Getting the Best Service Bureau Deal & Why Not to Go Direct | Service Bureau Accelerator Podcast E2

[00:00:00] I think a lot of people think that, oh, I don’t want any middle man. Like, kinda like what you’re talking about.

Yeah. The middleman as well. I want to be straight up where it’s like the software and then me.

Everyone thinks that may be the best way to go, but realistically, especially in our scenarios, when I started my first service bureau I went direct to the software, And it was fine. I made money. But then as you start growing there’s things that all of a sudden you need.

When you direct, their preparers called up the software, the software gave them my cell phone number. I don’t want to deal with Tia’s preparer. I don’t know who they are, right? Number two, I’m a software seller. I don’t do taxes. That is not my job.

But because I was the service bureau and I thought I was smart by going direct to them and negotiating that, that was my responsibility, and guess what I had to do? Customer calls my cell phone, I pick it up. I’m sitting there like I have no idea. I had to call up the tech support line and three-way them in because they would only speak to me.

That was a major drawback.

That’s when I made the decision back then to go to a bigger service bureau that could offer [00:01:00] me the deal that I wanted. Which included tech support and not really caring what bank was used because if they want to use TPG or refund advantage, my money didn’t change, so I don’t have to worry about those little things.

Welcome to episode number two of the Service Bureau Accelerator Podcast. My name is Baldeep. I have with me Ross, or as known by the many ladies in the group. [00:02:00] The Uncle Ross. Daddy Ross. Uncle Ross. We got Tia, the Tax Goddess Community Liaison for the Service Bureau Accelerator.

And today’s topic, which if you watched the first episode, may veer off into other conversations.

But today’s topic is getting the best service bureau deal, and why not to go direct. So, Why don’t we just start off.

Ross, you had a thought of how you wanna start off. Why don’t you kind of bridge that gap and we’ll dive in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What

is that, I guess, give us the context.

Exactly. I wanna, yeah, let me unpack it first. So, going direct with the software companies, right? So if you’re currently using tax software. You know, if you were to want to start a service bureau, there’s a couple options out there for you. Obviously. One of them is to just go direct to the software companies and get a service bureau set up through them.

And so that’s what we’re gonna kind of really dive into in this episode is, you know, how can you get the best deal out there and why? Maybe it’s not the best idea to actually go direct [00:03:00] to the software. So the reason why a lot of people feel like they’re, they like they should just go direct to the software is, and a lot of people think about this, like when they’re on our webinars or we’re talking to ’em in chat and stuff another people think like, well, why would someone join my software versus like, just going direct to the software?

Because everyone feels like, Hey, if I’m going direct to the software creators, right, if I’m going direct to the software company, That’s the best deal out there, right? Like, that is how I get everything, you know, making sure I’m legit, I’ve got the correct deal.

I’m an actual service bureau, and I’m gonna get everything that I need to be a service bureau. And so, it’s understandable, right? It’s like, hey, if I want to become a service bureau for, you know, tax layer or crosslink or whatever, then I’m just gonna go to that company and I’m just gonna get a service bureau directly through them.

However, Those are not always the best deals. And that’s what we’re gonna break down in this episode is how do the deal structures actually work? You know, what do you typically get if you go direct to the software company and what other options are available to you if you were to actually just go through another service bureau to [00:04:00] start your service bureau?

Namingly obviously, our program, we’ve got some pretty sweet deals, and we’ll get into that in this

Yeah. And we’ll talk, I don’t wanna mention other service bureau’s names, but I’ll give you examples of like, there’s a big one that does this. Maybe good for you.

Yeah.

Probably not, cuz we’re better. But anyway let’s dive in to the direct relationship, right?

Because I think a lot of people think that, oh, I don’t want any middle man. Like, kinda like what you’re talking about.

Yeah. The middleman as well. I want to be straight up where it’s like the software and then me.

And everyone thinks that may be the best way to go, but realistically, especially in our scenarios, it’s not, right. Like when I started my first service bureau back in 2015, 2016, when it was, that’s what I did. I went direct to the software, right? And it was fine. I made money.

I negotiated a good deal. I think. It was one of the best deals somebody that had no history, quote unquote, with was able to negotiate and it was cool in the beginning. But then as you start [00:05:00] growing, there’s things that all of a sudden you need, couple of main ones when you direct. When the customer’s ERO’s or their preparers called up the software, the software gave them my cell phone number. I don’t want to deal with Tia’s fucking preparer. I don’t know who they are, right? Number two, I don’t know how the damn software works. I’m a software seller. I don’t do taxes. That is not my job.

I don’t know how it works. Right, but because I was the service bureau and I thought I was smart by going direct to them and negotiating that, that was my responsibility, and guess what I had to do? Customer calls my cell phone, I pick it up. I’m sitting there like I have no idea. I had to call up the tech support line and three-way them in because they would only speak to me.

So annoying. That was a major drawback.

And then the third one, I’m not gonna get into too many details, but essentially when you’re direct, you [00:06:00] have to, and say you offer like TPG refund advantage you have these bank options out there. You get incentives based on volume.

And I had a lot of customers on TPG, for example. But if I had a customer that came and wanted to use refund advantage, I would get no fucking money from that because I didn’t have enough volume with refund advantage to even get any money. You know what I mean? So as a service bureau, there’s volume tier in involved and these are significant tiers.

It’s not like a hundred. Yeah, you can get a little thing. You get really nothing as a service bureau on a hundred, you need volume. And if you have 5,000 products on TPG, you’re gonna get extra money. Right? But if one customer comes and they have 400 products and they wanna use refund advantage, now all of a sudden your economics changed because you made no money off that customer on the bank side.

So basically that’s when I made the decision back then it was a couple years after to go to a bigger service bureau that could offer me the deal that I wanted.[00:07:00] Which included tech support and not really caring what bank was used because if they want to use TPG or refund advantage, my money didn’t change, so I don’t have to worry about those little things.

And to this day, we still have two of those relationships or one of those relationships now. We have a lot of volume. So, I think a lot of people think that. Oh, it’s better, but you’re playing yourself on just that, those two aspects right there. We’ll get into another one, but Ross, go ahead.

Yeah. I just, I wanted to dive in real quick just for some of the terminology that we’re gonna be throwing around a lot on this podcast. Some of the things that you mentioned before was like products and volume. We talked about it on the first episode a little bit just on where you really generate revenue as a service bureau is on the bank products.

So whenever, you know an ERO who’s using your software, they’re working with their tax customers and someone’s using a bank product to pay out of their refund or get a cash advance, whatever it may be. That is where you as a service bureau have additional fees that you can add on, and that’s where you make a large chunk of the revenue.

And so the volume is basically [00:08:00] the accumulation of how many bank products get funded through everyone using your software, right? You may have 10 offices or you know, a hundred pairers, whatever it may be. The total accumulation of bank products that are getting funded. That’s where as a service bureau, you can potentially get, like, you get some little volume incentives where it’s like, Hey, when you do a thousand bank products, you’re gonna get a little extra kickback.

Well, not everyone gets this, but this is the deals that you should get. And a lot of times if you are direct with the softwares, they may not give you those kickbacks because you didn’t know to negotiate for those so they have no kickback or like rebate incentives that are available to you.

Again, it’s all depends on the deal point, but a lot of times you may not even have that cause you didn’t know to ask for it. Whereas if you go with a service bureau, they may have those standard, like we do that standard for everyone that’s on our program. We give you standard rebates so that as you’re growing your service bureau, You’re actually getting more dollars per product getting kicked back to you.

And so that’s where those little volume tiers are.

And to piggyback from Ross, we do use bank [00:09:00] products and service bureau fee. They’re all the same thing.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And what Baldeep was mentioning earlier with, you know, the difference between TPG or Refund Advantage, they were like different pools and you got money for one, and none for the other. That’s where, again, depending on the deal where Baldeep found it was more advantageous for him to go and work with the Service Bureau because they’re like, yeah, we don’t care.

We already have massive volume. We’re getting these deals anyways, and we’re just gonna share that with you. Whether it’s refund advantage or TPG, didn’t matter what service Bank those products are going through, it all goes into the same bucket.

So, you know, I didn’t have to worry about that. Go ahead, Tia. You’re smiling. You wanna say something?

No. No, because that is, cause, you know, I like to be messy and also they’re because I’ve seen and experienced in myself where there are people who think that they’re going software direct, and you’re really just going to another service bureau that’s just so large that you think that they are software

direct.

Yeah. Some people think that with like, should I say the name?

No.

[00:10:00] Nah.

We’re gonna keep the names, I used them as an example be earlier.

No, no, no. I’m not talking about the software. I’m like, well, there’s one service bureau that everyone always thinks, they’re a direct software. I’m like, no, that’s crosslink. Like it’s not, but whatever.

Yeah. You know? Yep. That’s exactly I’m talking about.

So I’m like, no, but that’s fine. They’re big enough to, that they command, like they, and don’t get me wrong, they provide a lot of value. They have extra technology that they built to help their clients. So no, they’re great. Like I have nothing negative to say except that I think we have a better deal, neither here nor there.

Yeah. So, another topic. When it comes to going direct with the software, let’s talk about licensing fees because that’s another huge one when, so licensing fees, again, I’ll do the the breakdown.

The definition. Mm-hmm.

And then you guys can dive into it.

The license fees is basically whenever you sell your software to someone, right? So say you go to a software company, you become a service bureau. Typically in the deal, they’re gonna give you an allotment of licenses. you pay this much to become a service bureau and we’re gonna give you 5, 10, 15, whatever it is, licenses.

So those are individual licenses that you can sell to an ERO. So [00:11:00] every ERO you set up, they’re gonna use one of those licenses. At a certain point, if you use all those licenses, now you have to pay additional fee for every license that you want to continue selling, right? And obviously you’re gonna want to continue selling and setting people up.

Now those license fees, again, it’s gonna vary. It depends on which company you’re working with. But say it’s anywhere from, let’s just say $300 to $500 per license, that means that if you go out and sell another 10 people, that’s $3,000 to $5,000 that you’re gonna have to pay in those license fees. So that’s money now coming out of your pocket, out of your deal.

And that also means that you now have to mark up your software package and sell it for a price target beyond that license fee. Otherwise, you’re just losing money and that doesn’t make sense, obviously, as a business. So those are licensed fees, and depending on your deal, again, you can have a lot of hefty license fees that can be a massive expense to your service bureau if you’re going direct with the software clients.

Go ahead, Tia.

And again, the license fees give you access to the software. So if you have 15 licenses and you have three tax [00:12:00] offices, you have to subtract that from your total and whatever’s remaining is what you can sell. So it gets even pricier if you think about including your own offices within that cost.

Yeah. And the licenses, I mean, we could go into a couple of different, like scenarios or examples, like, what I’ll do is there’s one that comes to mind that’s not a software we provide, but somebody brought a deal to me saying, Hey, is this a good software deal?

It was for like a service bureau deal. So immediately when I looked at it, I looked at the pricing, it was, the total was 75,000. Right? And it included, I think, I wanna say a hundred licenses, whatever, whatever. But then there was a couple of little caveats. One of them was, oh, each license can only have 10 users, which means that if you sell it to a somebody and you show them like our prepared development strategy, and they go have a hundred preparers.

Now what do you do? Because you could only have ten.

That’s ten. Ten licenses.

No, no, [00:13:00] no a hundred licenses, but 10 users per license, so now you need ten license.

Exactly. So you have to, 10 licenses cuz it’s 10 users.

And then on top of that, the technology transmission fee was, this was direct from the software. It was like 50 something dollars. And I’m like, but their default is this.

But they’re saying, oh, you can get this extra money. They’re basically saying, they’re basically baking in the add-on to your contract. I’m like, you didn’t even negotiate an incentive. There’s no fucking money here besides, what’s that markup? Cause the default’s this. So they’re just giving you that. So what? Then, you know, afterwards that person went back to that other person and was like, oh, we could give you more money.

I’m like, well, they should have given it to you to begin with. Right, not because you said, oh, it’s a shitty deal because I reviewed it and it’s a fucking garbage deal. Right. But a another example, like, and you know, it’s like I’ll give you a, just comparing, you know, going like say direct to slayer versus coming to us, and getting it right. You know, in a direct relationship with them. You’d be looking at something like [00:14:00] $1,500 for the branding annually you’ll be looking at a per license fee of their 12, $1,300 for like the first five, and then everything additional after, that’s gonna be probably from like say 5 to 700, right?

Depending on what you negotiate. So you’re still paying per license. Whereas on a deal with us, our technology transmission fee is already cheaper than what you would get if you went direct, right? So if you’re direct, it’s 24. With us it’s 21. If you’re direct, there’s an admin fee. When they charge or when you do an add-on.

So if you do an add-on, they charge an extra $2. That doesn’t exist in our ecosystem on that software. And two of our softwares, it doesn’t exist. Right. And then you’re not kept on licenses, right? So you can go and sell a hundred people and keep all that money yourself there. You don’t pay it to us, right?

We don’t collect that money. Way we look at it is that’s your money. You’re the service bureau. You go make that money. Yeah. We’ll make money other places and we’ll tell you where that is. Right? We make money on the volume just like everybody else, but we don’t mark it up to [00:15:00] make that money. Well, we have other things down the road.

You may wa wanna purchase extra stuff from us and we’ll upsell you things down the road. Sure. But you’re never forced to. Right. So it’s just like, things like that people when they go direct, they think they’re getting the best deal, but they’re really just playing themselves. Cause now they have to charge more.

When somebody, like there’s somebody in our group who literally just sold somebody from a software that we provide to another software we provide because they’re paying about $120,000 a year for their service bureau license for 200 offices or whatever it was. Well, okay, switch their software. They don’t have to pay.

Now they’re in a position where they can get that volume. That service bureau is happy because guess what? They just saved $120,000. Right.

Yeah.

So, the way I look at it is I wanna make sure that our people have the best deal, but then our people, the people in the service for accelerator are in a position to give the industry the best deal out there.

Right. And we help you guys structure those kinds of things. But yeah, those are things to definitely keep in [00:16:00] mind when, you know, going direct, you end up having to, you know, play by that. Unless you have the volume to warrant it, you’re not gonna negotiate that, you know. So let us negotiate it for you, and then you take advantage of that, right?

Yeah.

I’m like, wait a minute, let’s not, you know, gloss over the fact that there is heavy negotiations that are always going on on the back end every year within the service bureau accelerated team. Like I don’t do it, but you have to.

He’s always working in the back end.

Yeah. You know so I think people may wonder typically in this is how it traditionally works.

It’s kind of like wholesale resale. You go and you get something wholesale because it’s direct, and then you resell it for more. In our case, we go and we get it for cheaper than what you would get. So in essence, we kind of have that wholesale deal that we can go out and give it to you guys at, you know, [00:17:00] a cheaper rate.

And that’s because of the heavy negotiations that are going on the back end with, you know Baldeep and Ross and you know, the other Salesforce team.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it comes down to relationships and knowing what to ask and, you know, being actually, having volume. Like there’s people that think that they can go get our deal with fucking a thousand bank products. Good luck. You know what I mean? Like, we’ll make sure like, the people that join our community, we make sure you get a better, there’s people, I was gonna go off on a little tangent.

There’s people that we’ve brought over from other service bureaus and gave them that were maybe with the same companies we work with on the backend. And we gave their customers a better deal than they had, than their previous provider had. Like bar none. Like, there’s people, I think that there’s a lot of people that come to our group, get their service bureau deal from us and their prior provider doesn’t, maybe it does not even have a good deal, right?

So off the bat, people are coming to us getting a better deal than they would get [00:18:00] from anywhere else. I feel, and come here, and stand by.

Especially software direct.

Definitely software direct.

Definitely even other service bureaus too.

like I’ve seen the deals out there, like I know our standard deal is better than the deal that some of their service bureaus, their old prior service bureaus have.

Yeah, and to add on to that as well, I actually want to address something that comes up a lot. And this is like, especially on our webinars you know, even on like the sales calls, when people look at our program, it’s the, it’s too good to be true. And that’s where it just comes in where I know Tia like on the kickoff calls, I remember last year you run the kickoff calls and you address that head on.

You’re like, all right guys, look, welcome to the program. You guys are in now let’s address, is it too good to be true? Yes, it’s too good. But yes, it’s true as well. It’s like, yes, yes getting both. It is crazy good. Yeah. And it’s just like, no, this is.

Now that Ross and Baldeep aren’t here, okay, Tia, be honest with me. Is this too good to be true?

Well, it is too good, and yes it is. So, you get the best of both worlds.

I think a lot of that [00:19:00] comes from, aside from, so when we put together the program. The main thing for me was I wanna make sure everyone gets the best fucking service bureau deal possible. Right? Especially starting out like, you know, as you grow. Yeah. There’s other things that, there’s other benefits down the road, but off the bat, I don’t want anyone to feel that they got ripped off or they got a bad deal.

Right? Because I know that our deal is the best out there just on the software merits alone, software package, all that stuff.

Yeah, just on the software, just on the service bureau software deal points, it is still the best points.

Well, that’s core, like aside from the training that’s core, but then for us to go and sell, and the way that I felt you know, working with directly at softwares with other bigger service bureaus, I was like, well, what good is having software if you don’t know what it’s a fuck to do with it?

Right? So, well, we’re good at marketing, sales, all that stuff, and we’ve done it on our programs, on our service bureaus, all that stuff. So, [00:20:00] why not put the only thing out there in existence that breaks down how to actually grow it? Cause you know, dealing with sales reps in these different tax softwares that I’ve dealt with, when I forgot my first service bureau.

Sales guy, if you’re ever watching this, you know who you are, right? You’re working at another company right now. I still like you.

You.

But you could have help me grow my fucking business. You like, right? Like you can’t. Sales reps in Georgia, in California, wherever they’re based out of, that are direct software sellers.

They don’t know what it is to grow. They have a corporation behind them giving them a list, and they’re just calling and maybe they go out and do these trade shows, build, like that’s the old school way of doing it. They don’t know how to help you actually grow a business, right, because they’re salaried employees for the most right?

They’ve never built one. So when we’re like, all right, well great, what good is it just giving people software and a service bureau? It’s branded. It’s nice. They may feel happy. But they need tools, [00:21:00] training, guidance, resources on actually growing it, right? Because, otherwise, what’s the point? Right? The otherwise we’re gonna have a bunch of people that are making no money and they’re not doing any products.

And that’s, if you’re not doing products, you’re not making money, you’re not happy, we’re not making money either. Cause we only make money on the products. Right? Yeah. We make the money on the upfront sale for sure. But that’s not, that pays the bills. But it’s not what the motivation is, right?

The motivation is, hey, oh you guys are making a shit ton of money, awesome, cuz we’re just gonna make a little bit, right. And that’s kind of been the focus is when we launch this. Let’s provide them everything they need to be successful, not just the software. Right. Because I couldn’t call up my sales rep and say, Hey, what do you think about this?

Oh yeah, that’s a good idea. Fuck, you know, you never did it. Right.

So, good luck getting growth strategies from the software direct list.

Right, because they’ll show you how to set up an office add a enroll in the bank. Great!

And, you know, and to be honest, I think that’s where [00:22:00] we, again, cuz I was through this too.

You paid money to be, our community liaison, but you paid money to join the program to be a service bureau.

I did. I did, you guys charged me. Well, actually, sometimes I pay stuff without you even knowing about it. But I think the bigger aspect of it is the sexy part. Like, oh, my logo is on software. I’m the shit. But then when you get it, you’re like, damn, I’m still doing the same thing I was doing last year.

Nothing changed. Like I haven’t grown more. And I think that’s the part that we have to do better when we’re vetting what we’re getting into. Like what besides that upfront, that feel good part. What act like the training and stuff, I’m not gonna lie, it don’t feel good. It does not feel good to sit there and have to go through it and to have Ross be like this.

No, it’s not scripted. Correct. And now it’s, you know, uncle Ross is coming out. Like it doesn’t feel good, but the parts [00:23:00] that don’t feel good are the parts that really hope you grow the most. You know, besides putting your logo on it. That’s temporary. Okay. Your 1500 2000 is gone. Like what comes next? And I think we do a great job at giving you that.

What comes next part?

Yeah, it’s the actual, like, okay, now let’s actually go and grow the business because just, yeah, like you said, getting a logo slapped on the software. It’s like, okay, great. Warm and fuzzy. I’ve got my own software, but now what? Like now what do you do? And that’s where it cuts off.

If you’re going anywhere else I mean even with other service bureaus, yeah, you may, there’s a lot of other service bureaus out there that’ll probably give you a better deal than if you go direct with the software. But again, they’re just giving a deal on the software.

But what happens afterwards? And that’s where our program, that Larry completely is on its own own trajectory because there’s nothing else, there’s no other programs out there that actually go, okay, let’s now dive into the business model. How are you actually gonna grow your service bureau?

How are you gonna get people using your software? Where do you find them? How do you market them? How do you sell them? How do you structure your deal so that it becomes a no-brainer? And everyone, you have, [00:24:00] you know, a flood of customers wanting to buy your software. Versus going direct. Right? How do you handle that objection when people are like, well, why don’t I just get my software direct from it?

We break all that down because that is, that is a part of growing the service bureau business. You gotta be able to handle those, handle that, and actually have some strategies and training, and guidance and support and mentorship to actually back you up so you can go out and be successful.

Yeah. And I’ll repeat it. That sales rep in Georgia, California, or wherever the fuck they are, can’t help you there.

But once you go through our training, you can hire that guy to work.

Yeah. You can hire that guy to excel. Yep.

Have him sell your software.

It’s levels to the game, levels to the business.

No, that’s not unheard of, there’s sales reps from the banks, from softwares going and getting hired by service bureaus, that happens. They kind of float a lot of times when they stand, they float around the industry. We’ve had conversations to bring someone on. But we have yet to actually bring them on. I dunno, our philosophy at our company is really just [00:25:00] probably just grow in-house, right?

Because a lot of times, you know, people come from these big corporations and they expect their nice six figure salaries, but at the end of the day, you know, we have a marketing and sales engine. So it’s not like we need them to bring us clients. We are serving up people, right? We serve up deals for our sales reps, right? And just like we show our service bureaus to do, right? How do you build a sales machine for your service bureau, right? How do you get people raising their hand wanting to do business with you consistently, right?

So you’re not sitting there trying to just cold call people and do what all these guys used to do back in the day. But yeah, so, you know, it could go either way.

And so I do wanna, again, I like bringing in, the drama. So we have clients, just to be honest, that say, I don’t want your training. Like SBA, I do not want them, why do I have to sit through this? Why can’t I just pay you? I don’t want the training. Like what do we, I don’t know. Cause that’s not my department.

So there there’s a couple people that think, oh, I just want this so I don’t [00:26:00] have to pay the two grand cause I don’t need all of it. Well it’s, we have one price, one package and with, we show people one price, one package. Now there’s some people that have a lot of experience in sales and already have stuff going on and they’re like, oh, I just need the deal you have cuz it’s way better than what I’m paying right now.

Right. So that happens. So we’ll make a little note. Hey, let’s not bother them too much about this stuff, but what’s available to them? It’s there for them, right? And then there’s, the flip side. The flip side of that too, Tia is we got a lot of people that already are branded or a service bureau.

But they want the training and we’re like, well, you can’t have it. Your whole service bureau has to come with us, because we don’t do this shit for the two grand. We are here for the volume. So you’re not taking our stuff and going and doing whatever you wanna do. Like it’s not for that.

We’re very transparent with where we want is volume. We don’t care about anything else, you know? Well, I’m not like, in a lack of better words, like we want the volume, but so you’re not, that’s the flip side. We’ve had people come to us and then, then they’ve been moved over. Like there’s people that have gotten released from where they were.

They’re like, look [00:27:00] man, I love those guys. They’re great. I’m like, yeah, they’re good people. I know them. Yeah, they’re great. But they’ll tell you too, that we could provide a better value on the trading side to help you grow than they can, cuz they just don’t, you know, they just don’t offer that. So there’s two sides to that coin.

And so I know, right? And so I was gonna say, I know that we and I’ve actually talked to a couple of people who were here during the initial year and then came back and I’m like, I feel like I’ve seen your name before or something. Oh yeah. I came, decided not to take the deal. Then I came back again. The price when I, you know, came back.

But, and I know this is for our group, but if there is someone in our community that has a friend or that knows someone that wants to get in on our community, but they cannot because they’re currently in a contract with their software.

With a conflicted contract.

Yeah. How long do they have to wait to be able to take advantage of our program?

It depends on where they’re coming from. In most cases it’s a year or [00:28:00] two. But that doesn’t mean we can’t put ’em somewhere else in the meantime, right? Like, so it would be, all right, cool, we’ll transition you to this other software for two years or a year, whatever that states, and then, we could set you up on the other one again, right?

I mean, there’s, there’s different ways to work that so that’s just something that, you know, they have to go through the process, book a call with our team, and we can dive into

that.

On that note too, that’s something that we haven’t mentioned before, but if people wanna find out more on that. I mean.

Oh yeah. We didn’t even do that on the first episode.

We should, maybe there’s people listening and be like, shit, these guys got a good thing going. How do I find out more? We’ll, probably have it in like the show notes and stuff and the description, but you guys can head over to our website, ServiceBureauAccelerator.com and just book in for one of our webinars.

That’s the fastest way. Don’t just email us, jump on a webinar because we’re gonna break everything down, and go over the entire program, and then you go through the process, fill an application, book a call with one of our team members, and they’ll go over any other questions.

yeah, the webinars important. We’ll definitely in the show notes. There will be links to all this stuff. I guess we gotta set that up. We should mention that. Yeah, go. We’ll probably in the future episodes. We [00:29:00] may have like some free giveaways, so we’ll always be checking the show notes.

But yeah, definitely the webinars are important. On the website, there’s a way to register. They are live. Like really live, not fake live, right now they’re currently all live. So if you can’t attend.

You did the webinars.

I used to do all of ’em, but Ross has been doing the past couple, I did like only two this month cause I just moved and then I didn’t have my mic set up and I was off the computer for like three weeks.

So Ross jumped in and started doing them and I think people like him better. So, he could keep doing ’em if he wants, but yeah, we’ll we’re working on all the ways to automate it a bit more. But the reason why the webinar is important is because it’s not just the software. It’s not just like those things.

We go over everything that’s included in the program. And if you book a call with our team and you have no fucking clue what what it is or anything.

We’re gonna, we’re gonna tell you to go watch the webinar.

We’re gonna tell you to go watch the webinar because it’s not fair to our sales reps right? To have to go and re-present. They have a certain amount of time for that call.

Their job isn’t to [00:30:00] represent what everything is. It’s to address any questions that you may have had. Go over any specific nuance you may have with your current software deal. Make sure it’s a good fit for you. There’s people we turn away sometimes it’s not a good fit. Right? And especially if you do know bank products.

Probably not a good place for you to be, cuz you’re not gonna make any money if you don’t do any bank products. And it’s hard for you guys, for people that don’t do bank products to go and try and convince other people to do ’em if you’re not sold on ’em yourself. Right? So it’s very difficult.

So it may not be a good fit if you only deal with business clients, business returns, and that’s the type of clientele you want to deal with and that’s the type of ERO’s you want to track. Not the good place for you. Sorry. Like it’s just not.

Heavy on the good fit, heavy on the good fit. I’ve remember a couple of times on the the kickoff calls, I’m like, Ross, this is not going in a good direction. He’s jumping like you’re cut.

Yeah.

Refund them [00:31:00] immediately.

Don’t be an asshole, right? Like, look, we don’t have to like, and not in a bad, like, look, it’s a community, right? You have access to everybody in the community. If you’re an asshole and you’re always complaining and you don’t want to do the work or just negative energy, it doesn’t happen like goodbye.

Like, I’d rather just give you back your money. It’s not for you. It’s, that’s just how we, how we, our philosophy.

Yeah.

I’ve never seen a company refund somebody so fast. Here today, gone tomorrow.

We try to catch up, sometimes on the webinar, like they’ll present themselves pretty quick and we just ban them.

Yeah. Oh, I’ve banned a good handful of people off the webinar because look, at the end of the day, and this is what we tell our team, like, our sales reps who are taking those calls up to the webinar, it’s like, look, this is a community, this program. It’s like, yeah, okay.

We’re selling a product, that’s fair, but it’s not for everyone. This is a service. We are here for the long term. We’re working with all of our members in the SBA community. We got support tickets year round, like we’re working with people, we’re helping ’em grow their business. It’s a very like, tight-knit community, and we want to have, you know, personal [00:32:00] relationships with a lot of our members and actually like, know who they are and help them succeed and help them grow their business.

That’s the reason why we’re here. So if come someone’s coming in with a shitty attitude, it’s like, nah, I’m not gonna work with you. You’re outta here. Like, we’re not gonna gonna deal with that stuff. If people are here and they’re really wanting to grow this business.

They wanna like dive into the training, and work with us and get support. I love jumping on calls with people who are actually out there working hard and growing their business. I’m a open book. It’s like, whatever help you need, I’m here to help you out and help you grow the business cuz that’s what we’re here to do.

So, yeah, attitude and you know, bringing the right people into the program, into the group is a huge part of it , as well.

Yeah. And, and you know, of course we’re wrapping up this episode, but for direct sales, I know we talked about why you should not go direct. That’s the biggest part. Like community. There is no community.

There’s no other community.

There is no community.

Yeah. Yeah, you’re on your own. You’re just kind of like, you’re a lone wolf. Just kind of trying to figure it out.

No man.

With no guidance, no support. [00:33:00] Yeah. So that’s great. Great way to wrap it up to you there. Yeah, get getting the best, best service bureau deal. Not only the points, but yeah, direct is not always the best choice.

All

right. Well, thanks everyone for being here for episode number two. We’ll see you on episode number three.