Be The Bank

014 - Optimizing Your Business

August 12, 2020 Justin Bogard & Super E Season 2 Episode 14
Be The Bank
014 - Optimizing Your Business
Show Notes Transcript

2 Wealth Show S2 Ep14 – Optimizing Your Business

On Episode 14, Justin Bogard and Super E discuss ways to optimize your business.

Key Takeaways:  

  1. KPI's
  2. Trending Hashtags
  3. Geo Fencing and SEO Marketing 

 Resources and links discussed  

Sponsored By: Integrated Health Solutions

We are passionate about your health and wellness and we know you want to enjoy a vibrant, pain-free, active lifestyle, but when you are in pain this seems almost impossible. 

In order to be pain-free, move fluidly, and enjoy an optimal level of functionality, you need a personalized yet integrated, research based and clinically proven approach and that’s what we do.  

To learn more visit us at
ihsindy.com
cryotherapyindy.com 

About the Hosts 

Justin Bogard – Note Investor specializing in performing Residential Real Estate Debt. He finds deals and acquires them for his own portfolio as well as educates investors while walking them through the process of owning a Real Estate Note!  

Super E – Real Estate Investor specializing in short-term rentals and the management of them. She connects investors with short-term tenants and manages everything in-between.

Connect with the Hosts: 

  • @2wealthshow – Facebook/Instagram 
  • @wealth_show - Twitter 
Justin Bogard:

Music. Welcome to the, two wealth show a show that shares how you can create real wealth for you and your family. I'm one of your hosts, Justin Bogard. And my cohost is Elizabeth Sickles, AKA super E. I am a real estate note investor specializing in performing residential real estate debt. I find the deals acquire them for my own portfolio, as well as educate investors while walking them through the process of owning a real estate note, my cohost super E, a real estate investor specializing in short term rentals in the management of them. She connects investors with short term tenants and manages everything in between. Our show is sponsored by bright path notes and Elizabeth Maora. You can find out more information by visiting our websites at brightpathnotes.com and elizabethmaora.com. Hey everybody. This is Justin Bogard from BrightPath notes, cohost on the two wealth show. It's episode 14. So what do you think about that? Elizabeth?

Elizabeth Maora:

I'm excited and I am Elizabeth with Elizabeth. Maora very happy to be here. And I want to mention that our show is, or this episode is sponsored by integrative health solutions. So they are passionate about your health and wellness and know that you want to enjoy a vibrant and pain-free active lifestyle. But when you are in pain, this almost seems impossible. So in order to be, pain-free have more fluidity and enjoy an optimal level of functionality. You need a personalized yet integrated research based clinically proven approach. And that's what they do at integrated health solutions. So you can visit them at ihsindy.com Or cryotherapyindy.com and dr. Charbel and his staff is absolutely fantastic.

Justin Bogard:

Absolutely. They are top notch. I love it. Every time I get to go in there, get adjustment, do acupuncture. Couldn't speak more highly of them. So if you're in the Indianapolis area, looking for a chiropractor, excuse me, an acupuncturist. If that's the name, um, check them out for sure.

Elizabeth Maora:

And I get to do cryotherapy this week. So I'm excited.

Justin Bogard:

Yeah. You get to be frozen and thawed out. That's right. It's fun. It's fun. It's a neat experience. You blood and everything just rushes, right. When you get done with it's pretty cool. So Elizabeth, today, I thought we could discuss, um, kind of optimizing your business and looking at the numbers and just kind of understanding, you know, what do you have one to two properties or whether you have a portfolio of several hundred properties or if you're managing things or if you're in a note business, um, all in, all in this game, we got to know the numbers, right. Because if we aren't making money, we're losing money. Right. That's right. Right. So, and also I wanted to give a shout out to you and myself. Um, we got over 250 downloads right now. Thanks everybody. Yeah. Thank you very much. Absolutely. Thanks for watching this show when he watched it and thanks for listening. So that's just the listening part. That's just the podcast downloads that we have. So pretty cool. Yes, it is. All right. Super E let's talk about some stuff that you actually learned recently. You were just telling me about it before the show.

Elizabeth Maora:

Yes. So I have hired a consultant. So they help with getting your businesses, whatever you need help in, they help us. So I was on a conference call and what they're talking about. No, we're just after. So this is August. We're just after mid year, which is July and it's, what are your numbers? What's your KPI. That's key performance indicator. So what's great about this is it doesn't matter what your business is. And just like Justin said, whether you're brand new or you're an avid investor, these are great things to know, and to be able to measure yourself against. So what are your goals? Where are you trending this year?

Justin Bogard:

Absolutely. So KPIs. So in your business, Elizabeth KPIs are measured probably in several different factors because you're managing things. You have different vendors you're using on each property to keep track of things. You're also having income coming in. You're having a lot of expenses going out. There's a lot of taxes that need to be paid and things like that. So your numbers, you need to be dialed in, I'm sure in your business more than anything, because you have a lot of moving parts in incoming and outgoing and all this flow. So how do you keep it all together? What, what's one of the tricks that you, that you use to help you understand at the end of the day, did you make money?

Elizabeth Maora:

Sure. So one of the things is now what I have done is once a month, I designate, I call it financial Friday. So it's where I go through and look at every absolutely everything. So where is my money going out? Where's my money coming in? What money am I making? Right. Who's costing me the most. Who's making me the most money, what properties, all that, all that type of stuff. So I would encourage you to definitely block that time out, turn your phone off and just focus on your finances and make sure too that even if you have an accountant or a CPA, that's doing your books, a bookkeeper, which I do, but I always look over the credit card statements every month. I mean, we buy so much stuff, but just last month, because I, I actually did my financial stuff on Saturday instead of financial Friday. But, um, one of my vendors charged me three times. Um, this is a normal vendor that I use. So, so it's so important just to do that quick. And it literally took me not even a minute just to scan through real quick. Okay. Yep. All that looks correct, but not that enough, not three

Justin Bogard:

That's. That's funny. You mentioned about credit cards because that just jogs something to mine. Mine recently that happened is that my credit card got hacked for the company. Whoa. Okay. So because, um, I do our financial overlook is on a monthly basis. We don't have a lot of outgoing, uh, costs per se, as you do, but a lot of incoming, incoming, um, money profit, you know, but when I do look on my credit card every single day, I do look at the bank statements every single day, just to check on that because it does happen and it can't happen. And actually our, our bank card, our checking account actually got hacked into as well. I don't know if they hacked into, but it was, we had these just anomaly charges that just showed up. And it was really odd. They weren't large amounts of money, but they were just small amounts. So on the credit card, I saw things from like California, like at a restaurant or like a Costco gas station and stuff. And so that was my red flag. And because I have a, I have a capital one card, it was pretty easy to contact them and let them know that that wasn't me. And they just immediately shut off a card. They sent out a new one and they have some sort of features built into them to where a lot of the major vendors that we use, they were able to tab my old card. And then my new card was automatically put into their system somehow. And so they, they were able to continue my monthly reoccurring charges that happen on some of the big vendors that we use, um, across the country, which was kind of neat. And then also what I learned Elizabeth, is that, because that happened, we found out that capital one specifically because we're using them, they have these virtual cards now that you can dedicate for certain merchants that you use. So if that virtual card got hacked or got exposed, somehow you could immediately, um, get rid of, and they would just give you a new virtual card number. So everything links to your actual real credit card, but then they have these virtual card numbers. I said, that's a really good idea because then you can have a different virtual number for every merchant you use theoretically, or I guess you can use the same one, but then it would just turn off and on. So that way your hard, you know, your actual real credit card, you wouldn't have to replace because they wouldn't have that information. Right. Right. And so if you just use it like to swipe at a gas station or like at a store, that's the only time your credit card would be, you know, of, I guess, potentially be compromised. Wow. I had to throw that I had to throw that in there. Cause it happened recently and just want people to look out for. So if you're looking at your credit card statements every day where your credit card, you know, whatever your transaction list is, if you look on almost people can see them online, Raven, your bank, your bank card, or your checking account, you know, check that stuff over almost daily to find those anomalies, it's easier to spot them.

Elizabeth Maora:

Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, you know, you might be thinking, especially if you're a new investor and you hear, Oh, well I'm supposed to have my team together and should my bookkeeper look at that or my accountant, or even if you are a seasoned investor, I have a very good friend of mine who has a$10 million business. She's all self-made and she is the only one that does her finances. So nobody's going to look after your finances like you are. Yeah. So just set that time aside.

Justin Bogard:

Yeah. So that brings up a good point. So a lot of people, um, talk about how they have a bookkeeper, cause we have a bookkeeper for our business. I know you do for yours and you have a CPA as well, and we have a CPA and that ours is the same, the same company that does both of those. And just because you send your books or your, your stuff to somebody doesn't mean you still shouldn't look it over before you send it to them. So what we do is we look over our statements. Like we talk about daily, just, you know, just because there's not a lot of transactions to look through, it takes like, you know, five or 10 minutes to look at all the different statements that we have or transactions that we have like on a daily basis. So then we can see those anomalies. And then we know that when we print our statements at the end of the month and we hand them to, um, the bookkeeper so that they align all the stuff and put them in. Well, we use QuickBooks that it's just easy to catch things or to maybe, um, give an explanation as to this weird transaction or this, this flow of money came from here and went to there and this is what happened. So then they can break it apart and make sure that they're doing your expenses and your income correctly. Cause you don't want to miss a categorize, something to where it costs you more taxes, whereas opposed you can make your tax liability lower, which is always the reason why you have a professional look at stuff and dive into it. Cause you know, we don't know all the ways we can take advantage of taxes, liabilities, and expenses. So

Elizabeth Maora:

Yes, when I heard someone that has their own business as well, that this person she said, Oh, I just, I do my own taxes with um, Oh, with turbo tax. I'm like, don't, don't do that. It's fine. If your personal taxes are easy, but if you have a business man pay that person, do it because they know. And especially with how the tax laws are changing so quickly for businesses, they can say, they're going to save you. So therefore make you way more money than what they're just doing it on your own. So

Justin Bogard:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. Just a few, a few hundred dollars. It seems like to get a program or a subscription or whatnot and to hire a bookkeeper or a CPA to go through it for the year. It's definitely it's well, well, well, well worth it because they can save you definitely more than the amount of money that you spend on that. So that's a recommendation, but don't just think you're just handing it off to them. And they figured out because they're not going to know what to do specifically in certain situations because they're not the ones that are charging things or seeing income coming in and they just look at numbers and they balance it out. So at the, at the end of the month, Elizabeth, we go over cashflow statements, we go over profit loss statements and we go and we go over, um, a different general ledger, I think, um, as well, and look at the numbers in different directions. We don't have like a KPI sheet, so to speak, so to speak. But we do look at the numbers a couple of different ways and we do it on a monthly basis. And we look back one year from this month and say, what was the comparisons to the year before? And then obviously as a cumulative year, we go from January to now. And then we say, what did that look like this time? And what did that look like in 2019? And we, and we just figure out what we're doing, how we're moving forward, because, um, we start pulling salaries now. So because of one of our corporations, we have an S corporation now. And so that's one of the ways that we figure out what we want our base salaries to be is based on our cashflow and our, really our profit as we're making it through the year. So we know we can sustain a certain base salary for, for whoever needs it. Right.

Elizabeth Maora:

Absolutely. And you know, and while we're kind of, we're, you know, we're obviously we're in this mid year, we're in August. Now, the other thing that that's really important to look at is okay, even if you don't exactly know what's going on with your numbers. Maybe you're just getting all this other stuff. But the other thing is, is where, where do you need to pivot? So for example, for me, I've added on a whole new segment on my business and we're doing cleaning now for the short term rentals for residential and for commercial as well. So you don't have to just say, Hey, I'm just doing, I'm just doing X. You can expand that. So where, you know, and even with Justin really like what other, where are where's money that you're leaving on the table? Cause you have all this knowledge. So there's an, there's still so much money out there. There's a lot of people hurting, but there's a lot of people that have a, still have a lot of extra income coming in.

Justin Bogard:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So what other, what other factors can we help optimize our businesses or help our listeners or viewers optimize their business?

Elizabeth Maora:

I think in, in one thing as well is if, if any of you all are doing social media, it's looking at what are the trending hashtags. And also if you're going to, for us, we, um, you know, we go down a couple of different paths because of university, but then we have clients and we have guests and now we have cleaning, you know, so with the posts, we're very diligent on, okay, this type of post, depending on who we're going after, these are the hashtags that we use. So we have actually, we have five different sets of hashtags that we use depending on the post.

Justin Bogard:

That's awesome. I'm glad you pointed that out because it's so funny that before social media really hit its, its greatest stride. I don't know how many years ago that was. But before that, traditionally, what people would do for marketing is like either if they're big companies, they'll be doing TV ads, they'll be doing radio ads or they'll be, be doing very large mailing, physical mailing campaigns or even email campaigns. And it's like at the end of the day, social media is free, but it's a cost, a lot of money to generate good social media stuff. You've brought up hashtags, which are a great way to get into people's feeds, um, using, they call it. Um, I don't know if it's it's SEO marketing, but it's more like geo-fencing SEO marketing. You want to tell our listeners what that stands for, Oh sorry, search engine optimization. And so that's a way now that we realize people are on their phones, a heck of a lot more on a mobile device or on a computer way more than they were before the pandemic. So now at the pandemics going on and most people are either quarantined or more quarantine than when they were before. Um, you know, after March happened. So that's what you need to focus on and take advantage of in your marketing stream. It's great. If you send out mail, it still works. It's an, it's an old school way to do marketing, but with emails and with Facebook and with Instagram and LinkedIn for, for business people, those are the main channels. What you have to get to, to, to reach an audience that otherwise wouldn't see you and it's free that part, but generating it and spending the time doing it is, is very time consuming, but it's well worth it because that's how we get to people, the quickest. And that's how we get to the people with the most, uh, reach because once somebody likes it or comments on it, it's organic and it goes out beyond that. So because you send a piece of mail to somebody and hit their mailbox, you know, how many other people are going to see that just the people in that household. Right. But what's cool about this technology and geo-fencing and SEO marketing, by the way, geo fencing is just, um, for example, on Facebook, if you do an ad on Facebook and you want to, um, advertise something that people would want after they go see, um, you know, any event that would happen at a, at an arena, like a, let's just say Disney on ice. And no, we're not doing that right now, but Disney on ice will be a very popular thing for families to go to. And then after they leave the venue, you would put a geo fence like a, an invisible fence around that area, on anybody that had Facebook or open it up with, see your advertisement. So if you want to advertise to them, that'd be a great way to do it. And at a certain time as well when the, when the show ended. So it's just really interesting and fascinating how technology has changed the way we can do digital marketing. Really.

Elizabeth Maora:

Absolutely. And even if your head is kind of exploding because you don't know any of the, any of that stuff, it's okay. You just get started. I mean, even like when I first started the business, I would just take pictures and put it on Instagram. And if it linked to my Facebook Elizabeth, Maora page, so you don't have to be an expert in all of this and as your business grows and as you find out in real estate, what you really love to do, then you can really hone in on that. But the biggest thing is to just get started, don't wait.

Justin Bogard:

And it is overwhelming and you're not alone because every entrepreneur or small business person that does this stuff, they're just like, I don't know what to do. And the first thing to do is they try to find the experts who do it. And that's what you do just like for your bookkeeping and your accounting. You're not going to, you, shouldn't be trying to do your accounting yourself. You shouldn't have a professional person do it like a, like a CPA or a, I don't know if a tax attorneys do that, but tax attorneys are people you want to have in your, in your wheelhouse, so to speak so that you can go to them when you have problems. Cause I know I've been audited before. Um, when I first started and it's good to have a CPA or tax attorney that can help navigate you through like, Oh, that's not really a problem. They just didn't, um, category to categorize this right. When you sent in your taxes and the IRS, like, Oh, okay, that makes sense. You know, so it could be as simple as that. Um, but yet at the end of the day, your, your accounting and your marketing are two major pieces of the puzzle for especially real estate businesses like Elizabeth and mine to where that's probably the bulk of my, um, expenses is what I go to to have somebody else manage for me because it's just, it can be very time consuming, but if you have somebody else do it, that's an expert in it, man. It makes you look like you're a 10 story building pretty quickly. And you, you get a return on your investment pretty quickly. I at least I think so.

Elizabeth Maora:

Yes, absolutely. You know, so the questions to be thinking about and asking yourself is where, where do I want to be right now? But where am I actually in? What do I need to do to get to where I want to be? Um, so, you know, and even despite through this pandemic and everything that's going on again, there's, there's always opportunity. There's always ways to, to make money, even if, even if you're driving for DoorDash, if you're, if you're doing something like that, there's ways to use that money and help that to get you into the real estate business. If you're not in real estate yet, because all those dollars add up for sure.

Justin Bogard:

Yeah. And always be networking. Somebody asks you what you, what you do. You definitely better come up with the 10, second pitch or a 60 second pitch or whatever, how long you have to talk to you ready for it. Cause I learn that quickly when I was in the business and I started trying to explain what I do and I would explain it in a way that people that aren't in real estate wouldn't understand. I'm just thinking like, man, what am I doing? Like, it doesn't make any sense to talk to somebody in a different language, right? You need to talk to them in their language. So you need to figure out what you do, what you specialize in, what, how you can solve somebody's problem. And that is your elevator pitch. So

Elizabeth Maora:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah.

Justin Bogard:

A lot of topics we kind of got off track a little bit, but I think we, we brought it back together at the end.

Elizabeth Maora:

That's right.

Justin Bogard:

Yeah. At the end of the day we have to optimize our businesses and Elizabeth, I'm sure you agree with me, but it's, it's ever changing. Isn't it? You always have to figure out what's, what's the direction marketing is going. What are people liking to receive? And how can you put that in front of them and make you stand out? Um, you know, make you stand out in front of your competition.

Elizabeth Maora:

That's right. That's exactly right. Um, yeah, because people need to spend money and they want to spend money. They're going to spend it with somebody. So might as well be you. Yeah. Yeah. Might as well be you right two wealth. Elizabeth. This is episode number 14, optimizing your business. We got over 250 downloads. That's amazing. And um, I just really appreciate everyone that listens to our podcast and watches us on our YouTube channels. So, and also don't forget to check out our YouTube channel to watch this episode, episode number 14, brithPath notes, YouTube channel or Elizabeth Maora's YouTube channel as well. So I'm Justin Bogard from BrightPath notes And Elizabeth with Elizabeth Maora All right, until next time guys, see you. Thank you.

Justin Bogard:

Two wealth show is produced by just a Bogard and super E it's sponsored by BrightPath notes and Elizabeth Maora. Thanks for listening and watching our show.