Episode 115: Skyrocket with Jorge Morales and Jose Pain

The first Spanish words I learned were dirty. Dirty words, of course. Because here's what happens. I was traveling through Mexico. I love Mexico. Traveling through Mexico. I meet some guys and they're like, oh, we'll teach them some Spanish. And the big joke, of course, is you teach the gringo the most filthy words so that if I ever use those, I will get beaten up in Mexico. But I'm privy to this, so I don't. Anything I learned from them, I don't even say it. I think, oh, when you meet someone, it's appropriate to say, como estas? I'm like, I ain't gonna say that, because I know I'm saying something dirty. Which, by the way, it's not dirty at all.

It's in dirty.

This is the Profit first podcast, episode 115.

Yes. Come on, Jorge.

Mike always gives himself a hernia. Well, welcome, everyone.

My face is beat red.

This is the.

I hope you're ready for this show. This is not like other shows.

This show's different.

And I'm Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording.

And I'm Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First. This whole show is based upon the foundation of profitability. I'm also the author of Surge. I just released it recently. If you don't have a copy of the book, what are you doing? Surge, Go to Amazon and pick it up. Surge on. And in studio, I'm joined by Christina Boldock.

Hello again.

Hey.

And you, listener, are listening to the Profit first podc. This is a show where we talk about all elements of profitability. I think today's episode's gonna blow your mind because we have ground zero for the first company ever, ever to implement Profit First. Start eight years ago. I'll tell you their story in just a second.

Wow, that's awesome. So, by the way, you can hear the show wherever you hear a podcast, Any platform, any podcatcher, itunes, stitcher, tunein radio, all that stuff. You can also rate and review the show. But, bruh, be kind. Thank you, bruh, be kind.

Rewind.

And also our website. Our website is profitfirstpodcast.com. you can go there. You can comment on this post. So what's gonna happen in this episode is Mike's gonna say something that you completely either agree with or disagree with. Go to profitfirstpodcast.com Hell, no. And give a comment there. So, and what I love best about this show, it is about profit, because revenue is a sticky note, but profit is the foot.

No, that was Kind of. That was bad. Yeah, that was pretty bad. Sticky note. Oh, down your throat. I gotta think of something better.

Oh, my.

Oh, we'll flow your butt. We'll float your boat. That's the one. So give it to me one more time because I want to, you know, and make sure you edit out all the other stuff.

Okay. Yeah.

Right.

Revenue is a sticky note, but profit.

Will float your boat.

Oh.

Just. Yeah.

Bingo.

Oh, I nailed that.

Without any.

I nailed that first way out of the gate. Dude. What have you been up to, bro?

Oh, man. Well, I'm still on YouTube watching videos now. Now I'm watching videos. Now I'm watching. Hey. I never realized how great Larry Bird was. Larry Bird, the basketball player from the Boston Celtics? I didn't know he was, like, literally top three or four all time ultimate player. Did you?

Insanely good.

Yeah, I didn't know that.

Insanely good.

I knew he was good.

Check out. I actually. In my new version of Prop First, I'm re releasing Profit first comes out 2017, February. I write a story about Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Rick Barry and actually, I'm sorry, Wilt Chamberlain. Wait, Wilt Chamberlain and Rick Barry. Rick Barry was the only basketball player in the professional leagues to do the underhand shot in modern times. Wilt Chamberlain used it in one game and had the highest scoring game in history. 100 points by a single player in one game. Yeah.

So February 2017. Profit first. Wow. We're gonna have to talk about that.

But 2.0.

Yeah. So what have you been up to?

Point out.

What have you been up to, Christina?

Oh, I actually have an audition in a couple weeks that I'm pumped about. Kind of popped up out of nowhere, so hopefully it's just something local, just, you know, soothing my soul. But I'm excited about it.

So next episode, instead of grunting in the beginning, you need to hit a really high note and just, like, destroy everything.

Hold it. Yeah. Yeah, you should. Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I mean, Jesus. Audition live here. And for me. For me. Last episode we recorded, I had chocolate up the side of my face. You didn't say anything, Christina. I went up to go to the bathroom. I'm like, what the hell is that? A birthmark?

I didn't even notice it. That's awesome.

Our new colleague, Emily starts today. It's a wonderful gesture. She brings in these crack brownies that you can't stop eating. I bite into one. It squirts chocolate up my face. I smear it with my hand. It's over My glasses, my eye and you don't say a thing.

I just like to mess with you.

Dude, you should have Instagrammed them. Jeez, I should have.

I should have.

All right, well, I hope you got your 17 point seatbelt system on today because you're about to go in for a ride of your life. Talking about the implementation of profit first in a business. The guys who started doing this, you're not going to believe the before and after. And the path they took to get there isn't by the book, so to speak, or literally. They found their own tweaks to it. I want to learn what those are. But first, before we talk about them, I want to thank our corporate partners and Christina. I remember to integrate them. Chris saved us last week.

Yes, he did.

I want to thank Fundera, Fundbox, Nextiva and Receipt bank for making the show possible. We'll give you more details on them in a little bit. Their names are Jose and Jorge. They read my book the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and that came out about eight years ago. I then put on a little mini conference. I think there was about 25 or 30 of us up there. It was my first little event. These guys traveled all the way from Florida up with their, I think at the time, girlfriends, now wives. You know, they're not like, it's not collecting. All four are married together. You know, it's not like. And they wanted to explore, they wanted to explore profit first. Now here's the funny thing in Toy Paper Entrepreneur. It was literally a small section about a paragraph I devoted to this as I just originated the concept and these guys started playing with it. Well, subsequent to this they've taken specialized ECU repair which focuses on automobile computer repair for super high end exotic European cars. You know the. Well, they can tell you more about that. But their business is wildly profitable and, and successful in growing fastness market because their implementation of profit first. So let's discover how they did it. Jorge and Jose, welcome to the show. Brothers. Hermanos, Primos.

Primos.

Hermanos, Hermanos, Primos. Yeah. Or just mono. I could just say manos, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's another way of doing it. It's all perfect.

It's all perfect. So here's the question, guys. What turned you on to profit first? Why would you even think eight years ago that something like this may have an impact on your business?

I think it was to begin with must have been that we had a lot of misconceptions about what a business is, how it's supposed to fulfill your lifestyle and you know, that anxiety that. How to also say this, like the, you know, just a lot of, like I mentioned misconceptions is gonna make you very curious. It makes you think that there's probably a better way. And when I find a better way, then. Or when I find an alternative, you want to jump on the opportunity right away. And I mean, it's just none of us had any kind of previous experience on what was right, what was wrong. And you gave us, like, the first idea that made complete sense to us.

Well, Jose, eight years ago, how long? I want to kind of take the business back and look at that window. When you started doing profit first, how old or established was your business at that point? What was the environment like? How profitable at that point was the business?

Well, the company got established in 2007, and it was just one man operation. Myself in this room in an apartment building where some people used to drive to leave their car, you know, and the guard will say to them, this is just a building. This is not a shop. Most people didn't knew that I was running small operation or business, you know, from the apartment that was pretty much. I was not ready to rent anything. And it was an exploration of what was going to happen with the business. But it was a small operation. Most of my customers there were people that I knew, they were local shops. And Jorge at that time, was helping me out with the advertising to see if we were able to gain traction. Gathering more customers at that time, honestly, it was scary at some time because I was married and we were thinking about having kids and the pressure to see if I was doing things right or I needed to go and find a second job or quit all together, what I was doing. So it was a roller coaster of emotions until we found the horizon. You know, we were kind of like tumbling left and right until we got balance. And we got into some trouble too, at the beginning.

Taxes? Yeah, taxes.

Accountants and. Yeah, yeah, it was. Being an entrepreneur is not for everybody. Most people will quit if they don't have the right direction or they don't have the right emotional support. That's for sure.

I got to hear about this tax difficulty. Can you give us some of the details?

Yeah. Well, you know, in the beginning, Jose was pretty much doing everything on his own. He would receive the customer, add him to an accounting system, do the customer service on the phone, do the repairs with the testing, shipping and handling. Literally he's saying one man operation. And, you know, if you have one person, one customer per month, that's fine. You can do it. But then once you begin to have 5 people, 10 people, 15 people per month, then it's very easy for one person to, you know, just kind of not be able to handle everything. And then so he had asked another accountant to help him out with, you know, the few invoices that he was, you know, collecting to make sure that he was doing everything by the book. Well, this person was just kind of really winging it and did it. Did everything as a side job and would probably just, you know, conference and call, like, probably every. You know, very, very randomly. And then. Yeah. When basically we had the first year that we had to file for taxes, the. There was an audit on our Florida taxes because we had. We had. We hadn't collected any taxes. And basically every customer that we had was from Florida. So we should have collected taxes from every single person. Or.

Okay.

Or at least if we didn't, we should. We had to explain why we didn't because there would be, like, a resale tax certificate to excuse you from collecting them, and we didn't know what a resale tax certificate was. When is it okay? When do you charge it? And it's like, so many little rules that we messed up every single one of them.

So how did you recover back then? I mean, did you just have to pull out of your own pocket any of the taxes you owed?

Yeah. I mean, basically, that's the only way you could do it. We. I think we hired an accounting firm to help us out. Like, kind of help us, like, figure out exactly what we owe. Because we didn't know. I mean, our QuickBooks were horrible. Or it was. We just. Everything was out of control, and we just didn't know what we were doing. And the way to do it was that we just tried to comply with what they wanted, see exactly how much we owed. It ended up being, you know, probably. I'm not sure if it was, like, 2,500 bucks or something like that we owed. It wasn't much, but back then, that's all we had in the bank account.

That means it's everything. Yeah.

Hey, Mike. You know, quick question for you, Mike. If someone is somehow all of a sudden owes a lot of taxes, is that a time when you might call Fundera and sort of maybe need a business loan or is taking a business loan for taxes not a good idea?

Typically and sometimes impossible. But Fundera could possibly source that for you. But I'll tell you, here's one thing you can do, is if you need to sustain normal operations, you could Use Fundera to fund those normal operations, freeing up cash to pay your tax liabilities. Interesting. Jorge and Jose. If you combine the two, you're Jorge, just, you know, Jorge and Jose, just so you know, we like to plug our sponsors in the middle, so. But let me ask you this. You discover Profit first, You implemented it, but I think you started. How did you get started on Profit First?

I think it must have been like you're saying, you know, along the lines of your book. And that's when the curiosity started. You know, we're getting, you know, like, we're getting anxious that we're working a lot of hours, and we're just not feeling like we're growing financially. We didn't feel like we were growing. You know, it's almost like it was better for us to quit what we were doing and then get a real job, you know, out there. It felt like that way sometimes because we just didn't have tool to give us that. Like, Jose saying that, that goal, that horizon to point towards. And around that time, like I mentioned, between your book and also you had that club that we went up to see you in New Jersey, you put out a video that I don't know if you ever want to show it again in the future, but it was an awesome video that you kind of put everything on a whiteboard. Oh, I remember. I am never gonna forget because you had like nine or 10 videos for that first million club that you had.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay, keep going.

So you have one of those videos where you put everything on the whiteboard and maybe more of a visual person. One of the. One of the. I think the way that you close that video, after I saw everything written down on the whiteboard and me understanding numbers, one of the last things that you said was, hey, your business should fulfill your lifestyle, you know, and you. I don't know why. It's just something like I had never heard it before. And, you know, you're young, you're naive, you. You think the world works a different way. You say that, and that's like. It resonated with me. And it's like, this makes complete sense. You know, this guy's like, speaking my language. And that's when I tell Jose, let's. Let's try this out. Because I think it's kind of what we were looking for.

Jose, did you feel that Profit first would work when you first heard about it?

With all honesty? I mean, like, when you have a co worker or partner that you really trust, I mean, like, at that Point I knew that George was a person to trust, you know, for sure, and it was enough to make him my business partner. But one of the reasons I got George was because I know that he will be very structured and he will not fool around, you know, with our resources or, you know, like with our capacity. So when he was talking to me about yourself, the toilet paper entrepreneur, and then what can we do? What needed to be the steps to apply in order to see and to improve our lifestyle and all that, I was, you know, all in into a system. And since the beginning, you know, we saw it working, you know, it was.

Hard to convince the account, the bookkeeper. Oh, yeah, it's almost like. Because at first it may sound illegal, you know, but then it's kind of like it's not. It's just. It's because of course, if you break somebody's conception about how things the world works, and you kind of flip it upside down the way that you flip finances upside down, then it makes more sense for the entrepreneur.

Let's fast forward to today. And then I want to go through all the challenges, like the bookkeeper challenge. Tell me about your business today and any numbers that you feel comfortable sharing. It just. It just helps me really understand. Where do you stand on profitability? Where do you stand on. On the pay that you're taking for yourselves in that tax situation? Has that ever come up again and has this helped grow your business faster or has it slowed it down, all that stuff?

Well, I'm gonna say that we. We live now with peace of mind that things are taken care of on the tax because of the great help we have and the great directions and instructions now. Things that are done ABC and no, you know, not like before for sure are our paychecks and our salaries. What we make are definitely. How to say it. It's not effortless because you work, but it puts a smile on your face every month. You know, like you're doing it and you're collecting it, and it has perspective to keep growing every year without any problems. And on the part of the profit of the company and the numbers that we're making, we feel like an engine that is running very smooth and is keeping pace and accelerating and without any issues. I mean, this is the great part that I feel the accomplishment on taking the right steps. And if it's going to be an example for any companies outside, it's just to.

Follow.

Follow steps, you know, from people that they know what they're doing and don't try to be smart, especially with taxes and stuff like that, they will bite you.

So your company now is reserving your personal tax liability for both you, George and Jose in advance for you. The company saves that money for you.

Yeah, I mean we don't. I have a separate bank account that it's already every week puts money in there so that when tax time comes around, the money is there. And I really, I mean I remember the first three years we had to pay taxes out of our own pockets. It was horrible because we didn't know what we were gonna owe. Now it's been like, you know, we're gonna be coming up on year 10 now and it's like for the past five or six years, taxes haven't been a drama. You know, there's no drama in taxes anymore.

Right. Because you didn't start the taxes. I think when you started you just started with a small profit account, built it and then you started going into the fuller implementation of profit first started reserving taxes and so forth. Is that right?

Yeah, yeah, yes, that's what we do.

So then let's talk about owners pay. You are taking a predetermined percentage. Are you comfortable sharing the percentage that you take?

Yeah, we do about 9% right now. It, it's about, it's a little bit more because of another thing that we're doing as well. But it's right now it's over 9% solid. We've been doing that probably for about a year and a half now.

Okay, so 9% of all your income goes to your pay. How much money do you reserve for taxes percentage wise? Again, can you share that a shoot.

I don't know percentage. I know I put like 600 bucks a week.

Okay, so whatever that was out to be, I gotcha. And then, but it covers your taxes and then 600 bucks a week, that's 30,000 a year. So that, that's a substantial amount of reserves to pay your taxes. And you also have a profit on top of that. Right. You're allocating money toward what percentage is that?

That's probably going to be the way that I think we do 25% of the 9% that we take or something. It's something like that.

Okay, so 25%, 9% is roughly 2 1/2% of your top line income is also allocated to profit. Now when you and I were talking and by the way, Christina, George and Jose are featured in my newest book.

Oh great.

So I was interviewing George. Jose was home in his beautiful house and kitchen that day and I was interviewing him And I said, so what do you do with your profit now? And George, do you mind just sharing, like, how you like to leverage to use that profit for yourself?

Well, you know, personally, you know, my wife and I do a lot of traveling, so a lot of first pensas go there. We also, at this moment, we don't have any children, so we kind of like, you know, are able to, you know, we are. We're always hanging out outside of the house often, so we get to eat out all the time. And that was something that, you know, we could never do before because, you know, you, you're living like, you know, below middle class at one point.

But, dude, you're also kite surfing, if I recall correctly.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's your passion, right?

We do a ton of, ton of sports. And Jose has been like a surfer for life. And now just like two weeks ago, he was with me in Puerto Rico learning to kite board.

So all on your profit, right?

Of course.

That's awesome. And it's so cool, like, when you're traveling too. Like, you know, I like keeping track of the receipts when you're traveling is really hard. So having using a receipt bank, especially when you're traveling, it's very handy, I've found.

Yeah. And you're always in different countries. The language can be different. I know you guys have gone to Europe and maybe so it's German or Italian. Just scan it in. It gets translated by receipt bank@receiptbank.com so, Jose, as far as I understand, you've replaced your entire kitchen to the point where it was featured in a magazine. Aren't you into model airplanes or something?

Oh, yeah. Well, again, the difference between George and I is, of course, married now I have two kids. Those emails.

Thank you.

And we went from an apartment to a nice house where we built the model kitchen.

That's awesome.

It's been a wise investment to buy the house, and at some point I'm going to flip it. I've been investing a little bit of money on that. Carefully not to. Not to be underwater. And yeah, I. One of my hobby, lifetime hobbies is model airplanes. So I try to go and fly them locally as much as I can. It's a little bit difficult with the, with the kids because they deserve, you know, a lot of time and. But as George is saying, I mean, I just got back from Argentina. I went there for one week. My family was there for almost a month with the two kids. And. And that's what I look forward to, you know, to.

And it came out of Your. Didn't your profit pay for that?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's. I mean, savings are not touch at all.

And oh my God, this was amazing. So. It's so funny, Christina. These gentlemen have lived the system so long. To them it's like, yeah, of course. Like you hear George, like, of course, of course I was gonna advocate for that.

Like, why don't you go back. Why don't you stop using proper. Go back to the way it was. Consider that.

No, I mean there's really. I was. I think I've told Mike before that there's no, there's no going back because it gives you so much clarity and peace of mind when there's very few things that, that you can use to predict the future. And if more people could predict the future, it'd be great for business. You could catch trends. This is a way of doing it. That's how I feel about it. It's a way for you to know where you're gonna be in a year from now, maybe two years. And it helps you have that peace of mind, confidence and that, hey man, you and your family are gonna be okay. Your lifestyle is gonna be okay. And you can plan for, you know what, Jose can plan for his bigger house, you know, he can plan for his kids education, for college, you know, and he can plan for whenever, you know, he used. He. Whenever he can. He's been able to. He takes trips where he just goes out and flies airplanes for a whole week in Oregon in like awesome places. Like he can actually. It gives you a peace of mind that, you know, like, hey man, that's October next year. This trip's gonna come and it's gonna be no problem. We're gonna be able to do it and there's no drama behind it. You know, it's a.

And it comes out of profit, right?

Brilliant.

How many vacations are you guys doing a year either together or separately? Total vacations that companies profit together.

We did this one about two, three weeks ago.

Of course.

Yeah, we went to Vegas.

We went to Vegas on November. We went to Vegas in November. And we. It's. It's hard because Jose has children, you know, so it's hard for him to.

They don't gamble that much.

They don't gamble. Yeah, but, but it, the, the together part is hard. So what, what we try and do is just like, you know, he'll go and do something and then I'll take care of things while he's away and vice versa.

But how many vacations have you gone.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you the truth.

Yeah.

Jorge does at least six to seven days every month.

That's three out of four weeks.

I'm gonna step in because that's something that we actually agree on. And we're being his business partner. I'm happy that he, he's doing that because he can be more productive that way. If you put him, you know, if you strap him into the chair, you know, in front of the computer, he'll need to stretch out. So.

Right.

And it's a little bit different for me because you cannot be asking the school, you know, to, hey, I'm gonna take my kid out of, you know, every week, you know, for two days. So.

Right.

That's. That's different.

But you express in other ways. You use the profit to improve your house, to make the vacation your home. It sounds like.

Exactly. That's to improve the lifestyle, especially of the kids. And talking about neighborhood, the school that we, that one of the kids goes to, or the perspective of the other one that that is going, is going to go. I mean, like, yeah, definitely, it's.

And what about growth like a vacation house? I don't know if you can share the size of your business now, revenue wise, like, where are you targeting? And has profit first slowed down your growth? Has it expedited? Your growth has had no effect.

And, you know, we start, I think the first year was probably like 80,000. The first year that, that we. Next year probably like 150. And then it's, you know, who knows if this year we can do 800, you know, $800,000. So that's what we're trying, you know, we are, we're going in that direction. But the $800,000. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of that sounds like a big number and all that, but the thing is that we do a lot of research and development. We, we put a lot back into research and development. We are in an industry that requires that you're always innovating. It's almost like a, like Pfizer, you know, it's kind of like, yes, you're always putting a lot of money into it. So it sounds like a good, like a, like a good number. And as we grow, our research and development will keep growing. But the whole thing with the profit first, it hasn't stopped us from growing. What it helps us is to make smart decisions.

I see. So can you give me one example of a decision that profit first influenced?

Yeah. About two years ago, we rented an additional Space to store cars and to maybe expand a little bit. But it was more to store cars. We hadn't. Because we were so busy, we didn't plug those numbers into an Excel spreadsheet. That helps me know, hey, is there going to be something left or is our profits going to be. Or profits, are they going to be compromised? I didn't plug that in. So we kind of made the decision. We were feeling good. We kind of went with the gut like, oh, we're feeling good about this. And then when I actually sat down and I plugged the numbers of that decision, I go like, oops, wait a second. That compromised, you know what, our profitability. It compromised the minimum that hosanna were expecting to earn. And it was a big wake up call to know, like, hey, let's stop this right now. So we kind of. I don't know if we lasted probably like three or four months in that place or something like that, but maybe it was longer. But we kind of like before the bleeding continued, we said, let's stop right now. So that's, that's a good way for us to like avoid a catastrophe.

It sounds like you felt the impact very quickly of that decision. You're evaluating your profit constantly and you unwound it. Where I find most people, they make a decision and then they constantly justify it. Well, we need this space. We have to do it. We'll make it up in sales. But it sounds like you guys did the reverse. So we have many entrepreneurs listening to the show right now. What would you suggest for them to get started with prop first? Like, what's the first step for someone to get started to see if this will work for them?

Man, you really have to. I know it. I know it's not everybody's cup of tea, but if you get a little bit of knowledge on Excel spreadsheets, it really helps out. If you just know how to add things and divide and subtract, it just saves you so much time. Right now. I think I'll share this with you after the show. I'll give you my Excel spreadsheet where it's kind of like my cheat sheet and we decide things within literally two minutes. We know whether things are gonna work or not.

Dude, could we share that with our audience? We put that in our show notes.

Yeah, 100%. I'll have to like, of course. Kind of like make it more user friendly.

Neutral.

User friendly.

Neutral.

Neutral.

Gracias. Mito.

Yes.

That's awesome. Hope you okay.

And, but, but that's kind of like what we use, you know, and I suggest that everybody that is a, an entrepreneur and this, I tell this to my sister and I tell this who she wants to start things on her own. I tell this to my wife, if she wants to start something on her own, that, hey, you know, it's. I know that math can be a little bit scary, but if you just dedicate, you know, a few minutes to plug in the numbers, if you're happy with, if what you want to earn is possible with your idea, do it. If you plug in the numbers and it doesn't and it's not happening, stop it before. Stop that. Don't do it, you know, because otherwise you're gonna be swimming against the current and you're gonna like, you know, put all these excuses when it should have been so clear to begin with. You could save so much time of your life and effort if you just really learn a little bit of math and put it in an Excel spreadsheet.

So let me ask the one final question. Going right back to the process or the transition, you said your bookkeeper was resistant to it. They thought maybe it's even illegal. How did you convince your bookkeeper to support you in profit?

First, definitely. It took probably three months for him to understand the idea because, you know, he's an older guy, but he's very smart about what he does. He does everything by the book and. But it took a couple months for him to understand what we were trying to do. And especially when he comes from, you know, the gap accounting. Is that what it's called? Yeah, he comes from, you know, the, the old school side of looking at things and when we flip set upside down. He's never necessarily seen it that way. He's more seen it like, well, just, just kind of like pay yourself a higher salary, you know, and, and by us kind of like looking at. No, let's, let's. Before we earn the dollar, let's figure out exactly what we want to earn and then make everything else have to like, adjust to conform to that. And it really forces. Once he sees the results, he's going along with it right now perfectly. I just basically send him an email every month. Hey, this is our distribution. And he gets at 100% what we're doing.

Wonderful.

I hope he encourages more people to follow suit. Guys, for the folks listening in who want to learn more about specialized ECU repair and both of you, where can they go to get more information?

They can go to the website. It's www.ecudoctors with the S@the end.com. and they can also watch our videos, some of the videos on YouTube. So if they type ECU doctors or Porsche ECU repair, you guys are going to be able to see a lot of the processes that we do and what we encourage people how to, you know, take this smart decisions about, you know, like what process or what service they need to follow when they work with a company.

All right, my listening friend. Go to ecudoctors.com right now or hop on YouTube. Especially if you own a Porsche now. You have no excuse. Go to ecudoctors.com mistillos gracias so much for being on the show. You guys are just wonderful. Gentlemen. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mike.

Have a good day, guys. Thank you so much.

See you later, guys. Great job, man.

See you. Now, when he said it's not your. For some people, it's not your cup of tea, did he say not your cup of tequila? That's what I heard.

Oh, tequila in your tea.

Yeah, I love tequila. I have. I have. I am a booze. I know, but I do love tequila. I have like six different types upstairs now. I was gonna share the names of them and I forgot them all. I even do have Cuervo, though. And everyone's like a Cuervo. Sucks. I'll tell you, it makes a great margarita. So suck it. I think it's pretty good. Suck it. I think Cuervo makes a good margarita. Okay, so let's talk about what we learned in just a moment. First, I want to thank our corporate partners again. Maybe. Maybe you had acute enough hearing that we actually snuck them in almost subliminally. A twofer. Do you remember their names? Who were they? I thought so. I thought you remembered. But just as a refresher, we talked about receipt bank. You know, in your international travels, you can be scanning in your receipts and they'll sync up with your accounting system. We talked about nextiva, the voice over IP phone system that blows away all their phone systems. We've been using them forever. Now, Fundbox, if you have an invoice due to you and your client's not paying in time, Fundbox will release all those funds to you immediately and you can continue your collections as normal so they don't interfere with your client relationship. And then Fundera, which is one stop loan shopping, I don't suggest getting a loan to pay your taxes. That sounds like stealing from Peter, punching him in the face and giving to Paul and then punching Paul in the face. That's what it sounds like, and then drinking. Yeah. Give it to Cuervo. He'll give it to Don Julio. Yeah. But they're a great, great company for many of your loan needs and perhaps even that one unique one. All right, I want to know. We learned today. Chris, I'd like to. You'd go first, sir.

You know, I. The most brilliant thing that was said on this episode, and this is. This just struck me like lightning. Profit first is a way to predict the future. I mean, yeah, that. Seriously, I'm done. That's it.

That's it.

Christina. I love.

Mic dropped. I think that. I think. I like that Jose and Jorge reiterated that they started small because I feel like there are still a lot of businesses out there who are struggling so much, and they may read Puppet first and they may hear what we're saying on our podcast, but not say, I don't have the money to do this. I don't know how to get started. And they literally just started with a profit account. They said, okay, let's dabble in this. And then as it became more successful, you keep going, but you don't have to go all. Or go home. You take it a little step at a time, and then one day you wake up and you're like, wow, we're in a great position. And this is how we got here.

So hallelujah. So, yeah, they started at $80,000 in revenue. That's a small little business. They're now 800,000, which is a much bigger, small little business. The funny thing is there's been companies on this. The show that's on millions of dollars, and they aren't living the lifestyles that Jorge and Jose, or he goes by George, by the way, I call him Jorge. But it's George and Jose. This lifestyle that they live. I mean, six to seven days a month on vacation off. And then Jose's like. And I support it. You know why? Because the profitability is growing. It's a working formula, and they know it because they can see in their profit that's the impact it'll have. And both these guys are modest. Like, the lifestyle that they live is what many of these multi million dollar company owners aspire to have. But they've baked it in from day one. So that. That kind of blew me away. But the other takeaway was the peace of mind. Jorge said it. George said it over and over again. He's like, yeah, peace of mind. Peace of mind. When the money is there, there's a mind shift. And I'll tell you one thing of the we estimate there's about 30,000 companies now running profit first. And hopefully you, as you're listening, you'll be the 30,000 in 1th to do it. But there's 30 in one. There's 30,000 companies that we estimate that are doing it right now. And I see a consistent thing. When you start profit first, you don't get rich overnight, but you get confidence overnight. You start seeing this money accumulating. It's like, holy cow. You can feel the shift immediately. And then it sustains throughout, clearly from George's and Jose's experience there. So that was my takeaway.

Can you give me another hallelujah, please?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Here.

You need that. I really. Because I want to ask you, bruh.

I got it.

So if you're listening to this, I want you to do a little exercise with me. If you would like to have six to seven days per month off and still make the same amount of money you do, raise your hand.

I just raised my.

Okay, I just read.

I hit the microphone. Raising my hand. Christina, hit the microphone.

It's up.

It's up. Okay. All right. Just. Just checking. Hello. My goodness. This is amazing. This has been a. I mean, this has been a wonderful episode. I like what you just said. Can I give my takeaways from what I learned from you giving your takeaway?

Sure. I love that one.

Yeah. Because you just said you don't. By implementing profit first, you don't get rich overnight. You become confident overnight. That's what I'm talking.

I'll tell you, the proof is with these guys, literally, it was one paragraph buried in the toilet paper entrepreneur. And they started it. So you don't need to master the entire system. You don't even have to read my entire book, which you. For God's sake, you should. But you don't need to. You can get started by just listening to this one episode. Go instead of one bank account at your bank today and call it profit and start allocating to start slow. 1% of all revenue to it, and you've gotten started. Then let the snowball effect take place.

There you go. So this is. This has been awesome. So listen, you can also go to the Website Profit first podcast.com youm can comment on the post of this show. We want your questions. We want your comments. You can also rate and review our podcast. And anywhere, wherever you're listening to the podcast, you can give us a rating or review if you'd like to. And you can, you know, five stars would be preferable on A from our end. We'd like that. So, and, and by the way, remember, you know how people talk about the world before the Internet? Like I just saw this thing on Facebook. It was 25 years ago, I think today or yesterday, that the Internet started. Before that there was no Internet. There was a time when there was no cell phones. Right? Think about that.

Yeah.

There was not even a smartphone. Forget smartphones. There was no cell phones. Well, can you imagine a time and, and, and Jorge and Jose were there when there was a time when profit first professionals did not exist. And people like George would go to their accountant and say, hey, we're gonna do this. And the accountants like, what? That's crazy.

You can't do that.

Now we live in a world where you can get an accountant or bookkeeper that understands profit first. I mean, Mike, do you, do you see the line I'm drawing in the sand here?

I see the line, I feel the.

Line like pre profit professionals.

And speaking of the line, I'd like to kind of shout out or start shouting out some of our current and long standing members. Starting one. Specifically Cindy Thomason. We've had her on the profit first podcast a couple times. She's a bookkeeper over in Arkansas. She niches an Amazon seller. So shout out to Cindy for being a longtime standing mender and mender. I don't know what a mender is.

It sounds damn impressive.

Member. And to connect with her and more bookkeepers and accountants like her, call us. Please call.

Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah. We gotta do more shout outs. I keep on forgetting to bring that up, but here's the thing you gotta do. There used to be this old school mentality based on GAAP accounting, which stands for generally accepted accounting principles, by the way. If someone's generally accepted like that should be a red flag right there. And what it said is sales minus expenses equals profit. That's the foundational formula of old school accounting. But that means profit comes last. It's a leftover. It's forgotten. You know, when something comes last is unwanted. The last kid picked for the kickball team is the one that nobody wants.

If you're not first or last.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for that voice, Ricky Bobby. It's true we need to put profit first. That's what the concept is. But you need an advocate that supports it. Could you imagine trying to do profit first in your bookkeeper account? Says you can't do that. I resist. I resist. Well, you'll struggle. Go to profitfirstprofessionals.com right now. Click on the find button, we will introduce you to accountants and bookkeepers who support Profit first, who can guide you through it. What? They can address the nuances.

What?

Yeah, yeah, it's all true. The taxes and all the different nuances with the compliance, they do that how to make actually more money, take home more money in your pocket and give less to the government. They do that legally. So go to proffersprofessionals.com right now. Click on find. Fill out the little form there, and we will hook you up with someone who will guide you to the highest degree of profitability you've ever experienced.

That's right. Guidance is good. You know, understanding the nuances is good, but these Profitability first professionals actually help drive profit to your business. It's insane. So thank you again to Jorge and Jose and Mike and everybody. And Christina and everybody in the background over there. Mike, who's up next week?

Susan's coming. I'm not gonna. That's all I'm gonna say, cuz I can't find any. You better be ready. You better.

There you go. All right, we'll see y' all next week. Thank you for listening.

Seriously.

May the prophet be with you. Peace.