Entrepreneurship Month Part One | Small & Medium Sized Businesses | Support Local Businesses | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 122

Hey, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by Allen Kopelman, and we'll be providing you educational information about fintech payment processing, small business, and the technology businesses use in the world today. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about entrepreneurship in honor of Entrepreneurship Month, um, so, which is awesome because there's so much to talk about when it comes to entrepreneurship. There's lots to learn. We have lots of tips. Allen has 20 years experience of operating a business. I've had my own business. My wife has her own business. My father had his own business. So entrepreneurship runs in the blood. It's one of those things that keeps the country running. I'm an advocate for entrepreneurship, small businesses, hustles, go get to the grind, you know, go get it for yourself, do it until you can't do it no more. But yeah, man, so Entrepreneurship Month is cool. There's lots of events happening, I'm sure everywhere in the city near you. Town near you. Plenty of meetups. Get involved. There's networking events happening all month, every— I mean, every day my email was getting a new notification about some sort of network after dark, network after hours, blah, blah, work after work. Yeah, network after work. After dark one was kind of spooky. I was like, I'm married, bro. I don't know what this means. But yeah, so entrepreneurship. Let's get into it.

Yeah, so, you know, same thing. Like, my dad had a, uh, you know, growing up my dad had a factory, and my mom's dad had a factory in New York. They used to knit sweaters. Cool. Banlon, which was stretchy material.

I love stretchy materials.

Clothing stores they had. And I had uncles that owned all sorts of businesses, um, a diner, flower shop, you know. My dad had a monogram store, did this kind of stuff on shirts.

One of my other mamas had a flower shop. Shout out to Savannah. She let us run that when we were like in high school. Yeah, yeah, it was awesome.

So I always grew up around business. I had a restaurant, you know. First I cut my teeth in the hotel business. I had a restaurant, a catering company, and then started the payment processing company. And inside that company, I started an app company. We made apps for a few years when the iPhone first came out. Then we made— started printing with payment processing. That's been around now, this company, 21 years in business.

So nice. Congratulations.

You know, and I remember we were talking, you know, you know, remember when you get— have your business and then you have your— hire your first employee, you know. So that's like a big step. Oh yeah, start to do that.

I never got to that step, but I mean, I guess I did hire people to do work for me, but I didn't hire an actual employee. Yeah, but when you—

whatever, you know, when you start to add people to the mix, you know, that's what it is. So the actual date of the Entrepreneurship Day is November 15th. And each week during the month of November, we're going to dedicate one of the podcasts all around entrepreneurship.

Is it an actual federal holiday?

No, it's some made-up holiday, like, oh, on some— who knows? There's a calendar. I mean, I've looked up these calendars before. Every day there's 5 holidays. You can just pick one.

Yeah, like National Hot Dog Day. Yeah, National Pizza Day.

Exactly.

National Pet Your Dog Day. Exactly. Walk Your Turtle Day.

Yeah, Sunday Daughter Day, you know, they're not vanilla ice cream day.

No thanks, man.

Exactly. But you know, entrepreneurs, huh?

Not to say that I am not— I am, you know, taking away from any days. Celebrate your day like there's no other days left.

Yeah, there's the day for everything.

If you celebrate it, celebrate it. I'm just saying it's not for me.

Yeah, when we did apps, we actually did looked on that calendar and we used to do a post every day for some one or two holidays if they were related to a particular business type.

I mean, so it's pretty— I mean, it depends on the popularity of it, I guess I would say, right? Exactly.

I mean, if you own an ice cream parlor, on Ice Cream Day, good thing to be involved, right?

Hot dog stand, Hot Dog Day. Pizza Day, Pizza Day, you know.

Exactly. So, you know, part of being an entrepreneur is being creative you know, and being creative with your marketing, you know, because you're creating a business. So it's important, you know. And entrepreneurs are also big contributors to society and the local community. And, you know, we support the local community here in South Florida. We support— we help a lot of charities out, local charities, giving them discounts on printing We're launching a new product to help nonprofits, um, get like, you know, get a website and donations set up and all that. We're gonna get that launched pretty soon. So that's really good for— and there's—

very cool—

there's tons of nonprofits in the local South Florida area that could use our service, you know. So, you know, talking about, um, you know, And, you know, small business owners are the lifeblood of our economy. Okay. Because most people today work for a small to medium-sized business. And we talked about this before. What was it? 1,000 employees? No, was it 500 and less?

500 or less.

Yeah. So anyone with 500 and less employees is considered a small business, which is crazy to me.

I mean, 500 is a lot. My brain, but you know.

Yeah, but we were talking about like, let's say someone owns a big restaurant, right? They could essentially have 200-300 employees. Then if they'd say they have 2 restaurants, then yeah, I mean, when you explain it, it's just crazy that, that—

but considering that 500 people in one place isn't— that's not a small amount. Well, I know it's not all at one time, right? I'm just saying like when you think of the number, right, it's a pretty big number.

Yeah, I mean, I remember working in a hotel. And we had, you know, you have a front desk department, housekeeping, you know, you got all your food and beverage staff for the restaurants. You know, we had 2 restaurants, a bar, a lobby bar, a pool bar.

Yeah, I mean, when you think of it, like, when you, you know, when you're talking about like hospitality or like restaurants, yeah, for sure. But when you're talking about like a cleaning company, yeah, some cleaning companies I might have, but 500 That's— that doesn't seem like a small cleaning company to me. That's all I'm saying. I think that there's— right, I think that there needs to be like some sort of a better way of classifying.

Well, no, what they were saying was it's like small businesses up to like 100 employees. 100 to 500 is the medium business. So we classify people in SMB, those are small to medium-sized businesses. I mean, you can have a regional you know, a small business that could have— I mean, I know people that have— we have a client that have 5 restaurants. They have about 4,000 employees. Oh, I'm sure, because it's, you know, 5 restaurants and they're open for—

one of them, that's a lot.

Yeah, one of them's open breakfast, lunch, and dinner, almost 24 hours a day. So it adds up. You have a lot of part-time employees, and then you have office staff and cooks and, you know, cleaning staff. It adds up the amount of employees that you have very quickly. I mean, someone has like a wholesale business and they, you know, but that's why also people start a side hustle. Yep. No, they start their side hustle, then they turn it into a business, and then they start adding on. Oh, I'll have one employee, two employees. Or the air conditioning guy gets busy, has— starts off himself with one truck and he gets very busy. Oh, now I need 2 trucks. Hires a first employee, right? And grow the business. So, you know, even you could have a business with 40, 50 employees. Yeah, it's a big business and it's a lot of responsibility. That person who has the business— I mean, we have 3 full-time employees in the office. It's a, you know, responsibility to make sure those people get paid. And we're, you know, earning money for the business, you know. So everybody's job is related to, uh, bringing in business to the— everybody's bringing in business to the company. So it's important. So investing, you know, small business owners are investing in the community. What most people don't realize is the average small business owner is probably only making somewhere between, on the low side, $50,000 to $100,000 a year. On the high side, maybe $250,000 a year. You know, some people exceed all that, but, you know, in most cases, you know, it's like people will tell me, oh, you own a business, you must make $1 million a year. Well, it doesn't go by how much money we bring in because we have expenses. You know, you have one of your biggest expenses in a business is rent. Yeah. And, you know, we're going through a fundamental change you know, since the COVID right, where people are closing up offices, employees are working at home, um, people are starting a business at home. And that used to be less common until probably about 5 years ago, but now it accelerated. Oh yeah, you know, where companies are like, oh yeah, well, we're gonna have, uh, office hours, and then you're gonna work at home 3 days a week, 2 days a week you're in the office, but you're sharing your desk with like 2 or 3 other people as everybody's just rotating through the office.

Yeah, no thanks.

It's crazy. Like, some companies do, you know, operate that.

Yeah, I couldn't do it.

But, you know, it's, you know, it's—

and also, I mean, I could do it like the remote thing and then come into the office 2 days a week. That's cool. But I'm not— I don't like sharing desks.

Yeah, well, that's what's happening because they shrink their space.

How does that prevent COVID from spreading?

Who knows? Maybe the person brings their laptop. I don't have a computer there. You're just bringing your laptop to your— to the office, sitting in my own little bubble. I don't know, that's what's going on.

I know, I wouldn't want to be a part of it, that's all.

That's what's going on now. I mean, there was a big shift like several years ago where everybody switched from desktop computers to laptop computers, except for it doesn't work for like somebody doing graphic design or something like that. Yeah, no, I need a bigger screen and they need they need more power for more programs.

I know a lot of web developers that switch to, you know, MacBook Pros.

They get it done with that, right? But they get a big screen.

Yeah, they got a monitor, right?

Big monitor hooked up to it and all that. So, but business owners are investing in the local community. They're paying people that live in the local community. Those people are all spending their money in the local community. So that's, you know, important to hire people in the local community. Don't go on Upwork and Fiverr and farm everything out to the Philippines. Yeah, you know, hire, you know, hire somebody local.

Negotiate, man. Like, the problem with what you're getting at is like people are afraid to barter, they're afraid to, to even, you know, they're just like, oh, I need this done, I'm not willing to pay more than $5 an hour. Well, you're gonna get the worst quality of work that you can possibly imagine. I don't care what living condition that that person was under, they are going to crank that out in, in a blink of an eye. And I know that, you know, that we're helping these other, you know, these countries that are impoverished, and, you know, it's very hard and difficult for them to earn money. And I'm all for that. I want them to make money. But they also have to charge more. Because the problem with that is the rest of the entrepreneurs and the independent contractors of America, we can't compete with $5 an hour, because the bills that we have to pay, you know, you can't, you know, $5 an hour isn't going to equal enough to put food in our bellies.

Yeah, the scale in our country and the scale in their country is completely different. If you pay some guy $100 in the Philippines, that's like giving somebody here like $10 grand, right? Literally, because their money—

exactly.

So then nothing over there.

So then like, I know like $10 grand sounds a lot, but you know, that's what it costs. You know, you're not going to tell your, your, uh, you know, your landlord like, well, the whoever owns your home, you're not going to say, well, you know, your house is only worth 20,000, I'm only going to give you $500 this month, you know, like, I'm not gonna, you know, that's all I got. You know, that's all it's worth to me is $500 this month.

It's a little different. It's a—

but I just saying, like, don't stop, stop, stop, just stop going that way first. There's a lot of options for you. There's, there's ways to get in touch.

Students, interns, hire young people, train them.

You'll be surprised. You know, you reach out to an independent contractor, you know, and, you know, you'd be surprised. A lot of us are very eager to work. We're very eager to build new relationships. We're eager to, you know, expand our portfolios, you know, so just, just keep that in mind when you're on your next project.

As a business owner, like when we were making apps, nobody knew how to make an app. Right? We had to train all the employees. So we hired a lot of students, right? And they learned, you know, they were going to school for graphic design because that was one of the modalities of that, that was one of the skills that we needed for a few of the people that were working on the projects.

Absolutely.

So yeah, we hired students and we trained them. They got a job experience and they worked here for 6 months or a year and they went somewhere else. Where they could make more, you know, make a lot more money, right? Because now they had a real job experience. So sometimes as a business owner, you know, like, you know, if you own an air conditioning company or a plumbing company, hire people like apprentices. When I was a chef, that's how I, I went to school, but I also was like a chef apprentice. So I worked at a place, they paid for my school, and I got paid, but I didn't get paid as much as everybody else because they were paying for my school, right? And, uh, that was part of the deal. So, you know, you can have— you can— there are jobs out there like that, especially in the trades where there's a big shortage of, of people.

That's how I got started in web design. I got hurt on a job and I went to, uh, a vocational rehabilitation center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Um, yeah. You know, definitely there's, there's ways to get, you know, right?

There's ways to get it. But also, you know, support the local business. Like, we have lunch in the office every Friday or every other Friday, and we order from local businesses. We don't order from the chains. Sorry, chain restaurant, but we try to order from a local place.

Well, that's not entirely true.

Yeah, but it's a franchise.

No, he's Twin Peaks.

Okay, we got from— but it's a franchise.

True.

So it's local.

Maybe it's locally owned, right?

So we try to order from a local— we try to order from local businesses.

Indeed.

So, you know, in the area to give support down. And businesses, you know, a lot of local businesses do their advertising by supporting local schools, the PTA, local charities, local organizations, local business networking groups. So it's important to help support the— look, your local business owner. And, uh, you know, like for us, we ask people buy credit card processing from Nationwide Payment Systems. You don't have to go to PayPal, Stripe, and Square. In fact, we now can do the same exact thing they do, get you set up with a merchant account, answer 10 questions, and you have a merchant account in about 5 minutes. Justin set one up, right? Yep, didn't take very easy. Right, very easy. So, you know, support a local business. But entrepreneurs and business owners also have to, have to deal with challenges. Challenges that they have to deal with is, um, you know, when you're setting up your business, you need to make sure, you know, you have the, like, like the right legal entity. Yeah, you know, you set up banking, you set up ways to get paid, you know, how you're going to invoice or collect money from people. Where you're going to get your funding from? You know, to start your business—

right? Right. You go way too fast.

I know. Okay.

So what was so the first thing? What's the first thing of business should do?

Well, you got to set up your corporate name.

What are you gonna call your business?

What are you gonna call your business?

Where you're gonna name it? That's one of the first things you should think about, right?

And then go to the website, make sure it's available.

Check it, go to Google Domains or GoDaddy.

Yeah, but also your state that you're in. You have like— well, yeah, like in Florida you have Sunbiz. You want to make sure the name is available.

Yes, I— locally, right? You don't want to have the same, you know, I'm not gonna know Jay's, uh, Bodega if there's 3 Jay's Bodegas in Fort Lauderdale, right? You know, but if there's one in Orlando, I'm not really worried about that, right? But hello everyone, we'd like to take this time to thank our sponsors Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS Printer. We'd also like to shout out the listeners and everyone that subscribed to our YouTube channel. Thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to reach Allen or myself, head over to b2bvault.info where you'll find two forms, one to contact us and another if you're interested in becoming a sponsor. If you'd like to sign up for a merchant account, click the Apply Now button located at the top of the page of b2bvault.info, where you'll answer a few questions and you'll be on your way to processing payments in no time. The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, and other popular streaming networks. Thanks again for listening. He's right, you know, you want to make sure, you know, search, you know, like when I I picked a very, like, hard— I don't know— niche. Digital 1380. The numbers are my birthday. So, you know, it's very unique, right? As I thought. Come to find out, when I started to rank, there was a scale that was the Digital 1380 scale. Yes. That was the, like, the model number, Digital 1380. So I had a— that was a, that was a funny, you know, little competition to outrank, because, because that, you know, that was probably getting a lot of traffic, right? People like, they're constantly losing weight, you know, whatever. So that was interesting. But, you know, but that's just a, you know, example of you want to do your research diligently and, you know, come up with something that is easy to pronounce and easy to type. You don't want to have— so like Allen Kopelman is a good example, right? They, they picked Nationwide Payment Systems. That's a lot, right, when you're typing that in, right? So then they went back and they, they went and chose NPS Bank. We could go get it. This is a whole podcast we could talk about, like, oh yeah, because first of all, they're not a bank, right? They actually don't really offer anything that a bank does besides ATM managed services. So that was a very bad decision.

But we'll—

we're going to digress and we're going to go to Nationwide Payment Systems. Nationwide Payment Systems is long. Come to find out someone else owned the web— the, the domain.

Yeah, somebody, somebody, even though we had the corporate name, they bought the domain and they had it directed at their site and they were in our same business, which was payment systems.com or something like that. Well, I don't want to say the person, whatever.

Yeah, whatever.

We got it back from that.

Yeah. So they finally got it. And so then, you know, I talked to Allen and Dave, you know, like, hey, we should brand, go back to this. And so we're working on that. But so like, that's just an, you know, that's just an example of like, you know, making sure that you're, you're really thinking about what you're going to name your business.

But also, you know, over the years, the SEO rules have kind of changed.

Oh, when you started, you could do whatever you want, right? So it didn't matter.

So much what the name was back then. No, as it does now, because yeah, like back then NPS Bank was probably not bad because it was short, right?

No, it was good. I mean, because when you're tight, you— I always tell someone when they're, you know, picking a domain name, I'll give you a little jewel. When you're picking a domain name, right, and say, you know, your business is my business was Digital 1380. If I knew what I knew now, I would have bought seomilwaukee.com, right? Because I wanted to rank locally, right? So if you're a cleaning agency, right, in, um, Boca, you know, I'm sure it's taken, but like Boca Airbnb cleaning That's a great domain name to purchase because it has keywords within the domain, right? And that's good for search. When someone's searching, if you're a business, you know, like my wife's company is Supreme Clean, they're not searching for Supreme Clean, they're searching for Airbnb cleaning, right? Right. So there's a little jewel for you. If you're— whenever business you're in, try to find a keyword that matches your niche, or whatever service that you want to, you know, that's particularly important to your business. You know, you would want to, you know, add that to your keywords, to your domain. I'm not saying to add your domain, Fort Lauderdale plumbing services, fixyourpipe.com. Don't do that. You know what I mean? Yeah. So what I'm saying is fit on your checks. Exactly. So like, you know, SoFlo Plumbing, South Florida Plumbing, FTL Plumbing, those types of keywords, because you want to localize it into your city, and then you have a better likelihood of popping up in the search results.

And also, you know, what's really crazy is, is they changed the law a while ago for your, you know, your federal tax ID number and then your corporate name. I don't remember how many characters it has to be, but it's limited now. So we had a client one time and their name, the name of their company was Professional Golf Courses, Golf Course Management of America, right? So that's this really long name. And then that doesn't fit in the field to, to check the federal tax ID number. So it's got— so we're getting letters like, oh, the Fed— because they made a rule that the merchant account has to be connected to the federal tax ID. So we're getting notes from the bank, oh, we can't find this company, blah blah blah. So it turns out after looking on the website that their name, even though they had the name for like 30 years, right? They had too many characters, right? So they had to go to their lawyer and they had to go change the name of the company. They left the name of the company the same, but then they changed the legal entity to the initials of all that. Yes, because it was too— because it was too long. They used to only use the initials, excuse me, but the whole name would not fit in the search bar.

Definitely don't need your lawyer to do that.

Well, no. Well, they had it— it was a big thing. It was— I mean, it was a big company, so they had to get like their— they had to do like a legal name change. It was, it was a little—

okay, I see what you're saying.

It was a little like— yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That'd make like a legal name change. They had like checks going out, so it was like— yeah, not just checks, but there was checks coming in and there were contracts with companies.

And that would be a disaster nowadays, right?

It would be a big disaster.

That's why you see all those companies with like P.B. P.I.B. That's the name of the, like, the legal entity, right? You'll never know the name of the— you know what I mean?

Like, and it's good sometimes to take your— to have a different legal name.

It is good.

And a different DBA, because that way you can have—

that way you're giving a lot to— a lot of jewels here.

Yeah, we're giving you lots of stuff.

Finish. No, you should finish that jewel.

Yeah, so, and the reason for that is maybe you're in a business that's a little bit hinky, or you're selling something that's like CBD. So you don't want to go name your company Allen and Justin CBD Emporium, right? You want to call it AJ Inc., you know, and that's it.

AJ, uh, what's a good word, you know, ajdreamsinc.com, right? You know, something not .com, but yes, right?

So that way when you go in the bank, they say, oh, what do you do? Oh, we have a store. Yeah, okay, great, sign you up.

Boom, boom.

They don't, they don't need to know that you're selling this you have a CBD smoke shop.

Yeah, especially if you're in a high-risk— yeah, you know what I mean?

Pick a name that's gonna—

or let's say you're gonna have multiple businesses, name it after your daughter, your son.

Okay, that's a good idea.

Name the legal entity, and then the DBA can be whatever you can imagine, right? And then you, you know, it'll be tied to that, but it would take somebody to do some research to find it.

But it's also good if you, if you're going to have, let's say, maybe multiple businesses.

Yeah, that's why you can form your umbrella and you can have your—

build your umbrella. You don't have to worry about, oh, I picked this very niche name.

You can form your— start your own conglomerate, as they would say.

Well, make it easier, then you don't have to go back and redo everything like some people have had to do. Yeah, it's important. I told the story on here on the podcast once. We had a customer, I'll never forget, they owned a bunch of restaurants and they go, we're opening a new restaurant. So I go there because it was before electronic applications. And I look at the name and I go, uh, you guys really named your restaurant that? Spazio. I was like, are you serious? Like, you know that that's a famous restaurant in Chicago owned by a huge company, Levy Restaurants. The guy's like, whatever. I'm like, okay. So we signed them up for credit card processing, boom boom boom. Literally, I don't even think 2 months went by, they got cease and desist. They got letters from them that it— they had to change the sign, the menus, the website, the, the whole— they couldn't even get a website. They changed— like, they made a website with a different ending on it. Uh, they made— they had bought chairs with the name on it.

Oh, they're tripping.

Tables. The guy— the guy was like it cost them hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can't even believe that their lawyer didn't search to see, like, was there another restaurant, and what— or search for a trademark, because that's—

so that's what he did. Because a lot— I've known a lot of companies who've done this, and there's a lot of companies you can have the same name, right? Right. That's not a— that's not a problem, you know.

But if it's trademarked—

but if there is a trademark or a copyright, or if their logo has been copywritten, or there's some sort of tagline What's that other thing?

No, there's another thing you can do besides a copyright and a trademark. I forget what it is. There's some website you can go to and you can like, you can sort of like register your mark, they call it, which is your logo. It's T-something. I forget the name of the website.

I think I do know what you're talking about.

Yeah, so you can, you can, let's say you have a logo like B2B Vault. We want to go register it there. So it's not really a trademark, you're registering your mark, right?

It's called— it's a little cheaper than doing a trademark, but it is the cheapest way is to print it, put it in a sealed envelope, take it to your courthouse, have the notary public stamp it and mail it to yourself, never open it.

Well, then it's caught. Yeah, but it's— I'm just saying, but if someone goes—

if you—

of course you got to have a legal entity, then that's how we were able to get our name.

Ghetto copyright.

Right. No, people do that with music too, all the time, right? So, but we, you know, someone takes your name, but you should make sure if you pick a name that it's not been trademarked. Yeah, it's easy to search. No, it's very easy because that was in a very—

you'll see it, right? It have a little either a T and the M next to it or a C or an R. You can't use either one of those or three of those or an R, right? Because what's the one that's—

that's a P for pending?

Yes, another one is P for pending. Don't use that one either.

So that was a very expensive lesson they, they had. It was probably in the mid-six figures.

Yeah, I was waiting to, to get a cease and desist from the company that had that—

the scale. Yeah, we got one. We made a thing once. We had this product for people could pay rent, so we had NPS Rent. I outranked them. And then we got a letter from the, from the some company, and they said, oh, we have a product called NPS Rent. And then I said to them, well, we had a website, we're gonna have to change the website, we have to redo the printed material. They said— they asked us how much that was going to cost, so we told them. They actually sent us a check. They said, well, we feel bad, we want the domain name, blah blah blah. They gave us some money.

Nice. Well, that's— see, that's a good shout out to those people.

They were— they did it right. They weren't, you know, they weren't mean about it because we actually searched it, and they never did anything with it. They didn't register the domain, they didn't use it, but it was the name of a product that they had. Had nothing to do with what we were doing, right? Which was kind of funny. And then they gave us some funds and that was the end of that.

My uncle had a very similar situation, uh, he had Unique Remodeling Concepts. And there was another company in— they obviously had some money and they had to stay just a little bit further up north of where, where he was living. And, uh, they made him change the name, man. And I had to change it to Unique— My Unique Renovations.

Well, there was a company too where Some guy went out and he trademarked the letters NPS. He spent a lot of money and we got a letter, oh, you can't have this NPS, like you can't use NPS. So that's how we ended up with NPS Bank. So that's how that kind of happened, right? So then I said, you know, how many people have NPS? A lot. I looked it up everywhere. So they sent me this like massive document, then they sent it to me in an email too. So I was like, okay, well let's just have a little fun, right? The guys being— they were being very mean about it. Uh, they were sending us all kinds of letters and all this stuff. We kind of ignored it, but they were in the same niche as you. Yeah, they were in the same niche business as us, but they're trying to do this. But they trademarked the letters NPS. Well, I thought it was funny because Guess what else is NPS? The National Park Service is NPS, right? So we took the packet and that they sent by the email because we say, oh, can you please email that to us? That was a big mistake. They shouldn't have done that. So then I looked up online, I found hundreds of companies that had the letters NPS, and I shared the packet with them. Some of them were not too happy because They did not want to change their name, and this guy was like going after people, and he was going to try to sue. He was threatening this. He was threatening to sue us, so we fixed it right away. You know, always avoid lawyers.

Yeah, suing at all costs.

You don't want to do that. Never, never fight. Total waste of time, because the only person who wins are the attorneys. Yep, because they get paid. And then, you know, so, and especially if it's something where you know you're not going to win right? So I said, well, let's just make this guy— since the guy took— he wouldn't give us back Nationwide Payment Systems. So I said, well, if you're not going to give that back to me, then I'm gonna— I'm not gonna go to war, but I shared this NPS thing with like 100 companies. So they all got it, and they were upset. They started writing the guy letters. So I'm sure that he got a huge legal bill. Good for him from all that. And we also sent him, uh, we also got a friend of ours to send him a legal letter that he was cyber squatting on our, you know, since he's given us crap about the NPS. Well, you're cyber squatting on nationwidepaymentsystems.com. And he gave it back. He finally, he gave it back to us because he said, hey, he for free, or did you have to pay him? No, for free, because he was saying, can you please stop mailing this thing out to everybody? I said, okay, I'll stop sending the emails.

I'll see my domain.

Give me the domain. So he did. So, but you know, you have to be very careful. You have to be very careful with names nowadays. There's a huge fight, like, still. I don't even know if that— I haven't looked up the update for it, but there's a company, a small company that's called Meta, right? And then Mark Zuckerberg just went and called— I shared that to you. Meta, right? Yeah. And then there's a— you— they're in a lawsuit.

And Meta, the, the first Meta is gone. Take a look for yourselves. You ain't gonna find nothing.

Oh, it's gone?

Oh, it's gone.

Did they give him money?

I don't know.

I don't know if Mark Zuckerberg paid them because the first offer— the first offer he gave him, the guy said no. I would have said no too. They were sneaky. They had just had like a lawyer call them on the phone. And offer them like $100 grand or something.

I forgot all about that. I'm gonna have to— I'm gonna check again.

They had them— they, they look on your phone real quick— they had them offer like $100 grand or something. They said $50 grand, then they went up to $100, then they went up to like $200, to like $200 grand. And then the guy said to himself, why are they offering me all this money, right? Who are these people? And then They find out that it's Facebook, right? And then they said no, the price went way up after they found out it was Facebook.

On September 7th, they just had a court date.

Oh, they did?

Trademark, that's the court for damage of at least $60 million.

That's crazy.

Mark, the same amount that they used to acquire trademark assets of Meta Financial Group, a regional bank. So they're— so what basically he's— they're saying is Meta's out here buying off everyone that has Meta in their name. Wow.

But they only offered that guy to start off with was like $50 grand.

It's terrible.

And then he said no. Well, some people probably got tricked because it was just an attorney, right? But then somehow the guy did some research and he said no way, now he's going to get millions.

So this is the one that we're talking about, was founded in 2001, right?

He's a long way before Facebook, way, way before Facebook, right?

2021 is when Facebook changed, right?

But I'm saying like Facebook didn't even— wasn't even started in 2001.

Well, maybe in his brain, right?

But I'm just saying like it wasn't out there. But I'm just saying, so you got to be careful when you're doing your formation and all that. Maybe you'll get lucky like this Meta guy. He's probably gonna get like $40, $50 million.

There is a ton. Meta X LLC.

What, they're all getting paid off as a blockchain? Are they all suing them?

Yeah, they're all—

they're all suing Mark Zuckerberg. Uh, you know, listen, I'm not gonna—

I'm gonna hit with trademark lawsuit by virtual reality company. Uh, Meta X, Meta hit with trademark. Man, geez. Yeah, it's not looking so good for the name Meta. He's got to be dishing out tons. I mean, but how much money does Mark Zuckerberg—

I don't know. Their stock took a big hit though.

Billions.

I don't know about billions, but they took a big loss. But that's the one thing you got to be very careful about with your business. Don't pick a name until you do your research. And then, and also then when you find the perfect name, make sure, oh, the .com is available, all the social handles are available. Grab all the social handles at once.

Don't just say, oh, I'm gonna only use Facebook.

No, get them all.

Go, go.

And just when we picked that B2B Vault, we went and got the domain, all the— we made sure before we went crazy. Yeah, B2B Vault, you know. And even then, because YouTube, right, some guy snagged our YouTube thing and he has one video.

Yeah, it's terrible. We still haven't heard back from YouTube.

YouTube, YouTube, like, come on, dude, help us out. Yeah, the guy's one video, it's not even related to business at all. Nothing at all.

Like, it's like some child playing a flute or something. It's weird.

It's weird. One video, and it's like in, in some Chinese or Japanese.

It's definitely something.

Yeah, different language, not even English. And we're like, how'd the guy get that? Because it's not even in his name, right? Thing. Yeah, got beat up.

So yeah, that's not cool.

He must have been up in the middle of the night when they flipped the switch on that. I don't know. He had to have. And that— why target us? I'm— come on, dude, we'll send you a gift card for like $100. They would probably take it. Uh, but yeah, I tried to see if there was contact info. There was no contact.

I'm gonna actually reach out to— I know how to do it.

Maybe leave him a message.

That's what I'm gonna do.

I'll just—

I'll find him.

Okay, we'll find the guy.

So, so that's, that's just one—

that's one aspect. That's why we're gonna do one podcast a week and we're gonna talk about dive into all this stuff. And the next one, we'll probably do—

talk location.

About what?

Location, location, location.

No, we'll talk about like your digit— we'll talk a little bit more about your digital footprint and e-commerce.

All right, before we end this one though, so your name, right? So we're gonna— you're gonna make sure that you've— you figure out what you're going to name your business. And you don't have to name the legal entity if you're going that far.

And the DBA don't have to be the same.

Yeah, so I mean, if you're just doing a DBA you know, for now, like, name it whatever. But, you know, think about what you're going to name your LLC or your INC or whatever it is you're going to do. But when you're doing that, you know, also, right away, what's the first thing that I would say someone should do?

Domain and social.

Yes. And buy your domain.

Yeah, right.

Immediately set it up. You don't have to set up the website right away.

But yes, put a coming soon page.

Yeah, if you can, you know. But the main thing is go to GoDaddy and buy whatever domain it is, you know, Al— Allen'sIceCreamShop.com. Buy it today. Because you always buy another one if you change it, you know, they're very expensive. They're fairly inexpensive.

GoDaddy is the cheapest place.

Yeah, don't go anywhere like those namecheap.com, please.

No, don't do that.

Because you'll buy it, you'll buy it for real cheap. Then you go to renew it.

Yeah, they want to cost you $300. Exactly.

You don't read the fine print. And now you're held hostage. Your website's down, you can't renew it, you're screwed. So use something like GoDaddy. I like the GoDaddy process. Google Domains is also another good one. Um, just whatever was best for you. But so yeah, man, buy that and get all your social handles. Yes, immediately, right away.

Exactly. It's the most important thing to do because that way you're not going to be scrambling around looking for, oh, where's— I can't get my social handle. I picked out a name, the domain's not available. Then you got to go back. You don't want to have to go rename your company, you know.

And that's tough, right? Because it's like the business owner's working on their, um, their product or their service, right? You know, so they're, you know, they, they don't necessarily think like, oh, it's just going to be Al's Cleaning Service, right?

They don't think about it.

So, but, you know, you got to put a little effort into the process. Yes.

So you got to put that into your process. So we talked about entrepreneurship, we're celebrating entrepreneurship, support local businesses. Local businesses are the heartbeat of America. That's for sure. Small businesses are employing most of the people in your community. Small businesses are the ones investing in the communities. People that work at small businesses are spending their money locally. So support small business and stay tuned for our weekly entrepreneurship celebration in the month of November, and we'll be talking about entrepreneurship. All month on the B2B Vault podcast. Peace out, everybody. Have a great day. Peace. Much better than yesterday.