How to Hand Over Your Books Without Getting Robbed Blind | 352

Download my FREE 8-Figure Playbook

This playbook walks through the exact process I used to build from $0 in 2016 to $50M+/year today across multiple franchise brands

Grab it here: https://brianbeers.kit.com/b79cf77012

Let's connect:

Find me on X
Instagram
LinkedIn
YouTube

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to the Business of Beers Podcast, your daily dose of strategies, tools, and tips to help you build an eight-figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers. You have to have these systems in place and you have to have people that you trust. Otherwise, you can get robbed blind. The first thing I would look to do is is admin. So admin is going to be all your bill pay, your payroll, your you know HR, your insurance. It is extreme outsourcing this to global, what I what I like to call global talent. Some people call like you know VAs, but um other I I call it global talent. Uh it is extremely easy to find extremely talented people across the globe who can handle everything in your admin. Like our office today, we have we have like and I'm not over it like in the day-to-day, so I might be a little off on these numbers, but I think we have anywhere from I think we have 10 people in the Philippines who who really run our entire back office. We have three people here locally and 10 people in the Philippines. You know, in our company, we do you know 50 million in revenue. We have 10 people in the Philippines. So our controller, all of our accounts payable, accounts receivable, uh tech support, like you know, the average wage is probably twelve hundred dollars a month, fifteen hundred a month, something in that range for full-time people. And so that would be the that would be the first place I would look to get rid of like your bookkeeping, um, reconciling credit cards, uh, even customer service. Uh in our artificial turf business, we have somebody, uh I think she lives in Brazil or Colombia, somewhere in Latin America, and and she handles all the calls. So when someone calls to book an appointment, which is you know, and schedule and do that, that's a you know, we that's an admin role. That happens overseas. And so I would do that. And then growth, like growth is gonna be your leverage, right? Growth is gonna be the thing that that that really fires you up. And so your goal is to be able to remove that time. So now instead of doing admin work and all this stuff that's like not fun, you hire somebody for, you know, let's just call it $1,500 a month who who hopefully takes 20 hours of your time away, and then now you can spend that 20 hours and focus on the growth stuff. You where you're going out and you're building relationships with, you know, if you're in the franchise business, it's other franchisees. If you're you know independent business owner, you know, you you might be like going, just like physically going and meeting other people. Maybe you're networking, maybe you run a business that you know does really well with like Chamber of Commerce and things like that. And your best and highest use of your time is finding accounts and finding relationships that can make a lot of money. So a lot of things go through the credit cards. Uh, you know, we we have obviously systems to be able to do checks and balances. So the the biggest thing with anybody in the who who pays bills is is you you you want to split um the person who puts the invoices in with the person who actually pays the credit card, right? So so you want to kind of have this like division of labor and responsibility for invoices and then payments. Because otherwise, if someone could create their own invoice and then that same person could make the payment on the invoice, that's where uh someone would have the most leverage in in stealing from you. And so uh I mean, ours have access to our credit cards, ours pay the bills. I mean, luckily with us, like there's a set number of vendors. So the main thing that they could do, the the biggest, like the the way that someone could steal the most from you in any business, and this could be an American too. But by the way, the only stories that I've ever heard of people stealing from them in back office have been uh uh American back office women and not not not Filipinos, not Latin America, not anywhere else, but like the lady that literally comes into somebody's office and sits there. Multiple stories I've heard, that is the person that that does the tap. So just putting that out there. Um the biggest way someone could steal from you, if I was gonna steal for myself, would be you would make up an entity that would and you'd call it like, you know, Brian's Services or whatever, Brian's Automotive Services, and then you would make invoices that would pay to Brian's Automotive Services LLC, and you would book those as um like cost of goods, or like like we outsourced a job to another shop. And then we use that credit card to run, you know, I would have a Stripe account, you'd use the company card to like run on Stripe, and then like my my business, quote unquote, would get paid. Uh that is like the that is like the way someone would steal from you. And so, you know, if you knowing that, you have to put really good systems in for invoices, specifically new vendors. So anytime you would say, hey, I'm gonna have a a a new vendor come in, uh, that that that that you as the owner or someone that you really trust uh is the one that does the approval of that new vendor to set up payments in your system. That you have a credit application, that you like know all these facts about the person, that like new vendor setup, right? The second part is every single invoice that you that gets charged should tie to a customer, uh we call them repair orders, but like you know, every single vendor invoice should tie directly to a customer invoice. And so in our system, we can pretty much when a service gets done in the stores at the at the point of sale level, we receive the we do an accounts bill, we we create a bill at the store level that says, I just bought these this thing from this vendor. It was you know $1,000. And then in our system, we can we get the invoice for $1,000. It's got the same number as the PO number to our like customer invoice number. And so then we can see, okay, we got this bill for $1,000, and we can see we charged a customer for something and it has our cost of a thousand dollars. So then we know it's good to pay. Uh that is like you have to have that checks and balances. And you go back to like we go back to how do you build a business that runs without you? You have to have these systems in place and you have to have people that you trust. Otherwise, you can get robbed blind. This is how they're gonna do it. Uh, and so new vendor approval on the credit cards. I mean, otherwise you can have limits. The the other way we do it is if it's over a certain amount, somebody else has to approve of it as well. So you would have like your the key person you trust. And so maybe they could charge it up to a certain amount, but if it's like very high, you could get it over. Um the everything else is view only, so they have like all your bank access that you're gonna set up for them. So like they reconcile all of our credit cards, they track all of our cash deposits, they uh I mean do ever everything. Uh there, it's gonna be bank view only. And so that they're gonna be able to see deposits, but they're not gonna be able to create ACHs or transfers or do anything else. Um, except one person. We have one person who is over in the Philippines who is our controller, so she does have the ability to transfer money. Now we have to approve it, so the transfer she can set it up, but it doesn't go through unless somebody approves it. And so, yeah, um huge factor to have to trust, but uh it's gonna be the same no no matter where they are, overseas or Americans. Uh and our longest tenured employee now it i from the Philippines is six years. She's been working for us. I hired her during COVID. She she she does she helps with payroll. So she she's like sees the most sensitive things, but she's our longest tenured person and haven't been a single um issue.