Welcome, hello, what's up, it's Nick. This is episode four of the Sweaty Startup and here we're going to run through a lot of information. The goal is to bring in revenue as quickly as possible and one of the major advantages of services is that there's low overhead. There's no office, there's no brick and mortar, there's not a lot of barriers to entry. You can save tons of money that way. It's ripe for scrappy entrepreneurs. So let's go over the tool belt. What you will need to offer your service as quickly as possible, I'm going to run right through it, feel free to slow it down, rewind, do whatever you need to do. You also just might want to skip this episode all together if you don't yet have your concept, you're not ready to jump in and you're not trying to get started right now. If you have anything new that I missed and would like to have added to this, please email me,
[email protected]. All right, here we go. So step one, download the Asana app and make a to do list. Organize your to do list here. Collaborate with your employees when you get them here on Asana. Right now, as I talk, here we go. Create a bank account, put $500 in it, plus the cost of whatever equipment you're going to need. Get a debit card, only use this for business. No meals. Hopefully you have a name. The domain name is available. Don't go to GoDaddy.com. Don't use Squared Space or Wix because it looks cheap at first and it's easy, but they'll hit you for $50 a month forever. They'll raise prices on you quickly too. You're stuck with them. So for the website, go to iPage.com, hosting for $3 a month. Buy three years of it if you're really confident in your idea. Because as soon as the amount that you buy runs up, price is going to go up. Domain registration is included. So now you're going to install WordPress onto your website. Install the Yoast SEO plugin onto that WordPress. Install some other plugins as well. We'll go over that later. So now you're going to optimize each page according to this Yoast SEO plugin. Quick thing on SEO. Visit trends.google.com. It tells you the relative search volume from zero to 100. You can compare terms. You can learn your market. You can tell when the busy times are in your market. You can tell what SEO terms you need to target on your website. Focus on them. So watch YouTube videos on how to work with WordPress. It's a great tool. We don't have nearly enough time to go into it right now. Next step, go to fiverr.com with two hours and get a simple logo created. Make sure you tell whoever you choose that you want it very simple, small. They always try to do too much. They always try to make it too fancy. You also might want to get some media on here. That's up to you. Now, go to TJ Maxx or look in your closet and get a professional polo shirt and get a local embroider to put that logo on it. Should cost less than 50 bucks. When it comes time to buy a parallel, you are your employees, you owe four year employees. The t-shirtland.com. It's the cheapest around. We buy everything there. So now you're going to get a professional headshot. I don't care where you get it, but you're going to put it on your site. You're going to put it on some of your other media outlets. Now, you got your website going on WordPress. You're going to need a few major, a few main pages. The first one is the about us. This is where you put the picture of you. You personalize this page. The person who reads it should get to know you, should like you, should root for you, should know your story, should know a little bit about what you do. Next page you need. The services page. Why? Where? How? What makes us special? What we're going to do for you? The next page, pricing. Explain the way you charge, how you charge, and why you charge that way. Next one. Contact us. A page to contact you. Your phone number. A form. To an email. Whatever you want to do on that page. Now, next big step here is you're going to create a Google account. This Google account is going to have tons of aspects to it. You're going to use it for almost everything that you do. Each of these apps that I tell you about right now, you're going to set up an account, and you're also going to download it to your phone. There's Gmail. Obviously, now we have Google Voice. Now we have Google My Business, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google AdWords, and YouTube, which is owned by Google. Let's briefly talk about email. We'll keep this simple. So, you're going to create an email address on your iPage account under your domain. Your first name at yourbusinessdomain.com. Create a forward to your Gmail. Now, go in Settings on your Gmail and set up Send Email as and set up your domains email. Okay, so now you can send email from your name at yourbusiness.com from your Gmail. You can use your Gmail to do, to receive the mail from there as well. Now, create a professional signature. Your address, your Google Voice phone number, your email address, your title, and for title, don't put CEO. You look like an egomaniac put owner. Okay, that's enough on email for now. Now, voice.google.com, go there and create a business phone number. You can put letters in there. You can put numbers in there. Use your local area code, and you can have it forwarded to your cell phone. Okay, you can create a voicemail. You can create hours of operations. You can set different voicemail messages for different hours. You can text customers, and you can do all this from your computer or your phone. It's awesome. Okay, now go to business.google.com and set up your My Business account. Download the app on your phone. You send a postcard to your house. Send a postcard to all your friends homes. Wherever you want to send postcards, and wherever you want to have a location, wherever you want to have a presence, you set up as a Google My Business location. Okay, this is where Google's, this is where customers search Google Maps, and you show up. To build a profile here, build it, nourish it, make posts, get reviews, a big part of your SEO, and your advantage over your competitors comes from this. So, the next tool is Google Calendar. Download the app on your phone, keep all your appointments on here, and it syncs with everything. You get your reminders. All that good stuff. Now, Google Drive is the best tool for staying organized. You're going to upload everything here. Remember, you are paperless. You're going to get a scanner and printer. I like the Brother MFC-L2700, okay, it's a printer scanner. Now, your Google Drive account is where you're going to stay organized. You're going to organize everything here. You're going to title everything correctly, so you can search it and instantly find it. Okay, you're going to buy a shredder and shred everything once it goes up on Google Drive. Don't keep paper anywhere, throw everything away. Okay, so, go to the Google Drive homepage, and you're going to create a folder. Title it, expenses, and projections. In this folder, create another folder, title it, receipts. Put all your receipts in here from your online purchases or whatever else you buy. Okay, now, go back and create a new document in this folder titled, Proforma. We'll talk about this later. This is going to be your estimated cash flows. You're going to have all of your budgeting items in here. How much money you're going to spend, how much money you're going to make, on a month-to-month basis. This is important. Okay, now, create a new document, still in the expense folder, and title it, MyLidge. Now, you're going to keep track of every mile you drive. This needs to be very accurate. The name of the vehicle, starting with diameter, ending with diameter, starting location, indestination, total miles. This is your most valuable tax deduction early on. You're going to get to write off 55 cents a mile for this. We'll talk more about taxes later. Don't put your fuel to your car on your company credit card, instead write off these MyLidge. This MyLidge, it's much, much more valuable to you. So fill this spreadsheet up with as many miles as you can. All right, next, theanalytics.google.com. This is the account to track traffic to your website, so you're going to add the analytics code to your WordPress header. Now, there's tons of YouTube videos explaining you how to do this. This tracks who visits your website, from where, and for how long. Okay, where they came from, what link they clicked, if they were organic traffic. This is all extremely valuable. Set up conversion tracking, if you are going to schedule customers, or make sales on your website. Okay, last but not least, you're going to go to youtube.com, all right? This is an account for video, and you're going to record a video of you in your polo talking about your service. Title it very search friendly, your town name, your buzzwords, okay? Now upload it, do it again, and again, and again, and as many, make as many videos about you and about your company as you can. This is going to help your search a lot, okay? Now, get your first five customers to write reviews on your Google place. Okay, that's important. And the last one is AdWords, okay, Google AdWords are, for marketing, we're going to get more into this later. You can look up tons of resources on this, but it's basically paid search, okay? In some, non-competitive service businesses, you can get cheap costs per click, but that's a whole other, that's a whole other kind of worms that we're not going to open up right now. Okay, now you're going to need to set up a QuickBooks online account, QBO.intuit.com, you're going to link your bank account here, you're going to keep track of all of your expenses here, you're going to categorize your expenses here, watch a youtube video on how to organize your QuickBooks at first, okay? You're going to want to categorize things right, you're going to have a mess on your hands later on. All your expenses need to be in here, all your income needs to be in here, you'll know where you are all the time, okay? You're also going to want to set up your phone to send and receive emails from your professional email address, okay? You're going to copy your great email signature on here, you're going to put it on your phone settings so you can send business emails mobile. All right, now let's talk about taking payment. So I always advise you to be able to accept credit cards right off the bat. Recurring billing for subscription or scheduled services is always important, you're going to want to not mess with accepting checks, you're going to want to just be able to build these credit cards monthly, okay? You can use Stripe to do this. There's an industry-specific platform for a ton of different industries. For self-storage, we were able to get a company called StorageRentPayment.com, they negotiated a rate for us, we actually could accept credit cards at 1.9%. A lot of other industries have the same thing, but you might have to pay a little bit more, you might need to pay 2.9% at first. It's worth it. Trust me. Now you can use Stripe. You can accept credit card when you're out servicing customers, all right? And listen, that's it, you're ready. You're ready to operate. You don't have an LLC yet. You don't have anything fancy. Go out, start selling. You're in business. Get out and grind. Implement the marketing plan. Get customers. Offer your services. Bring in revenue. All right, so now let's talk briefly about software for operations. There's a lot out of the box software that you can buy now. 15 years ago, Custom Software, get out your checkbook, $50,000 minimum, and you need a few admin staff to put it in there. Okay, now you can go right out of the box. Jobber is a great one for the service industry. Okay, it allows you to interact with your customers. You can make appointments on there. You can automatically send invoices on there. Sends reminders for customers to pay. You can take pictures of what you're servicing. It can organize everything. Works for several employees, too, if you end up growing. Make advantage of that. Business starts to pick up a bit. You're doing more work. Looks like you're going to pursue this. Try to make it happen. Now the next thing you're going to want to do is register your business. I recommend creating a Delaware LLC, putting a simple one person operating agreement in place, and then register your business to do business in your state. Note that the Delaware LLC is not for tax purposes. It's for liability purposes. The State of Delaware has the best liability laws there is to protect small business owners. Okay, so your Delaware LLC registered to do business in Georgia or Indiana or California or wherever you are. Now we'll talk more about this stuff later, but you're going to want to elect to be taxed as an S-Corp, which means the profits pass through to you at income rates, income tax rates. So no payroll for yourself is needed yet. We'll do an episode later or several episodes about taxes. Now you'll want a general liability policy. This can be basic with lowish limits, but you're going to want to think about your financial picture, how much do you have to lose, how much do you want to protect, work with an insurance agent to set up a basic general liability policy. Alright, now you're operating a little bit more. You're ready to make your first hire. You're definitely going to want to keep accurate payroll records as well as the record of the role of each employee, what exactly they're doing, whether it's administration or field work so that you don't get overbilled later when your payroll, when your workers' conversation gets audited. You're also going to want disability insurance and unemployment insurance. Usually this is automatically deducted when you run payroll, okay, but you still need to register for them and get codes with your state or municipality in a lot of cases. Look into this based on where you are. Now, when it comes to payroll and onboarding services, I recommend Gusto, okay, onboarding is complicated. You have W2s, you have I9s for every employee, if you're trying to run around and get this stuff in paper and upload it to your Google Drive, you can do it, but I recommend letting Gusto handle it all. They can fill out their I9s, they can fill out their W2s right from their phone. It's stored there with them. The uploading of these employees is easy, okay? You're never going to give cash, employees give employees cash on to the table. It's illegal and you are putting yourself at risk if they get hurt, okay? Gusto's easy to manage from everywhere and there's a lot less hassle involving Gusto than trying to do payroll yourself. All right. Now, let's talk about mobile time tracking. There's apps that your employees can download on their phone that track their location and all their hours, okay? So they clock in on their phone, you get pinged location data of where they are the entire time that they work, okay? They clock out. They put in what they did if you want them to do that, okay? This sinks with Gusto and payroll is simple. It's awesome. Now, communication method, Slack is what everybody uses to communicate among their team. It's efficient, it's better than calling, it's better than texting, just have a strict policy about banter on there to keep everyone from distracting everyone on your team. Now, let's talk about purchasing. You need some equipment, you might need a cargo van, you might need a pressure washer, whatever you need. Now, Craigslist is the place, Facebook Marketplace is also growing fast. Now, as far as a cargo van, which is suitable to so many different businesses, I recommend the Ford E-150 lineup, it used to be called the Ocon line, now it's E-150, 253, 50 to ping on how big it is, you can get them extended as well if you need more space. These vans are amazing and they are so cheap used. When we first started storage squad back in 2012, we purchased 10 of these things over the next couple of years. Now, you have a checklist to what to look for when you're buying these used vans. I can share that with you if you'd like. It's
[email protected] as my email. I can send you my van checklist, what to look for, how to shop for the van. When you get there, you're touching your feeling the van, what do you do? Okay, we had a budget of $3,000 for a van. We paid cash for all of them. We got eight to 12-year-old vans and they ran great, okay? They can haul a trailer, they're half the price of a truck of the same year, and half of them are still running today and our business eight years later, without new engines, without new transmissions, they're still making us money. It's a great investment. Okay, so last thing here I'm going to talk about is my mobile office setup, the tools you need that will make your life a little bit easier while you're on the road. Okay, the world is your office, you don't have an office right now. You're going to get a secondary screen for your laptop that runs on USB power, so you can have two screens, you can be way more efficient and you can plug it right into your computer to get its power while you're on the road. Okay, now get an adapter for your vehicle that plugs into your cigarette outlet and then you can plug in your laptop charger and your phone charger or whatever else you need to from the road, from your vehicle, from anywhere. Okay, now AirPods made a huge difference for me. I could answer calls, I was hands-free, it was a game changer, I loved it. So there you have it, that's the tool belt. You're ready to make some cash, you're ready to get after it, you're ready to learn the business. So there's the basics, thank you for listening. We're going to take a break from our regular scheduled programming here and I've been getting a lot of questions in. So sometimes this weekend I'm going to try to record a podcast on me answering some of your questions. Again, submit questions to me at
[email protected]. Thank you for listening and have a good one. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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