Shopping Carts & Insurance

Greetings, folks, and welcome to the Small Business show, the show where we provide advice for new and existing business owners. This is episode number 34, Wednesday, September 2, 2015. And here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And I'm Shannon Jean in Lafayette, California. How goes it, Mr. Hamilton?

It goes. It comes and it goes. It's chronic, but I'm getting by. How about you?

That's good. Yeah, yeah, it's hectic right now, as you know. We roll, get ready for the end of summer and back into the fall and the busy time of year for us.

My kids started school today. Yeah, I saw that.

And it's dark when they're getting up. Is that right?

Oh, dude. Well, not yet, but it will be.

It will be.

Yeah. When we, when we change the time back and all that. And then it. And then the days get shorter here, obviously. But yeah, it, I mean, it's, you know, it's just the middle of the night. We're not, we're not morning people. So waking up at, I mean, 6:30 is the middle of the night to us.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, you're musicians and that kind of thing and you know, you've got a lot of stuff going on tonight. I get it.

Well, and I'm a total. Are you the other way or. No, you're the other way.

No, no, I'm a total night. Night monkey as well. Most of my businesses have been started.

After 10pm Yeah, I actually, you know, that's an interesting thing. I, I was trying to explain this to somebody that, that is a morning person and not really an entrepreneur, although doing some entrepreneurial stuff. And I'm like, yeah, man, you know, so if you want to get together at midnight, we can talk about, you know, stuff. He's like, midnight? Like. Yeah, well, you know, I mean, that's when, that's when you can get this stuff done. Nobody's going to interrupt us. And it was.

Right.

I didn't even think about it, saying it. And he was like, I'm fast asleep by then. Like, yeah, well, so I either. I find that between. Yeah, the hours of 5pm to 10pm are bad times for me to work. I just, I'm. I can't get my. Even if my family's not around, I can't, I can't work during that time of the day. I'm just not productive. I mean, if I have to, I can, obviously.

Yeah, sure.

You know, it's not productive. And then really, if I'm awake some sometime between 4 and about 10am I'm also hyper productive.

Oh, that's pretty good.

10 to 10 to 5. It's hard to say because there's so many interruptions that come in. I honestly don't know if I'm productive or not. In fact, I am. The. The other day I had to get something done. I was doing a. I was actually on a Skype call with Adam, one of our programmers here, and we were getting something done and all my devices, everything was just beeping because people just had things to tell me. And so I put my Mac. You know, if you run a Mac and you've got the notification center, you can option click on that and that mutes it for a day or until you option click again. So I did that and that stopped all those in. But then my phone kept going and finally said to Adam and hang on one second, and I took my phone and I went out and I put it in the front seat of my car. I could have put it on do not disturb and all that, but I just like, I need it. I can't see it flashing. I just. I need to pretend like nobody needs me right now because I have to do this, you know?

Yeah. And that's a big thing for me is that productivity, you know, mine, you know, five to 10 or six to 10 at night, it was kind of like family time, hanging out with kids, that kind of thing. But then, you know, I always wanted to start a business called 10 to 12. 10. 10 to midnight.

Yeah.

And for a long. It was like 10 to 1, 10 to 2. But you know, that span of time, that two to four hours has always been very productive for me. And I think you, you hit the nail on the head is nobody's bothering me. It's. It's quiet, it's dark. You know, it really allows you to think and put your thoughts in place and not have anybody hassling you.

Yeah. Well. And I'm kind of add. And I know you are too, if you don't mind the.

Are you kidding?

Right. But it's. I find that by 10pm I'm a little bit tired and. And that actually helps me to focus, believe it or not. Right. Because I'm. I don't have all these. And maybe it's the lack of interruptions too, but it's also that, you know, I'm just. My pace is slowed down a little bit and I can actually get stuff done. Yeah.

I used to have this. This is kind of relevant. May not sound like at the beginning, but I used to have this. This Bird dog and this dog, Roman, and he was a Weimaraner and he was super, super hyper. And it was kind of the same way we would go quail hunting. And the first is you, when you got off into the dirt road to go back to the place to hunt, is you would let the dog out of the car or out of the truck and you would drive and the dog would run behind the truck for maybe a mile or two. So by the time he, by the time he got to where it was ready to go, he could focus. And if you. And I never knew this until I read about it because if you just dump him out of the truck, he's. They're so excited and this. And they're really ineffective. It's probably the same way with us.

Yeah.

You know, you're burning through all day, this excitement. This, you know, squirrel is a constant comment at my house.

We say squirrel, but you know, really what we're doing is alluding to dogs when we say that. Right. You know, squirrel. So, so this is a lot closer to home than we might have thought. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's an interesting, interesting concept and it would be great to hear, you know, everybody else's stories. What's your most productive time of day? We'd love to talk about it and we'd love to get, you know, some info from you and you can reach us@feedbacksinessshow.co.

That'S right. That's right.

Which kind of.

Speaking of. Yeah, speaking of feedback, we've got a couple of questions to answer today. Right?

Yeah, yeah, let's. Why don't you start? What's number one?

Number one is from Ed. I believe that's the one we're starting with. Well, it is the one we're starting with. Ed says, I'm starting a new website and I want to sell things there. What's the best way to do that? Short question. I doubt it'll be a short answer. So. Yeah, yeah, E commerce is the question. Right. I mean, I guess, although it doesn't have to be. Right. You could put a phone number on and say, call me and I'll sell it to you right. Over the course.

Which is kind of a. Also, if. Maybe if you're not selling a product, if you're more of a service or. There still are certainly a lot of service oriented businesses that are not scheduling business online, but they're using it more like a, you know, contact me type thing with, with a phone call.

That's true. If I was, if, if I were to go back into doing consulting today, I don't know that I would put an. On. I mean, I might put an online request form up, but I. For scheduling. I want to talk to you. I need to, you know, I need to sell you on my service. And part of that is, you know, that conversation, that interactive conversation. Yeah.

Yes. So for the sake of this, we'll assume that, that Ed is going to sell products and has some, you know, needs some advice on what, what type of service or what type of thing to use. And, and you're right, it is very complicated. I think it kind of comes into two areas and maybe, maybe there's more, but it's, you know, one is use a service that's either a hosted store or, you know, shopping cart or roll your own.

And honestly, the place that I would start is Squarespace. Yeah, because. And yeah, they sponsor one of my other podcasts with macgeek Gab. In fact, I'll tell you, if you use coupon code MGG, you save 10%. Yeah, but I would use them because it's a one stop shop. You get to build your entire website right there, including the cart. And I had to do a website for a. We were going to sell tickets for a function, an event that we did with the band. This was a couple years ago. And I thought, well, I'll use Squarespace. And literally in less than an hour, I did the entire thing. I created the website, I put the band's logo in, I put in some, you know, text about. Here's the event that we're doing. It's this family friendly rock and roll party we have. I've had two products. One was an individual ticket for five bucks and one was a family ticket for 15. I did the whole thing, signed up for Slice, I believe is the payment processor that Squarespace uses. But you know, I had my own merchant account, but I didn't wire that up to this. This was 100% through Squarespace. And it just, within an hour I was literally taking orders.

Yeah. And I think that is the, you know, massive, massive benefit of jumping into a service. Because I'm assuming, again, I hate to assume, but let's speculate that Ed is not an expert in E commerce or building websites or doing things like that.

Right.

And that's where you want to be focusing on your business. And one of the real negatives of the role, your own, is that you can really dive down the rabbit hole, which can cause you to take your eyes off of your primary Business.

That's why I did that with this thing for fling. I know how to build a website. I've done it before. I know actually how build a shopping cart. I've done it before. I also know how to go out and find an existing shopping cart engine and plug it into my website that I'm hand coding or whatever. But that's, there's no way I'm going to do all of that in an hour. It's going to take me a day at best. And that's because I know how to do it all and I know where to find it. You know, it's. Yeah, yeah. And like you said, it wasn't. My goal to. My goal for the day was not to feel productive at creating a website with this shopping cart that I built and all of that. My goal for the day was to sell tickets to our event quickly. Quickly. Yeah, quickly, yeah.

And I think that there is just a lot to be said and there's numerous services out there that you can jump onto whether it's Squarespace or Shopify Big, you know all these different things. I think Wix weebly they, they all have E commerce.

That's right. Yeah, they all do. That's right. Yeah yeah, yeah.

And we'll, we'll link to some of those today in the, in the show notes at the end of the show when we post it. In my experience there always seems to be in some reason some feature that we need to customize that keeps us away from these types of services. And so we do, we, we have a bunch of different sites but on all our E commerce stuff we typically have stuff we built ourself for very specific uses which like our, our repair business. Being able to handle our business for check restore for repairs is really the opposite of E commerce. You're, you're really bringing product in the door and we're booking it all over the, the country and so we, there's a lot of things to facilitate of and options that the customer needs to be presented with and labels that need to be automated and generated and tracking the things that need to happen. So we built that ourselves and we just got through going through a new build and it was fantastic. I think it probably took a couple of weeks off my life in the long run. I mean, you know, you're definitely pulling your hair out but the biggest benefit of rolling your own is you typically you get exactly what you want.

That's right.

You're going to pay more money. There's no doubt about it. It's you're going to have a lot more upfront cost, but you're going to be able to really design and build it yourself. And you know, we could go down that road too. Whether you use programmers here, whether you use programmers offshore, there's pros and cons to those. Depends how much time you want to put into building something. But the other way we do it is what you mentioned before, using an off the shelf shopping cart that you host on your own server.

Yeah.

And for our wholesale parts site we use open cart. It is, you know, an open source CART program that's extensively modifiable but its primary duty is, you know, pushing product out the door. And it does a lot and it's, it's great. But again, you want to get started with something that's going to have all that back end support for you. And if you get to the point where you feel like you're outgrowing it, then you can kind of go to the next step, which may be a hosted or a CART hosted on your server. Sure. And then maybe moving to, you know, where you build your own app, if you will. Whatever you do, it's critically important that your site, your, the service, the cart, whatever you're doing, has the ability to present your company very well on mobile products.

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. That's right. Yeah.

And we talked a little bit about that last week with Tim Cox from Zingpr. In fact, I think that was one of the things he said he regretted and not getting his site mobile friendly sooner. And that's critically important to the point where, you know, Google is, is lowering, you know, sites ranking that aren't mobile friendly. Because I don't know about, you know, other businesses, but about 83% of the people that come in through our sites are coming through mobile.

Is that right for you?

That's unbelievable. Yeah, it's, it's, they're either looking through a cracked screen and trying to find somebody that's, you know, can help them do the repair or they're, you know, small business owner buying parts or they're shopping for refurbished products, you know, iPads and Macs, that kind of thing. And they're doing it on their phone or on their iPad and we've just seen and we track it and it's, it's just gone. It's like the hockey stick, you know, the last couple of years it's just got less and less desktop, you know, browsing.

Wow, that's amazing. Wow.

So that's, that's really important to, you know, to do and, and I think it all really depends on what your needs are. And I would ask yourself that Ed, is what are you trying to do? And visit some of these services, make sure that the functionality is going to work for you and, and when you're looking at those services, this is one of my problems. I tend, I often overthink it and maybe with just a slight adjustment of the way you handle things, one of these services would work for you versus looking at it and go, well, we don't do it that way. So I need my software to do this. And, and that can be a very expensive thing to deal with when you're trying to, you know, build something and program yourself.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's you. The, the, an off the shelf product can sometimes get you, you know, somewhere between 70 and 90% of exactly what you want.

Yeah.

And the question is, is that 10 to 30% worth not only the cost either in, you know, man hours of people that you already have on staff and if you're a small business owner that knows how to do this stuff, that might well be you. Right. Or you know, in, in time. Right. Can you wait long enough to develop what it takes to get that extra 10 to 30%? And, and yeah, you know, for, for a lot of businesses you want to get your card up right away and yeah, it might not be perfect, but if it works, and I mean it needs to work well, but there might be some things you can forego.

Right. And these companies that are offering you services, they've invested a ton of money into building something that does just that it works well. It's going to be mobile friendly, I'm sure of it. These guys are all aware of what's going on and you're just going to have to make some compromises to, in, in little, little ways. And I think you'll have far less headaches than if you try to, you know, get something going on your own. At least when you're, when you're getting started.

Yeah. Come in with a punch list of things that are important. But, but by all means, don't start to sketch out on paper what you think your store should look like because yeah, if you get emotionally or, or otherwise committed to that, there is no way you're going to do it with a built, you know, with an off the shelf engine.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. And I can tell you, you know, the first time we ever built something ourselves, I, this was a, you know, maybe eight or nine years ago and we did not have an app that really brought our customers and our people, our employees together in the same piece of software. We were using bits and pieces of this. We had a service and a shopping cart. Nothing was ever connected. So my, my dream was, hey, let's get connected and get closer. So this real time information that we're inputting is accessible to the customer and anything the customer inputs is accessible to us instantly. That was my end goal. And so we found a shopping cart that was very robust and all this kind of thing and it was X cart. And I got connected with the developers that are in Russia and Russia and I spent a lot of time talking to them, trying to figure out if this would work. And then they, there was one fateful sentence that they sent in an email and that changed the course of the next 12 to 18 months of my life. They said, we can make it do anything you want. And I said, oh, that's awesome, because I'm going to build this application around this infrastructure. It'll save me a lot of money and it'll be great and I can really tweak it. But I'm the kind of person that really likes to tweak it. And so I spent my 10 to midnight time online with the programmer for about a year going through this is where you want to do it. This way we do this with that. Tying it into all kinds of services. You know, APIs from FedEx, from PayPal, from Authorize.net, i mean, anything you could think of. Sure. And you know, we launched about nine months after that and then we kept tweaking, but it never stopped. I mean, because if you continually. What happens is people line up at your door and say, hey, could we get it to do this? And why couldn't we get it to do that? And I learned a lot about how to spend way too much money on software development.

Well, I was going to say, yeah, that's less about a shopping cart than it is about just general software development. And yeah, you have to, because I've been through that many, many times in every capacity. I've been it as the developer, I've been it as kind of the developer, slash, business owner, where we're doing it for ourselves. And, and then I've done it as the business owner that's hiring a developer. And in all three of those cases, it doesn't matter. The same thing holds true. You have to freeze the features at some point and just ship it and then you can add more later. But you just got to ship and that's. Honestly, that's a valuable skill to learn to develop, because it's not. I mean, it. It seems. And in some cases it is just as simple as saying, that's it. The line is here, we will ship. But, you know, there is some, There is some finesse there, like, okay, you know, what can I live with? And realistically, what is not mandatory to get this thing out the door?

Yeah, minimal functionality. What is the minimum functionality we need to make this thing live? And then you can have all the feature requests and wish list things that you want.

Absolutely.

But you got to know that all comes with a price. And you can then present that to your developer, whether they're on staff or whether you're outsourcing that, and say, okay, I wanted to do A, B, C and D. How much is that going to cost me? And you can get a better sense of what's going on. And for me and the application worked great. I mean, we used it for almost seven years, but the wall we hit eventually and unfortunately was only about halfway through. It was halfway through usage of this thing. So about three and a half years into it, there was a new version of XCart that did all kinds of great things and bells and whistles. And I went to the developers and said, hey, great, we would like to upgrade that to, you know, upgrade our system. And they looked and said, well, you have modified the core system so much that we. You cannot upgrade.

You can't. That's. That's where you get into trouble. That's right. Yep. Yes.

So the next time we used a CART piece, you know, application that we started modifying, we went with open cart for our wholesale business, which has all. Only does things via. There's a Q mod. It's like an extension. I don't know if it's a language or whatever it is, but some kind of platform that it basically plugs in extensions of the original software, but it does not modify, you know, the core piece of the application. So you can continue updating and upgrading that. And that. That's been really important for us.

Yeah, I, That's. That's a man. There's so many lessons here, so I want to rewind just a little bit, but. Sure. You know, you said when we were talking about just rolling out what, what it takes to the, the minimum thing that, that you can, that you can live with and, and can work and, and there is a, a term for this and it's used all over the place called mvp. Minimum Viable product. Right. What, what is it that it takes. And there's a great description on Wikipedia, I guess it was coined by an investor. What is the product with the highest return on investment versus risk? Right. So how much time are you going to put in just to get something out the door? Yeah. And, yep, that's, that's really important.

And you can do the same thing with the service or software.

Yeah.

We tried to go get on board with BigCommerce and I was into it for almost a year before I finally said, no, this is not going to work, we're not putting any more time into it. And I think we did a show maybe a month or so back where we talked about knowing when to pull the plug on a project, even if you've invested money into it. Yeah.

Sunk cost.

Yeah, sunk costs. That's right. And we had sunk a considerable amount of costs into. The software was very robust and it would do all kinds of things and we'd been working with it, but then I finally said, man, we've got a tremendous road down to go with this thing. And we pulled a plug and I mean, lost that investment. But then you immediately gained all your time and any future investment back.

Right, right, right.

Yeah.

It's fascinating stuff. Yeah. You learned a valuable lesson and I continue to learn this. And it's that whole thing about, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to choose an existing off the shelf product, learn where the, where the walls are, beyond which if you modify things, you can no longer take advantage of. Perhaps the biggest benefit you get when you buy off the shelf. And that is upgrades.

Yeah.

Right. Because, you know, we've done that with our content management system at Mac observer in the past where, you know, we actually moved. We wrote our own content management system. This is, this makes people shudder these days. Right. You know, when.

Sure.

But. But even when we started deals on the web, I just wrote that out a whole cloth.

That's correct.

It didn't take very. I mean, it was, you know, it was like whatever we need. Well, we needed it. And the phrase WordPress did not exist in our lexicon at that moment. Right. You know, that's right. It was. How else are you going to get it online? You got to just write it. I didn't even have a framework. I mean, we just wrote it.

Yeah. And then we kept adding features. How do you get it to this?

And that's great. Right. Because the nice part is you have ultimate flexibility. The problem is with that 100% of the upgrades rely on you. Whereas if you do go with something like WordPress, you can take advantage of all of the, you know, the work they do for everyone and the work that everyone contributes in and continue to upgrade and add plugins and features and all of that. But if you modify your core, WordPress or core anything beyond the wall that exists, well, then you can't upgrade anymore because your site's going to break.

That's right.

You just need to be, you just need to be aware of that when you're making those decisions. But that's always an important question we ask when we're starting to do, you know, like, hey, can we do this modification? The answer is always yes. The question is, what's, you know, does it keep us from being able to upgrade? And if the answer is yes, well, then it's like, okay, is there another way to, to accomplish this that doesn't provide, you know, doesn't impose that limitation?

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's right. It's, it's a very, you know, I mean, the great, you know, Ed, thanks for your question. And the great thing about where we are right now is never before has it been easier to get online and to start selling something. Even if you're a craft person that wants to, you know, sell products through Etsy or you're moving high volumes of swizzle sticks, there is a, a quick solution that you can get going very fast. And in the past, you know, it just wasn't like that.

That's true. It's true. Yeah.

Very cool. Have we beat that one?

I think we're good with that one. So the question is, do we, do we continue down the tangent that we skipped the whole hiring offshore programmers thing, or do we answer the next question and you get to vote at home? But sadly, we've already made the decision by the time you.

That's correct. I think that we could probably hold off on the offshore versus here because it may, I don't know how applicable it is to people. Yeah, tell us how applicable it is. Send us, you know, an email to feedbackusinessshow.co and we can decide, let's feature, you know, offshoring versus, you know, outsourcing versus doing things in house. And we can cover all kinds of topics on that, not just E commerce. We can talk about design. We can talk about every whole thing. That's true.

Yeah.

And I think you and I. Yeah. Because we've done it both ways and with different, all kinds of different things. And, you know, if we've got time, I've completely lost track of time. I think it was the, the shock of going over that development with the Russians has blew my clock out and I have no idea where we are on time.

But we've got time for one more.

Yeah, good, good. Let's, let's, let's see. Let's answer Ben's question.

Okay. Ben writes, I'm a computer consultant, regularly going out to people's homes to serve their needs. My business started doing this for friends, but now is growing fast. And I know I need to get more insurance to cover myself from liabilities. What kind of insurance do you recommend for my business?

That's a great question. And it looks like he's a consultant and he's going on site and that can be a very sticky situation when you're in other people's locations, whether they're home or their business. But let's back up a bit. And just in general, the first thing you do need to ask yourself, like Ben, is what kind of insurance I need and why do you need it? You know, I will be the first to admit I'm, I'm not a huge fan of paying for insurance because I always think, you know, it's like you're sending money out into the ether and yes, it's there in case of emergency, which is a critical thing and you have to have it.

Yeah.

But I'm just, you know, we have so many different kinds of insurance and we'll talk a little bit about those here. You really have to start where, you know, what is my almost like your minimum viable product? What is the minimum insurance I need to do the business I'm doing what today and not get ahead of yourself with all kinds of other insurance products that your insurance salesperson will be more than happy to present to you. You want to just start where it makes sense. And I think with, with Ben, there's a type of insurance called errors and omissions insurance that's really specifically designed for people like yourself that are going on site. You're doing things yourself, you're, you're giving advice and you, that, that, that's the service that you want. There's, it's also called like professional insurance, that kind of thing, but more specifically for consultants and things. It's that errors and emissions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Not, nothing's going to protect you if you intentionally defraud or, or harm someone or, or harm their data or, you know, whatever it is you're out there doing. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's really important. And again, maybe we'll Back up a little bit and just talk about, okay, how do you get this? I mean, who do you call to get this insurance? And you know, I've made the comment before here. You know, every small business needs to kind of build what I call their board of directors. And you know, since you're a small business, you got to get people that are your advisors, if you will, and that typically can be your banker, your attorney, your accountant. And those people can give you good referrals to people they trust who probably have somebody they know that sells business insurance. If you don't have that, you know, you can check LinkedIn, your, you know, chamber of commerce, those kinds of things. You want to find someone that you're comfortable doing business with because insurance is a very long term business and you want to get, you know, like I said, you're starting, you're going to get out, you're going to get some errors on emissions or professional business insurance that's going to cover you when you're on site. If you break something, if you catch something on fire or you know, something happens, you want that, that coverage. But as your business grows and changes, your insurance needs will change too. So it's really, I think important to have someone that's going to grow with you and understands your business, what you're doing because you want to be able to ask them that question. Hey, I'm usually in my case it's hey, I'm already doing this. Yeah, what, what, what could really happen? You know, and you know, if you're going to, I mean the first thing besides like an errors and emissions insurance, most companies need just a general liability in, you know, policy.

Yep.

It's not very, not very expensive, not very expensive but you know, gives you kind of general coverage for things that can go wrong. Accidents, injuries, you know, negligence, that kind of stuff. You need to have it and it doesn't cost a lot of money. You know, I could say one time, years and years ago when we, we moved into our second commercial location in a business that I owned many years ago named Mac Rescue. And I was so excited. You know, it was really, the first place was kind of rinky dink and this place was, man, this is great. This is a place my mom would have been proud of.

Right, right, right.

She comes by, she's like, wow, you're really not just, you know, telling stories, you're really in business. And the first day we were there and I was there with my business partner and we're getting everything set up and in comes walks this customer who trips on the threshold of the business and this. This is. Wasn't kind of elderly lady, and goes down on her knee, probably still to this day, harder than I've ever seen anybody go down and rolls over, grabbing her knee, moaning loudly. And my first thought was, oh, this is it. We're out of business.

That's it.

Yeah, we're sitting.

Close the door and remember this moment, folks. That's right.

This is it right here. You know, go in your journal. We were on path, so I can remember, you know, rushing, helping her up and everything. And she was a wonderful, you know, person. And we had insurance for any kind of thing like that, of course. And she, you know, thankfully never did anything that required us to have an attorney or those kinds of things, which is. Which is great.

Yeah.

But you need to feel or you need to be protected against if someone hurts themselves on your. Your property or you're in your business or, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, yeah.

Really? Really.

You know, for somebody who's a consultant, you may not. I mean, if you don't have a place of business and this might be your home. Right. But if people are not coming to see you, you still, you know, your question is still valid, Ben, because you need. You need to be covered. If you make a mistake with someone's. Let's say you're. I assume you're a computer. Yeah, you're a computer consultant. Okay. I wasn't sure if he said consultant or computer consultant. You erase someone's data, they might choose to sue you. Now, you know that that doesn't matter how that ends. If they choose to sue you, it's going to monopolize a lot of your time. Right. And so you want to have a partner there at least, you know, in the insurance company that's going to perhaps be involved in this at some level. But even before you do that, the best thing you can do is create an LLC for yourself. You know, if you're just doing this as a schedule C, that's bad because. Or so.

Or a sole proprietor. I mean, it's your.

That's right. That's what I mean. A sole. Sole proprietor Schedule C. That's right. Yeah. If you're. If you're. You're doing this on your own and you don't have a layer between you as a person in your business, you're gonna. You could be in real trouble. You could lose your house. Right.

For.

By. For. With no negligence involved. Right. You could tell the customer, look, we're gonna do this this may well, you know, destroy all your data. Does the customer agree? Yes. Okay, we're gonna try it. Boom. Yes. As it turns out, this troubleshooting step did destroy all your data, Mr. Customer. You backed up everything. Because you told me so, right? Well, no, I didn't. I thought it would be okay. And now you're in a lawsuit. Right. And your house is at risk. You probably won't lose it in that particular example, but you have to get to the end of the example to find out. So you're better off setting up that LLC and running all your business through that. And you really have to. We've talked about this in other episodes, but you have to be diligent about making sure you're not, you know, taking a check from a client and depositing it to your personal checking account, because all you need to do is do that once. And that's all the evidence they need to show. Oh, you've co. Mingled funds. You know, the corporate veil is gone. You don't get any protection. Right. You have to be pretty diligent about that.

Yeah. And that's where your, you know, your advisors, as you develop over time, are going to give you that, you know, you're. You have an attorney that you've talked to, and they're going to say, hey, man, you know, you really need to set up your entity as such, because it'll give you this layer of protection, and that's really important. And when you are contracting for insurance, you really do need to read the fine print, because after an event happens that you're going to need insurance, the person you're going to deal with is called an adjuster.

Yeah.

And that person is charged with keeping costs as low as possible for this insurance agent or insurance company. Most often, you're going to have a relationship with an insurance broker who's going to represent your company perhaps to various huge entities, you know, that are in the insurance and the reinsurance business. And, you know, it's crazy, but you want to be sure that what you think you're insured for is actually what you're insured for. And you may need some help reading through the fine print. And I mean, the worst thing that can happen is that something occurs and you have some liability. And you. You realize, you get, you know, you talk to your insurance agent and you get. Then you get a call from the adjuster, who's not the guy that takes you to lunch, like your. Your broker.

Right.

And he says, oh, I'm sorry, you know, Mr. Gene, you're you don't have coverage for that, you say, well, wait, I thought I had coverage for this. So you want to be sure and ask very specific questions of the type of coverage that you need. Very important.

Yeah.

You know, and even to the point where you mentioned, you know, working out of your house. Well, you know, insurance companies often require you to have either, you know, a writer, you know, a small addition stating that you are working from your house that offers you that kind of coverage. And so really, really important to ask, you know, if, if you have, if you eventually you get to a commercial location or you already have one, you want to make sure you have commercial property insurance. Because in anything you store there, or if you're sharing a building, if you're in a suite and one of your servers or computers or your copier catches on fire and burns the whole place down, you want to have commercial property insurance. Again, all this stuff, it's not very expensive, but it is necessary to get if you're manufacturing. Go ahead.

No, I was going to say, I have found that, that going and finding, you know, making one of those team, one of the people on your team of advisors, your insurance agent, it has been very valuable. Now, the term insurance agent sounds like and, and often is, you know, a shyster. Right. But, but if you find a good one, yeah, you, you really, that person can be your partner in, in this, in this particular portion of your endeavor for a long time. Find someone that is not married to any one insurance company and, and they get, yes, they get a commission for what they sell you. That's how they get paid. You know, so be upfront with, you know, let's just be upfront about that. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Just make sure that this person is out for you long term. And you know, I've got a great insurance agent here in New Hampshire and he carries everything for me. He handles. Actually he's got a couple of different divisions now. One that takes care of my health insurance and my cars. And then kind of his portion of it is still the liability stuff and the business stuff and this, that and the other. And it's fantastic because you can have a conversation and say, here's what I need. How do I get there? I wanted to ensure my drums. Right. This is a weird thing because I make money with them and I'm taking them out of the house and setting them up in, you know, some place where there's going to be people drinking.

Yes.

You know.

Yes. And that's. Right.

Most Most homeowners policies end, you know, as soon as you say, and I'm making money with them, but a business policy is cost prohibitive. But he, you know, he's like, oh, I know how to do that. You know, we can add it as a rider to your homeowner's policy, and we'll specify on the rider. You know, there's a whole different way of doing it that you're making money. You'll pay a little bit more, but they're covered from $1, and you don't have to worry about it. And it's fantastic. You know, it's the way to do it. But you. But again, you've got to have either. You have to become an expert in insurance and learn all of these things, which, I mean, I certainly didn't know about this, but I just asked him the question, and then, boom, it's covered. You know, I don't know. I pay 100 bucks a year or something. I don't know. Yeah, it's something trivial.

So, yeah, yeah, most of these things are, like I said, they're not that expensive, but you want to have that person that you can ask that advice of. And one time, we ship so much stuff, UPS and FedEx are very friendly with us. And I can remember FedEx one year, flew my wife and I out to the Orange bowl, which is the FedEx Orange bowl, and put us up in this fancy place. And I was thinking, man, you know, we got to get some better rates because this is how they're paying for these things, right? And one of the ways they were making a lot of money was on insurance. And I mentioned that comment to my insurance guy at the time, and he said, well, you know, you need to get inland marine insurance. Okay, what. What is that? You know, I've never. I mean, maybe I stumbled across that term, you know, once or twice, but I had no idea what it. What it is. So he says, yeah, that will cover all your incoming and outgoing shipping on land or in the ocean. I said, well, that's great. What does that cost? And it was very inexpensive. I mean, I think it was another writer that we added, and maybe it was a couple thousand, I think maybe $1,200 a year. And we were paying thousands of dollars in insurance at the time on a monthly basis. And we've had that policy for 15 years, and it has saved us a ton of money because we were talking to our insurance agent about our business, and it just comes back to, like you said, you know, you want that person that can be around who knows your business and can look around and say, hey, you know, you're paying too much for that. Let's find a way to save. Save you some money.

Pretty cool. Yeah, that's great.

So, yeah, yeah. So there's. There's a lot more about insurance. And, you know, with the caveat, Dave and I are certainly not experts. You should definitely talk to an agent. There's some great resources on the SBA.gov website, the small Business Administration, that I'll link to in the show notes. And, you know, as you move, as your business grows and gets a little more complicated, so does your insurance requirements. We're not even going to go into what you need once you start hiring your employees, you know, workers comp. Unemployment insurance. Some states require you to have disability insurance. You need somebody who can help you along the way and advise you and make sure you're protected and have all the requirements for you.

Works for me.

Works for me, too. Anything else you want to talk about insurance, Dave? It's a pretty exciting topic.

You know, it's funny. I actually get excited talking about both insurance and accounting, and I know that there's something wrong with me, but.

You're sick. You're sick, man, Dave.

Yeah, but that's what makes me an entrepreneur. Yeah, absolutely. I don't hate this stuff. I kind of like it, you know, and you kind of have to. You. You got to find a way to be interested. I'm not saying you have to make it fun. You don't. You certainly don't want to live in my head. But. But you have to make it interesting to you and make, you know, find some part of it that's a game like, okay, you know, I know I need to be covered this way, but if I package these three things together, it's actually cheaper for me than doing it that way. And then you can get excited about insurance, you know, that kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Think about it like that. You know what you're saving like that. I tell that inland marine insurance story all the time. And that to me is like, look, man, we saved thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, you know, with this one little thing. So that's. Yeah, you're right.

You're pretty good. It sounds like a BS thing, too.

A lot of that. Well, let's call it inland Marine because nobody will know what it is and.

They'Ll never use it, they'll never buy it. That's right. We could just turn them off right from the start. That's right.

That's great.

All right, folks, feedback at BusinessShow Co is where you can send in your questions. We would love to answer them. We have a lot of fun doing this. Perhaps we are part of your small business advisory team, and that's what we're doing here with this show is really just trying to help everybody and be a resource here. So please include us in your conversations. Ask us questions. We'll be happy to share. We might not always have the answers. We'll find the people that do and we'll get them out to you.

Right on. Sounds great. We will see you next week, folks. Enjoy the rest of your week and your upcoming weekend.

Bye.