How To Start 2024 Strong for Your Business!

Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Nick Saban of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's episode, we'll be talking about kickstarting your 2024. You know, what you doing? How you getting started? How's it going? What's new? Any good plans you got? Stuff like that. So what's up, bro? How's it going?

Listen, 2024, here we are. We started off with a bang. We went to our first, uh, starting— yeah, I went to our first networking event, you know, the other day. That was fun. And you know, 2024, you're talking about the LEED thing? Yeah, well, I'm just saying, you know, it was a conference, not a conference. Well, we did networking. Yeah. You know, so 2024 started off with that. How's your 2024 going?

I'm great. I am very blessed to be alive and I'm thankful for every day that I have moving forward. Yeah, man.

Yeah. It's the time of the year, you know, like, you know, the last, you know, maybe couple of weeks you were busy. Now's the time to, you know, sit down., come up with some new fresh ideas. Yes. You know, for marketing, for maybe if you had a restaurant, some new menu items, figuring out like your pricing strategy for this year, um, maybe where, you know, how can you get some deals on some goods to bring into your store if you, you know, things like that.

Yep.

Yeah, you know. To create, uh, you know, you know, people— a lot of businesses use like a loss leader to bring in business, you know. Sometimes that helps, you know. You got to explore everything, got to sit down, have like a team effort, do it, have a discussion. We, we're going to have a bunch of—

I mean, I think what businesses— like, for me, I always would see what was working and what wasn't. Like, uh, you know, what was getting engagement, what types of businesses were, were reaching out to me, um, that type of stuff. You know, crunch your data. Do you know it's there for a reason? Use it.

Yeah, you got to figure out, like, hey, if you got item— like, if you're a restaurant, you have items on the menu and the items aren't selling, maybe it's time to You know, or let's say you're dealing with a labor crunch in your restaurant, which we talked about before, right? Cut down your offerings so that you can give better service.

Speaking of cutting down, like, I've just seen Google's, uh, laying off hundreds of more people in the, uh, voice assistant, um, their Fitbit, because their Fitbit, because they bought Fitbit, I guess, a couple years ago, and then also in their engineering team. So I'm assuming that they're the Google Watch, the Pixel Watch, or whatever it is. I'm gonna take a shot in the dark here and say that they made some sort of advancement. And, you know, in the article is real nice, like they figured out how to, you know, utilize their processes and, you know, functionality and everything has been maximize so that they were able to not need as many people. Right. But in my, you know, it seems as if they just had an aha moment. And now, you know, those all that the stuff that they were needing to crack that, that code or whatever they were looking at, you know, they've accomplished whatever enhancement they were trying to make. Right. I feel like they've, they've, they've plateaued it, you know, and it's no longer needed because I mean, AI has come in. So I'm sure that AI is going to be built into the watch to like help generate like, um, you know, customized workout plans and stuff like that. So like you put in your weight, height, etc., you know, and it'll— that's what the AI is for, right?

AI's everywhere. I saw this morning, I was walking by my Alexa, right? Rocky hates that Alexa thing. Yeah. But, uh, I was walking by Alexa, and now Alexa's got AI. It's crazy. Yeah, it's like, oh, do you want to turn on your AI?

I didn't do it. 2024 is, uh, starting off interesting, so I guess—

yeah, like we talked about on the podcast about, you know, like Bitcoin making a comeback.

I said it. All of a sudden I said it. You were on the other side of the fence, buddy. Well, we're taking this, the claim for saying that crypto is making a comeback in 2024, and boy has it already.

Well, one thing that, one thing that kind of, you know, you mentioned that BlackRock bought all of that Bitcoin, right?

And now Ethereum or whatever. It wasn't Bitcoin, they just invested in the BlackRock. I don't know what exactly.

Well, they bought a whole bunch of coins.

They bought like a half a billion dollars, right? So half a Trillion.

So today they launched the— I guess they must have got permission from the SEC, so they launched the first BlackRock ETF stock, which— so ETFs, a lot of people don't understand what ETFs are. ETF is very interesting. So like trend, electronic, tangible? No. Well, let me— it's an electronic fund.

Tangible fund.

Yeah, tangible fund. So the— so what an ETF, right, is a lot different than owning like a stock or owning the actual coin. So an ETF.

So a lot of people like to buy ETFs because you don't get confused with NFTs, right?

You can buy this group of stocks or group of assets. It could be real estate, could be— oh, precious metals—

traded fund. Excuse me.

Right, exchange traded fund. But I'm just saying is, so within the fund they can do trading, right, which is— could drive up the price of Bitcoin. It could. We don't know. We'll have to see in the coming weeks how that works out. And there would be no taxes. Because inside the fund, they can trade. Let's say you have a, like I have funds, and there's stocks in there. So they can buy and sell stocks within the fund. As long as you don't sell the fund, you don't pay taxes because you didn't make a profit. But the fund, that's the way the funds operate.

Right.

So it's very popular for people to put these in their IRA account, have them in your investment portfolio. These, these type of programs. And having that with crypto assets is similar to having it like, it could be a currency ETF, it could be precious metals, right?

And now with, um, you know, BlackRock rolling this out, it's like 11 companies that got— that were able to—

yeah, there's a bunch, there's quite a few of them coming out, but 11 got permission, right? Got permission. And now we're going to see how that, you know, how that, how that all pans out in the world of that. The other thing that's—

I knew it.

The other thing that's on the news, well, you know, it's probably better to buy into this fund than it is to actually buy coin. That's what everybody's debating. So if you want to escape the taxes, it's better to buy into this fund.

The ETF, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's better to buy into this fund if you're looking to do some long-term investing. So the other thing that's all over the news, I got 3 text messages about it since the beginning of the year. People calling me on the phone asking me.

What are you talking about, the aliens in Miami?

Well, that was crazy. But this was about the LLC thing. And how, and it's been on the news. Oh, if you have an LLC, you're in big trouble. The government's going to know everything about you now.

They already did.

Right, exactly. But the thing is, is, you know, someone said to me, what do I do? I says, well, you need to make a choice. Either register your LLC with FinCEN and just get it over with, or B, change your corporate to an S corp and be done with it.

But why would you want to do that?

Well, an S corp—

what's the real benefit of changing to an S corp for a small business?

For a small business, an LLC and an S corp is almost the same thing. The only difference with an LLC—

Money. Money is how much it costs.

No, it costs—

Filing S corp, no, it's more expensive to file as S corp.

Okay, but the LLC lets you hide who the stockholders are.

So. Right, if there's 4 owners in one LLC, you don't have to list out everyone. You just need to put the one guy who—

The guy who's the managing member. Right. The federal government says, nope, we want to see who that is. And that could make some changes significantly.

To me, that's like, in my, like, I'm, and you know, I'm anti-government in a sense, you know what I mean? Not like that, you know, we need checks and balances, whatever, you know, whatever. But for me, what's the, that just means, well, I'll give you, can I give you, I don't, okay. So like, I get like people are trying to be, you know, under the radar, right? And I'm all, you know, like, that's cool, but at the end of the day, you're running a business, right? Right. And if you're trying to— if you're trying to be as successful as possible, you would want your name attached to that type of stuff.

So let me explain.

So we can build your personal whatever, man. I don't know. Stop hiding.

So let me explain to you.

Stop doing shady shit.

So like the state— so like you have, um, Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming, Utah, Utah, and I think something like Alabama had it for a little while, but I feel like they might have not.

North Dakota, maybe North Dakota.

So the way they have it set up in those states, you can open up a corp, an LLC, and then if you go to the state website, you don't see who owns it, right? But now they're going to have— these people are going to have to expose the ownership.

I mean, I get it, you know, there's always workarounds and tax I get it, man. But yo, so the jig is up, man. Like, technology is here, bro. Like, you can't keep pretending like it's gonna be the '80s and the early '90s. It was wild, wild west out here on the streets, man. We could do anything we wanted to as far as taking cash for stuff and getting paid for our businesses and all that. In my— it's a wrap for that. Like, it's really, it's really time for us hustlers and, you know, entrepreneurs and business owners to make a strong pivot on figuring out how to like really take advantage of our businesses legitimately and on the, on the up and up, bro. Like, because it's a wrap for it. Like, I'm just, I keep, you know, I got a lot of, I do a lot of consulting, you know what I mean? And I talk to a lot of people about, and they're like, man, we used to do it like this. And I'm like, man, you can't do it like that no more. You can't just set up a PayPal and you know what I mean? Like, get money out of the sky anymore. It doesn't—

you can't just like—

I wish it was that easy, but it's not.

But it's the same thing, like getting money from Zelle and Venmo and all— Cash App and all that. The ship sailed. I mean, this— they gave—

the ship has sailed.

I mean, they gave everybody like the, you know, they gave a couple years, they gave everybody the warning, and they gave sort of the pass, and they put a limit. But now coming into this year, anybody doing over $5,000 has to report it.

I mean, the IRS is trying to do some wild stuff too, uh, for next year. They want anyone— as soon as your bank account exceeds $10,000, you're gonna get, uh, like a, you know, like a little— well, they report it, but no, I'm just saying, like, instead of it before, like, yeah, of course they report it, but like, they're going to be looking into it.

Let them look.

I mean, I guess. I don't— it's so stupid. Like, if I'm getting paid from a job and I reach $10,000, what the hell are you looking at? I don't understand. Like, the government is nuts, bro. Yo, lighter note, man. Katt Williams fried the living fricassee out of the Kings of Comedy. Did you see that? No, he was on, uh, Sharon Sharpe's—

oh, okay, Club Shay Shay.

Yes. And Katt Williams, Steve Harvey, Cedric the Entertainer have it, dude. It was— I suggest if you like comedy and like Katt Williams or anything, check it out. That it had me. I, I didn't watch the whole thing because it's like 3 hours long, but so I watched like some clips of it. And I saw—

I think I saw a clip on it.

Yeah, the internet is undefeated because they went and did the fact-checking on everything Katt Williams was saying about Cedric stealing his jokes.

Yeah.

And they found it.

Wow.

And it was, it's, it was crazy. That was crazy. I definitely shout out to Katt Williams.

So here I got it.

2024 is the year of the truth.

Okay.

The year, the year of the truth, man.

So here Justin always tells me, oh, I don't know if anybody's really watching, you know, how many people watch the podcast? So Justin made a comment about Temu sending him too much email. And then in my email box, we have an email from—

I got the email.

Alice Wang from Temu. She says, hi, this is Alice from Temu. I'm very sorry for your negative experience. I want to clarify that our customers have the option to manage the frequency or suspend promotional emails from Temu. I can help you with that. Let me know if you need any help. With your promotional email management. I'd appreciate if you could reply to me. Thanks in advance. Best regards, Alice.

I responded. Now listen, I had unsubscribed from everything, like, and you guys were still sending me promo. It was getting sent to my junk folder. You can miss me with how to unsubscribe from your Special offers, Alice. And yes, I responded to your email.

So that was pretty funny though.

That's hilarious if it's really her, you know. I mean, it could be a spoofed email, you never know.

I don't know. Or somebody watching the podcast decided to mess with us, right?

That's what I'm saying.

And they said, oh, let's get in touch with them.

So the aliens in Miami thing was insane though.

Yeah, that was crazy, dude. All of a sudden I saw like all these TikToks and all this stuff, and— but it doesn't make sense. Why did they send like 100 cop cars for some kids, for some kids fighting.

I don't believe it.

I don't believe that.

I don't buy it. I don't buy it.

I don't buy that.

But I also don't— you would think falling into the trap of the alien thing either, bro. I mean, so this is what I think, what in my head, what like the way I'm like when I'm wrapping my head around this, this thing, what I think is, is that these kids had guns. Oh, and, and these kids were like shooting, having like a real shootout. Yeah, in the mall.

Wow.

And so that's why, one, you're not seeing no footage of what's going— all you see is a quick freak.

I heard they shut the internet down and everything, and the power, the power, everything.

They had Black Hawk helicopter, military Blackhawks flying around. Yeah, the Miami Mall. I mean, the very— Bayside Mall. Yeah, it's very suspect. I seen the video footage. So the funny thing is, is I was watching, somehow I was my— I was talking to with my pops.

Yeah.

And that had like came on his TV screen. Wow. Right, like the, the, all the cops was down there, right? And so I'm watching it and I'm literally— the footage of when they show the three whatever—

yeah, people, people, or aliens—

when I'm watching it, I'm watching it at a different angle and it's three cops walking the other direction, right? So, but then when I look online, it's like the same footage but flipped.

Right.

And like the people are kind of like walking in reverse.

Yeah, but then they look bigger.

Yeah, so like I just, whatever. Like, I mean, you'd be foolish to not believe that there's extraterrestrial life in the universe, right? Like, I mean, I don't believe we're the only living organisms in the entire universe. I just, I can't believe it.

Well, the police are definitely keeping it on the hush-hush.

Right.

And they even made like a TikTok And at the end of the TikTok, there's like an alien behind the police officer guy.

Yeah, see, so I mean, it's like all this joke.

So he's making fun of it.

Is this, you know, I made a funny on LinkedIn. Is this the start to Operation Blue Beam? You know what I mean? Like, I don't know, man. Like, I'm joking around. Like, don't take me serious. Like, the government, please don't drone me.

I want to live.

I have a lot to live for.

2024. Yeah, me too. Don't miss Justin and hit me and Rocky.

I mean, yeah.

Don't do that.

Like, we're up here. Making jokes. This is not to be taken serious. Do not take our advice on anything. This is just— this is a podcast.

We are not lawyers or accountants.

I can neither confirm nor deny anything.

So, and I said it to my daughter, you know, because she's like— I said, oh, you guys, here's a good story for you guys to report. She started laughing.

Yeah, like, she's like, are you— my homie up north, I asked a bunch of my homies up north, they're like, nah, we ain't seen none of that, bro. I'm like, wow.

Oh, it's all over, like the reels.

That's crazy. That— I mean, it's definitely on like our, you know, feed for sure.

Um, but yeah, yeah, that was pretty crazy, man. I was like, dang.

There's something else I wanted to talk about that already happened too, man.

There was—

oh yeah, the Epstein list.

Oh yeah, Epstein list.

Did you see Stephen Hawking's?

Yeah, there's like all kinds of people on the Epstein list, dude.

I don't want— I guess we could say, did you see what he liked? What they—

no, I didn't see what he— I didn't go read.

I don't know if it's appropriate. I probably shouldn't repeat that.

Let's— apparently a lot of pedophilia going on.

Well, that he was— I, I don't know if they were underage or not. Yeah, well, we don't know. I don't, I don't want it.

Youngish women, let's put it that way. Yo, also, wasn't Oprah on the list?

Yo, yeah, everyone was on the list. Yeah, everyone.

You know who's not on the list?

Me. I was smart. I'm safe.

I'm not on the list. Not on the Epstein list. Rocky's not on there. And you know who else? Trump's not on the list. He's not on the list.

Okay, yet that's only a partial list.

What's—

that's only the part— that's like one of— I think if Trump was on the list, there's supposed to be like 2 or 3 more releases.

I think if he was on the list, they would put that out first, bro.

Did you see the tennis court thing though?

What was the tennis court thing, man?

This is terrible. So someone was Googling when they were building his tennis court. Yeah, and before they built the tennis court, right, there was literally a— it was what looks to be, look, mass graves. Wow. Like literally holes dug in the ground.

Well, they need to go dig up that. I don't know who else. There's a house there, probably.

Whatever there needs to be demolished, and they need to find whatever. That's just— it's just so tragic, man. I don't know. That's— it's mind-blowing.

There was a movie, I don't know if it's on Netflix or Amazon, but there was a movie where some girls like told all on Epstein.

Really?

Yeah, and it was pretty brutal. Oh yeah, there's like a whole movie, there's like a movie about it.

It's wild, man.

Yeah, they told on— they, they went so— and told on them.

Enough of that Epstein, it's sickening. You guys should be just— no wonder you're building bunkers.

Yeah, that's the other crazy thing. Why is like Mark Zuckerberg and like 10, 15 other like gazillionaire people are all building these bunkers?

So I got a question. Just, this is just how my brain thinks, right? Like, right, so say something does happen, right? And all you very well-off people decide to jump into your bunkers, right? What are you gonna do? You're gonna, you're gonna come out of those bunkers and what, be okay with the rest of the people that didn't have a bunker to go to? Bro, you better stay your ass inside that bunker. Because the second you open that door, we're running up in the bunker, bro. So like, I don't— yeah, I don't know, man. Whatever's going on. And with all the movies, the Civil War movie, that's just— it's just pumping more division and separation within the United States of America. Please do not believe the hype, bro. Like, I don't know what this—

I mean, that Civil War movie in the movie theater, it's about to be— oh really? Oh, you know the other movie, the one that's on Netflix?

That's what I'm talking about.

That thing's freaky.

So it's like, it, it's like, so like the media and the powers that be like to present us with them, us these things in advance so they don't have a guilty conscience You know what I'm saying? So it's like, you know, karma is real. So I feel like they feel like if they warn us, right, their karma is clear. So it's only, you know, it's for those who are awake and can see what's going on in front of them. But, you know, like, at the end of the day, bro, if there's really something that is going on that's, that's, you know, that they're planning to happen, or they think might happen, or they think might happen, The second you guys come out of those bunkers, man, we were taking everything you have.

So yeah, Mark Zuckerberg's like building it into the—

you better have some serious security with you at all times. You better have like a whole army with you when you—

I mean, the people building it, don't they want to go inside the Mark Zuckerberg bunker?

You don't think the guys who built it built another entrance? Yeah, I would have.

Exactly.

I would have built 10 of them. You would have never known where I was.

I would build some secret entrance so that we could come back and get in. Come on, man.

Anyway, man. So, but we didn't really talk about our marketing efforts for 2024. I mean, we got a lot of stuff cooking. There's a lot of stuff.

Well, we're talking about simmering in the pot. Simmering.

Yeah. Planning stuff together. But I suggest, you know, it's like everyone do the same.

Like my book, the book I always talk about, Who Moved My Cheese? You know, it's a good time to review the where's the cheese at.

Definitely.

Where's the cheese and how to get more of it?

I mean, it's the goal every day, right?

Yeah, it's the goal. That's the goal. But that's the, you know, that's one of my favorite, favorite books that I always put out there. I was quoted in an article recently and I said that someone asked me about merchant statements and I said, yeah, you need to have, you need to be a mathematician to figure some of these merchant statements out. I mean, Yeah, thank goodness I have like an AI tool that deciphers it all and spit it out quickly. Yeah, well, the site, you know, I look at it, you know, I eyeball it, but then we give it to the AI tool, which checks a whole bunch of different— really takes a deep dive into what somebody's really paying, you know? Right. And I was quoted in an article talking about that.

Well, What was the article? Where was the article?

In the Green Sheet. Yeah, they're talking about 2024.

Greensheet.com, right?

Yep, greensheet.com.

It was the greensheet.com, right?

I think it's just greensheet.com.

I don't remember.

Might be the— I don't think so. But the weird thing is, is there's like two websites called Green Sheet. I don't under— even understand how they both exist. Doesn't make sense to me.

I just built a website for one of my brethren.

Yeah.

And they have a store, it's called Roots and Culture Shop, the Roots and Culture Shop. And we had it anyway, there's another domain, literally rootsandcultureshop.shop, and their domain is roots, just the letter N, culture.shop.

So hopefully they don't get a letter.

I think they've been around longer than the other one, so they should be good.

Okay.

They've been in business for a long time, so I think, you know, I think they actually got that domain in a part of those times when the domain was down, right? So I hope that works out for them. But 2024 is looking great, man.

Uh, a lot of exciting things coming up. We got another Good topic coming up for the next podcast we're going to talk about. And, uh, looking forward to a great 2024.

Indeed. Smash that subscribe button for us for the one time. Like and comment for us. You got any questions, anything that's interesting that you want us to tap into, man, hit me or Allen up and we, uh, would love to hear about it. Peace out.

Peace. Carpe diem.