Entrepreneurship Trends | Business From Home | Gig Economy | FinTech | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 124

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 small business fintech, payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And today is— well, this month is Entrepreneurship Month, um, and in so of honor of that, all podcasts are focused around entrepreneurship. Not that the premise of the show isn't based on the same, you know, idea, but, you know, this week— this— these weeks, we're just gonna take a little bit more of a deep dive into different, uh, entrepreneurial things and, uh, speak on it. And in today's podcast, we're going to talk about, uh, some entrepreneurship trends that are, uh, in the news, or things that are like that we're trying, uh, other businesses are trying to incorporate in their, uh, marketing and day-to-day operations. Um, it is also Hurricane— what is it, Nancy? Nicole? Whatever.

So this is a special storm edition.

This special storm edition, yeah, live from, uh, inside of Hurricane Nicole. Uh, it's a Category 1 hurricane looking like it's gonna head up west a little bit. It's gonna probably breeze right past us again, thankfully.

Yeah, you know, everybody else, if it's in your path, be safe. Yeah, be vigilant. I always tell people, like, you know, I've been through a lot of hurricanes. You need to just keep your, you know, eye on the news. Make sure if they say you need to evacuate, make sure you have plenty of time to evacuate.

Um, get yourself some water.

Yeah, make sure you have your supplies. I always tell people, like, with hurricane supplies, you have to plan way before hurricane season. And have a special like go box.

Yeah, I just ran to Publix right now just to get a couple extra gallon, like, gallon jugs of water to cook with just in case. Uh, I mean, we have tons of water, but my wife was like, could you just go get a couple? Your dad— my dad asked me, so of course, why would I say no? Um, but other than that, yeah, man, we got canned goods, we got propane, we got protein bars, Gatorade.

You just got to make sure you have, you know, don't wait till the last in it, you know, have a plan.

Yeah, because the shelves are empty now, right?

I'm just saying you have to have a plan before hurricane season starts, and you just take that stuff and sock it away. Make sure you check your battery.

It's one of those things I feel like— I don't know if you really live in South Florida. I know, you know, I've been here almost 6 years now, um, and it's not forever, I know, but when I first got down here I was kind of like the guy that would be like headed to the store and then like spending 3 grand at the store, right? Yeah, you know, and then realizing that we didn't use any of it. The storm went right past us. I spent all of this money for no reason. Um, and so then I started, you know, I would ask a few questions, you know, and then I started realizing, oh, okay, I can stack this stuff up. I can put this stuff in the reserves. I don't need to use this stuff.

Right. Yeah, you need to have like 3 to 5 days of food, you know, non-perishable stuff. I just put it in the— I have it in a box, and at the end of the hurricane season, either donate some of it, eat it. Yeah, you know, and then, you know, and then the next year, the same, right before, you know, hurricane season, and I just make sure like, oh, there's cases of water, right? I get those big 5-gallon things.

That's what I was getting at, like just being aware that, okay, if, you know, if the lights go out for a couple days, am I okay? You know, you need to be thinking about that not during hurricane season. You just need to be thinking about that in general.

Yeah, just have a plan. That's it. Yeah. One thing is people think that you can just— you know, there was a lot of negative stuff with the last hurricane. They think like, oh, everybody could just get in their car and drive. There's nowhere to move a couple hundred thousand people.

You can't, you can't, right?

You can't do that. It's You gotta, you know, and that's because they just close the—

everything gets closed down. You can't enter the on-ramps, you know what I mean?

Like, well, it's not that, there's nowhere to go on beyond that. Yeah, 200,000 people.

Well, I mean, even if you try to— even during like this super evacuation thing, right, you know, you got to be smart about that.

Exactly.

Because you're gonna hop on the road and then you're not going to be going anywhere because there's going to be so much traffic. So, you know, I don't know. Well, you know, I'm not an expert at, uh, you know, bugging out, but I would say no, I wouldn't be taking the direct path that everyone has taken. You know, create your own routes, you know what I mean? Be safe, make sure you have your family stuff in order. I put a nice, uh, uh, first aid kit together that I never touch. You know, the first aid supplies are good for, I think, till 2028. You know, that's— I just have that in my mind because I know that's, you know, this stuff expires. But you know what I mean? I got a fishing kit in there. I got some, uh, water in case you're dehydrated, you know, like the, the, yeah, flavored electrolytes water, uh, some ponchos, first aid kit, a few, you know, weapons.

Uh-oh.

You know, I'm just saying, you want to be safe, right? Yeah, you know. And then, uh some, and then we have our like a small safe. Well, one thing that's for our important, like Social Security card, you know, we got that in plastic and, you know, we keep that on us.

But you know, you haven't been down here long enough, but after one really bad storm several years before you moved to Florida, I made it a law that the gas stations all have to have generators. So we don't have those problems anymore. And all the grocery stores have to have generators.

Oh yeah, I remember here.

So that, that really, you know, cuts down on what you really need to, to have, because the store is not gonna— like, what happened was we had Wilma, and then everything got knocked out. Then all the gas stations, you couldn't pump gas because there was no electricity and no generators. Terrible. And then all the grocery stores, everything that was in the freezer, refrigerators, all went bad. I mean, I'm sure Publix, Winn-Dixie, etc., etc. Whole Foods, Costco, right, lost all their food, right? So there was no fresh food. So now they changed that after— that was probably like more than 10 years ago. They changed that. So now if the power goes out, no problem. All these gas stations have— and I remember like when Wilma happened, I had no gas in my car. My neighbor owned a gas station and I had to go there, go to the gas station, at night because they didn't want anybody to see. And they actually had like a hand pump and they were hand pumping out gas for, you know, friends and family because he said you could— they legally, whatever, they weren't supposed to be doing it, but they did it at night. Cops didn't care. But no, but I'm just saying like that was a big— that was a big huge problem that, that now we don't have to deal with anymore because they fix that. So that's very— so let's dive into entrepreneurship trends. You know, COVID really helped— I don't want to say it helped, but it accelerated a lot of things in, um, in the world of business, accelerated a lot of things that were going on, you know, but it made a lot of big shifts in our society. And the business landscape, you know, of what had— what was going on. And it also increased the amount of people that maybe had a side hustle and then turned it into a business, and people who didn't have a side hustle created a side hustle. People who worked at businesses that were closed went back to school and learned new skills so that they could get a they could start a business. So it really accelerated that.

And, you know, I mean, I think COVID motivated people just to figure out a way, right, in general, right?

But I'm saying they got— people got— used their entrepreneurial spirit and figured out a way how to make, how to make money by working at home. So here's— let's talk about some trends. The first one is Top reasons why some startups fail. So some of these cost issues. So a lot of things people don't realize, one of the most expensive thing— the two most expensive things that you have when you have a business is your rent and then labor, right? So if you're a solo entrepreneur, obviously Labor is not an issue, but then rent is— used to be frowned upon to have a home-based business, right? Now it's not frowned upon at all, right? So I would say that'd be one of the bigger trends, except for maybe if you're a restaurant.

I mean, I don't know. I know some people in a neighborhood selling plates and they're making a killing.

No, I know, but I'm just saying, like, that's maybe like a little bit—

they're almost— I know some people back home that are like they're using that, you know, they, they use their kitchen and then they're stashing the money away to open up a, you know, their—

right. But they're— but a lot of people do these pop-up restaurants now and stuff like that. So it's, it's— you're able to kind of do that if you have a, you know, you get a license, you know, to do it properly. So another reason is if you did that—

yeah, the people I'm talking about got no license, bro. They're cooking out of there.

Hey, listen, I give it to them. They're gonna try.

Nobody—

listen, the cops probably don't care.

No, they're buying them plates from them.

I know, but I get upset when I see like the cops bust some kid with a lemonade stand. No, don't do that. I was watching Gary Vee one day, went to a garage sale.

You see the one where he got pulled over?

Yeah. And but there was— he went to this garage sale and there was a kid selling lemonade. He gave the kid $20 for lemonade. Yeah, he gets— he got pulled over by the cops more than once.

There's a— there's a lemonade stand by my house. It's all right, man, shout out to y'all, but it's not the kids. You can tell it's the parents running it.

So here's the other thing where people get into a situation when they're starting a business: outcompeted. So can you compete with whatever in the business that you're in. Now we're in a business, merchant services, you know, there's mammoth companies, right, that we go up against, but we don't need to do as much business as they do because we don't have the overhead that they have, right? So we're able to compete, you know, but not maybe— we can't get the amount of accounts that they get. So you have to remember there's ways to do, you know, yeah. You just need to know how much you need to make to pay your bills. Not the right people. Maybe you're not the right person. Like, if you're— if you start a business and you have to make, you know, you have somebody's making sales, right? So you have to become a salesman. They should really teach that in high school, like sales.

They should— I don't know, something better. Entrepreneurship in general.

Yeah. But they need to teach people about sales, like money management. Yeah, basic money management 101. That's also a big problem.

Economics.

Because the next one is no more cash, right? You don't have enough cash for your business. So service businesses are always good if you don't have a lot of cash because you're providing a service and you're not providing, you know, you don't have to go buy a bunch of stuff. To sell. So if you have to go buy inventory and then sell the inventory, that becomes a cash flow problem. If you don't have— if you're just doing a service like making a website, um, making a bunch, you know, shooting videos for somebody's business and doing their social media, or doing dog walking, it's a service, not a— you don't, you don't really have a lot of inventory. You don't have any inventory to deal with in most cases. Nope. And here's one which I don't get: no market need. Maybe you came up with a service nobody—

that nobody really needs, or it's too niche, or you just picked a terrible location.

Well, yeah, so terrible locate— well, everybody, you know, when it gets down to it, everything's location, location, location, you know.

I mean, if you're, I don't know, like a restaurant, any type of those types of businesses, you got to be very aware of the neighborhood, what's around, the businesses, the competition, the poverty rate.

I mean, yeah, you got to know. You got— and your certain— your product has to be priced right and priced competitively so here's that the neighborhood can actually afford, right? That the people can afford. Because you got to remember, when— if you have a store, right, a physical location, right?

Gucci isn't going to open up a shop in the middle of the neighbor in of a bad neighborhood, right?

But what I'm trying to say is most of your customers are going to come from 5 miles away, and then maybe 10 miles away, and then beyond that, you know, unless you have some special things, it's gonna be very loyal that, that people are going to drive for, right?

Right. Then, then you have a, you know, that's like, we'll talk about that, uh, the, the famous, uh, the sandwich shop in, uh Chicago, they closed one of their, like, their original locations, and the owner says, I'm, I'm moving 10 miles away, it's 10 minutes, they'll come and get— they'll still come and get the sandwich. And they have a— that's their other location is 10 minutes away. So, okay, he's like, forget it, you know. And that's loyalty though, right? You gotta build— what am I trying to build? Your loyalty, right?

Yeah, some, some products people are not going to drive. They're gonna— not gonna drive, uh, 20, 30 minutes to go get it. But no, unless it's something really special, you know, or the price is right. Yeah, or the price is outstanding, or you have a great selection of clothing that nobody else has, it's unique, right? Then that's good. So entrepreneur age profile, this is interesting. So who's most likely to start a business? So here we go. Let's start with the youngest age, 18 to 29 year olds, only 4%. I think that's a little higher.

I would say it's more than that, dude.

And also I find that a lot of, uh, the tech stuff is young people, you know. So I think that's higher. This is just some, you know, we see some facts online from different sources. And then the next age group, 30 to 39, 14%. 40 to 49, 25%.

That does not seem right to me.

What, that you would start a business at 40? Maybe, you know, it's a second career. You gotta remember, like, work-wise, I can tell you this, like, 50 to 59 though. Yep, 50 to 59 is the number one. You know why? Because at 50, maybe you get people retire, you get canned out of your job, right? Because they want— they don't want to pay somebody. And then what do you got to do? You got to start a business. In order to make money. So that's, you know, it's 7.

And then the 70-year-olds are tied with 4% with the 18.

And yeah, maybe they have a 18 to 29.

I mean, it could be that low.

Maybe somebody does, but you never know.

I don't know.

Yeah, so here, I definitely was out there hustling before 18. So top industries for businesses, entrepreneurs, business services— that's what we talked about, have a service. 11%, food and restaurants 11%, health, fitness, and beauty 10%. You know, because when you think about it, you can go to a, let's say, a barber shop or a beauty salon or a nail salon. They rent a space. You can rent a space in a lot of those places. You don't have to be in an employee situation. You could be a—

no, they're most of the time, they're all, yeah, you know, yeah, they're, they're their own, your own entrepreneur.

Fitness, like, I would rent a—

I just— they're just renting a booth at the, the barbershop. That's how that works.

Like a lot— like one of my friends during COVID was working for a company, they cut back a lot of people, and he was a big fitness buff. So what did he do? He started a personal training business. Now he's happier, he's making, you know, about the same amount he was making before. He built it up. Yeah. And he's doing well with it now. He's got a couple of gyms that he actually, you know, goes to where they he gets clients at the gym and stuff like that.

I was just talking to my guy Chuck Hightower back in Milwaukee. He's got a training. It's called Getting Cut with Chuck.

Yeah, man.

He's, he's like a— I mean, this guy looks like he should put it on.

He should get a picture next to Charles Barkley because you don't want to look like that. Oh, Chuck Norris. Okay. And then general retail, 7%. Retail is probably one of the hardest businesses unless you have a lot of money for it.

I say a restaurant is the hardest business.

I don't care, probably both. Restaurant is— the inventory is perishable, so if you don't sell it and it goes bad, screw it, it's going in the garbage. Home services, 6%. That's one thing that needs to change in the United States. Like, one of the guys I like to watch all the time is that guy Dirty— the Dirty Jobs guy.

Oh yeah, he's hilarious, right?

He always talks about, you know, people fixing stuff and everything. There's just not enough—

took that out of the schools, man.

I know that.

There's no tech We had, man, growing up, I know you had— we had cooler than I did, right? We had auto shop, wood shop, you know, they took away auto mechanic shop before I got there. But my dad had that, right? They were so, you know, like, by the time they got out of high school, he could change his tire, his oil, check his spark plugs.

I wouldn't want to ask like a young kid today. Oh, you got a flat tire? What do you—

my daughter literally asked me yesterday. Yeah, Dad, do you know how to change a tire? I looked at her and I said, what?

Yeah, my son, my son.

Yes.

Yeah, my son didn't know how to change a tire. I was like, dude, you better learn like really quick.

Like, because what are you gonna— man, I'm not gonna be sitting like sitting outside waiting for 8 hours for AAA for a, a tire.

Yeah, exactly.

No, no, my dad would— if he would literally find me and chokeslam me like The Undertaker. If I ever told him that I called someone to change my tire, I'm telling you, like that, you know, like he gets mad. No, but that's what—

and to change my oil, that's the same thing. Like we're talking about like basic skills need to be brought back to the school. How to change a tire. Yes. Driver's ed, wood shop, like, well, learn carpentry.

Yeah, all of these things, these services. What is it that we're driving? Trades.

Yeah, trades. The trades needs to come back. There's not enough trades.

Yeah, the guy— I mean, you gotta call 30,000 numbers to get a hold of somebody to come and fix something at your place, man. Yeah, that's crazy.

That's crazy. Yeah, you gotta find—

not everybody is a rapper, not everybody is a dancer, and not everyone is a social media influencer or NBA player. Stop telling everyone that they're gonna be, uh, in pro athletes, or they go to college. Listen, it's okay to push someone to be in a trade, right? It's okay to say, hey man, you know, I see you struggling in school. Ever thought about, uh, carpentry, plumbing, electricity, right? That might be really good for you.

Air conditioning, HVAC.

Like, you don't have to go to school for that stuff. I mean, you do, you got to go to get it certified, but it's not like this huge, you know, but you might get that.

You might excel at that and like it. And then learn how to do it and make a lot of money. These guys are making $50 to $100 an hour.

I went to school with a guy, Julian Coleman. Shout out to you, bro. And we went to school together ever since, I don't know, 3rd, 4th grade, whatever. Yeah, we went all the way up until 8th grade and we stayed in touch. We were, you know, we're all friends. And even when he— when we were like, I forget, we had one of those like the trades actually come to the school and talk to you about the stuff. Yeah, he met the guy who was a plumber, right? He owned his own plumbing company. And he said, like, word— I swear to God, word is born. When, when he— we got back from that thing, we was in the, in the classroom talking about, like, what we were gonna do. He said, I'm gonna own my own plumbing company. It's going to be Diamond Plumbing Inc. or whatever.

Yeah.

10 years later, what do you think he did?

Started up—

starting a plumbing company, and it's one of the largest plumbing companies in Wisconsin.

Okay, it's awesome.

Like, the dude is, is Black-owned, um, straight out of the slums of Milwaukee. Like, everything that you thought that would be put against you to not succeed was there for him, and he did it, man. So shout out to all the entrepreneurs that are going through adversity like that.

Yeah, that stuff needs to come back. There's not enough tradespeople. When you want to go fix something in your house, it's, it's very stressful.

Listen, before I started doing what I'm doing, I was a power engineer like Homer Simpson. Like, I controlled the temperatures and made sure that it was hot and cool. And not like the press the button at the nuclear plant, like power engineering, but That's what I did, right? That's the second part of power engineering. I mean, that's a trade. And you know, you got to go to school for that. I didn't have to go to school long. I got some license. And that was it. But I got hurt on a job. And I had to adapt, I had to pivot, which, which is something that you learn in entrepreneurship that you have to do a lot. So well, that's how I've been going through that. You know, it helped me through my, you know, entrepreneurship career.

So that's why I always tell you, you know, one of the most important books that somebody ever gave me when I first got into payment processing was Who Moved My Cheese?

That's a good book.

And basically the concept is, you know, you have to look at that all the time, every year, twice a year, like what's changing in your business, what's changing in the economy, what's changing that you adjust your business to— how are you changing, right? How are you changing? All different factors of changing. So here, let's get into like a couple of different factors that are going on with business. So like we talked about, business from home, that's like really growing and, and very, you know, and also, you know, becoming more acceptable.

Yeah, I mean, people are doing drop shipping from home, they're doing customer service from home, they're doing scheduling.

Yeah, tons of companies hire people to work at home. And that was the next one. Globalized business.

What does that even mean?

Oh, there's, you know, people that are getting hired to do jobs from all over the world to work at, you know, they're working for remotely, remotely, remote work. Yeah. Now, one thing me and Justin agree on is that, you know, we should be trying— if you live in the United States, employ people in the United States. Please, we're for that. We're not for like going and getting these people.

The main, the main reason I'm for that, beside like, I understand those people are, they're going through it over there, right, in their country. They're, you know, that's, you know, I feel, I don't know if I feel bad for them, you know, that, well, they got to earn a living, right? They have to work just like we have to work. But, and so like, the thing that really bothers me about that whole situation is, and I also, being a business owner, I also understand that there is an overhead of of running a business, right? So like, stuff gets expensive. Yeah, you know what I mean? And you don't always want to pay what it costs for the work that needs to be done. Well, unfortunately, when you're sending all that work overseas, you're taking the value away from everyone here. Because we can't buy— pay our rent off an 8-hour check that, you know what I mean, what they would get down there, they could pay their rent for a whole year. Oh yeah, you know what I mean? Like, so I didn't even understand. It's really hard to—

I didn't understand that. My friend was explaining to me, goes, oh, you pay some guy like $200, like in one of the, like in the Philippines, because $200, because that's like 50 grand. Yeah, for sure. Crazy.

I mean, I was working with— I had to sever the ties because it's like they get— I don't want to say greedy, but it's, it's just, you know, they knew that it was— it's like I'm a cash cow to them, right? You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And so they could always, hey, I got this, you should do this for me, let me do this for you, let me— I started catching myself like, hey man, wait a minute, I need to send this work to someone else, man. Like, you know, you gotta sprinkling it around a little bit.

But there is a lot of businesses like from other countries and they're hiring people in the US to do stuff for them, programming.

For sure, a lot of that one hand washes the other, but at the same time, like, that's at a higher level.

We're talking about like the low level.

Yeah, the guy— hire the local— the— oh, hire the local web developer instead of going on Fiverr, or hire your own employee that to do it, and that way you could do more.

And change stuff quicker and move faster. Like, okay, here's a thing— mobile commerce. Now that's been around forever, and I always thought, what would that be? So mobile commerce is, you know, like you're on the road and you go to somebody's house to fix stuff, you know, having a device so that you can take the credit card from the person is really important versus just key-entering it. You really want to have the device, make your business look like, hey, this guy's got a real business. He's got the swiper machine, you know, the little swiper thing hooks up to your phone. You're going to save money on the rates and fees anyway. Like, don't be cheap and do get a good mobile commerce solution. Same thing, you know, or let's say you're selling something very expensive, want to have like actual credit card machine maybe. And you know, they look at You want to make your business look good and efficient, make it look as big as it can be. Like the same, like the same thing we talk about, like with invoicing, right? Don't be cheesy, have a good invoicing solution. So you're sending somebody an invoice, it's all detailed out, they click the link and they make the payment. Don't just send them the amount, you know, do, do the detailed work, you know, to make your business—

put a note in there. Like, I always add a note at the bottom of an invoice.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Doing business with me. I appreciate it. Let me know if there's anything else. Yeah, ask for a referral if you, if you haven't already, you know what I mean? Say, hey, blah blah blah, you know, make it personal.

Like with our new website, Nationwide Payment Systems, what's really cool is you send the person an invoice and then you can actually have a conversation with them. Yeah, so you can put a link in there. Hey, would you mind giving me a Google review? Oh, do you have a referral? Anybody you could refer to me. So you can actually keep in touch with your customers. It's a really cool feature that's in there for the invoicing. Social commerce. Now this is something that's like really on the rise. Selling— if this doesn't actually mean like selling stuff on Facebook and, you know, and using the Facebook Marketplace, means, you know, actually, you know, figuring out how to post like a specific item you know, and then sell it through a link.

Got it.

You know, and we have that in the new software. We give you the option to create these really cool links, you know. So that's what he's saying.

What he's trying to say is like when you're scrolling in your Instagram feed and you see a t-shirt and it's like click this link and you can just buy that t-shirt. That's what he's—

that's social commerce. Not— you don't want to send them to your website and then they have to go find it again, or they have to go to the website and go through the shopping cart. You can actually enable social commerce.

The least amount of click-throughs that the, that the user has to—

right, the least amount of clicks is gonna get the sale done. And then gig economy, this is growing, but I will spend— Justin always says I talk too much about bills in Congress and everything, but gig economy is very important. You know, but they're trying to— economy, gig economies like Uber, DoorDash, it's like the gig economy. Okay, you're— you might be a DJ, gig economy, people who get a chance is considered a gig. Yeah, gig band is a gig. Wow. They don't put you on the— like, let's say you have Allen and Justin as a DJ, I would—

but see, I've— I know so many DJs. Yeah, that they run it like business. They're not gig working though. They're like— they're—

I know, but I'm saying the new law we saw that Congress wants to make, they would say, oh, let's say you're hiring the Allen and Justin duo to come out, you know, I'm gonna play the banjo and just hiring a fiddle.

You're hiring B2B Vault.

What, to come out to your—

to your event, to podcast, right?

To podcast at your event. They're trying to say you have to go hire us and make us an employee and pay us through payroll instead of just writing us a check, and we deal with it.

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.

We read the whole thing. It was— it's crazy. It's some crazy—

when you just put it like that, in those— the way you explain it, though, we didn't explain it that way.

I know, but you did a really good job at explaining it that way.

Like, you know, we go and— what?

Right?

They're saying like, how long is that gonna wait? I gotta wait 2 weeks, right?

That's what I'm saying. They're trying to say like, oh, we're gonna come in and DJ at your at your bar. Now they— you can't—

we can't send you an invoice for the half, right?

Yeah, that's what they're trying to say now. They want the business to hire us as employees even though it's only for the day.

That's ridiculous.

I don't— that's what I'm saying.

Whoever complained or got fired from somewhere that's trying to pass this, man, you guys suck.

Well, what it is, is, is that you have people in Congress that are very out of touch with small business, and they're basically making a lot of rules to just to screw small businesses. And I don't like—

I was reading about something the other day.

I don't like it. Talk about it. Well, let's not get into that. Yes. Increasingly niche markets. This I love. There's all the time I hear about new types of businesses, new, new things. People are trying to do will be a niche market. Okay, so I had this guy that wanted to have like, let's say your iPhone, uh, let's say your cell phone company has $100 deductible to cover your phone when it breaks.

Okay.

And you don't have a lot of money. So I saw this, there was a guy, we tried to get it, I couldn't work with him. Because he just does— he's not funded well enough. So he wanted to charge people $5 a month, and then if your phone broke and you had to pay that $100, they would cover the $100 because you're paying the— this $5 a month to them. But I said to the guy, this— you're not— the guy's like $5 grand in the bank account. I'm like, dude, do you think the bank is going to let you collect payments from thousands of people and then you have no money in your bank account. No, that's not going to work. I said, you know, he went to Stripe and PayPal, they declined it because it's too risky.

Sounds super risky.

Yeah, like that's— but a niche market would be like, they would replace your whole phone. Yeah, they would— no, they would give you the $100 to cover the, COVID the warranty, the fee you'd have to pay to get your phone replaced. Like now with all the phone companies, you don't just get it for free unless it's like deductible. Yeah, there's a $100 deductible now on these phones. Used to be free unless it's like a complete— like the equipment just, you know, fried out, right? And it's their fault, then they would just give you a free phone. But if it's not, I know you got that. It's a $100 deductible for the fix the screen and all that.

These things like cars.

Yeah, it's nuts. Yeah, I read this article about cars that I did not like the other day. Like, it's one of the things that I see people complain about Tesla. Yeah, I read about Carvana. They're gonna go bankrupt. Their stock went to like a dollar. I mean, it's rough.

No one is buying cars right now.

No, cars are way overpriced. It's a prop. Cars is a big problem. I mean, they're gonna— I don't know how these car dealerships are going to survive because now they're moving into this thing where the car dealership, whatever, 2, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, you would go to the car dealership. Like, there's one by my house, have like a 6-story garage full of cars, right? There's no cars in that thing. They're— as fast as the cars get delivered, they're sold. So you even have to order your car, and then when it comes, you come and get it. There's no— they're not carrying any inventory. And now these— what are these car places going to do with these massive parking lots and massive car garages they built and all that? It's nuts.

They're going to turn them into condos.

Well, it's— something's gonna have to get done.

That's what I'm— well, I don't know, because when I drive past these car lots now, like, there's no cars. There's no cars. And the cars that are there, they don't move, right?

Or they're used cars. Yeah, a lot of it's filled up with used cars.

Like, how can these used car lots even afford the rent?

I have no idea what's going on.

The car market is crazy, right?

Because where I live in Fort Lauderdale on State Road 7, yeah, there's car lots everywhere. Every—

yes, side of the street there's a car lot, restaurant, car lot, restaurant, car lot, car lot. Oh yeah, everywhere.

441. Yes, car, car capitals, car, used car capital.

Yeah, it's crazy.

No, so a niche business would be like, oh, I only— I train Jack Russell Terriers. Oh, okay. Right, so very niche. But there are like a lot of companies coming up with like niche products, niche things, and you know, and that there can be success with that if you have— if there's a market for it. Okay, you have to make sure there's a market for that product.

Well, yeah, man, you gotta research whatever it is you're gonna go into. We talk about that a lot. We talked about researching your name, right, your company's name, and not just locally, you know, nationally on social media, making sure you can get those handles correctly. But yeah, man, niche markets, it's a cool, uh, cool thing to get into. I think that most entrepreneurs—

this has to be really thought out. Yeah, you're gonna do something niche that there is actually a market for it, right? Here's the—

just real quick, just like, you know, like web design, for instance. It took me a long time to realize that my niche market was, uh, home renovation, right? Right. So I was— I had tons of clients that were home remodelers, you know, tile companies, roofing.

Yeah, when you find your niche, that's where you go. You just go, stay in your lane.

Don't, don't stray.

Yeah, stay in your lanes.

Try some new stuff every once in a while, you know, if you're good at what you're doing. And, you know, you, you know, maybe you want to focus on interior decorating, you know, that's not far out of the— it's— you're still in the, you know, the home.

Yeah, you want to develop like a good niche when you're doing something like that. Here's the thing, continue— we've talked about this before— the continuous rise of subscription-based businesses where people charge a monthly fee. I, and I still think that Enough businesses don't do this. They don't do it. I think they need to do it more, and they need to— businesses need to actively think about how they can have a monthly subscription plan for their business. I mean, I can tell you, like, we have a— right, we have a pest control place that does it, we have an air conditioning place that does it, we have, we have a pool, you know, like, and also, like, you can't wait, like, this Like, we have a pool guy, and it's a friend of mine, and he started a pool company. And I was like, what are you doing? You're just like going to these people's house trying to collect money from them every month. Just get everybody on automated billing. Yeah, you can't, you can't just do that. You got to have everybody on automated billing for your service. That way you're spending less time trying to collect money and more time make it getting new customers. So it's important to figure out like Even with our new thing, the nationwidepaymentsystems.com, it's a subscription-based merchant processing. Yeah, you're paying a monthly subscription, it's month to month. You like us, you keep us. You don't like us, you get rid of us.

And so it says you'll like us, you'll like us, you'll love us, because the pricing is good and there's excellent customer service and the other tools that you get within it, you know, the It's irrepricable.

Yeah, the tools are awesome. So here we have the adoption of disruptive technologies. So this is something that I've met—

the metaverse is a—

yeah, the metaverse is a little bit disruptive. NFTs were disruptive. Crypto was disruptive. I mean, we're reading like crazy news about crypto. There's one guy that had all these crypto ATMs.

What's his name? Friedman.

Yeah, Friedman with the FTX.

Boss. Bank Friedman, whatever his name is.

Yeah, whatever. He's the guy, the FTX guy. Yeah, he tried to rescue all these companies that were failing.

Shout out to you, bro.

Yeah, yeah, shout out, man. He took, you know, whatever that guy took. He took a shot at trying to fix stuff.

Oh yeah, he got assassinated.

Voyager, he tried to get bail them out.

He's on life support right now. He's on life support right now. Now he's hoping that Binance is going to come in, which is his adversary, right? They hate each other, which is crazy.

So he's hoping they're going to come in, buy his company for $16 billion, right? Then he'll walk away with $16 billion. But I think he was worth like over $100 billion not that long ago. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So good luck, Sam. Yeah, Sam, that's his name.

Sam Friedman Bank.

Yeah, whatever. The guy that—

his name is hyphenated.

The guy that owns FTX. And then there's another story that came out which is insane, with some guy that had these Bitcoin ATMs everywhere. And then they— I guess now he's going to go to jail, and he was laundering all this money. And then I was talking to some guys that deal with like Bitcoin trading, and they were telling me, they said, oh, after like that got— those transactions got flagged right? Because there was money laundering going on. Like, this guy didn't pay his taxes. The government's gonna— they're getting him on everything, like non-payment of taxes. They found them. Oh, they caught the guy already.

Why were you still in the United States, bro? Right?

So now they— so then my friend was telling me, goes, oh, let's say the people bought those Bitcoins and then they took them and they either cashed them out, let you know, cash them out some way, or bought stuff with it. Or let's say they traded them to traded those Bitcoins for like Dogecoin, right? And then they did something with that. But if they still held on to any of them, all those coins that were not used for anything are all flagged, and now they can't be used because the blockchain— it's like, it would be like the equivalent of you stole a bunch of money from the bank and they had all the serial numbers, and then somehow when every time you went to the store to use a, let's say, a $20 bill, but it was stolen, right? And the bank— and the Publix had a way to scan that money, right? Which they don't yet, right? To scan the serial number, right? And make sure—

the feds do though, right?

To make sure that it wasn't— well, they don't know all the time when somebody— like, if there's money—

well, that's how they track those when you rob a bank and you go start spending that money, right?

Well, they track that you spent it, but My point is, is that it— with Bitcoin, apparently, you know, every tran— everything has a serial number. Say, well, they'll go in the system, and this guy was telling me that runs a coin company that we're working with was telling me that, oh, those coins, if we see a transaction come through and it contains those serial numbers, the transaction is blocked. Wow. Because you can't use those coins. They're involved.

How do they see it? They just have some sort of algorithm them go to?

Yeah, they're, they're flagged on the blockchain as like bad coins. Right, right. Now if you spent them already, right, somebody else has them, there's nothing they can do about that because that person has the coins now, right? So let's say I got—

no, I missed it. Yeah, yeah.

And then I gave— then I, then I spent them at you. I gave you the 10 Bitcoins to make me 10 websites, right? So now you have the coins. Well, they're not flag because you have them now. No, right, right.

But yeah, that makes sense.

But, but if I still had them, let's have 3 more, they're no good. Growing importance of social responsibility. This, I don't know, I, I don't really agree with this. In fact, when I see companies that put social responsibility statements like on their website, I think it's a lot of pandering. Whatever they're— whatever social—

what is social responsibility?

Social issue. That they want to put on their website, say, oh, climate change, or whatever, that they're supporting it. I don't think it's very— I don't think it's an important thing to put on your website as a business.

So I would say the only thing that I like seeing is like, you know, like, looking at websites who are, you know, trying to be carbon-free, you know, because some websites are really, you know, really big, right? And it requires tons of servers to operate, right?

Right.

So that's what they're, you know, I mean, other than that, I'm just saying it's a difficult thing to— I don't care if Johnson Johnson supports whatever.

I don't care, right? That's what I'm trying to say.

They shouldn't be— that's, that's one thing about this whole—

yo, man, it's, it's part of the woke thing.

I don't care about your opinion, bro, right?

That's what I'm saying.

Like, I grew up in a place where were in a time where your opinion, if not kept to yourself, could either get you punched in the face, right?

Yeah.

Or, you know, in a really big argument that you didn't want to be in, right?

I'm just saying, like, I think that that needs—

I don't know.

Yeah, I just think that doesn't need to be part of this.

Didn't your mom always say keep your opinion to yourself, right?

I don't think it needs to be part of business.

I don't think it should be a part of the social community. I don't— your opinions are your opinion.

Mark Wahlberg, write a book. Like Mark Wahlberg said, celebrities should be celebrities and they shouldn't put their opinions on the public because they have a lot of money and it's very easy for them to say go buy an electric car that costs $80,000.

Right. And I'm saying like, like, not like this is like these are our opinions. Right, of on B2B Vault. And I'm not saying we shouldn't have a voice for that, but what I'm saying is, is like, I don't want to be for— I'm not forcing you to listen to this, right?

But we're also not telling people to be socially responsible on a particular issue.

So all I ever say is peace, be righteous. That's how it's—

peace, love, and happiness.

All I can say.

Uh, the next one, which was on a couple of lists that we looked at increasing diversity. I think that it's very important. It's important. But I think that, you know, there's, there's laws. Like, I worked for big companies when I was in the hotel business, you know, equal opportunity employment. You know, I'm just a believer everybody— people come in for a job, you interview all— you interview everybody for the job, right? Pick the best person. You know, you try to—

I think this is more for When I'm reading about diversity in entrepreneurship, right? Yeah, I think it's more for like, when you're, when you're talking about like, women in like, C-level role, I understand that.

I'm just talking about like, diversity in general, I think is important. But, you know, at the same time, like, we don't work with like, we work with banks, we don't try to scrutinize like, where does the person live? What, you know, what's their economic background? I mean, I've had people come to us with like bad credit. Okay, well, they might have bad credit, and there's certain businesses like, you know, they have bad credit, we can get you still approved for your merchant account as long as it's some kind of like, you know, it's a restaurant, somebody's coming there getting stuff there, it's a retail store, you're cutting hair. But if it's somebody with like bad credit, they want to sell electronics on a website they're probably not getting approved, right? So you gotta, you know, you can't like take these things too far, is what my point is, you know. And we, you know, and we try to work with everybody. We don't care what you're— we don't care what, what it is. We work with everybody. More specialized business education, which is what we talked about, you know, like different things. Also, like, basic skills need to be taught in school. Like, give kids Canva, right, to do— learn how to use— oh man, to learn how to use basic graphic design, graphic— to do basic graphic design, learning how to use, um, WordPress, Office 365, you know, or Google Docs, whatever you call that, Google Suite, Google Suite, G Suite, you know. People need to learn these things, but not after they graduate high school, right? No, in school they need to be given these tools, like whatever the tool is that they're given, but they need to learn how to do like Excel spreadsheets.

And shout out to Google for, you know, all the work that they do for the schools too.

Yeah, Google. And I, you know, Apple gives away a lot of computers to school. Dell— a lot of companies give away computers to schools that try to help, you know, give people, uh, those Chromebooks and all that.

And as parents, man, I'm a parent of 6 daughters, you know, advocate for technology, but be aware of what they're doing on the technology, man. Monitor the screens. Stop playing around. Steve Jobs didn't give his kids iPhones, iPads, any of that. Think about that one.

And then, so also, when you're talking about that, my daughter is a meteorologist. So she goes to schools all the time. You know, I think she missed it during COVID not, you know, they didn't send her to schools, but she goes to schools all the time. She talks to kids about the weather, she talks to them about STEM— now they also call it STEAM— but, and she judges science contests, you know, and she promotes that, you know, people, kids should learn about science, science, technology, engineering, and math, right? Science, technology, engineering, and math. Because all of those things are important. You need engineers, and engineering can be all sorts of engineering. Electrical— like, if you're an electrician, you could be an electrical engineer too. So it just depends how far you want to take all that. So specialized business education is good. We're getting to a long time in the podcast, so let's not get crazy. Younger entrepreneurs, we're seeing, you know, more internet media outlets. I don't know Media is just crazy. There's too many pay channels. That's— there's just way too many. Mobile businesses will adapt and evolve. I think we're going to see more mobile businesses in the future, a lot more, because rent is too expensive.

Shout out to all the mobile barbers out there. I think that's a really cool thing.

Yeah, mobile barbers.

I've seen it. Yeah, this one guy I knew, he has a truck, you know, he redid a bus.

Oh, we had a—

we had a short school bus.

We had a lady for a while and she had— she took a school bus and a motorhome and turned it into a retail store. And she used to do a pop-up retail store.

It's very smart.

All over Miami. I don't know what happened, but they— I think that they had a problem with, uh, with, um, something and they ended up going out of business.

That sucks.

But it was— it was a good idea. I just think that they didn't have enough places to go take it, you know what I mean? Yeah, where, where to go park the store.

And kind of fits into the next—

yeah, hyper-local specialty shops, you know, we see that popping up a lot. Seems like to be very trendy, like donuts with all kinds of weird stuff on it, or ice cookies, or ice cream, and egg rolls. Yeah, weird egg rolls or things like that, different kinds of like Korean food, like food that you don't normally see, like, you know. And I think we're going to see a lot more like fast casual restaurants with like takeout for like get where you can get, you know, meals for your house, you know.

How come there's not so many places to sit down? Like, I know there's a lot of places on the beach to sit out and eat, right?

Right, outside seating.

How come we don't do that? Why is that not a big thing down here?

It's a problem because Space is expensive. So a lot of, you know, I think that— I think a lot of businesses need to rethink where they're putting their business. I think— I think COVID also accelerated businesses to start thinking about, hey, do I need to be in a freestanding restaurant building?

Do I really need this building? Right.

Do I need this building? Are we going to see more ghost kitchens in the future?

Do I need—

you know, if I have a restaurant, I need to have a patio outside.

Do I need a food truck?

Right. Do I need a food truck? I don't know, food truck is like a weird thing to me. So like, you know, I think if a restaurant is—

is really quickly, I think if a business is big enough, right, like a very popular place.

Yeah.

And they, you know, they, they purchase a food truck to extend their reach, like to go to events or stuff like that. That's how, like, for instance, BurgerFi does that, right? That makes sense to me. But like food trucks, if that's your only thing, right, and no one can always find where you are, yeah, I feel like you're at— you're kind of setting yourself up for failure, you know. Like you gotta—

well, it's a difficult kind of business.

Yeah.

And also, you know, it's difficult— how does the health department deal with that? People want to feel safe.

So many different rules for that, right? So many.

Like when they have an event outside, they're gonna have to help then the health department will show up. Yeah, there's 10 food trucks and they inspect all the food trucks.

You also have to be registered for that, right? Then you got to go get your licenses for that event. You got it.

They're making it expensive. The city is making it expensive to do that. Like down in Miami, in Wynwood, they have like a big parking lot and there's a lot of food trucks in there. They're not even trucks. A lot of them are just like a trailer, right? And they don't—

they, they never move.

They never move. You're right. So that was pretty cool that they did that.

There's a place like that over in Flagler Village in Fort Lauderdale.

Yeah, I saw, like, they just—

pretty cool.

They just started that recently.

Yeah, but it's already done. Like, they already— I don't know what they— you know, it's like the businesses around there pushed all of the, the cool stuff out already.

Yeah, it's— we're very— yeah, the city has to stick with it. Green businesses, I'm not like a big fan of that because I've been been hearing different things like, oh, if you put solar panels on your house, you got to take out extra insurance because it's not covered under your insurance.

I'm paying $25 a month for— to FP&L for solar panels, and I don't have solar panels. So tell me how that works.

That's weird.

No, it's the service fee. It's because that's what everyone asks. If you look on your bill, you're paying it too.

Oh, I noticed that my power our bill went up recently. Yeah, also because of the price of gas, everything, everything. So that's our thing. So we talked about, you know, entrepreneurial trends today. And if you're an entrepreneur and you need credit card processing, check out our new website, nationwidepaymentsystems.com, where you can answer 10 questions and get approved in about 5 minutes. And then you have an active MID, you You can send out invoices. You get a free WordPress plugin for your e-commerce site, so you can avoid a bunch of fees that you usually have to pay in reference to having an e-commerce merchant account. So you don't have to pay $100 a year for the plugin, you're not paying $20 a month for the gateway and additional transaction fees. So we can save you a lot of money in that way. So it's a great way to have to get what you need for your business.

Indeed.

And we take all, all types of businesses. You don't have to talk to anybody. All the pricing is there. It's very straightforward, transparent. We're the alternative to the big three. And as a bonus, there's actual customer service. So there's 24-hour chat through the dashboard. You can always chat with somebody. There's phone numbers to call up, open a support ticket, so on and so forth. So there's a lot of— there's a lot, a lot that can— you can do.

Or you could text book, the word book, to 954-827-9818 to schedule an appointment with Allen, and, you know, and he'll answer any questions that you have, right?

So that's our storm edition of B2B Vault. Everybody stay safe with Nicole. Try to stay dry and celebrate entrepreneurs.

Hit me up if you're having any, uh, hurricane parties. Peace.

Rocky wants to go to a hurricane.