Matt Putra, CEO of Eightx Joins On Biz To Biz Podcast!

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news. Hey everybody, welcome to today's episode of B2B Ball. Today we have a guest, Matt Putra. He's the founder of 8.co and he's formerly a CFO in private equity. He's a seasoned fractional CFO with over a decade of experience helping e-commerce and consumer brands achieve financial clarity. And today we're going to talk about you know, how his company helps businesses and talk about different things that businesses need help with, you know, that we talk to all the time. We talk to business owners every day and we're going to dive in. So, Matt, introduce yourself to the audience.

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, guys, my name is Matt. You know, I was in private equity for quite a while, but about 5 years. I was a senior partner and CFO of a group. We did, while I was there, probably $500 million or so in deals. So smaller group, of course, but we did about $500 million and I had to run the back office and also do portfolio management. And, you know, a friend of mine and his wife had an e-commerce company and they asked me for some help and then their friend asked for help and so on. And that ended up being way more fun than corporate. And so now I work with companies, you know, between $2 and $100 million or so, work with companies in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia. And, you know, me and my team, we drop in as sort of your GPS system for finances, help you navigate scaling, growing, exiting, purchasing, raising money, all kinds of things, turnarounds. But yeah, yeah, we help people scale their businesses basically.

So one of the things, one of the things I saw on your website is, was about ad spend.

Yeah.

And, you know, brands today, you know, are, you know, even like you're a startup company or you're a small business. I mean, my company, we're small compared to like Stripe. So, you know, so we're, you know, we don't have the buying power to buy at, you know, the amount of ad spend that they're spending on Google and Facebook and all these other platforms, or, you know, against other billion-dollar companies. So is there, you know, I've always said, you know, I thought that Google and Facebook should give local companies some kind of, you know, local advertising options, but I've never seen that happen. And do you, is there some secret that you know that's that where you're able to do that?

Right. Uh, you know, I heard, uh, you guys probably have people know Gary Vaynerchuk. He was talking recently about, for people that are truly local to their city to buy ads within like, you know, 5-mile radius of their business, and then you can become a local celebrity. So there's probably some ways you can advertise hyper-locally. Um, in terms of like, what do you serve all across the US, people, or across the US?

But you know, if there was an opportunity to advertise locally for less money, you know, or better ad spend, obviously we would try to do that. We've tried to talk to the, you know, Facebook and Google about that, but they've never really represented like an opportunity. They, they always tell you that when you start going through the process of building the ad, they'll be, oh, the audience is too small, the audience is too small, the audience is too small.

Yeah, so there is that issue, of course. But there, for, by way of example, um, I work with somebody who's rolling out to some retail stores and they are targeting, um, the cities that they're, that those stores are in. So they are doing geo-targeting. Um, and so for you guys, look, I'm not an actual ad buying expert, Um, but there are some ways to, to do like geofencing around your ads, and it could just be that you'd have to open up a bit the, the criteria, because presumably you're looking for business owners and maybe a specific type.

Yeah, business owners in Florida, let's just say, or South Florida. It could be the whole state to get an audience big enough, but it's just kind of funny every time we try to hyper-localize. Maybe if you have an app, maybe it's a little bit simpler, but to target people because you could geofence an app where you can't really geofence your website.

Yeah. So one of the, you know, again, I'm a bit outside my lane, of course, but like one of the things you actually can do and what I've heard from others in my industry is that you can use your creative to do the targeting for you. So if you ask Facebook, let's just say you're asking Facebook for likes, right?. So you can set the outcome of the campaign and you create an ad that only your type of business owner will like. Facebook will then go and find them, and it doesn't matter if you geofence or not. Facebook will find the people who are most likely to like your ad. And if it's targeted to, hey, Stripe sucks, we are a great option. We have, you know, we're going to help you, you know, risk management and all these things. If that's the ad you've made, only certain people are going to like that, and Facebook will then go and find them. So the buzz— the buzzword is that creative is the new targeting. And so that is the way you can look at it for yourself.

See, it's a good idea maybe to try that, like, Florida— attention, Florida business owners, something like that.

Yeah, because again, if, if, if it's— if your ad is hyper-targeted to your audience and it speaks to their pain, only they will be like liking it or commenting or clicking through or what have you. Right. And Facebook will know how to find more of those people because their algorithm is good.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So a little workaround. That's, that's interesting. So another thing I read about on your site, you talk about accounting. Yeah. You know, my brothers are accountants. And when we were talking, I said, yeah, my first thing my brother told me is, you know, You don't know how to use QuickBooks. You need to learn how to, how to at least do the simple tasks in there.

Yep.

And, you know, and I have like a person that goes in and cleans it up for me once a month to make sure everything was done correctly.

Absolutely.

Any mistakes or whatever. And, you know, I found that super useful to my business in helping grew, you know, helping, you know, manage, manage money, you know, and also keep an eye on what's being spent.

Of course.

So any, you know, what do you— what, what kind of accounting tips do you have for businesses?

Absolutely. You know, there's probably top 3 things that you can think of when you're looking at accounting. And the first one I would say is, you know, after, after learning a bit about QuickBooks, the top 3. One is just find yourself a good bookkeeper, right? Because most people who go into business are not really interested in doing their own bookkeeping. And so do what it takes to find a really great bookkeeper. And the way you do that is trying to find out, do they already serve clients like yours? You know, how long have they been in business? What sort of certifications do they have? Do they have a team? And so there's some questions that you can ask, right? And if you have a good bookkeeper, life is a lot more simple. If you have not a good bookkeeper, life is a lot more difficult because you have to answer more questions and things are late and you can't see how you're doing and they misclassify transactions and all these things. So that's, that's the first thing. The second thing I would say is have a good chart of accounts, meaning can you make your categories in a way that give you information about your business? So, you know, you could theoretically run your bookkeeping with like 4 categories: sales, cost of sales, and expenses. Right? Right. Well, let's say— let's just say so 3 categories, right? That would tell you nothing. But if you set up your categories properly, looking at your reports will give you information rather than just like seeing how you're doing. You can see like, so you could break sales into geographies or channels, or for you it might be different types of verticals that you're serving. For example, let's say you had, I don't know, cannabis and e-commerce and wholesale or something like that. Then you can see, well, which one of these categories is bigger for me?. And then you get signals when you look at your information, right? And then when you think about your expenses, again, break your expenses down so into meaningful categories to help you understand what's, what are you spending more on now? What are you spending less on? You know, and then you can look at, you know, efficiency calculations and ROI. So that's the second one. And the third I think would be, you know, use a tech stack that helps the bookkeeping stay simple, meaning use Bill.com, let's say, for paying bills because your bookkeeper can put your bills into Bill.com and try to set the payment and then you can go in and approve it and then you don't have to do anything. Use Dext for receipt capture. So your receipts, you just get them on your phone, take a picture with the Dext app and your receipts are now saved in the cloud and your bookkeeper can get them and put them into your QuickBooks as well so that everything is saved inside your QuickBooks. That's what we do. And if you do that, it makes your life a lot simpler and it's a little more expensive than just using QuickBooks alone. But then you have, you know, receipts are captured, your bill payments are really easy, your bookkeeper can find everything, you know, everything is— you ever get audited by the IRS, then everything's inside of QuickBooks. So those are the top 3 things I would say about accounting.

Yeah, it's definitely important. I know bookkeeping is boring, but if you don't do it, Right. You know, it's a pain in the butt. And I always tell one, one tip I always give, like somebody like they're starting a business or they're a solo entrepreneur. One of the tips I always give them is you need to take a paycheck.

Oh, yeah.

You know, pay yourself. You don't have to pay yourself every week. You could give yourself a check once a month. Don't just take distributions. Get a paycheck because you'll be sorry 30 years from now.

When you have no pension, you just take distributions.

When you don't have any Social Security, you know, right? So it's worth it to, you know, it's worth it to deal with that, you know, from there, you know. And then when you hire, you know, I always find it an interesting journey is like when you hire your first employee or your first group of employees and you have to deal with that. So that's why it's important to, you know, have payroll and deal with payroll from the beginning.

Absolutely. How many employees do you have?

5.

Nice. Nice.

We have about 35, 40, 1099 sales reps and referral partners.

Oh, cool. That's great.

So we have like referral partners that are, let's say, you know, a restaurant consultant or a business consultant, a bookkeeper, you know, e-commerce, someone who's building like you know, e-com stores and their customers need merchant services and they refer to us.

Cool, cool.

So they get commissions.

Amazing. That's great.

Yeah. So another thing I find, like, do you— so obviously if you're dealing with e-com brands, one of the biggest trends in the last year or two is definitely— or probably in the last 5 years is, you know, besides SaaS, is companies developing recurring billing products.

Yep.

And, you know, now companies have to deal with click-to-cancel law that came out from the FTC.

Yep.

And also California passed a law specific to their state, which kind of pushed the FTC, you know, to move their rule forward very rapidly, which went into effect this month. And I think, you know, that— how do you think that's going to affect e-com businesses?

Yeah, I mean, it's going to be tougher for the businesses, but in some ways I don't care. Like, my wife and I have been victim of this problem too. Like, she signed up for— I don't know if I probably shouldn't say the brand, but some apparel brand— and didn't want to receive the packages anymore and had a hell of a time canceling. Had to wait on hold, had to send— I don't know if we had to send like a paper letter. Like, I mean, it was a disaster. And so like, I'm for these things and the reason why is like, you know, we're all in business to serve the needs of someone. Well, we don't need to be an asshole about it when we try to do that, right? Like, if your product is good, the people won't unsubscribe, or when their, their need is fulfilled, they won't unsubscribe. Like, I have a client, by the way, reference, who is in the health industry. And what they found is that someone will use their product for a time and unsubscribe. And they're like, well, how do we keep them? And I was like, well, what if you don't need— what if, what if they're healed of the thing you're trying to heal them of? So rather than trying to fight them churning, why don't you find something else that you can help them to heal from? And so that was the discussion with them. Like, yeah, you can try to keep them, but like, that's, that's not really the end goal, to make someone stay with you. The end goal is to serve them and make them happy, right? So, yes, it's going to make it harder for businesses. I would 100%.

Yeah. The rule, the rule basically says as easy as it was to sign up, they need to make it that easy to cancel.

Exactly.

We've communicated that to our clients. And when we get new clients, we tell them, like, if you're not compliant with that, the bank's not going to board you because you have to be fully compliant. So you need to be transparent on your pricing on the way in. And I even tell, like, we had a conversation with a gym owner and they were like, well, people signed a contract. And I go, yeah, that's a legal contract, but that's not a contract that the credit card company is going to enforce. If someone came to your gym, they signed up for a year and they're making monthly payments. Yeah. After 6 months they want to leave. You have to basically let them leave. You want to take them to small claims court or send them to collections. You can do that, but you can't keep charging their credit card.

You're kidding. Really?

What?

I didn't know that. So, so, so you can't— so if they sign a contract, you can't make them keep paying. You have to sue them.

You can sue them to get your money, but you can't make them keep paying you on a credit card. I had a company do that to me. I was like, I signed up. They didn't stop. They wouldn't stop charging my card. I was like, there's no contract. Like, what are you guys doing? They're like, no, you signed up for our 12-month program. I was like, oh, hell. No, no, no. And they kept— they were, they were hooked in with credit card updater, so they were finding out when I was updating the credit card. No, I was like, no. So I did it more. I had to charge back like 5 or 6 times. Finally, I just called the credit card. I go, cancel my card, because— and that was canceled, and that was the end of that. They didn't try to sue me. It was only like $30 a month, but it was ridiculous.

Wow, weird.

Yeah, but that's what happens a lot of times is, you know, these companies don't understand that, you know, yeah, you can take people to court, but you can't just keep charging their card because they're going to keep doing a chargeback.

I wouldn't have known that.

And then you could be non-compliant from a— on the credit card side, as the credit card company, the Visa or MasterCard or American Express, is going to go, hey, you charge this guy like 3 months in a row and 3 months in a row the person's charging back. You have to let them cancel. Hmm.

So I imagine that would make it hard for some businesses then, especially when you rely on a contract and an agreement with somebody upfront. Yeah, that would be difficult. And I would feel for that business when they were upfront about how it works. And the person can still leave. That doesn't seem necessarily fair, I suppose.

But I guess it's not. I mean, I guess it's, it's fair. And I mean, I think it's fair in that there's still a way to collect your money. Obviously, it might not be.

Yeah, exactly.

To collect the money.

Of course. Right.

But, you know, the credit card company is not saying, no, you can't collect the money. They're saying you just can't use us to collect the money.

I see. Interesting. I wonder if that rule has come to Canada yet. I'm in Vancouver, Canada.

Oh, I'm not sure. I'm sure what, you know, whatever gets, you know, whatever gets adopted, you know, gets adopted like worldwide eventually, probably.

Well, I mean, we're about to be a 51st state, I hear, so.

Well, who knows? I mean, Trump, you know, he's the, he's the kind of guy, you know, it's like somebody said to me, they're like, how does somebody manage like that many projects at one time? I said, it's called organized chaos. I go, if you've ever, if you've run business, you have to run organized chaos. You make a list. Okay, here's 10 things I need to do, and the, you know, what are, which, which, you know, starting at number 1 through 10, which is the most important. And then you just start going down your list, and, you know, if you have employees, you start assigning tasks to those different employees. And he has a lot of employees, huh?

Yeah, of course. No, no, you're right. But I was going to ask you, like, on that point I think focus is a superpower. So how do you decide, how do you rank importance for the projects that you're working on?

So I take a list of the projects and then I decide like, okay, what, what things are easy? What could be completed in either an hour, a day, right? Those need to be done right away. So if we can complete a project in an hour, those are projects. Okay, let's complete this, this, this, and this right away. Let's knock those out because those are simple, easy project. We need to change a picture on a blog post. I don't like that picture, change the picture. Again, how long is it going to take to change the picture?

Yeah, a few minutes.

So you have to kind of like measure like things like that. Oh, this project's going to take a week. Okay, well, let's complete all of this, and then we're going to work on this project. But you're not going to work on it all day long every day, you know. Then as other little things pop up You got to put it in there. So you have one of the things I find people have difficulty doing is delegating. Okay. And in a business, so you have to learn how to delegate as a bit because otherwise you're not going to be successful. I, before I got into the payment space and had my first employee, we didn't have a first employee for probably like 4 or 5 years. Totally. But, you know, until we had like a full-time employee. We had like a part— some part-time and some 1099s, but we didn't have like full-time employees. Yeah, but you know, you have to learn how to delegate. And I was a chef and I worked in a hotel. No end.

Okay.

Yeah, so, and, and you know, the— my first job as a chef, I was in charge of one restaurant, so I had like 8 people working in the kitchen. So you have to learn like, okay, you know, you got to assign everybody. This is your station, this is what you're responsible for, this is what you have to do. And you have to, you know, and I always have my saying: people do what you inspect, not what you expect. So when you do, do— when you do delegate, you need to learn how to act. You need to, you need to expect what you inspect. If you don't inspect, you might not get what you expect. Does that make sense?

100%. 100%. Yep. I'm not awesome at the inspecting part.

So you have to really know, like, okay, I'm going to assign you a task, now I'm going to inspect this task. And make sure it was done properly.

And I guess as a chef, there's probably a lot of that, right, to make sure the food goes out happening like, well, as they're cooking.

So but, you know, if they're doing prep work, everything— we used to have a saying in the kitchen, mise en place, everything in its place. So if you have everything in its place, then you're prepared to cook.

Cool. Very cool.

If you have all your spices chopped up, your herbs chopped up, your garlic, your shallots, your wine, you have your oil, your butter. You know, you have everything ready to go, all your ingredients for all your dishes prepared. When you start to cook, you're not running around going, oh, I don't have the garlic, now I gotta chop up garlic.

You gotta—

everything in its place. And that's the same thing, like if you're building a website, everything in its place. Okay, what's the theme I'm going to use on WordPress, or whatever you're doing? What plugins do I need? Make sure, you know, we've bought all the plugins, so on and so, you know, the licenses. I learned that the hard way.

Cool. Very cool website.

So you have to make sure you have your project, your, your ingredients prepared, whether you're making a website, you're building an app, you're whatever you're doing, you're building a business plan out. You know, you need to have everything in its place. Like I was saying for accounting, my saying for accounting is figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure.

So tell me more about that.

So I, I have like a client one time, and they sent me a spreadsheet, and I looked at the spreadsheet and I go, these numbers— I said, I said, I caught— it was like a PDF, so I copied the PDF, I put it into a— I actually put it, I put it into a spreadsheet, and I was like, look, this is not— I showed the person like right in front of them. I go, the guy made all these numbers up. None of these numbers work. So I said, you know, you can't just go by, you know, whatever numbers you have. You have to, you have to make sure, like, you have to add it up, divide, you know, you have to know what you're doing. So, you know, you can't, you can't, you know, you can't fake, you can't fake numbers. People fake, you know, you have to make sure. That's why people do inspect, expect. You have a bookkeeper. Yeah, you have a bookkeeper. Then you need your backup to be your CPA, that your CPA CPAs checking what, you know, like that's how I found all my bookkeepers, through my CPA.

Yep.

Oh yeah, they referred people that they knew, 100%, you know, that they trusted and all that. And also, like, you gave a good thing about paying bills. Yeah, don't let anybody pay your bills for you. Don't let anybody have access to your, uh, to send like ACHs and wires, which is super common today. Yeah, not 20 years ago. And don't, you know, and make sure like you're controlling that.

Yeah, me too. So we have an online payment system within my company, right? And people can load up payments, but they still need to be approved before they'll go out. And that's the easiest way to do it. Yeah, that's what we found.

Yeah. What is, you know, one thing I also find that businesses struggle with? I want to hear what you have to say about that. So they have a product or that, or they have a service and they don't understand. They don't understand how to price properly. And, you know, someone would be selling, let's say, for example, like printing or selling a consult. Maybe they're, maybe they're running wires in your office for computers, right? So I was talking to a guy that, you know, and I was like, listen, you, you're not taking into account everything, you know, when you're going to charging somebody. He's like, well, what do you mean? I said, well, you know, you have your time, What's your time worth? Right. So how much time are you going to spend on this project? And then I tell them, I go, what's the cost of the goods? Right. Your cost of goods. And then the other thing that people don't think about is, you know, you got to put gas in your car and drive to this location. What is the cost of doing that? You know, and you got to figure that all out because you can't just go, oh, well, I bought this for $100, I'm selling it for $200, so I made $100. Well, you didn't make $100. $100. Yeah, you know, you didn't make $100 because you had gas. How much gas did you use? Oh, you know, that doesn't count. Yeah, it does. How much gas did you use and how much time did you spend?

Right.

So if you told me you spent 3 hours working on this project and then you only made $100 and then you had gas, how much did you make? Yeah.

So I am very good at this and I'm trying to think of the best way to explain it. And I would say like, so there's a word we have in accounting and we talk about making a total cost model. And what this means is, and I'll try to make it very simple. So if you take your P&L and you have your sales, you have cost of goods sold, then you have everything else, right? Your cost of goods sold includes the cost of the widget and, you know, the shipping costs and shit like that, right? So now what I want you to do is, so look only, so don't look at sales, don't look at cost of goods, look at what's called operating expenses. So everything else.

Exactly.

If you're a service company, you figure out how many service hours do you have in that year that just passed you. So look at your P&L for a year. How many service hours did you have in that year? And then you look at— if you're— if you sell a good or an item, look at how many products, like units, did you sell in that year. And then what you do next is you divide that total operating expenses by the total service hours, or units or for you to look at your—

you need to live, you have an office or something, you got to look at your rent, your insurance, everything.

Yeah. So you know, that comes in 100%. And so you might look at dollars processed or something like that for you would be your, your divisor, your denominator. And so when you look at the operating expenses, you divide it by— let's just start with service hours. Then you have overhead cost per hour basically, right? And you would remove because the cost of the salary of the people should be in cost of goods sold for the most part. And so then you have, then you have overhead costs per hour. So what you do is you now take some person's salary and you add the overhead cost per hour, and that's their total cost. And what you want is you typically, most people want to make, let's say, a 20%, 30% EBITDA, 50% net profit, what have you. And now you price so that the, the, the, the what what your customer pays you covers off the cost of goods, covers off the overhead cost per hour, and covers off the 15% profit. Okay, and so that's how you do it for service company. Very similar for our product company. The difference here, of course, is that, you know, some product companies, like, you have to price it what the market says is, uh, you can. But do the same thing. So look at, you know, your total operating expenses And how many units did you sell? Let's say you sold 1 million units. Well, divide that operating expenses by those 1 million units. That gives you the overhead cost per unit. So now when you think about pricing that unit, you have to cover the cost of goods of the unit, the shipping, the cost, the raw cost, the packaging. But then you have the overhead cost. So price so that you cover the cost of goods, the overhead cost per unit, and you tack on another 15% because that will end up being your net profit. Now there's two nuances. One is that in every case, all of us are what they call price takers, meaning that like we, there is some wiggle room to what you price at, but you, as know, as a payment processor, you probably can't charge 5% on volume. You probably can't charge 8%. There's some band that you need to work in. If you're a better company, better service, you'll charge the higher end of the band. But You know, there's probably the limit there, right?

Oh, there's definitely a limit as to what you can charge. One thing that's important is, you know, like as a business, you know, I always say keep your overhead as low as possible.

1000%.

You know, your fixed overhead, you got to— you can't be like in a— you know, some people have an ego. I got to be in a fancy office space that's costing me $15,000 a month. Yeah, you could be where I am in a warehouse.

Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, well, keep your— I always say keep your overhead as low as you can, as long as you can. Um, it just— the people I know that are the happiest business owners have the lowest overhead, typically.

Yeah. And you know, they always say volume cures everything, right?

That's a good point, right? Well, so, so back to pricing. So, a— so first nuance is that there's a limit on what you can charge for any one thing. And if you're the best in that thing, you can charge higher end of the limit. If you're average, you you might not get away with charging more than the average cost. So that's the one problem. The other problem is a capacity issue. So let's say you are a service company and you have 2 people. So that's 4,000 hours of service a year, let's just say. Okay. And take 15% off for inefficiency. So whatever that number is going to be. So, you know, you have 30, whatever, 3,500, let's just say. I can't do that math that fast. So 3,500 service hours per year. But let's say you only delivered 2,000 service hours. You can't then divide your operating expenses by the 2,000 because your customers aren't going to pay you for wasted time.

Right.

Okay. So you have to divide the operating expenses by the available reasonable service hours or units. Right. And then if you're not selling as many hours as you need to, that's your problem, not your client's problem. Right? So this is the volume, cures everything. So just sell more shit.

Yeah. One thing I also find businesses have like trouble with is like collecting money.

Yeah.

So I'll talk to somebody and, you know, two things I tell people, you know, like we talked about, like things— I'm a new business owner, what do I need to know? You need to know about QuickBooks. You need to know how to price your items. You need to know how to you know, collect money. And the fourth thing is you need to become a salesperson. So you're not a sales— you know, when you start a business, if you don't think you're going to be a salesperson, you got another thing coming.

100%.

So, but the collecting money part, you know, I always try to, you know, explain to business owners like, oh, I sell this big ticket item, it's $1,000. I don't want to— I want to just get a check from my client. Okay, well, maybe your client doesn't have checks, or maybe they don't want to— they're not going to pay you right away. So, you know, your money, you know, like right now, money— the last 4 years, money has been super expensive. So if you had a— if you were servicing a letter of credit at your bank and you didn't have a bunch of money, right, and you had tons of outstanding invoices, that's costing you money every day versus you could just raise your prices a tiny bit, let's say 2 or 3% to account for the expense of credit card processing and then force all your customers to pay you by credit card versus waiting, you know, because always, you know, when you give somebody 10 days to pay, 10 days turns into 20 days, 15 days turns into 30 days, 30 days turns into 60 days. And turned. And then, you know, all of a sudden, you know, I had a friend with a business and he's like, oh, I'm struggling. I said, why are you struggling? I said, let me see how many— I said, how many outstanding invoices do you have? So he shows it to me. I go, uh, why don't you use credit card processing? You know, I could set you up with credit card processing. Yeah. Oh, well, you know, people don't want to pay. I'm like, I said, you're out of your mind. You're, you're owed like $35,000, you know. You're at $35,000 every day. You don't collect that money. It's costing you money. Yeah.

Well, so collections is a huge issue. And I, when I started my business, like as an agency, you know, we— the ideal world is ACH, right? But then you're waiting for somebody to manually send you an ACH. And so we've just accepted the credit card fees because it just recurs. Right. And right, we talk about cancellation, they cancel whatever they want. But it's been so much easier to manage once we switched to recurring payments on credit card. Way easier.

Yeah. You can set up recurring on ACH too for customers. We, we deal with lawyer, lawyers, accountants. We have companies who do like wholesale. Well, they're also like B2B, like plumbing or plumbing supplies, things like that. And a lot of, you know, the big— their bigger clients, you know, some of them want to use a credit card. Card and they pass them a small fee and some of them want to pay by ACH. And then the ACH fee is small, half a percent. And if it's big tickets, we put a cap on it.

Okay.

So they don't have to, you know, so let's say they're collecting $50,000 ACHs, we'll do it for $10.

No way. That's pretty good.

Yeah. So, you know, so we'll do a cap. It just depends on each business. We'll customize a plan. For each one of them, you know, for, for each business. So we customize a plan for them. You know, I recently switched over this one company. They're like a— they call themselves— they're like some kind of agent. They're not really like accountants, but they're sort of accountants. They're like this— some kind of agent. When you owe money to the IRS, you hire them and then they go and they do like your audit and then they go deal with the IRS and they try to get the money down. And basically you pay them and, you know, they help you get your, get your situation straightened out with the IRS. And so they were having a hard time every time that a customer, every, you know, to charge, they were like punching it in manually. So we set them up with software that has a database. Now they can set it up like they say, oh, Matt has to pay us $1,000 every 2 weeks for 10 weeks for 10 payments. They just program it in there, it automatically charges you whether it's an ACH or a credit card.

Cool. Yeah. Or yeah, when I used to work in our private equity group, we had a number— we did private lending as well. And so we had to set up recurring payments for these borrowers, let's say, right? And we use them. There was a bank that had a central system. And we use that, I believe.

Yeah, well, when you're doing stuff like that, you got to definitely have a bank, bank involved. VersaPay. VersaPay was one of things that we use.

I don't know if you've heard of that one, but yeah.

No.

Okay.

But it's, you know, it's, it's important to do, to do that. So any— so you're located in Vancouver. Are you a sports fan?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Soccer. So soccer's our sport. So it's not very, not very popular at this point. Well, it's getting there, but soccer's our sport. My son plays fairly high level and my little guy plays and I play and we watch as much as we can. Yeah. How about you?

Oh no, I'm like, I'm wearing 22, Caitlin Clark, WNBA. Uh, my daughter lives in Iowa. She's a chief meteorologist at, um, CBS 2 and Fox 28 in, uh, Iowa. Shout out to Rebecca. And their TV station is the station for the Iowa Hawkeyes. And so we became— I became a big Caitlin Clark fan watching her at college and following her to the WNBA.

That's so cool.

I share that with my daughter.

Amazing.

Her love of sports. And she went to the University of Florida, so we followed the Gators.

Yeah. And, you know, your daughter plays sports too?

Not me. I didn't play sports.

Did your daughter play anything?

She played soccer growing up.

Oh, okay, great. Perfect.

Yeah, she played soccer until like into, into high— like Beginning at high school, she got away from it. Then she started doing marching band.

Fun.

Yeah, she played in the marching band at UF, which was incredible to watch. Like, their band stretched from one end of the field to the other.

Wow.

It was crazy, like, how they learn how to do that, make shapes and all that. Incredible.

What was her instrument?

She played the piccolo.

This little— oh, no way!

Oh, cool. And they have like 30 Piccolos in the band.

Okay. So we don't have anything like that here. Like our everything is so much smaller. I— yeah, it's too funny.

It's too— yep. So any parting words for us today for the audience?

Mm. I would just say, like we talked about, collect your money, use it. I mean, you know, I think like accounting is huge. Pricing is huge. And when you need support, you know, probably the first person you reach out to is your CPA, right? When you need support and they often will know, they'll have connections to bookkeepers and fractional CFOs and all kinds of things like that.

All right. And if people want to get in touch with you, they can find you at your website, 8eighTX.co. That's right. You can find Matt, you can link up with him on LinkedIn.

Allen Kopelman. Absolutely.

And, uh, you can get more information about his services.

That's right.

So thank you to everybody for listening to the podcast today, B2B Vault, sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems. You can find B2B Vault on all the podcast networks, YouTube, LinkedIn. You can get in touch with me on LinkedIn if you want to be a guest on the podcast or check out the podcast. And, you know, bye to everybody. Thank you to Matt for being our guest today. Carpe diem, seize the day, and everybody have a great day. Peace out.

Bye, everybody.

Cheers.