Good morning, good morning, everybody. We are here for another episode, and it is December 26th. And if you're here, that means you're a business owner, maybe you're an aspiring business owner, and you're unsure and where you need to go to uncover obstacles, or maybe you just want some tips, strategies to maybe reach that next level as you head into the new year. Well, you're in the right spot. Business Unscripted Podcast, where we help business owners like you learn from our experiences, as well as you know, we give some tips and advice, and we also bring on guests that are in the industry to go into your journey. We've gone through your journey. So that's why we're here. So grab grab your favorite cup of Joe. Let's jump into the show. So I'm solo today. Hopefully, DeWarren may probably recovering from I'm assuming recovering from a crazy Christmas with family, but we're here, and I hope everybody had a safe, memorable, wonderful, full day with their families, filled with memories, and you know, was able to enjoy. We here near Cleveland, we did not have a uh white Christmas this year, but that's okay. It was a fun, it was uneventful, it was good, relaxing, amazing day. So I hope you had an amazing Christmas. And so in today's episode, there's a couple things that as we wrap up the new year, or the old year, I guess you want to call it, heading into the new year, a couple things to I wanted to you know kind of quickly touch on and review as we as we look back, but also how we look forward. And a couple things recently that if you are in my network on LinkedIn, if you're not find me on LinkedIn. But uh, we have a newsletter out on LinkedIn called Cash Flow Stories, and every two or three times a week, we're we're posting articles about specific topics or strategies that can help you as a business owner get a better understanding of what you need to do to get better knowledge, insights, and focus when it comes to your finances. Now, as you grow, this is something that you want to outsource, especially if it's not a strength of yours, because you need to focus on the areas of your business where you're gonna make the most money. And a lot of that time is not spent doing admin back end office work. So follow that letter, newsletter, sorry, over on LinkedIn called Cashflow Stories and get some insights every single two times a week. And some of the things I want to talk about is a couple things that I posted recently in that um newsletter. And the first I think that resonated with a lot of people is if you are not paying attention to the payment terms that you're offering, you're essentially becoming like this zero interest bank for your clients, for your customers. And I've had this come up with multiple clients where they give their customers 30, 60, even sometimes 90-day payment terms when it destroys your own cash flow. And here's a simple kind of way to think about it. You know, if you allow somebody to pay you back in 90 days for a service that you've already provided, you have to front that money for 90 days, the salary, the cost of materials, if you have, you know, material cost, the cost of your own time, right? And not only that, if you now have to go out and get a loan or some sort of, you know, and I've seen it happen as well. Some people fall into another thing we're gonna talk about a little later, right? You fall into these zero interest, you know, kind of offers that land into your mailbox just when you think you need it. And you and what happens is now your customers get 90 days to pay you, but you're left holding the cash bill, right? You're left with that hole in your cash flow. So ultimately, when you give them these 90 days or 60 day terms, you are now giving them a 0% interest loan. And what that means is now you're actually discounting your services, right? Because essentially there's baked-in interest now in your service. And so what you need to do is if you are currently giving these 30, 60, 90-day invoicing terms to your clients, what you need to focus on first is one, understand how you can communicate to them, right, that you're changing your policy. Going into a new year is a great way to look at that. First, you can send them an email notification, right? Send them, send them an email, just update, say, hey, by the way, you know, effective, and I wouldn't do January 1st because it's too close. You want to give at least a 30, 45-day notice, right? On invoicing, go and and and send an email, especially if you're like one-on-one client. Effective February 1st, we're changing our invoicing, and all of our invoicing are gonna be gonna be due 30 days out. And implement a late charge. So many people are hesitant on a late charge. If you don't provide these sort of fees, you're training your customers how to react to your business. You're training your customers to not pay you on a timely basis. So you have to implement these. And so if you don't have these implemented, again, this could be in the same notification. But implement some sort of fee, whether it's 5% or $25, whatever's great or whatever it ends up being. But send that notification out. Effective February 1st, March 1st, whatever you feel you want to do, we're changing our invoicing to a maximum 30 days. And if it's not paid in 30 days from the due date, from the invoice date, you know, there's gonna be a late charge. Now, some of your clients are probably gonna push back, especially the ones that are in ID dates, but you have to just let them know like, you know, that's okay. Like if you want longer date, longer terms, we're gonna add a little bit of a premium on that, right? Add a little bit of additional you know, fee, right, for financing, etc., whatever it ends up being. You're more than happy to give them that term, but you're gonna add a little bit of financing that covers your cost for carrying that money. So, Fred, welcome, sir. And then with that in mind, as before we kind of continue on with this, if anybody's watching and you have any questions, you know, maybe you're running a business and you really are in this situation and you know how to change it, drop a question down below. We're more than happy to answer them, you know, live on the show, or if you are watching a replay right now and you want to have a question on this, drop it down and we're we're we're checking our comments at all times. So, again, we have 20 years, you know, for myself, over 20 years in in corporate finance entrepreneurship, and and we're here helping you, the business owner, kind of overcome some of these situations that we're facing. And so I see this all the time with with owners. And the client right now, we're we're working through this because he's feels tight on tight on cash, right? And the reason was was one, he was waiting till the end of the month to invoice for these services that were reoccurring every single week. And then on top of that, he then was giving them a 30 or a 45-day window. So now he's literally giving them essentially almost 60 to 75 days of free money, and he's got to carry all that cost. So the first thing that we did was one, we invoiced a more, we we sorry, we changed the invoicing to be of a weekly frequency. So at least now he's invoicing at the end of the week and still giving some of his clients 30 or 45-day terms, but now he's got four or five invoices going out every month instead of one, right? So that was the first thing we changed with them. So that's you, and you only invoice at the end of the month. The first thing you should do is start invoicing every single week. And then the second thing was we started invoicing, we only started implementing the late fees. Late fees were important. Just with the fact that he implemented was able to kind of say, hey, like, hey, like if we're gonna continue to pay me late, you're gonna start paying a $25 charge on top of every invoice. People started paying. And so that's a big thing, it's a big sort of emotional shift with people. So that's number one. So that we we just kind of put that one out recently about talking about you know, stop being the interest re bank for your customers. If you're gonna sit there and you're going to give them all this free money, at least, at least get some sort of premium for giving them payment terms. So at least you can do. And so what that then does for a lot of owners who are fronting a lot of this cash, a lot of your payment processors, especially nowadays, it's you know, in this period of time, your Christmas, they feel like you probably want a lot of you know, some extra funding, some extra cash flow. So you've probably seen these offers. If you use a Striper, you use a Square, or any of these payment processes, even QuickBooks, you've probably seen the offer for a no interest one-time fee cash advance, or in real terms, a loan. And a couple of clients have sent me one. One we put out in the newsletter, we put out in a video on our YouTube channel here, specifically from Stripe. And it was a $2,000 cash advance, and it came with a one-time fee, so there's no interest on it, one-time fee of $290. And it required you to pay back 22% of all your payments until the loan is paid off. Now, we ran through a quick sort of overview of this. And what you need to do as a business owner in order to understand what these truly mean, you know, and you may see, oh, it's only a little over 10%. Like that's not bad, it's only 10% of my money. But you have to annualize that in order to truly understand what you're paying for that for those funds. So if you in this in this one example, if you had a $2,000 advancement from Stripe and you did $500 average weekly, okay, it would take you about 22 weeks. 22 weeks to pay that off. But you have to understand as well that for those 22 weeks, you're only going to be operating on about $380 when you're typically used to operating on $500. So for half a year, can you operate on a reduction of $120 a month essentially that you are your or sorry, $120 a week that you're losing because you're paying back this loan? And the APR for that, when you annualize it, because you have to annualize these fees as interest, because they are in order to truly understand what amount that you're paying back. At $500 a week, it's modest, it's not too bad, but it ends up being about 36% APR for your money. So for $2,000, you're paying back $1,290, comes out to about 36, 35, 36%. Not too bad. But it gets worse when you do more per week. So when you got went to $1,000 a week average, yes, you cut down the repayment time. But here's the thing that fee stays the same. You don't get a discount for paying it off any earlier. So you're now running $1,000 a week. You pay it off in about half the time. However, your interest rate APR skyrockets to about 70%. So you pay it off quicker, but you still, for that 10 weeks, 11 weeks, instead of getting $1,000, you're getting just under $800. So if you're tight now, bringing in the $1,000 a week, how do you expect yourself to continue for the next 10 weeks operating on $800? So you see why these things can be a trap, even though they they seem like they're right, low cost, it's only 10% of the funds, but over time, it has a bigger impact. So there's a lot of things you have to pay attention to than just what is the fee that you're paying. And it gets worse. If you run $2,000 a week, it you pay it off in five weeks, but the APAR is like 140%. So it's it's it's a trap. And sometimes if there's an ROI related to it, it might make sense to do it. But if you're only taking these and you're and you're looking at these one-time loans or advances that they call it from your payment processors, and you're using those things to pay off events that have already occurred or expenses that have already gone out that you need to bring in the cash flow, you're actually gonna create a negative spiral for your cash flow in your business. Because essentially what you need to look at is yes, you're gonna get the 2,000 now, but you're actually gonna lose over the next 10 to 22 weeks a portion of your cash flow, which then what happens? You end up having to get another advance to pay off the first one, but then you're getting less now, and now you're paying more fees. And what I would say too is if you're ever in a situation and you have one of these things come up and you don't know, right, don't listen to the broker on the other end of the email or the other end of the phone. Right? They make money by you signing and getting this advance, or you signing and taking the loan. Find a third party. Doesn't have to be us, but we're more than happy to help out with that. But find a third party that you trust to review the situation and break it down for you honestly, and that you can talk it through without being emotional. I think that's the biggest thing that you as a business owner, as a CEO, as a you know, president that you need to operate as your business, you have to take the moment to take the emotion out of decisions and look at it, you know, from that perspective of long term, is this the right decision? Or is there other alternatives that I can do in the short term, right? To not have to go and take this advance. And some examples of that that I've talked to others. Renegotiate longer, you know, your contact, your your contracts or your vendor invoices, renegotiate yourself, ask for longer payment terms yourself, right? Get those 45, 60-day payment terms. Awesome. Depending on your business credit, you could essentially get zero interest, right, for 12 months. Well, go ahead and pay those invoices on that 0% interest card or balance transfer. And now you're taking advantage of some of these other terms that you're given as a business owner. The other way you could do it is pay it on a credit card, right? Especially if it's right at the beginning of a period, because you're going to get 30 days and then another probably 15 to 20 days until that bill actually becomes due where there's no interest. So now you're their credit card companies are giving you 45, 50 days of zero interest that you can use to your benefit. Another way is, you know, in those interim. Obviously, the the easiest way is to say go get more clients. But if you're a business owner, you probably know that it's not just as easy as just go signing up people and getting a new client. But you could look at your pricing model. Maybe your pricing model long-term needs to be changed. Maybe you haven't actually reviewed your pricing in a long time, which it leads to another one of the recent articles that we posted, and that is pricing. But we'll get into that a little bit later. So closing up this section of the podcast, do not right take one of these by emotion, whether it's in advance, a BCA, an MCA, whatever they want to call it now. And please, please understand that when somebody says, hey, we don't charge interest, it's cost of funds. That's interest. Just in their own industry laden wording. Right? Anytime you have to pay back more money than you took, it's interest. So please don't fall into this trap of these brokers, these new industry, you know, uh experts telling you, hey, we don't charge interest. This is all interest-free. It's just a cost of funds fee that we charge you. Don't fall for that. Please listen to this, share this, at least just one part share with your network. And here's the thing that they lie to you on. Why it's worse, right? It's way worse because that fee, right? That cost of funds fee, you have to pay that no matter what. Right. Interest you would save if you pay it off early, right? You pay the principal off early, you get you save a lot of your interest. Not with these offerings. With these offerings, no matter when you pay it back, even these things from your payment, your stripes, your squares, even if you pay it back early, you owe them the full fee, which is worse than them charging you interest. But they're trying to make you feel in the emotion of that decision, well, maybe I am saving some interest, so I'm okay. No, you're not. You're actually worse off because you pay it off early, you're still paying the full amount of that fee. And maybe sometimes, yeah, maybe they give you a discount. But in the end, you're paying the full fee. You're paying more interest. Don't get caught up in that trap of them trying to convince you that it's not interest. And there, I we had another podcast, uh, what was it, the day after Thanksgiving, where I had back and forth. It was actually our longest podcast, right? It was about two hours long. Back and forth with one of these brokers who was convinced that just because it doesn't compound, that it's not interest. And you're right, maybe it is, you know, it doesn't compound. Yeah, it's not interest in your terms, but in real world, anything you pay above a loan principal, you're paying back its interest. You have to claim it. If I gave you a loan, and this is how this is one of the if I gave you money, let's say I gave you $2,000 and I told you to give me back $2,500 no matter when you pay it back to me. But you have to pay it back to me in the next six months. Legally, that $500 that I get extra, I have to claim that as income. It's it's interest income on my tax return. So if that's income to me as interest, and you guys have to claim it as some sort of interest income from your clients. I know you're trying not, but you're probably trying to claim it as some something that it's not, it's interest to you as the business owner. What's up, Nick? I'm doing great, man. It is a uh it was a beautiful Christmas, you know, looking to a more successful, amazing new year. Which leads me to our new subject. We started a couple weeks ago talking about the softwares that we use on a regular basis that we can kind of help give you guys some insights on what we're using and go check it out. So last week we talked about repurpose.io, which is a great platform. If you guys like and you do a lot of video and you share it to a bunch of different of your networks and your social platforms, it is a great way for you to automate. Made a lot of that. And then the week before that, we talked, we were talking about granola. And granola is a note-taking app that it doesn't join a meeting, but it listens to your system audio on both sides. And it's also on your your phone. So you can do in-person, you can do phone calls, whatever it is. I use that one on a regular basis now. It's more of a newer one. It's for me beneficial because I, you know, and it prompts me. You know, sometimes a lot of times I'll forget to if I if it's a one-off meeting or if I have to call one of our team members, it prompts me, hey, I we think you're taking, you know, we think you're in a meeting. Do you want to record, right? Or do you want to take notes? And then it becomes a note taker. And the other side of that is that you can create these custom recipes in it that talks to your notes from those meetings. And it doesn't keep any recording or anything like that. It basically just takes a transcript, just like any other software would do. And now you can create these recipes. So one that I have is, you know, for my team members, is a follow-up email, but also action plan, right? So it'll create a document that I can then give detailed steps for my team to take the next step and to work through a solution that we're that we're talking through in that meeting. So and you can customize that any way you want. So granola is another good one. But today, what I wanted to talk about is again kind of playing more, you know, kind of into the video aspect of it. And that is what I call captions. I'm sure you guys have seen it, but I use captions on a regular basis, only because it does save a ton of time on editing. And the beauty of it is that all you have to do is kind of upload like so the short clips. So I'll create the clips and I use that on Wizard. So these two are kind of you know in tandem. But my process would be at the end of a podcast here or any other long form video training, anything that I do that I want to cut into short clips. I will take the link, whether it's uh on YouTube or even here on StreamYard, you can take the link and you can drop it in the Wizard. And Wizard.ai helps you cut down into more relatable. It gives you sort of like a social score too. I don't know how accurate that is, but still, it gives you a social score. But that cuts down into about 20 to 40 clips for long form video. I'll pick the ones that I like and I'll export them. And what I'll do then is I'll put them into captions. And captions then takes the basic cutting editing of a scene that Wizard will do, and it'll drop it into an AI editor as long as it's under 60 seconds. Drop it into an AI edit and add a lot of those transitions, a lot of the sound effects, things like that, as well as the you know, the actual captions on the video, which uh saves a ton of time on my end. I used to do a lot of that manually, so it just saves a ton of time, looks a lot better than I could do it, but it's not changing anything, it's still us doing it. It just saves a lot of time versus you, especially if you're solo or a small team, it's gonna save you a lot of time from editing. And then from there, I export it from captions. And as I talked about with repurpose, um, I just drop it into a Google Drive folder and repurpose is connected to that folder. So anytime there's a new video, it will pick it up and then schedule it to go out through my workflows that I built. And so that's kind of our AI right now. That's our AI video editing sort of process. I spend probably about two hours every week to fill the folder up for the week, and then the system takes the rest of it. So if you're looking and you do a lot of video, or maybe in 2026, you're looking for ways to increase your awareness, increase your outreach, and you want to do more video and you want to do more long form, which is you know going to be your best bet heading into 2026, then that may be your workflow for you. And it's all sort of cost effective. You know, I would say probably with the three of them, I believe you can probably at $100 or less a month for all three platforms, and and and be able to do the work of four, five, six people. So that's how we do our video editing. So we export, go to Vizard, Vizard cuts, then from there, what the ones that we like. We can also edit, right? You can also extend or you know, make your own as well on Vizard, but then from Wizard it goes to captions, and then from captions, Google Drive, which is goes into the repurpose program uh and gets scheduled out across all of our workflows. So if you're looking to do more video, let me know down below if you try this workflow or maybe you're already using it and you have some other insights that you've been doing that you found you know impactful for yourself, drop it down below. So that's the that's the software section of today's podcast. That's a software conversation. We'll do more of these. I love it. But now, so something that you know just popped into my head. I watched a video, you know. I've if you've been following me, Dwarne, you know, the podcast, we we are big fans of Alex Ramosy. And I was watching a recent video of his where he was talking about his 2026 sort of strategy when it comes to social outreach and social awareness. Uh and one of his big things, he kind of broke it down into four main areas, and I'm not gonna go into what he what he talked about. You know, if you want, you can go to Alex's channel and watch his video where he talks about his 2026 social strategy. But the biggest thing that I picked up from him was the importance of doing things like this, the importance of doing live streams and doing it in a way that is impactful to your audience, right? And so not only are we gonna do the podcast, but it's something that we're kind of planning for right now. And I shared it, so I created an infographic, you know, kind of breaking down the steps and broken down, you know, kind of that that hierarchy of shorts, long form live, because essentially shorts is at the bottom of the hierarchy, right? You know, you are gonna be at the mercy of the algorithm a lot. And then you have long form, which as long as it resonates, right? It's to the interest of your audience, that's gonna give you more expertise because you're talking about a particular topic in detail. And then from there is live stream on top of that. And the beauty of a live stream is that you're authentic, it's not edited. You know, like this this podcast right now, I have some talking points, but everything is is live. It's not like to the perfect version of whatever I want, which is what happens in your long form content, right? You can retake, you know, you can cut out and you know, say it in a way that is more beneficial, that you feel is better for your audience. That's what happens in long form. Live video, you can't do that. It's live just like this podcast is every single week. So, what I'm doing from that for not only right the business unscripted podcast, but thinking through on you know, Triumph side, right? Triumph Business Solutions is how can we do more of these versions of live streams that is impactful to you all? And how can we do it more often? So, not just doing the podcast, but what else can we do that will add value to your life, your business, your journey, whatever it may be? So if you have if you're watching this, drop it down below. What I'd like to hear from you guys is how can we better serve you by doing more live sessions in the future? You know, some of the things I thought of was you know, kind of doing some first reactions to maybe offers that people are receiving from these BCA, these MCAs, and and really breaking it down with the interest, you know, the cash flow impact, et cetera. So maybe that's something we could be doing, you know, once a week or something like that, where somebody submits something that they've received and they have questions on it, and we can truly break it down for you. Uh, another one was thinking of can we do live uh financial statements reviews or financial, you know, questionnaire or whatever it ends up being. Some of these things have been thrown to my mind as I've been thinking over it the last couple weeks of what we want to do heading into January for 26 and beyond. So, what I ask for you guys is if you have a business and you're here, right? You're watching this, what would be the most impactful thing for you to learn more or to see more on our channels and our networks heading into 2026 that can lend you some information, lend you the support that you feel that you need in order to level up in 2026. Share it down below, comment wherever you're you're watching this video, or if you know me personally, feel free to send me a message on social networks, or feel free to you know email me. But if for those of you who don't know me, you know, I'm 20 years, right, in corporate finance, executive leadership, entrepreneur for the last nine, you know, and while working in the corporate world for over 20. So what I do is I help owners like you get a better understanding, right? Get get rid of that stress, the anxiety, everything that relates to your business finances. We partner with you to give you those insights that you need to better run your business. Focus on your strengths, not your weakness of trying to understand your cash flow or understand your forecasting or your budgeting. We help you understand what is actually going on in your business by taking away that stress, taking with that anxiety, and giving you that peace of mind to move forward and make the best financial decisions for yourself, for your business, for your employees, and for those around you and your family and your community. All right. So I know typically when I do these by myself, it's a little bit shorter of an episode. And today, there's one other thing I wanted to kind of quickly chat about as you're as you're heading into the to the new year. And that is you may be looking at your financial statement, and you may realize, man, I'm profitable. You know, you're looking at your maybe your year end, and maybe it shows you have 20 or 50 or 70,000 in income, and you're like, but where's all the money? Right. And this is the difference between profit and loss and understanding cash flow in your business. And high level, right? Your PL tells you in your history, right? In the period that you're looking at your PL statement, what was your money coming in and or earned, depending on accrual versus cash basis, but we're not going to talk about it here. Let's assume we're talking about a cash basis business, money coming in for revenue, and then money going out in expenses related to actual expenses, right, of the business. So whether that's a cost directly related to a service or related to a product or overhead, general, administrative, etc. What a PL right at the bottom then is going to show you, based on those activities, what is your profitability, right? Helps you give a general insight of are your services priced effective enough and is your clientele quantity high enough to cover all your expenses for your business? And if there's profit, typically there is. Now, again, it's not saying that you're perfect in pricing, especially if you haven't looked at it for a while, but it gives you that general insight, that quick insight of are we profitable? Are we not? Now, what a PL misses, and this is why you may feel like, oh my God, I have $50,000 income, but where'd the money go? And that's that there's some things that your money is spent on that is not an expense of your business, right? It doesn't hit your PL. And some of those things can be large asset purchases. So maybe you know you had to go out and you had to buy a new truck, or you had to buy a new dump, or you had to you know buy a new building, you know, something like that that required some cash outflow. Those things are not gonna show up in your profit and loss statement. On the flip side of that as well, is with like your liabilities. If you're paying down credit card balances, if you're paying down accounts payable or loans, right, the money that you're spending on these things is not gonna show up in your PL. Now, for example, let's say a credit card. Let's say you had credit card balances of $100,000 at the end of 2024. And now you're looking at your profit and loss, and you're like, man, I had a lot of income this year, and but you're like, where's the money in the bank? Like, I don't feel like I have any money in the bank. I was really profitable. Now you look at your balance sheet, which is why you have to look at both of these statements together. You look at your balance sheet and you realize, okay, I had $100,000 in a credit card balance last year, and now it's $80,000 this year. So you paid off $20,000 of expenses that were the prior year expenses. So the $20,000 of your profit right then gone. So I dare cheer you. Hope I said your name right, ma'am. Or ma'am. So appreciate you kind of being here. If you have any questions, if you're a business owner or anything like that, feel free to share them down below. Love it. But let's, in this example, right, you paid down $20,000 of credit cards. So yeah, you may have $70,000 of profit, but $20,000 that was used to pay down your credit card balance. Now, let's say you had a loan as well, right? That new truck you bought in the prior year. You had a loan of $100,000 on that. Okay. And you paid out $20,000 of payments, right? So maybe, you know, for example, you know, let's say, let's say your payment is $2,000 a month on this truck. I know it's I know it's just just example purposes, right? $2,000 a month, $24,000 total payments, right? You may be thinking, well, why isn't $24,000 showing up on my PL? Well, because the principal part of those payments, right, that reduces the principal balance of your loan. The only part of loan payments that you get to claim as a business owner on your PL is your interest. So let's say of those $24,000, especially at the beginning of your payments, if it's the first year, you probably have a good chunk of that. It's going to be interest, but the majority of that's going to pay off. So for the simple simplicity purposes, let's say $8,000 went to interest and the other, you know, $16,000 went to paid on your loan. So you were going to see $8,000 on your PL, but that $16,000, it's not going to show up. It's out of your bank, but it's not going to show up on your PL. So Geriel, awesome, man. Appreciate it. Love all you guys that are subscribers. And if you anything in this video, you have a question, Don, share it. Otherwise, you know, if you want to share the video, if you are friends or your network has a lot of business owners in it, would love it. If you can kind of help us out and improve the awareness. So for those of you that don't know, too, we have a goal by the end of 2028 to have an impact on at least a thousand businesses through this podcast, through our you know, operations at Trans Business Solutions, or in general, just in conversations and providing insight and advice that you know turned into a large impact for um business owners. So in this example, so going back to our example here on PL versus cash flow, there's $36,000 now that is out of your bank, but it's not shown up as an expense. So you had $70,000 of income, and over half of that's gone down, right, to pay off a credit card or to pay down principal. So you can kind of see how you have to look at both of those kind of statements. And there's a statement that as well is called the cash flow statement. It tells you how your money, how the cash in your business is being spent, not necessarily the profitability of the business, but how your cash is being spent. And if you have a bookkeeper or you have an accountant and they're not providing you those three statements, your balance sheet, your PL, and a cash flow statement, you need to start asking them for it. And if they refuse, you probably it's probably a good time to look for a new accountant, look for a new bookkeeper. Because those are the three statements in general, as a starter, as a basic, right, that is going to actually give you the insights that you need to make the best financial decisions for your business. And in the PL, there's two PLs I give my clients. One, right, is the current month that we just closed, or current quarter, depending on the frequency at which we're providing financial statements. But then I also give them at least a 13-month piece, especially a 13-month PL. And what that allows us to do is one, look at trending, right? Are there months when expenses typically go up and down? It also allows us to identify with the business owner if there's any abnomilies or there's any errors, right? Or an invoice that came in that was above expectation that the business owner didn't know because it just came out of their account. We're able to review these things by looking at that 13-month PL. So essentially, our financial package for our clients looks like a balance sheet, a current month, you know, just for the month profit and loss, or for the quarter, depending on how we're closing, a 13-month PL that breaks down by month all the activities that we can review with our client as well. And then a cash flow statement where we talk through and we review the cash flow of the business and how things have gone. And then for those that are part of the profit first implementation or they're operating in profit first, we help them understand what their allocations are and everything. And so we won't get into profit first here or cash management and cash flow right now. We'll get into that into another episode or another topic. But essentially, we'll help them understand what their allocations are, maybe where they deviated, maybe they took money out that they shouldn't, and we hold them accountable in that aspect as well. So those are the main things that we do for our clients. And now all of that helps reduce the stress time over time for those individuals, those business owners. And if you have an accountant or bookkeeper, talk with them, right? You should be reaching out to them. And if they're not reaching out to you proactively as well, it might be time, might be time to look for a new one. So, and if you're a bookkeeper and you're accountant and you're watching this and you're not doing those things, and you're not reaching out to your clients, or you're not giving them a full financial insights on their business, shame on you, but you can change it, right? You can start doing those things now moving forward into the new year because business owners need your support. If you're a bookkeeper and accountant, there's plenty of people out there. I'm not saying that I have to service everybody, that's not the goal, right? There's plenty of businesses out there that all of the bookkeepers, all the accountants can service if you need to. So what I can say to you is give them the support that they need, don't just give them the basic information and the basic numbers and leave them hanging. Give them some insights. There are so many ways now in today's world for you to add more value than just reconciling and categorizing banks, bank you know, transactions in an accounting software. That that is where the industry's going, right? We're not just here now to categorize, especially even if you're a bookkeeper, you know, you should be looking to level yourself up because essentially the the old duties of a bookkeeper of reckon of recording transactions and then just reconciling a bank statement. I had many bookkeepers on my teams, basic entry level, you know, sometimes not even you know accounting, they just got used to it because they were thrown into the position and trained on the job, because essentially you can do that, you know, and they had an accounting class in high school. Your jobs are essentially going to get phased out with AI. It's it's it's the truth. So many of these new softwares, there's new software's coming out, even QuickBooks, the old softwares, they're integrating all of this AI into their operations that can do your job in a split second that can reconcile your bank in a split second, show you the variances, all of that. For me, right, there's a platform that I use, it's called Kick. It's AI generated, right? It's a there's a lot of actual you know funding from this from open AI. I love the software for smaller businesses that don't have a lot of you know needs related to you know that needs. detail that QuickBooks gives you. But even then, it does give you something you can still class, you know, record by classes, record by project, which on QuickBooks, you'd have to have a big right, you'd actually have to have an upgraded account and charge a lot of monthly fees. Kick doesn't do that, but it makes it easy. So as a bookkeeper, how you can level up at this point in your career if you're afraid of AI taking you over one, embrace AI. It's going to help you be more efficient, but what you need to look at is especially if you want to keep your fees where they're at or even you know want to get a little bit higher, grow, learn, educate yourself on how you can provide more value to your clients. Okay. How can you take the information that you're currently providing and give them that variance analysis, that trending insights, the executive summary. And as a business owner listening to this, these are the things that you should be asking for. You don't have the time as a business owner, if you're looking to grow, you don't have the time to try to figure out all these things on your own. If you have a support person, you have a support partner that you're paying on a monthly basis to help you with this, they should be giving you this information up front, not having to be prompted for it and providing you with some insights, some support, answering your questions. That's the other thing you can do be available at all times as a bookkeeper accountant. You may think oh my God, people are going to be outreaching me all the time. I'm available all the time my phone's not ringing every single day 24 hours a day but my clients know that if they need to reach me at nine o'clock at night I'm going to answer them. That's how you add value to your clients. Make take away their stress the my longest client who's been with me since 2016 every time I talk to him he says bro I don't know where I would be if you weren't here you allow me to sleep at night because he gets a notice in the mail what does he do he screenshots it he sends it to me hey bro what is this I I make sure you know his taxes are filed on a on a timely basis. And he's not even like he's not a high level client either right he's just been with me for a while and for him it's that peace of mind knowing that the things that he doesn't understand the things that he doesn't want to handle are handled on a regular basis. That's what you need to be doing for your clients if you're a bookkeeper and accountant. And if you're a business owner this is what you should as a basic level be expecting from your bookkeeper or your accountant so with that. So that's the difference between cash flow right and PL. Breakdown. So we talked about a lot in this episode right we talked about you know the fact of understanding your invoicing terms and don't be stop being that that zero percent interest to your bank stop giving your clients your customers these terms that allow them to treat you as a zero interest bank. Start making that change two we then talked about if you are in that situation you probably got these offers from your payment processor whether it's dripe whether it's QuickBooks whether it's you know square anything right you've probably gotten those those hey no interest one time fee type loan offers and you probably were tempted or maybe you got suckered into one and you're like how do I get out of this it's it's destroying my cash flow what do I do how to avoid that we talked about that how to understand how to calculate the interest the implied interest even though they're not calling it interest what is the implied interest and what is the impact of your future cash flows we talked about that as well. And then number three, right, we talked about what is the difference between your PL and your cash flow. So if you have a profitable PL but you're like where's my money? Where's my cash flow? Where's my cash in the bank you have to understand and look at it's probably either in an asset purchase or you paid down liabilities you're paying down or maybe you're taking out too much money out of the bank right or you're paying down some liabilities that you had from prior years. And then we also talked about social strategy okay we talked about you know heading into 26 what are you going to do as a business owner to increase your awareness increase your outreach and it's not just shorts anymore it's it's long form it's going to be these live streams. So if you're watching this and you're watching a replay as I said earlier I'm looking to do more live heading into 26. So what I ask of you if you're watching this right now drop down below what I can do for you in live sessions that you're going to find impactful. So whether it's you know reviewing some offers that you get as loans live on stream and giving you the insights and the details and the breakdown of what it actually means to your business not from a broker perspective but from an actual financial cash flow per perspective. Maybe it's just having open QA sessions one time a week where you can come in with your general questions. Maybe it's financial statement review and planning. Whatever it is that we can do on these live streams my plan is to at least I don't know four or five hours extra a week maybe on live streams that is going to add value to you as a business owners that is going to help you as business owners level up and grow. I don't know I'm still I'm still thinking it through like I said you know it's it's something that we're planning for but I'd love to get your guys' insights especially my audience here of the podcast you guys have been with us you know Dwarne and I with this is episode 42. So we're heading into that you know year to we're we're 10 episodes away from a year doing this live stream of these podcasts with Dworn love it. So if you're here and you've been here from the beginning I'd love and value your opinion drop it down below let me know how I can serve you better through better live streams not just as podcasts but live streams into the future so with that I hope that if you got one or two tidbits or pieces of information out of today's session that you're going to now implement that's what I that's my biggest suggestion to you out of any of our shows any any episode that you'd listen to any podcast find one or two things in your business in your life that you're going to walk away from that episode and actually implement like and actually do like that as soon as you hit end right you go and you're like all right here's I'm going to change you know so for me you know as an example Alex Ramosy I listened to that 2026 got to get into live streaming got to do more live it's going to help with the expertise it's going to help with the awareness instantly I started planning how can I do things differently so with this if you've heard one or two things that are impactful to you that stand out to you as I need to start doing that more go do it. Don't wait for it. Start planning you know whether it's whether it's just you know starting jotting down some notes and brainstorming that's the start of a process and the beauty is is that you know I said it in past episodes taking one step at a time every single day is going to turn in the large leaps eventually down the road when you look back and you see where you are and I want to leave you with this it's easy at the end of a year or end of a quarter to look back and to compare yourself to other people at that moment to compare yourself to others and if you do that you're always going to keep yourself in the void in the gap right of never reaching your goal and you're always going to feel like you're always behind. But here's what I'm going to do and here's my suggestion to you and I got this from a recent book that I read look back and I I've talked to people about this you need to actually look back at the beginning of this year. So you you're doing your review for the end of 2025 look back to yourself in January where were you what were you doing? How many clients did you have what was your revenue and compare yourself to yourself but compare yourself to the past don't compare yourself to your goals and where you need to be in terms of evaluation right because you have to remember you're always growing you're always improving and your goals they're always ever changing right your goals for 26 are probably more than your goals for 25 and if you evaluate yourself against those goals you're going to feel like you're always behind that you're always chasing right your goals when in reality if you actually for your mindset right for your growth look backwards and look and say man I did do a lot this past year or this past quarter that's what you need to focus on. Still focused ahead driving towards your goals of course but when you evaluate you need to make sure that you take time to look and compare yourself to you don't compare yourself to me don't compare yourself to Alex Chermozy at his age or Gary V when he was our age or everybody's journey is different. But compare yourself to yourself that's all that matters so with that I hope you guys have a wonderful and amazing end of your week I hope you had a great Christmas you made some memories with the family or friends however you spend your your Christmas and the holiday season and with that you know this is our last one of 2025 our last podcast of 2025 as crazy as thing but next week we're going to be here with the first one of 2026. So with that I hope you guys have a wonderful amazing weekend have a safe and memorable new year. And again help us reach our goal of servicing a thousand businesses and impacting a thousand businesses by the end of 2028 by helping us share this podcast get the word out to other business owners in your network who may need to hear maybe one or two of the tips that we talked about today. And my advice watch it in two times my voice sounds a lot better at 2xp but with that hope you guys have a wonderful week great weekend and until then see you in the next one