The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Q&A: Real Estate Scraping, Selling Spreadsheets On Etsy, Bookkeeping Basics & More⏐Ep. #115

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

I'm back with another Q&A episode! This week, I answer your questions about scraping commercial real estate for leads, selling custom spreadsheets on Etsy, and how to close more deals over the phone. Plus, I share my thoughts on the best type of side hustle to start, whether you should choose e-commerce or a service business, and discuss my framework for starting, holding, and selling businesses. I'll also tackle the question of how to stay motivated when you're already well-off, and offer advice on bookkeeping for all of your new businesses.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Introduction to Business Ideas and Strategies01:08 Scraping Commercial Real Estate for Grants03:59 Selling Custom Spreadsheets on Etsy11:06 Closing Sales Over the Phone13:54 Choosing Between E-commerce and Service Businesses15:48 Exploring Low-Cost Mattress Stores19:04 Finding Motivation for New Business Ventures22:50 Business Philosophy: Starting, Holding, and Selling28:02 Bookkeeping and Accounting Essentials

Welcome to the Kerner Office. We've got eight short segments for you today, including how to scrape commercial real estate for a guy that needs to sell grants to companies. How to sell custom spreadsheets on Etsy. How to reverse engineer other Etsy seller selling spreadsheets. How to be better at sales. How to close more deals over the phone. What side hustle should we start? E-commerce or service business. What's the first step of that? Low-cost mattress stores? How to go all in on a business when you have enough money you don't really have to. What's my framework for starting and or holding and or selling businesses? And last, but certainly not least, how do I manage bookkeeping for all of my new businesses? Eight questions, eight

segments. You're going to love it. Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me on. So I have a side gig selling grants to companies primarily around the North Texas area. Currently, the only way we can find companies that qualifies by physically driving around and looking at buildings. Because for a company to be worth talking to, they need to be a small business, have high utility bills, own their own building, and be located in certain zip codes. You seem to be a king. of scraping the internet for companies, how could I scrape for any or all of those parameters? Thanks. Mike, thanks for calling in.

I love your question. And I'm excited to answer it. So you have to find your customers by driving around because they need to be small business customers that also own their building that also have high utility bills. I think there's some ways around having to drive around for them. I would start with rhonomy.com, R-E-O-N-O-M-M-Y.com. It's very expensive, $450. But they have a seven-day free trial.

and you can do everything you need to do within those seven days because I don't want you to spend $450 just like I don't want to spend it. I have a virtual assistant that I use from time to time. His name is Atec, A TTIQ, A TTIQ. If you email me, Chris at co-founders.com, I'll make an introduction. He can scrape reanimy.com. Rionomy is great because it is the best commercial real estate database that I have found. I use it for finding RV and mobile home parks. This is not sponsored. They don't know who I am, but it's a great piece of software.

So what you'll do is you'll go into Rionomy on your free trade. trial, you will set a search for whatever you're looking for, and then you would save the search by the filters that you set, and then you let Ateak log into your account, he'll go to your saved search, and he will scrape all of your results, because Rionomy charges you an insane amount for exporting the results. In addition to the $450 a month that they charge you, it's just crazy. Then what I would do is I would start with a very small radius, like a neighborhood, and whittle it down. You want to find building owners that have a name or a business name that matches the name of the business in that building. That will prevent you from having to drive around.

It's not super efficient, but it's more efficient than driving around, and you can find another virtual assistant to help you with that. So for instance, if you see a building in your exported spreadsheet that says Bob's Plumbing LLC, and then you see on another database like Outscraper, I guess that's the second part of the step, is go to Outscraper, run a scrape yourself for the same. same geography and then put them side by side. You can use a V lookup or an X lookup, ask chatypt how to do that. Then you can match all of the lines or all of the rows in the spreadsheets by address. And then just try to find LLC names or business names or owner names that match the name of the owner of the business. Because when you scrape on Outscraper,

if you check the box to get owner names, you'll also get owner names. So that's it. Rionomy Scrate plus Outscraper Scrape will tell you which buildings are owned by the business owner in that building. And then you'll also know by default that they're small businesses and you'll be able to market to them. You'll have their name, their phone number, their email address, their physical address. You'll be good to go. And then you can use my scraping guide, which is in my toolkit if you subscribed to my newsletter. TKOPpod.com, you'll get the scraping guide in the welcome email after subscribing. You'll get my copywriting guide, my cold emailing guide, everything. You'll get all my growth hacks in that welcome email. So hope that helps. And also this advice applies to

anyone trying to scrape real estate. Rionomy is a great solution for this. Let's go to the next question. Hey, Chris. I love making Google spreadsheets. I'm kind of nerd that way, but I would love to start selling them. I do have an Etsy shop, and I just partnered with somebody who will manage it and will do all the SEO and drive more sales there.

But where I really want to see myself going is working with small to medium-sized businesses who don't have traditional CRMs or anything who maybe already have spreadsheets, and I can jump in and enhance them or create different specials. such as CRM, sales tracking, that type of stuff. So the main question is, what do you think about this idea? Do you hate it? I would love to make about $5,000 on the side there, but I know that I need a couple more clients.

I need a lot of clients doing that. Once I do get a lot of clients, I'm more than happy to start hiring with Fiverr Upwork and kind of be the manager of those relationships. But I also need to get more businesses. So wondering what your thoughts are about this, how can I differentiate myself from my competitors, from other people who are doing this, how can I get a lot more clients?

My main goal of this as well as to do something while my kids are sleeping while it's a little bit slower at my day job. Yeah, so I just definitely want to make about $5,000 a quarter doing this. And I think that would be a game changer for me. So anyways, let me know your thoughts. Thanks. All right. Great question.

I don't know what your name is, but your email has the word Kiro in it, QU, ERO. So I'm going to call you that. Love this idea. I love the practice of brainstorming ways of selling spreadsheets because that's not something I've ever done. And it kind of makes my brain tickle or hurt a little bit, depending on how you look at it. So as you were asking me this question, I went to Etsy and I typed in spreadsheet. And there is a little growth hack you can use on Etsy, which I love. I didn't know, frankly, that spreadsheets were sold on it. Etsy. I knew that digital products were

sold here, but not spreadsheets, but it makes sense. It looks like there's a lot of people doing it, which is good for you. After typing in spreadsheet, I just kind of looked around. And I looked at the seller names because I want to find sellers that are primarily and or exclusively. selling spreadsheets and I found a guy called the sheet code one word on Etsy the sheet code and I click on his profile if you're watching on YouTube I'm going to share my screens you'll be able to watch this okay so the sheet code is selling a family and couples financial planner package for $8.23 and I just love this 24 people bought this in the last 24 hours so this guy's made 200 bucks today which is 60, 70 grand a year from one of his products. Just crazy. His entire store has 1257 reviews. This one

product has 191, almost all five-star reviews. But here's what you can do. If you want to know what type of spreadsheets people are buying on Etsy, if you're watching on YouTube, look at my screen, you want to find out how many products they're selling and then find out the ratio of number of reviews on that one product to number of their total reviews. So this, guy has 191 reviews on this product and he has 1257 reviews total. So this is about 15%. Call it 15% of all of his reviews are for this one product. 100 divided by 15 is about seven, give or take. So all else equal, he should have about seven products if they all sold about the same. But of course they won't. So let's see how many products this guy has. Okay. He's made 17,000 sales.

31 items. Okay. So surely. anyone listening to this is familiar with the 80-20 rule, but I'm just going to repeat it in case one of you isn't. I love the 80-20 rule because it appears everywhere. It's like a law of the universe. It just appears everywhere. 80% of your sales come from 20% of your people. 80% of your headaches come from 20% of your customers. 80% of your productivity comes from 20% of your employees. It's everywhere. And so it clearly looks like this personal finance budgeting spreadsheet is one of this guy's top sellers because he has 31 items for sale. He probably only sells a few of these other ones every day or every week. And he sells a ton of the other ones. So if I sort by highest price, they're all priced at $882 to like $1.89.

Very cheap. But they're all basically personal finance packages. So what you could do is you could use a software tool to scrape these. Or you could just do it manually real quick. Put all 31 in a spreadsheet. and then write down how many reviews he has for each of the 31, and then you're going to know what his bestsellers are. And then, if I were you, I would buy some of his bestsellers and look at it and read the

reviews and see what, if there are any four or lower star reviews, what are they complaining about? What could be improved upon these? And then you use the words in the reviews to write your copy on your product. So if people are thinking like, this is great, five stars all around, but I really wish that I could toggle and adjust for inflation. because of all the inflation we've had lately, I really wish I could account for it in a little toggle sell.

Okay. So now that's just one data point, but it could be representative of others that aren't saying it. So then you could not just put that in your spreadsheet, but you could advertise that in your spreadsheets. But from a broader perspective, just read every single review and find commonalities. What do they love about it? Because a lot of times this guy, this bestseller, it says family and couple annual budget,

Google Sheets Excel. just keyword stuffing, okay, which is fine. It clearly works. He ranks highly, but it doesn't really answer people's questions. So if people in the reviews are constantly saying, I love that it adjust for inflation, I love that adjust for inflation, I love that it adjusts for inflation, but he's not even selling that. Then you can just have a very similar spreadsheet that does the same things, and you could just sell that more in the title or in the description. So spend hours on Etsy looking at other spreadsheets, what's selling really well, what isn't. And then, break my advice. My advice is always to fish where people are fishing. Sell this stuff where other people

are selling it. But also do the opposite sometimes. I bet you very few people are selling spreadsheets on Facebook marketplace because they're not thinking to. But there's probably traffic for it. You can do some keyword stuffing yourself and see how many search results you pop up in. So Facebook groups, local Facebook groups, even if it's not a local city that you're in. But if you want to sell these to small businesses, as you say, I would go to a local Facebook group and just ask. ask for a small business owner if you could make some free spreadsheets for them, just to see if you can add value and then either you can resell that same spreadsheet to other small business owners in the same niche, or you can say, hey, in the process of making this sheet for tracking

all your dental patients, I learned that you probably need another sheet for tracking your receptionist hours. Would you mind if I make one of those for you? It'd be 30 bucks or something like that. That will just open your eyes to all kinds of other needs that the business owner might have. But you should start by doing it for free, at least so you could learn some feedback on what they like or dislike about your spreadsheets. Also, play around with Etsy ads. Some of these guys might just be crushing it in organic rankings, but if you put some paid ads behind your spreadsheets with zero dollar cost to fulfill, it could be pretty lucrative. Also, I would do the same reverse engineering on Gumroad, which as you probably know is like an Etsy, but primarily for digital products only. So great question.

All right. Josh has a question about closing sales over the phone. Hey, Chris, this is Josh from Ohio. I was just reading your article about your iPhone screen repair business and wanted to ask you about closing your deals. You mentioned that you'd hop on the phone with some of your bigger clients to make sure to close the deals compared to having your VAs do it all. I have a little experience with this with the EMD lending business and doing cold and warm

outreach like Alex Ramosey always talks about. But specifically, when you get on the phone to close a deal, What are some of the strategies, some of the tips that have worked really well for you and you use as a framework going forward throughout other businesses? I'd really love to hear what you think and what you have to say and look forward to hearing your answer soon. Love your content and thanks so much for listening to this. Thanks for the question, Josh. Love the question. And I'm just going to take two of the words that you said and point it right back at you.

Alex Hormosey. Alex Bromosey. He's the sales king. I cannot even hold a candle. to his sales ability. So I'm going to repeat a lot of what he repeats because I've taken his advice to heart and it's made me a better salesman. The most important thing you can do when closing any deal over the phone or in person is to have a no-brainer grand slam offer because a no-brainer offer will cover a multitude of sins. If you're not very bold, you're not very pressuring, you're not very

extroverted, you're not great with people. All of that can be covered by a no-brainer grand slam offer. and really anything above a no-brainer offer often gets a little slimy. Often turns into just kind of strong-arming someone or kind of twisting them into buying your product or service. And you start to flirt in the gray area, which doesn't make me feel super comfortable. But if you can have an amazing offer that conveys really well to them, then you will close more deals. So in the earnest money deposit lending industry, which I don't know much about, to be honest,

I would get on 10 sales calls with 10 of your competitors if you're a competitor and take a ton of notes on what they're doing well or not well on the phone. And you're going to learn so much from them. You really just have to be bold on getting to the heart of what their objections are because usually the objections that were given are not the true objections. Like, oh, I just need to think about it. That usually means it's too expensive. I just think it's too expensive. That usually means there's not enough value there in what you're offering or at least you're not conveying. or at least you're not conveying the value well enough.

So you need to put together an offer that feels risk-free to them. It makes them feel stupid for saying no. Like literally, they would feel dumb for saying no to your offer. Now that varies from industry to industry. Obviously, it's harder in some industries to make that no-brainer offer than others, but it's always going to be possible. So if you haven't read 100 million dollar offers, I would go read that. If you have read it, I would go read it again because there's a lot to learn in there.

All right, let's hear what Doug has to say. Good morning, Chris. My wife and I are racking our brains trying to come up with a side hustle. We are going to pull off and start something, but we're just not sure what just yet. We are scouring your ideas and also thinking about either a service industry or a Shopify store and product. What is the first step in order to pull the trigger and get started? Form an LLC, question mark. Doug, thanks for the question.

It's funny because you basically got down. to two different industries that you're considering, e-commerce and service. And I have a lot more experience in e-commerce than I have in service businesses. So maybe this answer is too biased because I'm jaded. But if you're choosing between those two, I would not choose e-commerce. E-commerce is hard. It is capital intensive. It takes a while to hit cash flow positivity.

It's generally low margin. It generally has to be driven by paid ads, which generally means you have to be really good at paid ads or pay an agency way too much to do paid ads for you. in which you'll get a mixed bag of results. So all else equal, I would definitely start a service business. Do not worry about getting an LLC. I answered this on a recent episode a couple weeks ago about when do you get the LLC. You get the LLC when you're generating revenue and you're sure that it's going to be a thing.

This is going to be something that you're going to file taxes on. It's here to stay. Don't get an LLC first. You need to find a customer first. Whatever your service business is, even if it's an unpaying customer, even if the customer is your mom, You need to get a customer. Start with a friends and family customer and or an unpaying customer and then upgrade to a customer that pays you less than what your cost is to fulfill just so you can get your reps and

get some testimonials and then just keep increasing your prices and go from there. But you've got to start testing things. Like we could research or learn business ideas until the cows come home, but we're not even going to know if it's a good idea until we start to try it. You just don't know. It's all theory. All right. David has a question about me.

mattress stores. All right. If you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check on my podcast while you're at it, because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTube's that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform, or you can go to tkot.com. Also, my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube. Newsletter.com.com. You'll see the link. And we'll see you there. What do you think about low-cost mattress stores? I just love it. This is the short question that's ever been asked me, what do you think about low-cost mattress stores? Very straightforward

to the point. And honestly, I probably would have ignored this question had I not been talking to a mattress guy here over the last week or two. He is on Twitter. I think he's known as the mattress guy or something like that. And we've been emailing. And I'm just curious about his business. And what this guy does is he sells high-end mattresses on Twitter. And he's making 20 to 30 grand a month, part-time doing this. And this is the last email that he sent me. I said, his name's Nick Hancock, direct outlet Charlotte is his business if you want to look them up. I have no affiliation. Just a guy of an emailing. Nice guy. So I said, Nick, can you send me some numbers? The margin you make on mattresses, quantity you sell per month, the crazy stories, how the logistics

work. Because as part of this podcast, I'm always doing research on cool business ideas. That's what I do. So this is just something that I haven't even posted about yet. You heard it here first. He said, sure thing, 50% gross profit minimum, typically around 55 to 60%. Average ticket is 1 to 3K. So we'll stop right there. Let's say $2,000 average mattress. He is going to gross about $1,200 on that mattress. 30% net after everything. So $600 net on average per mattress, saving people thousands as they are just getting quoted, $6 to $10,000 at mattress retailers. 20 to 30 a month and growing with Twitter. Logistics are simple. If in Charlotte, I deliver same day. If out of state, FedEx or LTL, LTLTL means less than truckload, aka not a full truckload, and typically they're in three to five days.

So then I asked, how do you source these? If someone wanted to make money at this, how much of that would you be willing to share? It's a fine balance because that's what people want to read. And he said multiple manufacturers here in the States, I won't be giving these contacts away. My dad built these over 35 years of doing business, but those people are all at the furniture markets in Las Vegas and High Point. I can easily share how I would start from scratch today with my knowledge, no problem. So thanks for the question. It looks like I searched mattress in my email.

It looks like you emailed me this morning at 738 in the morning. So hopefully this answer suffices. But zooming out a little bit, I love the concept of selling high ticket items just as a greasy money rubbing middleman. There's nothing wrong with being a middleman, especially if you don't have to hold inventory. And you're really just acting as a broker and making $600 bucks a pop. So as far as low-cost mattress stores, I don't know, it's going to be a little more complex. You're going to have to sign a long-term lease. You're going to have to hold inventory.

You might go a day or two or three without any sales because that's just the name of the game in the mattress business. But I do know that you'll want to post up next to other mattress stores because that's just what you do. You want to go where people are mattress shopping. And if you're right next to a mattress plus or a mattress firm or whatever they're called, you're probably going to do really well. All right. Let's hear from Spencer. Hey, Chris.

First and foremost, really love your content and just everything you're about, all the business ideas on the exact same way of always. Just looking and seeing every business around me, how can I expand it? How can I capitalize on an opportunity? I see all those things. So really love it. Thank you. Quick question for you.

I exited my business, which was an online licensing business. I exited it in the beginning of 2023. I do have another business that currently runs that I'm not really involved in the day day to day of. And so I not kind of work on it here and there. But my big question has been, I've really struggled over the last year and a half going on two years now since I sold my business. I've really kind of going all in and having the motivation to start a new business and really scale it up. You know, it's one of those things where I don't have kids happily married. And with the exit, I got enough money to really kind of live comfortably. I've never really

wanted for a lot, right? I'm not big into just buying stuff for the sake of buying stuff. And so I guess My question for you is, where do you get that motivation to continue going, essentially, when money no longer becomes the main driver of doing the business? And kind of where do you get that motivation to continue with these business ideas once you start hitting those friction points where it gets hard, where it's not as fun anymore? Thanks so much. And appreciate everything you're doing. Thank you, Spencer.

I see your question as being two parts. First part is how do you find motivation to start a business when you're well off already? You don't need the money. Second part of the question is, if you do start a business, how do you push through when things get hard if you don't need the money? So I've been in your shoes before. It was not a great time in my life, honestly. I wasn't super productive. I wasn't super hungry. I would start businesses and then just quit them as soon as things got hard because I didn't have to keep going. And the best and biggest businesses I've ever started have been when I had no plan B. I had no parachute. I had to make it

work. And that's usually the case. We're forced to make it work. But there is something you can do. First of all, you need to change your scenery. You need to travel more. You need to get out, see what types of businesses are going on in other states or other countries. Also, you need to join some communities, some meetups. You need to meet up with new people, entrepreneurs, maybe that are younger than you, maybe that are hungrier than you, are doing cool things that might not have your expertise and just get in the game more. It just sounds like you're not in the game as much. And when I say in the game, I don't mean just like learning about business ideas, like listening to my content, but like actually out there exploring, digging into ideas. Another thing I would suggest is to fall in love with a hobby and really just dive deep into a hobby, something that you never plan to monetize.

For me, that would be cooking authentic pizza in my outdoor pizza oven or turning wood bowls with my lathe. And then as you become engrossed in that task, you're going to start to see opportunities that you're really, passionate about that you really don't care if it ever makes money. Because if you love business, like it sounds like you do, then you'll love your hobby even more. Now, it is a thing when people try to monetize their hobbies. It doesn't become fun to them anymore. But that doesn't always happen. It doesn't happen with me. Now, how to persist. If you do start a business and things get hard and you don't really have the motivation. You need an accountability partner. You need to get a business partner. Maybe he's an operator. Maybe you're co-operators. But you should get a business partner or a friend or

someone that's in your local area that you do business with in person. That will help you have a lot more fun and stay motivated and have those late night whiteboard sessions where you're both super excited. That's the fun part of business. And you will feel indebted to your business partner to not just give it up because you're partnered with someone and they're holding you accountable. And also, to be a little more meta here, just don't worry about it, man. Like, you're going to figure it out. Like you're going to come across the thing that excites you and you're going to persist. It'll come eventually. It's been two years now, which isn't that much time in the grand scheme of things. So just keep staying in the game. Be in the game more. Like I said, go meet some people.

All right, we got CG up next. Friend of the pod, Connor Gross. He's been on a bunch of times. He's going to be on again. And I was delighted and surprised to see that he left me a question. So let's listen to what Connor has to say. Hey, it's Connor. I remember you and I having a conversation a while ago. And I was trying to approach it from the philosophy of every business that I start, I want to hold for a. and that was something that I was trying to work on because I thought that it would be easier just to start and hold companies indefinitely. And you basically told me that your whole business philosophy is you don't care if you buy

things, sell things, start them, make a couple hundred thousand and then they fizzle out, like whatever it looks like, you just enjoy the process. And I feel like that would be a really interesting subject to talk about, which is your focus on how you start companies, how you think about, how you think about, holding brands, incubating brands, when you want to sell, if you want to have a liquidity event every year, if you want to have it every five years, if you don't even think about that stuff at all because you're just too focused on growing things. Like, at some point, I've realized this for myself too. Having six things all under a million dollars a year kind of sucks,

and it gets very stressful. But you seem to enjoy the smaller things and either holding some and scaling them up or, you know, treating them opportunistically. So talking about that, I think would be a really interesting subject. Connor, great question. And you're right. Having six things under a million dollars in revenue sucks. It can, for sure. It also depends on how much involvement you have in those six things.

I don't have much involvement in most of them. But I had this thought recently where it's like, what is the opposite of a detail-oriented person or a details guy? Whatever that is, it's me. I don't notice things that other people notice. I'm not a planner at all. I'm the opposite of a planner. I'm impulsive. I'm off the cuff. And that results in 75 businesses started. So here's one thing I do

do, no matter what I start. I really want to nail the bookkeeping on day one. And you know what? There's another question in here about bookkeeping. So I'll get to that one next. But I want to start tracking my finances in a Google sheet from day one because you should read the book built to sell. Anyone listening to this should read the book built to sell. Anything you start, you should build it to sell from day one because it's just best practices, whether you sell it or not. You'll keep things cleaner. This is going to sound a little woo-woo, but starting businesses is art. To me, anyway, it's art. And I don't know what it's like to be an actual artist, like a painter or something, but I would imagine they just start painting and they just kind of see where it takes them.

And when they start, they're not like, all right, this is going to be, it's going to look like this when I'm done. I'm going to sell it for this much. I'm going to hang it on this wall. This type of person's going to buy it. It's going to be hung in this gallery. like they just have some sort of bug in their brain that's telling them to paint to get it out, get that thing out of their head. And so they just start getting it out. And they don't go buy an LLC. They don't go open a spreadsheet. They don't start calling art galleries before they even start painting. They're just making art. And that's probably a good reason why I'm starving artist is a phrase that most artists do not do well whatsoever. Because if they were more calculated

about it, then they might be able to employ some common business tactics and sell their art for more money. But for me, I look at it as art. I get an idea and I got to get it out, get it out of my head. And most of those will turn into nothing. Some of those will turn into businesses. Some of them big, some small, some will fail spectacularly. I just don't know. And so I watch Shark Tank sometimes or I used to and people like, this is my baby. I can't give away 30% of my business for a million dollars. Like what? That's nothing. This is my baby. I can't. I have. I, I've never had a business that's my baby because every business is just another business. And they're not people.

They're not living entities. It's a painting. That's it. And so with that being said, I'd sell any business. I'd keep any business. I'd shut down any business. It just depends on the situation and on what the opportunity cost is. If I own a business that's taking almost no time and it's just kind of languishing,

I won't even spend the time to get rid of it or to shut it down or to sell it because it's just out of sight, out of mind. for better or worse. If I own a business that's not doing well and I'm spending too much time on it, then I will actively work to divest of it in some way or another. But how it's worked for me in the past is the more businesses I take on, the more ideas that I start, the sooner I find the ones that have product market fit that are keeping me up all night, that are just crushing it, the ones that I'm going to Home Depot and buying a bunch of wheelbarrows so I can just carry all this cash to the bank. Those are the ones that my time and attention and investment naturally gravitate to

words and those ones I'm not passionate about. So I wish I had a sexy framework I could put in a YouTube short 60 seconds how I look at this or how I think of this, but it's just a way for me to be creative and it's a lot of fun. All right, let's do one more about bookkeeping. Austin. Hey, Chris, this is Austin. Really love the pod and everything else. You guys bring it to the table here with business ideas, et cetera, actually working on something myself based on something I heard on your and I just had a quick question. Even actually, as I am a CPA myself, mainly actually said myself as more as an entrepreneur and operator.

And as I start my first company, what's your advice on doing the bookkeeping and accounting? And how do you ever really get that started with your companies right off the back? Do you have any tools or, you know, obviously quickbooks and stuff is small. But if something was going to scale quickly, what would you really start with? How do you get this going? and I feel like not enough people on podcast talk about this because that is a crucial part to the business and a fundamental piece to every business is the accounting. If you don't have that right, then I don't think you can really end up with a really good exit or anything of the like. So really would love for you to touch on this. Thank you.

Great question, Austin. I don't talk about bookkeeping that much, frankly, because I'm terrible at it and I hate it and it's the bane of my existence. But it's a great question and I'm happy to answer it. I look at bookkeeping. as having three thresholds. Number one, Google Sheets. Number two, QuickBooks. Number three, bigger than QuickBooks. And honestly, I've never gotten to number three before because QuickBooks can handle businesses of over $100 million. Okay. Number one, Google Sheets. Very simple, revenues, expenses. You can export your bank account. I suggest Mercury and or Bank of America, preferably Mercury. We like Bank of America because they integrate with Zell and we need Zelle for some of our subcontractors and Mercury does not. But this is how I look at it. Personal checking

account to start to validate the business. Okay, once I see I've got revenue, this is going to be a thing. I do two things. I go file an LLC and get an EIN number, aka tax ID number. And then I will use those documents to go get a business bank account, preferably with Mercury. And then I will take the Google sheet that I used to track all the expenses in my personal bank account and I will true it all up, I will get everything in the business bank account, then I will run everything through that business bank account from that point on. Very strict. Even if like I have a business that's putting 30 grand a month on Facebook ads and it's really tempting to get a credit card to get 2% cash back or AMX points or something, I don't mess with that. I used to, but it's just like, honestly,

if I had one business and I knew I was only going to have one, I probably would do that. I would get a capital one or a venture card or something to get points. But when I have a half dozen businesses, I don't want a half dozen credit cards, a half dozen debit cards, a half dozen bank accounts, half dozen Venmo accounts, PayPal. It is an absolute nightmare. So I'll put everything in that Mercury account on the debit card. And then I will keep tracking everything in the same Google sheet, my debits and my credits. And then the second threshold is when I'll find a bookkeeper.

I used to set up QuickBooks myself, management myself, but it's not a good use of my or your time. So it's not hard to use. Anyone can use quick books. It's just not a good use of your time. Even if you like it, don't do it. You're better off marketing or selling your product or service. So get a bookkeeper. You can find thousands of bookkeepers for low hundreds of dollars a month.

It's money well spent. They'll get in quick books for you. They'll do all the hairy stuff. They'll maintain it. You just want a P&L and a balance sheet every month. That's it. P&L and balance sheet every month and every year, of course. And maybe quarterly if you're into that kind of thing.

But LLC always. But don't forget, LLC is a pass-through entity, which means you are taxed on the profit of your business. You are not taxed on what you pull out of your business. So if you make a million dollars in net profit in your business, but you're using most of that for growth or for ads or for inventory and you only take home $200,000, guess what? Your tax bill is going to be almost twice what you took out

and put in your personal checking account. So prepare for that. A lot of people are surprised about that. And you have to make quarterly estimated taxes, tax payments, and that's a pain. And I hate everything about taxes and book. keeping in the IRS and I have been audited it and it was the worst period of my life. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

But don't overthink it. Google sheet. One dedicated business bank account. Once you're sure this is going to be a thing and then find a bookkeeper, don't pay them any more than a few hundred bucks a month, maybe 500 max. Depending on how complex it is, we have a crypto business with all kinds of different accounts and crypto transactions, that's a lot more complex. But if everything's coming through a bank account, very little cash, you shouldn't

need to pay that much. you can find a virtual assistant that's really, really good to do it for you as well. Get everything categorized in QuickBooks and then everything will auto-metically fall into their buckets. All right, that's it for today's Q&A. Come back next week for the next Q&A. Please give me a five-star review. I need some five-star reviews.

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