 and change, and it went through. So that must have been a pretty good credit line on that card. It got an approval, and then the employee got nervous, and instead of calling somebody to say, hey, I just did this, what should I do? They made a huge mistake and they refunded the transaction. So now they got charged for the interchange on the sale and the interchange on the refund because it was like a large transaction. And then they call me on the phone to complain about the fees. But the employee hid it from the manager, the management, the man, the guy who runs the company.

Fired.

I don't know. The girl was pretty upset about it. She called me back the other day and she goes, oh, you know, you didn't get back to me. And I said, well, I spoke to the owner and I explained the situation. She's like, well, we shouldn't get charged for that. And I go, that's not how it works. I said, if you make a mistake, you void the transaction out. And if you didn't know what to do, you should have called somebody. You have my phone number. You know, and you have my email address. You could have said, oh, we did this, what should we do?

Couple hundred bucks?

No, like over $1,000 in fees because there's a million dollars got processed.

Oh yeah, right.

Over a million dollars.

Were you nice? Did you send them some money back or no?

We didn't even get paid on it yet. Oh, so we're— I was like the, you know, the whole thing, you know, and, you know, in some cases we can go to the— go back to the credit card processor and go, oh, there was a mistake and blah, blah, blah.

But he's hit the refund and they hit—

but they hit the refund button. If they would have hit the void button, it would have cost them $0.20. So $0.20 is like $1,000 and change each. And we're not going to get a bunch of commission from that because it's a It's a big account. We just have them on like interchange pass-through. So we just make a small commission, a few hundred dollars on a transaction like that. It's not going to help them with their bill when it's more than $1,000.

But, you know, you just can't, you know, got to train your employees, ladies and gentlemen. Never.

That's one thing. Never. If you ever make a mistake on a credit card machine, the amount is too big, void the transaction. Do not do a— don't panic and do a refund. I had it happen another time too, where this guy, this company, they sold pharmaceutical products to people, you know, to people in that home, you know, drugstore-related stuff that people bought often. And this woman ordered, um, something and it was like around a few hundred dollars. And by the guy— the person who did it was the son of the owner, and he charged this lady $200-something thousand by mistake. And then he panicked, not calling anybody again, batched out, then ran a refund, batched that out, right? If he would have done it in the same batch, it would have zeroed itself out. But because it was too— like, that— there's zeroed out. The one that these people did zeroed out because it was in two batches. It didn't zero out. And then the money has to come out of your account. Well, they didn't have that much money in their account. They didn't even do that on a monthly basis most of the time.

Ouch.

So ended up I had to go tell the owner, who was the dad, and was like— he made me come to his office, and I had to watch him yell at the skid. His kid? Yeah, it wasn't comfortable. And then we had to go to the bank, and he had to make a deal with the bank, and he basically borrowed like $200 grand for 10 minutes. He had to sign something that he wasn't going to move the money out of the account so that the money could come out, then the deposit would come back in, and the bank could get their money back because the guy couldn't cover it with his cash flow.

That's, that is, that's scary.

And, you know, I've seen that happen like a bunch of times in the, you know, with a bunch of times with merchants, and it's totally like unpleasant, you know. And it's something like we specifically go over that with people when they're new, you know, a new merchant, you never process credit cards before, it doesn't matter. You're a restaurant, a bar, a retail store, whatever, even an internet website, you know, a customer can make a mistake. And we had that happen before. Someone tried to order like 100. They put instead of 1, the person kept hitting, you know, hit the button wrong and didn't pay attention and tried to order 100 of something. And then, you know, I try to always explain to merchants like what's in your shopping cart and what's on the credit card processing side does not connect it. Right. So when you see it in your shopping cart and the person and you go, I canceled the order. Yeah, you cancel it in your WooCommerce, in your WooCommerce area, but now you need to log into the Authorize.net or whatever gateway you're on and then void it out, you know, and they didn't do that. Then the transaction went through even though I told them to do it. They assumed that I was wrong what I was telling them.

I just was thinking about if there are any crazy other stories. One of the craziest things that happened to me as a web developer though, I was, this is before I, you know, stumbled across Allen and I had went into a strip club to pitch for some digital marketing because they were, you know, they were looking— they were— it was a new strip club and they were looking to, you know, be found, right? Because nobody knew about it. Well, people knew about it, but whatever. Like 20 minutes after that meeting, I get this random phone call from— he sounds like a trucker would sound on the phone. You know, like super country. He sounded like a redneck, you know what I mean? Like what a redneck would sound like.

Okay.

Good old boy. And he's like, I need you to come to my warehouse so you can look at my inventory. I'm like, well, what do you sell? He's like, oh, well, I sell all kinds of stuff. You just gotta come in and check it out. Whatever. So I'm like, all right, it's way, way out by the airport, you know, it's like a 30-minute drive out of the—

from—

I lived in the city, Milwaukee, so you had to drive out to the, you know, the country. I pull up to this warehouse and it's like, like, what the fuck? What am I walking into here, right? Like, I, I don't I'm just like, it's just a white, you know, it looks like a farmhouse, like a building, you know, like, you know, like on farms have like where the chickens would be, right? All right, I walk in there and there's just dildos everywhere.

Okay, like, too bad you didn't know me.

No, we'd have made a killing because he— at this time they couldn't there's nowhere he could sell it. Like, he didn't, you know what I mean? The Shopify and all that, they weren't letting none of that type of shit ride, right? Like, it was even hard for people because he had DVDs. That's what he really wanted to sell.

Oh yeah, that's hard to sell. You got to register for some adult videos.

I looked at it, I said, holy shit. I mean, he had—

it was wall-to-wall sex toys and DVDs and Everything that you didn't know me, we would have hooked it up.

Oh, we would have. That was probably 10 years ago.

Yeah.

You know, I wonder what he ever did with that stuff. But yeah, I really, I wanted to. I mean, the guy who taught me how to build websites, we were trying to figure it out and all kinds of shit, but just we couldn't help him, man. I didn't know what to do. But yeah, man, that's the craziest stories I got. And, you know, Allen, he talks about that. That, that mistake a lot. But you know, if you got any crazy stories that you want us to touch on, or you want to be on the podcast, you know, reach out to me and I'll be— and I'd love to chop it up with you, man. Hit the like button on this video, smash the subscribe button for us for the one time, share this to your people. Peace out.

Peace. Carpe diem. Tell us your crazy stories.