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230 - I Honestly Thought I Didn't Have To Pay Taxes...

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230 - I Honestly Thought I Didn't Have To Pay Taxes...

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PLEASE don’t be as stupid as me. This is your lifeline.

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Best Quote:

I’m betting a ton of you guys that are using Clickfunnels, that are on my podcast, that are just reading our stuff are probably in that situation. Either one of two things. One is that you are behind on your books, or you’ve never kept books, or you’ve been selling stuff and hoping it never catches up to you. If that is you and you’re in that spot right now, I’m here to give you a life line.

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Transcripts:

Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Alright everybody, I hope things are going amazing. I’ve had an interesting last couple of days. I’m heading home right now to go work on the pinewood derby, which has been another part of my crazy couple of days.

But it’s all been good. Monday and Tuesday we had Anthony Diclementi came out Boise, Idaho and we were working on episode number one of Funnel Hacker TV, which the first funnel/business we are building and launching is for Biohackingsecrets.com, coming soon to a funnel near you. It’s kind of exciting. It’s been fun, we’re filming the process and story and everything like that.

Also, while we were here, working on biohacking me, with some of the stuff I’m looking for. Trying to get my energy to last longer throughout the day so when I get home at night, all my good energy isn’t wasted on work and I have a ton of energy left over for my kids and wife and everything like that. So that’s been really fun. And then we’re also working on helping me lose a little extra weight, so that I will be a little bit sexier by my…when is it, by summertime.

So for those of you reading the transcript, I said that with a lot of sarcasm, that’s not really what I believe, but those listening can hear my voice. Anyway, it’s been really fun. We did all sorts of crazy things. We were doing these breathing exercises in the mornings where you…anyway, it’s kind of cool. We do this huge hardcore, oxygenation thing where you’re breathing fast and heavy to the point of getting light headed until you’re about to pass out, and then you hold your breath. I held my breath for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Is that insane?

It doesn’t make any sense. But if you guys want to do that kind of stuff, it’s in the book and it’s coming out soon. It’s pretty exciting. We held our breath for 2 minutes and 40 seconds. And then when I was done I felt like a million bucks. It was crazy. So I did it yesterday and today, and I’m kind of addicted to that. Not going to lie.

So that was cool, and then a whole bunch of ninja, weird things that you will see in episode number one, which is kind of cool. So that’s kind of some of the stuff I’m working on. And I hope you guys are all having fun without me. What I wanted to talk to you guys about today is something that came to me….My car is like a million degrees. I’m sweating bad. So this is something that happened to me as a young entrepreneur and recently happened to a really close friend.

So I want to warn and help all of you guys just in case it happens to you. As a new online marketer I learned how to sell stuff, and people bought stuff and it was awesome. And then I took that money people bought things with and I took it and spent it on other cool stuff I wanted. And it worked really good, it was this perfect circle that worked for 2 years. Until one day, I was at my family reunion, and I was telling my dad, “Dad, I’m making money.”

Because he was asking, “When are you going to get a job.” All those kind of things. “Dad, I’m actually making money online now. “ and I was showing him. And I was kind of showing him some of the stuff I was doing, the money I was making. “This campaign I made ten grand, this one over here I made 22 grand.” These little things, and he was excited. He was like, “Cool. How are you paying taxes?” And I was like, “No dad, the cool thing about this is it’s the internet. There’s no taxes. You don’t have to pay taxes.”

Showing how naïve I was. He looked to me, “Russell, you have to pay taxes.” And I was like, “No if you sell online you don’t.” I realized later that might be true with sales tax in some states, but it’s not true with income tax. I had lesson number one. Lesson number two was, “Who’s doing your books.” I was like, “I don’t know what that means. I read a lot of books, is that what you’re talking about?” He’s like, “No. Someone’s gotta be making sure that you’re making money, not losing money. All these things.” I was like, “ I don’t even know. This is all foreign to me dad.”

And he’s like, “Let me help you because I don’t want you to go to jail.” So he came and flew to Boise once a month for probably 3 or 4 months. And he tried to catch up my books, so he’s going through my Paypal account and going through my check register. If he asked me, my check register was horrible. I literally had a whole bunch of checks, and I’d write the check and give it somebody and I would write the date and the dollar amount in my register and that was it.

I wouldn’t write who it was to or what it was for, or anything. I don’t even think I wrote the day, I just wrote the dollar amount on the stub thing. So he’s like, “I got a whole bunch of check numbers with dollar amounts but I have no idea what they are for.” We had a whole Paypal account with thousands of transactions that we didn’t what they were for or anything. It was 2 or 3 years worth of that stuff, so he came up once a month for two days at a time, trying to catch me up and get me to the point where I wasn’t going to be in big trouble if the government came and asked me what I was doing.

We figured out how much money I actually owed the government, and we paid that. Then from that point forward, we were at a clean slate and we could actually move forward. That has been hugely important and successful in any kind of businesses. So that’s something that was really needed for me. A little while after my dad came to one of my events and kind of told that story to our audience, and he talked about also business structuring. I wasn’t structured at all, so I was paying all these extra taxes, FICA and Medicare and a whole bunch of other things.

And I had no protection, so if someone would have sued me because of ZipBrander or one of my initial, my early products. How to make a potato gun. If they would have sued me, I would have been in big trouble, whereas now we have protected ourselves. In fact, we’re working on a webinar right now with him called Creditors and Predators, it’s like how to structure your business to protect yourself from people who want your money.

It can be the government, it can be lawyers, it could be a lot of things. And so that’s kind of the thing we’re working on. But he came and talked about that with our group, and he offered to help set up people’s businesses, as well as do bookkeeping and stuff like that. So he built up a little small team of people to do bookkeeping. And he kind of does it now for internet entrepreneurs like me and like you.

It’s not a huge business but he’s got….in fact, he at that one event spoke and signed up 8 or 9 people at that event, and then since then it’s all been word of mouth. A lot of you guys I know are using him just because of word of mouth, but he’s never once promoted or advertised since then. It’s been like probably 7 years. And it’s just been word of mouth among marketers like us. Anyway, that’s kind of the back story. So what happened, fast forward now a little while later, one of my close friends who does some work for me.

I was like, “Hey man, I need help with this thing.” He’s like, “I can’t, I’m stressing out about taxes.” I’m like, “Why are you stressing about taxes?” he’s like, “I haven’t paid them in two years, trying to figure this out. I’m going to go to jail. I’m freaking out.” I’m like, “Okay man, I’ve been through this I know exactly what you’re going through. Here’s my dad’s email, email him and you’ll be saved.” And then he did, and within two or three weeks my dad’s team caught him up and got him to today. Got him covered for back taxes and now moving forward has been a clean slate.

And my buddy is like, “Dude, the stress is at zero. I love your dad, thank you so much for that.” And it made me think, I’m betting a ton of you guys that are using Clickfunnels, that are on my podcast, that are just reading our stuff are probably in that situation. Either one of two things. One is that you are behind on your books, or you’ve never kept books, or you’ve been selling stuff and hoping it never catches up to you.

If that is you and you’re in that spot right now, I’m here to give you a life line. The second type of person is someone who maybe you started on a business you created, an LLC or something and you threw it up and hoping everything is right, but you have no idea if your structured right, you have no idea if your taxes are right, you have no idea with whatever. Which was also me.

Or you’re structured but you’re not doing any entity layering, so you don’t have one company that holds your assets, and one that’s working in public, so if someone sued you, they can’t take away your websites and things like that. If you’re in either of those situations where you’d like to make your structuring better, more solid to protect yourself from creditors or predators, or you need to get caught up on taxes, or you’re paying too much for a bookkeeper that sucks.

Any of those reasons are good reasons to contact my dad. He is insanely cheap. I keep telling him that he needs to raise his prices. He specializes in rich internet marketers yet he’s charging super discounted booking fees. Cheaper than you can get from a typical bookkeeper, which again I…… Anyway, you can never profit in your home town. I’m like, “Dad, first step one, you need to double your prices, and that should be the entry. Plus you need to charge people 10 grand to set up the entity.”

All sorts of stuff. He also, he told me this too and this is insane. So for those of you guys, if he does the bookkeeping for you, a lot of times they do your taxes at the end of the year for free. It’s just insanely cheap and inexpensive, at least for today. It will not be for forever, because I am working on a webinar with him, which I mentioned earlier called Creditors and Predators.

And he wants me to do the webinar which I’m excited for except for the fact that, if I’m going to do that two things have to happen. First off is Zuckerburg has gotta get paid, and second off, I gotta get paid. Therefore I am more than doubling, probably 3x-ing the price so that Zuckerburg can get paid for Facebook ads, and I can get paid for me helping him to pitch his services.

So that’s coming in the very near future. And most of you guys will be on that webinar, and you will be amazed at what you are missing in your business, you will realize that your entity structure is wrong. You realize you’re over paying for bookkeeping. You realize that your back in back taxes, you’re paying too much in taxes, a bunch of things like that. And when you are sold in that webinar it will be too late, because at that point the prices will be normal.

But for those of you guys who are Marketing in Your Car listeners, you’ve got a window here. My dad just finished tax season, and his people just finished everybody and he’s like, “We’ve got room for a few more people. Not a lot, maybe 5 or 10 people max to come in and we can get them all caught up and set up between now and when the webinar goes live.”

So if that is you guys, and you are looking for any of those things, entity structuring, protections, lowering taxes, someone doing your bookkeeping, somebody to catch you up, somebody to look at your entrepreneurial business when you realize you’re selling stuff and that’s all that you’re doing and you want some help, I highly recommend my dad.

He saved me, he saved tons of other of my friends and colleagues in this business and he’s here to save you as well. So this is my gift to you guys for being MIYC listeners. I get zero dollars and zero cents for recommending this, outside of the fact that when I go home for Thanksgiving dinner, my dad feeds me Thanksgiving dinner and that’s pretty sweet. So that’s payback for that and the fact that he pretty much supported me my whole life.

So I get nothing out of this, it’s something that’s a service for you and it’s something that I think a lot of you guys are benefitting. I would say if you’re anywhere from the start up phase, to probably two or three million dollars in revenue, maybe up to 5 million, that sweet spot is about where most of the clients they’re working with now are, so that’s a good fit.

You get above that, it might be smart to get somebody in house to run everything, that’s what we had to do as well. We had to get a full time CFO to manage everything for us because it’s gotten a little bit crazy over here. But that is what I wanted to share with you guys today, so if you’re interested in that, just email my dad, his secret email address is ross@bookease.com.

Yeah, if you go to the website, the websites not even done, it’s an old website because he was going to get setup, then he started getting referrals like crazy so he never finished it. So if you go to the site you will see an unfinished website. In fact, I need to make that a Clickfunnel page, so I will make that, add that to my to-do list for my dad. Anyway that’s kind of what happening. So if you need help, you can go to my dad, tell him I sent you. Say, “I heard it on the podcast, I’m in.” and he will get you setup and figured out.

That’s about it you guys. Other than that, don’t do what I did and think that you don’t have to pay taxes, because I really honestly thought that, which is kind of funny now. So that’s it you guys, I’m about headed home. Headed to the pinewood derby weigh ins. They weigh them the night before, which is kind of funny and then they lock down all the cars.

So then the next night they have the weigh in’s that way nobody can go and through on a whole bunch of weight over night. It’s kind of funny. So that’s what we’re doing right now. It’s going to be really fun. So that’s what I got for you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.

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