#303 – How Amazon Sellers Can Keep “Profit First”

We invited Freedom Ticket 3.0 instructor, Cyndi Thomason to break down the top cash flow strategies for Amazon, Walmart, and e-commerce sellers. Listen as she talks about how and why building a rainy day fund is important, how can your business benefit from having a cashflow management system, how the profit first method helped a lot of sellers during the pandemic, and more!

In episode 303 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Cyndi discuss:

• 01:30 – How Cyndi Got Started In The E-commerce Space
• 04:00 – Profit First Is A Cashflow Management System
• 06:00 – How To Build A Rainy Day Fund?
• 10:15 – What Is The Parkinson’s Law?
• 13:15 – Watch Cyndi’s Modules In Week 3 Of Freedom Ticket 3.0
• 14:15 – The Biggest Mistakes Sellers Make In Cashflow Management
• 19:30 – How Profit First Benefited Sellers In The Pandemic
• 24:30 – Examine Your Gross Margins On The Product Level
• 27:45 – Cyndi’s Quick Hitting 30-Second Tips
• 32:00 – How Much Does It Cost To Get These Services?
• 34:00 – How To Get In Touch With Cyndi  

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

How many bank accounts should you have as an Amazon Seller? What about credit cards? At the end of the day, how do you keep profit first? We’re going to talk about this and more on today’s episode. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think. As FBA business owners, we’ve put thousands of hours of hard work into growing our businesses. But what happens when you’ve grown the business, as much as you can and don’t have the time or resources to take it to that next level, enter Thrasio. Thrasio has acquired over 125 Amazon businesses from owners, just like you. With more than 600 experts at the top of their field in brand management, growth, marketing, creative, and supply chain Thrasio operating team can grow your business exponentially. Once you’ve sold your business, simply celebrate a lucrative exit and watch your personal wealth grow while I grew brand flourishes in Thrasio’s portfolio. To connect with Thrasio’s deal team, visit thrasio.com/helium10 that’s thrasio.com/helium10. For more information on if your brand is a good fit for Thrasio.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon, Walmart, or e-commerce world. And we’ve got another one of our guest here who was a featured instructor in our recent release of Freedom Ticket 3.0, and she’s going to talk about a subject that, you know, sometimes it’s not one of the sexy aspects of, of Amazon. Like, you know, where am I ranking on my keywords or how can I get the, the best PPC strategy, but it’s a very important topic about profit, you know, which at the end of the day guys, guess what sexy or not that is, you gotta be in this game for profit guys. So this is very important. We’re gonna, we’re gonna go over some of the strategies. We’re not going to give the entire you know, module and Freedom Ticket to get away, but just to get something to wet your appetite. So you guys can go in there and check it out. So Cyndi, welcome to the show. How’s it going?

Cyndi:

Hey, Bradley. Thank you. It’s going good. So glad to be here.

Bradley Sutton:

Where are you located?

Cyndi:

I’m in the middle of nowhere, Arkansas

Bradley Sutton:

And the middle of nowhere. Arkansas. Did you go to, are you a Razorback?

Cyndi:

I’m not, I’m a Wolf pack from North Carolina state university. So.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. How long have you been in Arkansas?

Cyndi:

Probably about 16 years moved here with my husband’s job and fell in love with it. We’re in the Ozark mountains and it’s just a beautiful, beautiful area.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay, cool. How did you get into the e-commerce space? I don’t, I don’t know almost anything about you. Have you ever sold yourself on Amazon or how did you get connected in this space?

Cyndi:

Oh, I have a Shopify store now where we sell some of our financial products, but I got into the space because my daughter I was homeschooling her. She had some learning disabilities and I needed something to do to generate a little income and to be able to help with all of her tutorings. And I come from a corporate background in finance. And at that time it was about 2014. The cloud accounting world was just starting to open up and I’m like, I can do this from home and be with my daughter and make a little money. So I started just a traditional accounting firm and had local clients, but I read Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First, the first edition that came out in 2014 and I’m like, this is the problem. This solves the problem that I’m seeing with my clients.

Cyndi:

So I started actually training with Mike and one of his very first pieces of advice to me was you need to concentrate on a niche. And I had a few e-commerce clients and I liked the flexibility that they had, you know, they weren’t looking for me to pop into their store and pick up receipts. We did everything electronically and I just felt like it was a good fit for what I was trying to do to create that flexibility in my life and also you know, kind of dovetail with what they were trying to accomplish.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. Yeah. I think like I said, this is something that it doesn’t really matter. What level of seller somebody is. It doesn’t matter what your business model is in e-commerce, you know, you’re, I’m a wholesale seller, I’m a drop shipping seller. I’m a private label seller. I sell on Walmart. I sell on Amazon. I saw on Shopify at the end of the day, you know, unless you’re just doing this for fun. And even if you’re doing it for fun, you can run out of money. You’ve got to keep in mind your profit. And I think everybody understands, Hey, you know, profit is first, but Profit First is not just two words. It’s actually kind of like this program, you know, that, that, that you’re talking about. So, so let’s just say in general, just to like, you know, help people understand, I think they understand the general concept of profit. Like, Hey, whatever money I invested, if I’m making a profit off, if I end up with more than I put in, I’m making a profit. And if I don’t, I’m losing money, but you know, this concept goes a little bit beyond just that, right?

Cyndi:

It does because, you know, you can make a profit on paper, but at the end of the day, it’s how much money you have in your bank account. And so what profit first as a cash flow management strategy is, it’s a way to use bank accounts to give you visibility into how your money is coming in and what you’re using it for. And once you have that visibility, just straight from your bank dashboard, you get so much real-time data that you’re better able to make decisions on day-by-day basis without all the accounting reports, which we love to do, but let’s face it. They’re hindsight. If you can look at your bank account and know how much money you have set aside for inventory, how much money you have set aside for your taxes and you know, that kind of real time, you’re in a much better position to make good decisions and to not get yourself in trouble of overextending yourself on fun, distracting things that are nice to have, but at the end of the day if you invest in those things are,, they’re going to take your money away from the next payment for inventory, et cetera.

Bradley Sutton:

I agree. All right. So let’s just dive a little bit into how it is different than just all right. Here’s my expenses and here’s how much money I have leftover. Let’s just say I’m a brand new Amazon Seller. I wanna get on the right foot here to start, you know, understanding what numbers I need to look at to really know, am I putting this profit first? So what kind of procedures or things should I get in place from day one to get started on the right foot?

Cyndi:

Okay. Here’s what I would do. This is what I tell for our first-time new clients or first-time seller-type clients. First of all, you want to separate your bank accounts. And I recommend having three to get started. Most people, most businesses start with one bank account and everything goes in it. And to me, that’s kind of like looking into a pot of vegetable soup. You don’t know how much, how many potatoes went in there. How many carrots, how many beans you can’t really tell, right? So when you do that with your bank account, you don’t know how many of those dollars really need to be earmarked for buying your next round of inventory to replenish what you’re selling. You don’t know what your tax bill is going to be and how much money you’re going to have to pay on April 15th. So by having three bank accounts that’s where I like for people to start.

Cyndi:

One is to have your regular business bank account where everything comes in, but then create a separate bank account for your inventory. And so when you get your deposit from Amazon, what you will do, or Walmart, whoever, wherever you’re selling from when you get your money in, take the funds that you get in and pull out the replenishment cost for inventory. So if you get $10,000 from Amazon and, you know, $3,000 of that was for the cost of those goods, that you just sold, pull that $3,000 out and put it into a bank account called inventory so that when you have to place your next inventory order, the funds are sitting there for you to make that purchase. And then the other bank account that I recommend from the very beginning as a profit account, after you’ve taken that $10,000 and moved $3,000 over to inventory, you’re going to be left with $7,000.

Cyndi:

Move 1% of that over to your profit account. And what that’s doing is it starting from the very beginning to build you up a rainy day fund, because things happen, our inventory gets lost, or we get suspended things that are out of our control. We need to have a little bit of cash sitting there in our rainy day fund. So the funds are building up in that profit account. And every quarter, what you do is you take half of that out and you reward yourself for being a business owner for taking a risk. Maybe you take your family out because they haven’t seen much of you because you’ve been had your nose in a computer trying to figure out your advertising, right? So you take your family out, you do something fun to reward yourself for being a business owner. The other half you leave in there to just build up to be that rainy day fund for when some inevitable situation happens.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Makes sense. You know, personally, I haven’t done that, so I might have to take a look at the way I’m doing things here. Now, what if, you know, somebody doesn’t have, doesn’t need the rainy day fund and it just keeps building up, or you know, at what point can I pull money out of there, or am I using that at all to like give myself a bonus at the end of the year or something like that?

Cyndi:

You know, every quarter you’re going to take half of it out. So it’s kind of like investing in stocks and as a owner and a company, you get the dividend every quarter. So you’ll be taking half of it out every quarter to do something for yourself. But as that rainy day fund builds up and you realize you’ve got enough funds sitting there to cover an immediate emergency, maybe it would cover one shipment from your supplier or cover you for a couple of weeks of your payout. When you feel like you’ve got your rainy day covered, then you can use that money for other aspects of your business. Like maybe you’re willing to, if you’re a new business and you’re feeling like you’re overwhelmed with things. One of the questions I get asked a lot is when can I hire somebody? Well, as those funds start to grow, you can look at it and say, okay, I have these excess funds here. I can use that to start to hire a VA, to help me, or maybe you wanna hire a bookkeeper at that point. You know? So they build up, you can either put them back into use for something in the business, or you can take it out as a bonus that year-end. That’s if your business is operating, finding you don’t need it in the business.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. Interesting. Now some of this ties into something I had never heard about since until you mentioned it in your Freedom Ticket Module, but can you explain about the Parkinson’s Law thing there?

Cyndi:

And since the law basically says you use what you’ve got. So in the example I really like to use is toothpaste. And back before COVID, when I was traveling all the time, I would have this little tiny tube of toothpaste that the dentist gave me. And if I was going to be gone for a couple of weeks, I’d use just a little dab of that toothpaste because, you know, why would I pack a whole tube of toothpaste? But if I’m at home, I’ve got the big tube of toothpaste. You know, you put a whole lot of toothpaste on your toothbrush. The idea is when resources are scarce, we use them more carefully than we would if there were a plentiful amount of something, when something is plentiful, we let our imagination kind of run wild and we start figuring out, oh, what can we do?

Cyndi:

So if you have only one bank account like that big pot of soup, and everything’s in there, and it looks really full that you wake up in the morning, you check your bank account, man. I got a lot of money in here. Then you start thinking about maybe it’s time I could get that new computer I wanted, or maybe I give myself a raise without really thinking through, I’m going to have to pay out for my inventory next month. And that’s gonna hit me for $50,000 or whatever it is. Yeah. Because everything’s all in there. We start using it as if it were plentiful like that big tube of toothpaste, just by separating your money into smaller buckets, with an intended purpose for that money just by separating it. We can see how much we really have.

Cyndi:

So if you’re setting aside that money in your inventory bucket, and, you know, you have to buy inventory every two weeks, you start to get a sense of that. Cashflow for inventory. Cash flow for inventory really flows a very different by every business. I mean, it depends on whether you’re getting supplier, you know, suppliers down the street versus, you know, across the world and having to put stuff on a boat. So your inventory cash flow, just the timing can be very different. And you need to learn that pattern so that you can start to see how the dollars are building up in that account. Are there going to be enough there for when I have to make that deposit or pay the final payment for my merchandise? So that’s what Parkinson’s Law is all about is just helping you see really the human condition of we use what we have. And so if we can understand better what the purposes are for things we can put that Parkinson’s Law and it would work for us.

Bradley Sutton:

I like it. Now, guys, you know, if you want to find out more information about some of these things that we’ve been talking about her module, she’s got two of them where we go in-depth into some of these strategies she’s referring to in week three of Freedom Ticket 3.0, so make sure to go check that, any of your Helium 10 members out there. Now, just in general, you actually have your own accounting firm. If I’m not mistaken or bookkeeping firm and, and you deal with a lot of Amazon Sellers. And what I’m curious about is I’m sure you have new clients come on to you as Amazon Sellers, but maybe they were handling their own bookkeeping before, or maybe they were having just a general bookkeeper, you know, handle their stuff. What is some of the biggest mistakes that you see? Like when you start opening up and like, well, you’ve been doing that, or they were doing what, like what are some of those, like eye browsing or, eyebrow-raising things that you’ve seen when you bring on somebody who maybe hasn’t used somebody like yourself, who actually knows about Amazon?

Cyndi:

Well, first of all, I think a big mistake is people record just the deposits that they get in. So if you get a deposit from Amazon you know, they’ve already taken about a third of it, right? So they’ve taken that money out on your behalf and managed gift wrapping and shipping and whatever else, but that’s invisible. Many accountants will just record the deposit rather than record the total revenue sales that you have, and then back out all those expenses. And the reason that’s an issue is because Amazon’s going to file a $10.99 for you, and you want your books to kind of match what Amazon has sent in on your behalf. So if you’re showing just the deposits coming in and not the whole transaction of total revenues, you can imagine if Amazon is filing a report on your behalf, that shows you sold a million dollars, but you’re filing something that said, no, my revenues were only 700,000.

Cyndi:

You’re raising some red flags. People are going to say, what’s, what’s this difference. Yeah, you can explain it, but you don’t want to have to. Plus the problem with that for you as a seller, as a business owner is you don’t have good visibility into what your gross margin is. Really every business owner, their first metric ought to be what’s your gross margin and Amazon fees, as a percent of, you know, Amazon sales, along with your cost of goods and you know, other aspects of cost of goods. You’ve got to really analyze that, to understand what your gross margin is and gross margin is the thing that’s looking at that on a regular basis, we’ll tell you when something’s going wrong, when fees may be out of what we’ve looked at it from for some clients who, for some reason, their weights got off, and all of a sudden their fees got went way out of whack. And you know.

Bradley Sutton:

Because they’re not using Helium 10 Alerts which tells you when that changed. I mean, that literally happened to me. It was so funny because I obviously work here at Helium 10. And so that’s why this is so embarrassing. There was this clip I have where the original Project X case study that we did, where I was showing people how to set up Alerts. And it was so funny. We do everything live. Like we record stuff live. We don’t like practice it and stuff. Like, we just want things to be genuine, right? So there’s actually a clip in Project X where you can see me and Tim Jordan going over Helium 10 Alerts. And then I’m like, wow, look at this coffin shelf. It looks like on this date, Amazon changed my dimensions. And at that time it was like two weeks after it happened.

Bradley Sutton:

I just happened to catch it. I was like, man, I got to go check on this. But what happened was I never checked it. And like a year later I went back and I was trying to do some audits. I’m like, it doesn’t seem like there’s as much profit as there should be on this. And what happened was I never went and called Amazon on their mistake. You know, it was ironic. So sometimes Amazon changes dimensions. Like if you flubbed up on your, or if you’re doing something wrong where you’re saying your, your product is smaller than it should be, Amazon is going to correct you. But sometimes Amazon just measures it funny. And in this case, these two inches resulting in like $2 per unit of extra charge or something like that. And when I calculate, it was like $5,000 over eight months, we got charged extra for this one product. Now I went back in and I got a lot of that back, but not everything because Amazon doesn’t refund. You’d only have a window. Like you can’t just say, oh yeah. In 2018, you guys charge overcharge me. They’re like too bad, you know, Statute of Limitation.

Cyndi:

They have narrowed that down recently.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. But guys, you know, that’s, that’s very accurate that, you know, first of all, make sure you have Helium 10 Alerts installed so that, you know, if Amazon changes, but when we’re talking profits and we’re talking to your bottom line one inch or two inches here, or there can really have a huge effect, especially when you expand it out over a year.

Cyndi:

Yeah. And just like you had an alert, you had an opportunity to see it happening, but you’re busy, everybody’s busy. It escapes your mind. But if you look at your financial statements, there’s another job where you can go, oh, wait a second. This is off and I think I know why. It’s just another data point to tell you, Hey, I better look at this. So that’s something that I see people doing that if you put that data in your financial system, it can go to work for you so you can truly understand your profitability.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Excellent. All right. So what else, any horror stories that you can, I don’t, you know, we don’t want to scare people out there, but Hey, sometimes you need to be a little bit scared about what could happen if you’re not doing things the right way. So anything, you know, you don’t have to give clients names or anything like that or what the product was, but anything that can give a little shocking effect here on why people need to really be careful about some things in the accounting world?

Cyndi:

Let me tell you a happy story from Profit First. It could have gone the other way. In fact, it did go the other way for a bunch of people back. Last, was it March timeframe, 2020 March. Amazon was announcing that they were only going to accept essential items, right? I mean, remember the panic that we all were feeling like, what is fixing to happen? I was feeling it for my clients and wondering how are they gonna make it? And I got a ton of email from our clients. We have about 150 clients, and I was getting a ton of email. And we went out with a offer to help forecast cash flow for them over for the next few months because we knew their whole world had been disrupted. So we went out with that email and I got these kinds of email back.

Cyndi:

One was, oh, we’re good. I’ve got Profit First set up. I’ve got plenty of inventory funds set aside that since I won’t be buying inventory, I can reprogram, we’ve got my staff cover. We’re good. Thank you so much for Profit First. Then I got these other emails back that were like, oh, please help us. We don’t know what we’re going to do. We don’t know how we’re going to pay, pay Amex next week. And we’re struggling. And so, you know, the pandemic really did make it clear to me how Profit First was benefiting our clients. We knew it because we knew they were taking vacations. I would get a note from people saying, I paid my mortgage off. You know, that kind of stuff is really cool. But when the pandemic hit and people didn’t know what was going to happen next, it was so nice to get these notes saying, thank you. We’re good.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I like it now. Here’s a question. You know, I think in the traditional sense, you know, accounting is nothing new. Obviously, you know, it’s been around for thousands of years, but when you think nowadays about just, Hey, I need a personal account. You know, I’m not, I’m already past the stage where I’m using what are those, what are those websites that turbo tax or something like that, right? Is people usually like having somebody local, like a office, like, Hey, I’m going to go into the office and let’s look at our books together and this and that. But if we’re saying, Hey, you know, you should probably should consider somebody with experience in Amazon. Chances are, you’re not going to find somebody local who is an expert on Amazon Seller. So what would you say to those people was like, Hey, man, I really love being able to just like sit across the table from my accountant and go over things. But I have nobody around here who’s an Amazon Seller Specialist. How is it okay that I can, you know, let’s say viewing, I’m in California, you’re in Arkansas? I’ll say I made you my Amazon account. And we don’t even have a face-to-face meeting. Like, what do you say to people who might be skeptical or worried about that kind of thing?

Cyndi:

Well, it’s interesting to me. My clients are all over the world and I’ve not met. Most of them have very few of them I’ve met because we happened to be at a conference together. Our client’s business is all on computers, all dealing with people they have no relationship with. You know, ordering supplies from India or China, where you never get to walk into the factory and sit down in the conference room or, you know, watch it being made. Those things just don’t happen hardly at all. Few people get that opportunity, but it’s a very few, so the technology has just made it so that we can have visibility and access to everything we need without having to waste your valuable time. Our whole approach is we try to do it in the background for you so that you don’t have to spend your time thinking about it. And for those people that want an in-person relationship, I totally get that. And you know, there may be in a larger metropolitan area. You could find someone, but in a small area, like where I work there’s just not that kind of specialty. So Zoom calls and just having the confidence that somebody has your back allows you to have that peace of mind without actually having the face-to-face relationship.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Makes sense. Now, what are some strategies now that again, somebody who has been selling on Amazon for a couple of years, but now they come to you, what are some easy wins out there for some Amazon Sellers that you’d probably say that more than half of the people maybe don’t even know about, or maybe they aren’t doing.

Cyndi:

I think the on the profitability side of things where I see people struggling is they really they’re not examining their gross margin at the product level, or they did once. And then they said it, and then they never go back and revisit it. And overtime costs have changed. Their price has changed. Their shipping has changed. And when we work with our clients, one of the biggest challenges is getting their cost of goods sold, recorded correctly because the assumptions that they made once as we apply that over, you know, a year or two’s time, they’re just not making sense anymore. And we have to dig in and go, okay, there’s something going on with either the way you’ve costed things. And it’s really interesting because you could have you know, a hundred different products and 90% of them by count are costed, correct, but say the top 10 are costed incorrectly, but they’re your big sellers that can throw everything off from a profitability standpoint. So doing some analysis about profitability on your top sellers, on your low sellers, that kind of profitability analysis has to be done, you know, a couple of times a year to ensure that those factors that change on a regular basis are not causing your profitability to just go off the rails.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. And then is this done? Is it best to do this at the marketplace level as well? Like for example, you know, back in the day, you know, a good 95% of Amazon Sellers, Hey, I sell on Amazon USA one and done now, especially in the last two years, people are like, oh, shoot, I can’t have all my eggs in one basket here. I need to start selling on Amazon Canada. I need to start selling on Walmart. I need to start, I need to have my Shopify, you know, I need to go to Amazon Europe. So when you’re considering bookkeeping do you suggest doing it at the, you know, the actual SKU level, which, or which necessarily might be just this, you know, I have this one coffin shelf and I’m selling the same exact product everywhere. What’s my overall, you know, profitability, or do I need to be, be doing it per marketplace.

Cyndi:

You’re doing it per marketplace because while it’s really, I get the want and desire to diversify, but it’s a huge distraction to your time and energy to try to get those different international marketplaces spun up and to make sure you’re taking care of all the customs requirements and the VAT tax requirements, et cetera. So you, you need to understand, are= those various marketplaces really profitable for you for the amount of attention and aggravation that they cause? The more simple you can make your business, the more profitable you’re going to be. You know, I know you have to weigh that as a trade-off against having all your eggs in one basket, but don’t have multiple baskets of little bitty things that are never bringing you a return. That’s a bad investment.

Bradley Sutton:

Some other strategies or tips, you know, we have this thing that we always say a 30-second tip. That’s a little feature that we have of this, of this show, but, you know, you can take longer than 30 seconds, but maybe some quick hitters of do’s and don’ts in the bookkeeping world for Amazon, Walmart, e-commerce sellers out there.

Cyndi:

From a cash flow perspective, a do is to make sure you’re setting aside replenishment inventory dollars so that you don’t get caught up in having to borrow money for your inventory. Many of our clients, they don’t have enough margin to also then have to pay interest on their product. Let’s see, don’ts. Don’t take your eye off the ball with regard to your operating expenses. Operating expenses can totally deplete anything that you would put in your pocket. So you know, keep your eye on the ball, keep those operating expenses low. There’s a ton of resources out there for you that you can get like on YouTube, like with your Project X, with podcasts, like you’re doing, there’s so much out there. Don’t just be throwing money away at trying to get the latest education. I see it all the time and I have a course too, but you really want to be sure that you’re getting a return out of that. It’s a time suck and you really need to ensure that that you’re going with something that’s reputable and it’s gonna pay off for you operating expenses. People just don’t pay attention. And then they have no money.

Bradley Sutton:

In general, you know, like I’ve had like, you know, my aunt is, an accountant and I have my personal people. I’ve always used and stuff. So I’m not really sure how things operate out there. But you know, agents or firms like yourself. How does it work? Like, am I paying like this retainer fee? Or am I only paying when you guys do, you know, some quarterly audits or does it depend on the size of, of how many SKUs I like how do I go about hiring someone like yourself? How does that work?

Cyndi:

Well the way we work in our firm, we try to handle the back-office accounting for you so that you don’t have to do a lot of it. Right? So we look at the activity level that you have, how many channels are you selling on? How many transactions are coming into how many bank accounts, because that’s the work that we have to do. We have to make sure that those transactions get coded to the proper place and that we reconcile those accounts. How many loans do you have? So for us, it’s a custom quote based on the activity in your business. And then we charge that on a monthly basis. And that’s the thing you have for us serving as your back office for doing your accounting and our processes to handle all those transactions that come to your bank account, get them in the right place, make sure they’re reconciled, make sure your inventory cost of goods sold makes sense for the month, then generate financial statements for you at the beginning of the next month.

Cyndi:

So you know how you did, and for the most part, our clients, unless they’ve got things that are changing up a lot we send them an email once a week with a list of questions. We saw these four things. We’re not sure what to do with them. You give us some information, we plug it in, and then we’re able to generate financial statements. So that’s how it works in our firm. You know, if you’re hiring somebody to file your sales tax or to file other aspects, pay your bills, do your payroll, which we do those kinds of things as well. They get a little bit more complicated, but for the most part, you know, we priced that out. This is what it’s going to take to serve you for the month. We bill you that on a monthly basis.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. I know you can’t give an exact quote here, but I just want people to understand if they’re being ripped off or what they can expect. If they want to go this route. Let me just give you our, you know, our Project X account, we’ve got like, you know, four or five products in there. We’re grossing, I don’t know, like $200,000 a year on it, we pay all our bills and, we handle all the bank transactions and paying credit card bills and all that stuff. But if our, like, you know what we want to start thinking about exiting this business. So I know I have to get our bookkeeping. Literally, we’re not doing much bookkeeping at all outside of what’s just what’s necessary for tax purposes and things. So I need to hire somebody like yourself or a company like yourself too, Hey, look, can you please handle our books so that once we do want to exit, we need to have this available. So is this like, Hey, this is going to cost a thousand dollars a month. This is going to cost $500 to a thousand dollars a month. This costs $50 to a hundred dollars a month. Like what’s the rough, rough, rough estimate of how much I would be looking at?

Cyndi:

For our firm. We have a minimum of $400 a month because for us to go in and touch the account a couple of times a week, to just be sure that we are doing everything right, communicate with you. It’s a minimum of $$400. Our average is in the neighborhood of $800 a month. I do have clients that are paying over $5,000 a month. So it, it really depends on how complex, how much you want us to do, how much volume of activity you have, but for somebody that’s you know, that’s, this started out, got a little bit of history wanting to get this off their plate a minimum investment of $400 a month. And then as the business grows, because I mean, here’s the trade-off. You’re not having to worry about this much anymore. And you’re getting things set up in a way you’ve got good data, right? And you’re setting stuff up for an exit. Then you’re going to have time to really focus on the business. And, you know, the idea is you grow the business as your business grows. We reevaluate it. If it becomes a material change over time and our hope, and this is what happens with our clients, they grow, our fees have to grow, you know, over time as well, but it’s because they’re able to do great things in their business.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Excellent. All right. Well Cyndi, thank you so much for joining us today. And like I said to everybody out there definitely go back into Freedom Ticket to take a look at these two modules to find out how you can put Profit First. But if somebody wants to reach out to you to ask for more questions on this subject, or possibly even, you know, procure your services, how can they find you on the interwebs out there?

Cyndi:

We’re under bookskeep.com. And my email is cyndi@bookskeep.com. I’d love to hear from people.

Bradley Sutton:

Awesome. All right. Thank you again for coming on. Cyndi, and well we definitely can be keeping in contact in the feature.

Cyndi:

All right. Thank you, Bradley. Appreciate you.

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