How To Get A Side Hustle Going At Your Agency | Agency Partnerships | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 123

What's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, Allen Kopelman, and we'll be providing you educational information regarding small business fintech, payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And it's Entrepreneurship Month, all month of November, uh, so most of the podcasts— well, all the podcasts are always pretty much focused on small business entrepreneurship, but it's Entrepreneurship Month, so we're going to throw a little more entrepreneurial spirit into the mix, you would say. Um, lots of stuff to cover when it comes to entrepreneurship, different angles, different ways different businesses, you know, just a lot when it comes to entrepreneuring. Um, go get your hustle on, never quit, keep going, stay in the fight, you know what I mean? Um, but yeah, man, so, but also, uh, there's a new program that we're offering to all the hustlers and, uh, uh, entrepreneurial-minded people out there, or small businesses that are already operating in the, you know, the digital space, or, you know, web design, digital marketing, SEO, blah, blah, blah.

Yeah. Or you could be a SaaS company, or a sassy person. Yeah. A SaaS company or something like that. Independent software developer.

Yep. So with that being said, Uh, let's hop into the new program that you got, man.

All right, so, you know, we're celebrating entrepreneurs. So one of the things that, you know, I've always tried to do is, you know, network with other business owners and to find out about how they do business. It's always interesting to me when I do networking or when I sign somebody up for credit card processing You know, one of the things is, you know, to find out how they do business, why did they start their business, right? And get all, you know, and find out exactly, you know, what's going on with their business and how they get paid and what's the flow of all that and how, you know, and then what can we do to help them with their business. So one of the things that we've done is we have our brand new website, nationwidepaymentsystems.com. Where you can— business owner can answer 10 questions and in 5 minutes or less you're approved. Bing bong. If all the business information checks out by the artificial intelligence that's checking everything, right?

Yeah, you need real stuff. Like, you need it, you know, this is a real thing, so you need to be a real business. You can't use fake Social Security numbers and fake EIN numbers.

Right, so the information, you know, they ask first name, last name, the address of the business, you know, the last 4 of your social, your federal tax ID, what kind of business it is.

You don't need the EIN, but—

Well, no, most people should have an EIN if they have any kind of business, even if you're doing a sole proprietorship.

It's free to get one.

Yeah, you should get an EIN number because all it is is one form on your personal tax return. Like, let's say you're a small business, you can get a— file a DBA, which is cheap in the state of Florida. It's like $35 or $50 depending on which package you get at Sunbiz. And you have that, and then that way, you know, you can file the one-page tax return attached to your personal tax return, which basically lets you deduct your business expenses from the actual money that you took in. So let's say you took in $100 grand, you don't want to pay tax on $100 grand because you didn't make $100 grand profit. You know, I've explained this to people before and they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, yeah, well, did you pay somebody? Did you pay yourself? Did you have expenses for your business? You know, treat your business, even if it's a side hustle and it's something small, You can save a ton of money. Yeah, man, by having an EIN number and filing your taxes correctly. So what we're doing is, is we're bringing this solution to people, like Justin said, in the agency businesses. You know, you're, you're selling, you're talking to the business owners that you're working with. Maybe you're selling them SEO, maybe you're selling them digital marketing, maybe you're making a website for them and they have e-commerce. And most of the time, we talked about on the podcast, Justin said he looked up, um, how many websites were WordPress? 43%, right? So that's a pretty big number. And you know, we have— our program works with other types of websites too, just it's not the 10 questions to get a merchant account, but we can work with anybody, any companies., you know, that have— want to have refer business. Because like, I call up, let's just say Justin is the agency owner, and I ask him, hey Justin, so after you build me my e-commerce website, what do I do for merchant account?

9 times out of the 10, they're gonna be like, sign up for PayPal or go to Stripe.

And then as an owner of a website company, do the PayPal and Stripe give you any money? No, so it's terrible, right? So we're offering— see, you know, the, they don't— the customer, you can send the customer to us and we're offering to give you a revenue share of the profits that's made every month. So if you're making 2, 3, 4 websites a month, maybe you have a bigger company, you're making 10 or more websites a month, you can create a good bit of monthly residual income. We provide you with reporting, right?

Because I mean, like, so before you get into what do you all get, right, no matter what, you know, like, I, I mean, I've said it on this podcast numerous times, of all the money that I feel like I've left on the table after like knowing what I know now, because again, you know, most of the time we set up the website that business has to get paid. Like, they're— that business isn't coming to us for a website just to throw a website up, right?

They're not doing it to not make money.

They want to get paid. So, you know, being able to say, hey, what are you guys gonna do to get paid, right? You know, you already have the relationship going, you built the website, you're doing the marketing or the maintenance or the SEO or the report boarding or blah blah blah, right? You—

whatever you're doing. Yeah, you're engaged with the company, you're engaged with the business owner.

Exactly. And so they trust you. There's a level of trust already established. And, you know, the payment thing is a lot to deal with, right? I mean, like, you know, there's— it's a lot of personal information involved. So I could see why it was easier for us not to deal with it, right? Because we didn't want to deal with all the, you know, because sensitive information.

Back in the day, you had to actually do paperwork. Yeah, like when I first got into this business, we actually had to fill out paperwork. Now we don't, we don't have to do any paperwork, right?

I just send you my referral link, you click the link, I don't get any of your information, or the agency that you're working with wouldn't get any, any more information than they already have. And then, you know, you would fill it all out on your own. And so the, the relationship that you still have with that agency or the developer wouldn't change at all, they would just incorporate, you know, the backend to the GoDaddy to the website. And so I think it's a win-win for the developer and the business because one, it's less to manage if everything is housed all in one place, right? Like, that's one thing that I always tried to do and convince people to do.

But what's also good is just like PayPal and Stripe give people a free plugin, right? For the— yeah, we're given a free WordPress plugin, right, for the gateway. Yeah. So we're giving away— we're doing the same. We're providing— what Allen's trying to say is—

what Allen's trying to say is that GoDaddy has a WooCommerce plugin, ready to go. There's nothing— there's no fees involved. So you install WooCommerce. And then after that, you install the WooCommerce payment extension. And you can make— you're starting to make sales, right?

Once they fill out the paperwork with us, the online application, they get access, they get— they go live, they get access in the dashboard, they just give you the API key, you're you're ready to go, plug, turn the thing on and go live. They could be live in 5 minutes. We're actually faster than Stripe and PayPal.

I wouldn't doubt it.

We're actually faster than them because they sometimes, they send back and forth all these emails. That doesn't necessarily happen with us all the time, but you're going to have the free. So we're, our service is comparable, we're comparatively priced probably priced a little bit less than they are. There's, you know, we— you get the free plugin just like that. Because now let's say I have to give— let's say Justin comes to me, oh, I have a merchant, they need a thing, they need a merchant account. Now we got to get, get all their information, get an application, send it in. Then once they get approved, they got to get an authorized.net account or an NMI. They're they're spending $20 a month plus another 10 cents a transaction. That's all eliminated. So there's no additional gateway fees, and they might not even need all that. Well, they don't need all that with us, right? But if you have a side merchant, if you get a regular merchant account, that's what we have to do.

No, right.

So, you know, so they get approved fast.

Oh, I'm just saying, like, in general, like, if a small business, like, right, it's overkill. Yeah, right.

You know, yeah, they don't want to spend any more money, plus then they got to buy the Authorize.net plug-in from the WordPress store. It's like $99 a year. Oh, it's yearly?

Oh yeah.

Oh, okay. So we're eliminating all of those fees. So we're making it very— we're making it very, um, what was the word I was using? Seamless to deal with us. It's very seamless. They come in, answer the 10 questions, get approved, boom. The developer goes and puts the WordPress— gets the WordPress plug-in from the store gets the key from the merchant. Bam, you're done. No, you're done. Your website's up and running. Because that's been the resistance that we've gotten from agencies before. Oh, you got to do paperwork and negotiate, and then there's a gateway fee. They can just go to PayPal, there's no gateway, right? Well, we're giving you the same exact program PayPal and Stripe have, except there's a bonus. Let's say the merchant has a problem. You go to PayPal or Square, what, just an email, right?

Oh man, customer support, good luck.

So we have live chat in the dashboard.

I will say PayPal is getting better, but that— I'm not giving them any like super—

no, but we have live chat in the dashboard. Plus if you need to call, you call our office and we can help you too. And then we have dedicated representatives on the other end if we need some technical support, we can get in touch with them and get you the technical support that you need.

Nice.

So it makes it for, you know, and GoDaddy is a multi-billion dollar company, same as those companies like whatever. PayPal is a big company, Stripe's a big company. Now it's just we're co-branded with GoDaddy, and we did that to bring this program forward, you know, to merchants. And I think that it's a tremendous opportunity because not only are we giving you the website, right? Let's say Justin Brink— let's say he makes a website and the person has a clothing store. Okay, well, they can all— they can basically also get a credit card machine from us too, and then all their payments are in one place. So they don't have to have a separate merchant account in the store a separate merchant account for the website. They can have it all together.

That's what I was getting at, um, earlier when I was saying like, you know, it's all in one, right? Like, so you have your, your web developer is plugged in the same place. They know everything that they're, you know, it's, it's very like, you use the word seamless, man. It's very seamless.

And yeah, seamless and frictionless.

The integration is very seamless. No, I'm just kidding. Uh, now, so it's very, it's very simple to get done. And I think that, uh, it's a no-brainer for agencies to hop on board. Because the number one thing is you're gonna get paid every time— well, not every time the client gets paid, but you'll get paid for all those transactions that the client's making. There's a— instead of you setting it and forgetting it, and you're never making a dime from that person ever again, now you're back, you know, there's a continued relationship, there's ways to make money. So, right.

And we also bring in additional services beyond what GoDaddy's merchant account is offering. So we have other additional services we can bring in, bring into the, um, the fold. So let's say you have a merchant, they want to add on crypto acceptance to their website. Let's say they want to— let's say they happen to have a product that has consumer financing and they and they want to add that to their website. Let's say they want to have— they sell something and they want to do international transactions to Japan and China, and they need Alipay. We can get them linked up with that solution. So there's all sorts of solutions that we bring beyond what's offered, you know, in the basic account that GoDaddy has. We can also offer these specialized type of things. And then we also deal with all different risk levels of merchants. Whereas GoDaddy won't approve certain things, we can get those approved at other processors. So, you know, it's a, it's a really good relationship where, you know, we're able, you know, don't be frustrated. Oh, some guy's asking me to make him a CBD website. Now where does he get processing from? Well, we have a solution for that. It's not the GoDaddy 10-question solution. That's for more of the everyday vanilla, you know, some, some chocolate sauce and a little whipped cream, right? But not, you know, crazy stuff, right? You know, not the crazy stuff. But we can get most, just about any type of account approved, and that's important, and approved quickly and get them up and running quickly. That's good, you know. So that's the, you know, that's the main thing. The person's not waiting 2, 3, 4 days to get their you know, to get their merchant account approved and then get a VAR sheet and get set up on the gateway, and then they get the gateway credentials, and then finally they're live, right? So this is a more quick way for you to get your client— you know, your clients don't have to negotiate, right? They just go to the link, fill out the application. The pricing is very transparent. Our pricing is similar to PayPal, Square, and Stripe. So we're giving you— but we're giving you much better service because you actually have a person to call on the phone, can call our office. There's live chat once you're logged into the—

goes a long way, right?

So you have a question, you're— and everything is in the dashboard. We have this dashboard that's amazing. You can put a little app on your phone and access your business information, have it on your laptop, see all your business information. Information.

And this doesn't only work for agencies, right? So we're talking to agencies. And so, so if you're an agency— 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. What types of businesses will use this? And it's every business, like literally. So if you're setting up an e-commerce shop, a barber shop, a barber shop, you can set them up through there. If they're a services company, they need invoicing, there's— you could set them up through, you know, you can get them going through the GoDaddy, same way we're what we're talking, the merchant program. Uh, so like the businesses, like it's not just limited to e-commerce.

No. And you know what's the funny thing? I was reading an article the other day from— I don't want to say who because it's a company I don't like to promote, so I'm going to use that company. But now, like, you know, should we be using the words like e-commerce and retail commerce and omnichannel and omnicommerce? You You know what it is today? Everything is commerce. It's just commerce, period. Business is commerce. Business needs payments. That's it. You know, commerce and payments. So, you know, every business needs to get paid. Yeah. And we're bringing that to the— we're bringing that to businesses. We're bringing all types of services into businesses that they need. And if you're You know, no matter what kind of business you have, whether you're an agency or you're a software developer, or you're— you have, you know, maybe whatever it is, maybe you have some kind of app.

Yeah, don't be, you know, discouraged by the agency word either. That goes for like the freelance guys too who are out there hustling, you know, building websites for small businesses. It's actually perfect for you, you know what I mean? Because Then first you set up your merchant account, right? You get your merchant account. Now you're able to send invoices through GoDaddy. You connect your business bank account or your regular checking account, whatever you got going, you connect it through there. So now you're getting paid. As soon as that— you're finished with the project, you invoice through our— the dashboard of, of our program platform. You send that invoice, they get the invoice, you get paid immediately. No waiting, there's no fees, there's no—

yeah, next day funding. You even and have the opportunity with the— within the dashboard, you could add a 1%, 2% fee to absorb some of the credit card processing too in there. And you send a detailed invoice, and what's great about that is nothing's going to get held up from an underwriter.

You know what they get off the invoice?

What do you mean, what they get?

What's the percentage of the—

that off invoicing?

2.9 off every invoice you send.

Yeah, yeah, 2.9%. But it's, it's great because you're sending them a payment link. You can put in all the details of everything that you sold to the customer. And what's good is, is let's say it's a big ticket for 3, 4, 5 grand, right? Okay. And you send out that through like PayPal or Stripe. Uh, they just, they don't send details. They just send, uh, you know, the payment amount most of the time. We want you to put the details in there so the underwriting department sees, oh yeah, Justin sold this guy a 25-page website, blah blah blah blah blah, the total is $3,287. Okay, good. And the, the transaction is going to flow through the system. You're not going to get like an email, oh, we need to see the details of the transaction and blah blah blah. That's never happened to me, so I don't know what that is, but Well, that can happen when you do like a large transaction and you don't put the details into the payment request. PayPal, I don't know. I've gotten payment requests from people that use PayPal that says, oh, pay me.

Well, that's because they didn't fill it out, right?

That's what I'm saying. But we want you to fill it. We give the merchants, we give them a heads up like, oh, if you do this, you're gonna— and also we have this communication tool. So let's say I sent Justin an invoice. Right? He gets the invoice, then he pays it. When he pays it, I can go to the messaging tab in the dashboard and I can go, oh, thank you for paying the bill. Hey, can you give me a review on Google? Put the link in there and send it to Justin.

That, that's really—

so that's— so it's a two-way communication tool also. It's not just, oh, one-sided. I sent it, they clicked and paid. Now you can, you know, you can have another conversation with your client and go, oh, can you write me a Google review? Or here, go on Facebook and give me a review, or whatever that is.

That's crucial.

Or let's say you want to sell them something else down the road. Now you can send them a message through the messaging system because you already messaged them before, right? And it sends them an email and they already know who you are, so they're getting a message from the system.

I like it.

Oh, do you want to 'Oh, we have a special this month.' Boom. Or you can get everybody's, you know, and then the same thing, you can set up recurring billing in there. So you can set up recurring invoices. So the payments, you get paid every month. 'Oh, Justin's package is $3.99 a month.' He's automatically billed the $3.99. So there's a lot of—

I mean, that's cool, man. I mean, I wish, like I said, I wish there was this I'm sure there was some sort of way of doing this back in the day, but not, not as easy as it is to sign up now. I mean, I signed up, it took me 2 minutes. Yeah.

And we have other tools in there. So we have those payment links that's in there also, where let's say you want to help your client, you say, hey, let me show you, you could do some social selling. And then they can go in there and create a special payment link just for one item. They could take it and put it all over their social media. The person doesn't have to go to the website. The person doesn't have to visit their website. I don't have to leave the page they're on. They could just click this link. Oh, I want to buy this widget for $29.99. Boom. And they're, and they're making a payment. So there's all sorts of cool things in there, even for nonprofits. You could put, oh, oh, we're doing a, um, a drive. The Frank playground got messed up with the hurricane or with a storm, and we need to raise $5,000. How much do you want to give? And they could put in there, oh, $25, $50, $100, $500— 4 choices. Person can just click it, boom, make a payment and go. You don't have to go create a whole web page and all this stuff. So there's a lot of different tools in there that, that you can use as a, a business owner and a marketer help your merchants make more sales, right? Because it's very popular to, you know, that way, and, and make money. Because otherwise, what are they going to do? Your customer is going to go on Facebook and make a Facebook post with it and get paid from Facebook.

This way, all their payments are in one place, and Facebook's taking their piece too.

So yeah, you know, yeah, so you, you can help your merchants do help your businesses that you're dealing with do all of that. Like, even I saw, like, one of the things on— we have a client that has axe throwing, right? So what did they do? They got, uh, their website, then they went on GoDaddy and added on to their website the— this appointment scheduler so people can make reserves, schedule their lane, the lane at the at the axe throwing place, right?

That makes sense.

And then they just put the— they— then they just plugged in the, the, uh, the WordPress plugin there, right? Put in the API key. Boom. Now they're getting paid for the axe throwing. When people go online, they make their reservation and pay for the lane. And then they get there, then they can order like the food and the extras and the, you know, whatever they want to get— t-shirts Nice. So there— so we're doing everything at that axe throwing place. They got the appointment thing, which is already part— some WordPress plugin from Go— that GoDaddy has.

They have an appointment setting?

Yeah, some— yeah, where you can pay for an appointment. It's pretty cool.

I have to take a look.

Yeah, so they, they use that, then they just plugged in the merchant account. Now they have everything in one place, plus have their e-commerce store where they sell t-shirts, you know, and different stuff online that you can buy your fake axe. They don't want to give somebody a real axe, you know, your fake axe. But they sell stuff like, you know, when you get to the place, they sell food there. Sometimes they have food trucks, you know, outside. Yeah, outside. And they, you know, they partner with the food truck people buy, buy the, buy the food through them, you know, then they just go outside with the receipt and go pick it up. Yeah, they go outside, pay for— pay the food truck guy. I think it's their food truck, but you know, but they made like a whole business over there. So you can do a lot with this merchant account. You know, we have another company we're doing business with that was referred to us, and they have a festival, right? So they have a store And we already put the equipment in the store, and then we made their— we have a website that they have, and then they have another website, and we're doing that website too for payments.

Okay.

Where they're having their web designer create for people who buy stuff from them in bulk, wholesalers. And so they're organizing that, and they're using the invoicing. I mean, they're using like everything we have. Nice. And then they have this festival and they need to get like 10 mobile machines so when people come to the entrance, right, that don't buy tickets online, come to the entrance. Most, they said like 50% of the people just pay when they get there, right? So when they get there, now we're renting them the machines, like 10 machines for the mobile with the 4G cards. When people come up to the front and then they sell other stuff inside and they're getting another 10 machines for that. And when they're done with the machines, the festival's for like 5 days, they just put them back, clean them up, put them back in the box, and ship them back to us. Nice. So it's like a, you know, a short-term rental. So we have— we can do a lot of different stuff, you know. And that was referred by the, you know, website guy, referred the client to us. Nice. So, you know, we ended up meeting with them, talking to them, do— taking care of the whole the whole business. And they were like amazed because they were like, oh, before we would have to go do this and then do that, and then we'd have to go get a bunch of tablets and go get those little square things. Yeah, now we're taking care of all of that for them. Like, they did a thing on the weekend. Now they're actually keeping a couple of the wireless machines because every couple of weeks they go to like a local, like not like— it's not like a flea market, like a, like a farmer's market craft fair place, and they sell all their t-shirts and stuff there. So now they have a couple machines and they're doing a lot more sales because now they're not just limited to cash. Yeah, yeah. And if that— then, you know, and then everything's in one place so they can go look in there in the dashboard, which is really cool, breaks it down by terminal so they can see like, oh, these sales came from the website, this came from the flea market, this came from the store. They could get all sorts of reporting, but all the money goes at one time, one place too. Yeah, all the money's in one place, all the sales are in one place. But if they want to see, oh, how many sales did Justin make at the craft fair, and then I was at another craft fair, they know which machine they gave Justin, they know which machine they gave me, they can see all the sales.

That's good.

So very good. Yeah, so you can do a lot with our system.. And, you know, and then, you know, the person who referred us that client, they got her— the, the client's been with us for a couple months, so they, they got their first residual check. And then guy was like, wow, he goes, I didn't— you know, I said, well, now you got to get us like, you know, 20, 30 more customers like that. You know, your car is paid for, your, your mortgage is paid for, you know, and it's just a recurring— it's a, you know, mailbox money. That's what my accountant calls it. It's mailbox money, right? So, you know, that's— it's easy, you know. The client trusted them, you know, and now the client trusts us. And they see like how organized their business is.

That's good, man.

And they like it. So, you know, that's how— that's how it works. So if you're interested, you go to our website, nationwidepaymentsystems.com. Um, we have a partner page. You can read about the partner program, click the sign up button, someone will call you on the phone, will answer any questions you have, send you out the paperwork, get you signed up, get you the link. We'll get your logo from you, whatever we need, get you set up to be a referral partner in our program. We'll help you, we'll help your merchants. And we make it seamless, easy. Just like you give them the link to go to Stripe, you give them our link. They're going to have the same experience. And then if they need help, there's somebody to call. They have a question, there's somebody to call. There's online chat in the, in the dashboard.

The difference is instead of you giving the link to PayPal, you actually get something in return when you give them our link, right?

Yeah, instead of just giving a link and then not getting anything you have a benefit of partnering, of partnering with us. Yeah, we partner with another company and they're making websites for cornhole, cornhole, this cornhole people. So yeah, they already gave us like 5 websites. Nice. Yeah, for people. And then they're— the guy's like amazed how fast it was. He's like, I can't believe it. He said he wants to switch his other clients over too that he get because he's not getting any money from it. So it's important, you know, we're in a, you know, especially in today's— I don't want to say bad stuff about the economy, but it doesn't matter what the economy— if the economy is good or the economy is bad, right? You want to create as much, as many income streams in your business as you can, right? You know, so that's what's important is being able to say, like, you know, same thing, like if you're making websites, you create a second income stream. Oh, I'm going to do SEO now. Oh, now I'm going to go into digital marketing, right? Those are extra revenue streams. So same thing, there's just another revenue stream to bring into your business. So when you're ready, you know, so if you're working with business owners and they need to process payments, they need commerce for their business, right? They need to get paid, you need to get paid. It's time to partner with Nationwide Payment Systems. You can also set up a meeting with me and Justin if you go to bit.ly/b2bvault.info.

There's an Apply Now button on the top right, or there's also a forum at the bottom if you are interested to talk to me or Allen Kopelman.

All right, so that's the podcast today. Carpe diem, seize the day. Hustle, the hustle never stops, never stops. Get your side— you know, you have a side hustle or you got a regular hustle, create an additional income stream with Nationwide Payment System. Thumbs.

Peace out.

Peace, man. They're scaring the shit out of everybody on the news.