In this video I discuss how to start the process to get an SBA guaranteed loan and what you need to do to have it forgiven. Also have the help offered by the City of El Paso.
Here is the link to the SBA site to start the loan process and to get the $10K emergency loan advance. https://covid19relief.sba.gov/#/
Here is the link to apply for the El Paso Emergency small business zero interest rate loans up to $25K and $5K grants. www.liftfund.com
In accordance with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control, the State of Texas, and the City of El Paso, to assist in controlling the spread of COVID-19, Wayne J. Belisle, CPA LLC is substantially reducing our in-office work effective Wednesday, March 25, 2020. We will resume normal operations as soon as possible based on developing circumstances.
We will be working remotely but we will be checking our voice and email messages daily.
What are we doing to assist our clients?
The federal tax filing deadline and the related tax payment dates have been extended to July 15th. We ask that you drop off your information as soon as you have everything to avoid having to file an extension after that date.
You may still drop off your tax information using our mail slot or by email (wayne@wjb-cpa.com). Please let us know when you do, so we can make sure we received everything.
We know many of you need your refunds to pay bills during this time. Accordingly, as we finish your return, we can either email you the return or have it delivered to you so you can review it before we e-file it. You can send back the required forms by mail, email, fax, or by delivering them to our office. (Email: rosemary@wjb-cpa.com) (Fax: (915) 857-7562)
We will e-file your return only after you let us know that you have reviewed and approved it.
If you give us consent to e-file your return over the phone, we will do so, but we ask that you return your signed forms as soon as possible.
Payment is due when your return is complete and before being e-filed with the IRS. To assist clients who are experiencing financial difficulties during this difficult time, we will hold your check or credit card payment until you have received your refund. For anyone not receiving a refund, we will work with you on a case-by-case basis.
If you need tax advice or just have a question, please call or email us. We will get back to you to discuss the situation or set up a phone appointment for a better time. We can also sign into your computer remotely if your question is QuickBooks related.
We want to thank all of you for your understanding considering the unusual circumstances. We are committed to doing our part to ensure the safety and well-being of our employees, our clients, and the broader community.
Thank you for being a valued client and member of our family.
There is little doubt that, even with government assistance, the country is heading into a Corona-Virus recession.
One mistake almost all small business owners make is waiting too long to decide that they have a problem! This further complicates their recovery because the longer you take to move into “survival mode” the more likely it is that you will need to take very drastic measures.
In this video I discuss the steps you must take now to ensure that your business survives and thrives during these challenging times.
In this video I discuss how to survive and thrive during the recession that the Corona-virus is causing. There is no doubt that we will be in a recession during and after this emergency. How, and how fast, the country comes out of this recession will greatly depend on how small business owners react.
Now is the time to take action if you have been forced to close your business due to Corona Virus. In this video I discuss what you must do now in order for your business to survive.
1. Seriously consider using a small local bank for your borrowing needs. a. There is more stability in their loan officers, which allows you to build a long- term relationship with them. b. The directors of the bank are usually local business owners with knowledge and experience in your area. c. The loan decision is made locally.
2. When lending is down it’s usually not because banks aren’t lending, but rather because Of a downturn in the economy has reduced the number of businesses that are trying to get loans.
3. Regulations on banks have increased dramatically. This has resulted in an increase in loan-related fees as well as accounting fees in order to comply with the new regulations.
4. Build a relationship with your banker early on, even before you open your business. They can be a great knowledge base and a source of advice.
5. The loan officer puts a lot of weight on the business owner’s management ability and experience in their industry.
6. Bring a loan officer into your loan acquisition process early on to help you find the best loan product for your needs.
7. Both the bank and the SBA expect you to have “skin” in the game. They will never lend you 100% of the amount you require to open your business or to buy or build your building.
8. You better know your numbers! Failing to is a big red flag to your banker that you may not have a good grasp on the basics of your business.
9. Don’t ignore the banker when things go bad! They can often help you.
10. Know what to bring to your loan officers for the initial meeting. This really impresses on the loan officer that you are organized and professional.
11. The business owner should have a good team that includes their banker, CPA, business lawyer, and business insurance agent.
12. Failing to educate yourself and not knowing your numbers is a big red flag to your banker that you may not have a good grasp on the basics of your business.
Product returns and refunds are a huge drain on profits. First, you have to return the money to the customer. Then you have to repackage, restock, and resell the item.
But making it hard for the customer to return products is a huge mistake. Studies show that when customers know that they can return anything they buy for a full refund, no questions asked, they will buy much more than the customer who worries that they may be stuck with a product that doesn’t work for them. They are also much more likely to refer their family and friends.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t manage your returns. You must understand what factors are driving returns and adjust accordingly. The biggest reason products are returned is that they simply don’t meet a customer’s needs. This is a failure by your sales staff.
Train your sales staff well and provide them with a series of questions designed to help them recommend the best products to each customer. They should be able to determine exactly what problem the customer is trying to solve, and what product is the best solution. This one step will greatly reduce product returns.
Product returns are even higher if you sell your product online. But the reasons for returns are the same—the customer purchased something that doesn’t fit their needs. Many companies have been able to reduce the number of returns by creating videos demonstrating how the product works and how it will solve the customer’s problem.
Don’t just complain about product returns; start managing them.
Other CPAs often ask me, “How do you find time to run a CPA firm, publish a magazine, write books, keep a blog, and create consulting products?” The truth is that I learned like everyone else—the hard way.
One day I woke up and realized that I didn’t control my time. Everyone else did! Being in the service business, I assumed that it was my duty to drop everything and answer every single phone call, email, or walk-in question. I thought this would help me grow my business. In truth, since I didn’t value my time, neither did my clients. As a CPA, all I can sell is my knowledge and my time. I had to start treating both like the valuable resources they are.
Over the years I have read many time management books, and I can honestly say that most are useless without the proper motivation. Until you, the business owner, decide it is time to take control of your time, others will continue to decide how you invest your time.
One warning: Don’t be rude about it. I have found that explaining why you do something when the customer/client/patient first hires you is the key. I start the relationship by explaining that the only way I can do my best work is by controlling the interruptions. I only return phone calls once a day and I only respond to emails at the end of the day. I then go on to tell them that if they have an emergency, the best thing to do is to speak with my assistant, who will relay the message.
Here are my favorite and most valuable time savings tips (in no particular order): 1. Schedule blocks of time to get projects done. During that time, don’t allow interruptions! Don’t answer the phone. Don’t check social media. Don’t check your email. Tell your staff that unless it’s an emergency (there better be a fire or blood), don’t interrupt.
2. Say no to drop-ins. Just say no to “Do you have a minute?” or “One quick question.” We all know it’s never just a minute, and it’s rarely just one quick question. Just say no! Tell them you are on a tight deadline and they will have to set up an appointment. Be firm! If you must talk to them now, set a time limit at the beginning. “Hi John, great to see you. I’m up against a deadline. Can we do this in two minutes or do we need to set up an appointment?”
3. Leave the office. When you have a project that must get done, go home, go to the coffee shop, go to another office…JUST GO! Trust me, the world gets along fine without you for a few hours.
4. Don’t answer the phone. Really. It’s not against the law. A ringing phone is an invitation to speak. Just decline at this time. Again, there is nothing that the rest of the world can’t handle if you don’t answer the call. If it’s from your kids, have them text you a code saying that it is important. And again there better be flames or blood involved!
5. Don’t check email or social media during scheduled work time. I check my email early in the morning, late at night, or when I am waiting in line somewhere. No exceptions. I check my Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts once a week at night using FlipBoard, which gathers them all together.
6. Create a VIP list of who can interrupt you. This is a list of the people who you are willing to accept interruptions from. Who is on the VIP list? My wife (I’ve been married 35 years this December. This doesn’t happen by being stupid!), my kids, and the clients who pay me the big dollars. That’s it.
7. Delegate the answering of all but the most important phone calls. The week before my last deadline, I checked my voicemail and had 19 messages waiting. Let’s assume that each one takes five minutes to listen to and make notes about, and then an extra 10 minutes to handle the problem. That’s nearly five hours! And this happens most days during our busy season. So be brutal—redirect as many calls as you can to your staff.
8. Start and stop meetings on time. Don’t be late, and don’t tolerate meetings that run late. If you have a meeting with someone and it is running late, set a timer. If you allocated a half hour, that’s all you can spend. If they come in 20 minutes late, let them know that you only have 10 minutes left and get started. Remember, if you don’t value your time, who will?
9. Prepare in advance. Don’t show up to any meeting without being prepared. Have an outline of the problem and have a plan of action for solving it. At a bare minimum, you should make sure you know what the meeting is about! If you have a major project, use a mind map program to help you plan it out in advance. This way you will have a much better idea of what it really will take to finish the project, and you’ll be able to explain it with your client.
10. Don’t answer your employees’ questions. You hired and trained competent employees. If you didn’t, train them or hire new ones. Now treat them like trained competent employees and refuse to treat them like children. Make them come up with a possible solution before they come to you with a problem. You want them to think things through and find a way to solve most problems without you. Don’t make their jobs easy by being their resident guru.
11. Minimize meetings. No greater time waster exists in the business world than the meeting. If it isn’t going to make you money, don’t have the meeting! Don’t meet with a prospective client until they have been screened. Don’t meet with a sales rep unless you asked for the meeting. Don’t meet with the person who wants to “network”. Before you schedule any meeting, ask yourself if a conference call or email would work just as well. Warning: This doesn’t include your customers! You should meet with them often, especially your best customers.
12. Use prioritized lists to track your work. Put everything that needs to be done on a list and forget about it. Review the list when you schedule your day or do work for that customer or client. But first, assign every item on your list a priority number based on what is important for reaching your goals. Don’t let others set your priorities. Ignore unimportant things. You will be amazed how often someone else can handle the task. If it can’t be ignored, then delay it.
13. Use a Tickler file. There are lots of organization programs out there. The trick is to use them. The most successful person I know uses a simple folder with slots numbered from 1 to 31. Any time he has to do something, he puts a note in that day’s number. For example, if the phone bill is due on the 20th of the month, he puts the bill in slot number 20. Sure, it’s low-tech, but it works for him. And that’s the key—find something that works for you. Doing everything at the last minute is a great way to waste time.
14. Eliminate as much travel as possible. GoToMeeting, Skype, and Google Hangouts are some of the best productivity tools out there. Our clients really hate to pay us for travel time. These programs have allowed us to have meetings, do trainings, and answer bookkeeping questions without having to leave the office. I once had to drive 30 minutes, one way, just to answer a client’s software question. Once I saw the problem, it only took me five minutes to solve it. Now all of these five-minute appointments really only take five minutes.
15. Block time for yourself. Make appointments with yourself. We all do a good job of keeping appointments with others, but we don’t treat ourselves as important. When I want to get this magazine done, I put the prep time on my calendar. When I am creating a new product, I schedule it on my calendar. I don’t break this appointment for any reason.
16. Group like projects together. It takes all of us time to get up to speed when we shift from one type of work to another. That is why I only return phone calls at one time. I review tax returns on one day. I answer tax correspondence another day. Grouping like projects together helps you get work done much more quickly.
17. Set deadlines. I set deadlines on everything I do. The pressure to finish on time forces me to eliminate all the fluff and interruptions. I take all of my work projects and set a time budget at the beginning of each one. If a client is only willing to pay $1,000 and I want to make at least $250/hour, then the project can only take four hours. If I don’t believe it can be done in four hours, I pass on it or raise my fee.
18. Stop trying to be perfect. For most things, good is good enough. Be perfect only if that is crucial to reaching your goal. Very little requires perfection. In fact, the cost of getting that last 1 percent of a project perfect can often be more costly than the cost of completing the first 99 percent. Don’t fall for the perfection trap.
19. Plan each week out in advance. Block the time and don’t deviate. Any new appointment must be for the following week unless it is clear to me that it is really an emergency. (Again, blood or fire better be part of the emergency!)
20. All appointments are scheduled according to your work demands. Block time for appointments that your assistant can fill. When these are filled, they should skip to the next week until they find a time that works. Before I started doing this, I had many a week where my staff had me fully booked, and I never got any work done. Who is really in charge here? Me or them?
21. Work on the most important thing first, while you are fresh. This is the biggest secret of the most productive people I know. They start with what is important and if there is any time left when that is done, they move on to the items that are calling out for answers but really have no effect on the bottom line.
22. Streamline your processes. I often finish more tax returns in a short amount of time than most people. That is because I give myself a ridiculous deadline and then figure out how to get it done in that allotted time. What should be done first? What can be delegated? What can be ignored or delayed until later? When you give yourself less time to finish a task you are forced to focus on what is truly necessary and important. Remember, work always expands to fit the time allotted. This doesn’t mean that the quality of the work will get any better. In fact, it often ends up being done at the last minute anyway because you know you can take your time.
23. Delegate or outsource everything you can. Delegate parts of projects. I just finished work for the corporate tax extension deadline. Doing the average return takes up to ten hours. About a third of the time is matching last year’s return and cleaning up the obvious errors. This I delegate. Another third of the time requires a higher level of review and planning, and so I do this. The final third is putting the information in the program, printing the return, and assembling it. This I delegate. Now I am only spending about 2-3 hours per return while guaranteeing that the quality of the work doesn’t suffer.
24. Make decisions quickly and firmly. This is a key characteristic of people who accomplish things. They make decisions quickly and stick with them. They don’t waste time pondering and worrying. They size up the situation as best as they can and make a decision. The secret is that very little can’t be fixed if they are wrong. Making a wrong decision often helps you learn what the right decision should be the next time.
25. Results are all that matter. Focus on your goals and make all of your decisions with them in mind. Keeping the end goal in sight gives you purpose and helps you press on to get things completed. This is a big difference between successful people and those that aren’t. Successful people complete the things that help them achieve their goals. They know that all the other tasks are just busy work designed to get in their way, and they treat them accordingly.
Action Tips: 1. Read the article. 2. Highlight those items on my list that you feel would work for you. 3. Implement the changes and record your results.
When I start sales consulting with small business owners, the very first thing I get them to focus on is increasing sales from their current customers and prospects. Without a doubt, the fastest way to grow a business is to increase what your current customers and prospects are buying from you!
In this video I cover the five best ways to increase sales quickly and at almost no cost.
Amazingly, this is one area that most small business owners ignore! Some form of outbound advertising is usually the first thing the typical business owner does when they want to increase sales. The easiest thing to do is to call up the newspaper and place an ad, or get some flyers printed and pass them out.
Yes, outbound advertising has a place in your marketing plan. But marketing to current customers is the fastest and easiest way to increase sales. These are the people who already know you, trust you, and like you.
A few other benefits of selling to your current customers:
The additional sale or work they need is often much more fun and profitable.
When you concentrate on meeting your best customers’ needs, you make it almost impossible for your competitors to steal them from you.
They are much more likely to refer their friends to you. Since people tend to be friends with people similar to them, the quality of the referral is very high.
Here are four areas you should concentrate on first:
Convert a higher percentage of prospects into paying customers. Count how many prospects you meet with who actually turn into paying customers. When I started, about a third of the prospects I met with turned into paying customers. Now this number is close to 80%. In fact, I am in the enviable position of turning away customers who are not a good fit for me.
These are some of the steps I would take to improve in this area:
Measure your current closing rate. If you don’t have a baseline, how will you know if you are improving?
Identify every first contact point with the prospect.
Determine what the goal of that first contact is. Is it to sell? Is it to educate? Is it to get a meeting with them? Plan accordingly.
Impress upon everyone who has first contact with a prospect that your goal is to get a customer for life, not a one-time sale.
Script out the first contact in detail. Too often the first contact with a prospect is made with a sales clerk or receptionist who has not been trained in sales. It just makes me cringe when good advertising has brought me into a store and the first person who greets me (or too often ignores me!) makes a bad first impression! What a lost opportunity.
Measure your new closing rate to see if there was improvement.
If not, determine why not, and make one change in the process.
Measure again and repeat.
Turn your first-time customers into long-term customers who come back frequently. This is too important to leave to chance! Get a plan in place to WOW your prospects so that they will never consider anyone else. Think of this as a first date where you and your staff are on your best behavior. Give your new customer your undivided attention, and really work to determine their true needs and solve their problems.
Contact your best customers and ask them what they like best about buying from you. Also contact customers who bought once and never returned. Find out what you could have done differently to make them return.
Give your customers an incentive to return. Frequent buyer cards, customer discounts, and special events for your best customers are some common ways of accomplishing this.
Educate your customers regularly on how your product or service improves their lives. An educated customer buys more!
Don’t let your customers believe you don’t care about them. Stay in contact. Emails to customers and print newsletters work well. Remember, your customers are not walking around thinking about the next time they will have the pleasure of spending money with you. In fact, they are bombarded with so many sales messages in an average day that they may have already forgotten about you.
Increase your customer order size each time they purchase. Plan in advance what related products you will offer during the sales process. When McDonald’s trained their employees to ask, “Do you want fries with that?” they perfected upselling to the point that it became a running joke with many people. But it worked!
Online, Amazon has implemented upselling effectively by adding a section that says, “Customers who bought this item also bought…” How many times have you purchased the recommended add-ons? I’m sure you have at least looked.
Train yourself and your staff to ask the right questions that will lead to add-on sales. Be sure that they know to offer the added product as a solution to a problem the customer may not even know they have. After all, you are the expert in your products and know what other products they may need. In fact, it could be argued that you have a responsibility to offer the add-on product to your customer if it will truly solve their problem.
Review your current customer list with an eye toward identifying customer needs that you can offer a solution to. Start with your largest customers first. In most businesses 80% of the sales come from only 20% of customers. It is only obvious that you should start to sell to them first. Remember, these people have already shown that they both have a need for your products or services and the money to spend on solving their problem.
Entice your customers to refer their friends, families, and associates. The best way to get referrals is to do such a good job solving problems, in a way that is both enjoyable and convenient, that people just want to brag about you to their friends. So make sure you WOW them!
Then simply ask them for the referral. But don’t just ask them for names of people who you can contact. No one wants to unleash a hungry salesperson on their unsuspecting friends. Ask them for names of people who have similar problems. For example, let’s say you just took photos of a couple getting married. When you go over the finished pictures with them, ask them if any of their friends are getting married, graduating, just had a baby, etc. This is more likely to get a referral because they can remember people in those situations easier than the mysterious someone who may want their picture taken.
Offer an incentive for referring. A discount for both them and the new customer often helps overcome people’s hesitance. Just look at the power of affiliate marketing.
Now I know that this all seems like a lot of work, and it is. But the rewards of doing the work are huge! I have worked with numerous business owners who made improvement in these five areas and experienced an increase in sales of 25% to 100% without any additional costs in advertising.
