MBA1537 4 Essential Purchases When Starting a Business + Free Ride Friday

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Hey, today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, or you can win it for free. Just leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for leaving us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode Foreign. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that provides the steps you need to get to where you want in business every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and in today's lesson you will learn the four essential purchases when starting a business. Whether you're starting an online business or a brick and mortar in person offline business, there are a few things you're going to need to invest in before you start opening for business. We're going to go through the top four things you need to purchase as you get started. I'll explain why you need them as well as roughly how much it's going to cost you. We'll also go through a whole bunch of things you just don't need when you get started that a lot of people buy and waste their money with. Get capital. The money that you have in your pocket is so valuable when you're starting a business, don't waste it on things you just don't need. I'll show you the what and how in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. All right, four essential purchases when starting a business, Whether it's an online business or an offline business. The first one may sound obvious, but a lot of people don't know it's something you actually need from the get go. And that's a payment processor. Now, this will depend on whether you're processing payments at a point of sale, meaning like in person, whether you're swiping cards or tapping or using something like Apple Pay, or if you're an online business where people are just gonna pop in their numbers on a checkout page and then go ahead and check out. Let's go with the easy one. Online businesses. Well, whether you're going with Stripe or PayPal, they'll both have a transaction fee, which is a percentage like 2.9% of the actual total amount they're charging for you. So you can get that money plus a transaction fee, which is a set fee like $0.30 now, depending on what kind of volume and business most of the time, just to get started, it's not going to cost you anything upfront, but it's an ongoing cost as you charge each customer. This is different if you're in an offline business like a cafe or a yoga studio or whatever it is, you need some sort of tool to be able to charge cards, to swipe cards, to tap them, a point of sale along with the payment processor. And often they go hand in hand. An option here is like square, where they'll give you some hardware or they'll sell it to you for about $100 or $200. Some even have some attachments that they can give you that plug into an iPad. So you might want to buy an iPad. So you'll be able to do this through your iPad. This is a pretty low investment for you to receive payment for your goods and your services. If you just go back 10, 15, 20 years ago, just buying an actual cash register was more expensive, let alone processing credit cards. So you need some sort of point of sale. You need some way to process payments. So a payment processor is your number one purchase. Can't make money if you can't take the money. All right, number two, a website. This is Important regardless if you're an online business or an offline business. Now obviously it's incredibly important if you're an online business because you cannot do business without it. But even if you're an offline business, this is how people find you. Today. No one's looking in the yellow pages, everybody's googling, everybody's looking you up. You need a website. You need it to control that traffic and have somewhere for someone to land and to find out about your products and your services. Investing in a website can be very, very low cost. You can go with a solution like Weebly or Squarespace, you can go to squarespace.com mba and get a discount or a free month, whatever promotion they're going on right now, or weebly.com MBA same thing. These are very, very good options. If you want a simple website for your in person offline business or even if you're building an online business, an e commerce store, a service based business, these are great options. Your initial investment is going to be under $30. So $30 a month depending on your needs, you may paying a little bit more. But a website is essential. No one can learn about you, find you, even if it's as simple as knowing your address, getting your phone number if you're an offline business, or getting directions. This is also a great tool, a website to allow people to book reservations. And of course, if you're an online business, it's a way for them to purchase your products, your services. A website is essential. You can't start a business without one. I do not recommend it. Have a website number three. A business email address. I cannot tell you how amateur you look when you have a Gmail email like your business namemail.com, when you're trying to tell other people about your business, when you're trying to tell people to email you or you're trying to, you know, cut a deal with a supplier, you're trying to make some sort of collaboration or some sort of partnership. It doesn't cost you that much to have a business email with your own domain, with your own website domain. So instead of me giving out my email for business and it's omarmail.com I have Omar at 100mba.net or omarebinarninja.com Perception is important, especially when you're getting started and it's going to cost you $5, okay, $5 a month with a G suite business email. And this is going to allow you to have all the other great stuff that comes with G suite like Google Drive, like docs and sheets and forms and a whole bunch of other things that you can use in your business. $5 a month and you look like a pro. That's the way to do it. Your email is really more important than your phone number these days, even if you have an offline business. So invest in a business email. There's a lot of online businesses that only do business with domain based emails. They don't actually accept emails that are from Gmail or Yahoo because they only want to do business with people that actually are serious. You're a serious player. It's going to cost you $5. It's going to go a long way. Guys. We have a fourth must purchase item when it comes to starting a business. But before that, I want to go through some of the things you just don't need at the start. Okay? You don't need to spend a lot of money at number one. You don't need business cards. Business cards used to be very important, but now with technology and business Today you have LinkedIn, you have phones. It's easy just to give each other your contact. I didn't have business cards when I started, maybe for years before I actually got one. You don't need fancy schmancy stationery. Okay? You don't need to do that. You don't need a fancy business line or phone number just for business. You can use a Google Voice number which is free, which will forward to your number and keep your personal number anonymous. Or you can use a Skype number. I really like Skype phone system. It's really, really cool and it works just like a phone. And people can send you messages and texts with that number. You don't even need a fancy office. You can work from home or from the shop of where your physical business is. You can actually spend money on that later once you make money.

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All right, number four, guys. And that's an address. I just said you don't need a fancy office, but you might be saying, hey Omar, you just said you don't need a fancy office. That's true, you don't need a fancy office. But you need a business address. Why? Because in order for you to register your business, in order for you to do email marketing, you need to put an address, a physical address. You don't want people showing up to your door, at home, at your apartment. You don't want to make your personal life, your personal home address public. And when you register your business and you have address with it that's public knowledge, you need a place that's separate from your personal address. You need a physical address where mail can go to. So you have a couple of options here. Number one, you can go with a virtual address with a service like Earth classmail. If you go to earthclassmail.com nbamonth you can get a free month. And basically they have a great system where you can have your own business address. It's a real address. All the mail that gets sent there actually gets scanned and uploaded to the cloud. So you can actually review all your mail from anywhere in the world. But most importantly, it's an address you can actually use for your business, for email marketing where you have to put an address when you're registering your business, all that kind of stuff. So that's one option. The other option is a lot of co working spaces have a virtual office plan. So something like WeWork, you can pay about 80, $90 a month and it allows you to have a business address. They allow you to use WeWork, the office of WeWork, as your business address. You can collect mail there. They'll even give you a free access to be able work from there a few days a week or a few days a month, I believe. And WeWork is just an example. Other co working spaces in your area might do this as well and may do it even cheaper. So you may want to shop around. But the point here is that you have a solid business address that you can use for banking, for everything that has your business name on it. So as you can see, all four of these must purchases when you start a business are not expensive, but it's often overlooked. You need to make sure that you have these in place to protect yourself, to set yourself up for success, to set yourself up for professionalism. Everything else is gravy. You can make money, you can grow, you can expand, you can reinvest into other things later on. But these are the essentials. You need to have these things in place when you start. Thank you so much for listening to the Hundred Dollar VA show, but today's episode's not over. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride and the winner is Eric cfi. Eric CFI says Down to Business five stars. I think the thing I appreciate the most is the quick business advice. It's great to hear those words. Let's get down to business. Thanks Eric cfi for that amazing review on itunes. Your mission is to email me over at omar100mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to Easy Course. Hey, if you are listening right now and you want to win a free ride just like Eric just did, you got a $500 course over at EasyCourse Co for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen on a Friday to see if you won. Just like you're listening right now. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you're starting a business, it's easy to spend money and think you need certain things double and triple. Think it over. Okay? Money is super, super tight at the start. You need to use your money wisely, okay? Don't spend it because you're getting excited. Make more money than you're spending, okay? If you haven't made any money yet, don't spend so much. Okay? You want to make sure you're profitable from day one. Thanks so much for listening. I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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