The registered agent mistake that puts your house at risk

**[00:00:00]** Hello everyone and welcome to the web talk show. My name is Armando Perez Carreno and today with us is Bobby Casey, founder of Business Anywhere. How are you Bobby? >> Hello Armando. I'm great. Best day of my life as always. >> Amazing. Oh that's a great way to manage it. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? What is Business Anywhere and how you got to where you are right now? >> Yeah sure. Um, so I'll talk about Business Anywhere last because that's kind of, you know, like evolution of career and stuff like that, >> but I mean I'm originally from the US, North Carolina. Grew up in an entrepreneur family. My dad had a construction company. My grandpa had had a restaurant and so just kind of grew up in that environment. never really had the mindset of like getting getting a job. Like I don't know. I was never pushed as a kid to to like get your own business. To be honest, I was pushed to uh work in the family business, the construction company. Um and I never did. I never I never worked a day in the family construction company because um I'm very independent, very uh focused, very driven. I don't like working for other people. I would be the worst employee on earth. I'd probably get fired within two weeks of any job I take. Um it I would I either have my own company or I'm homeless. Like really there's there I don't have a middle ground there. Like I would I think I would never make it. But I've I've never had a real job. So like I mean as a kid I had jobs like you know I worked at the grocery store bagging groceries when I was like 14. And you know I mowed yards. I worked at the go-kart tracks. you know, normal kid job stuff. Um, but I started my first company when I was 19. So, I I never had a real job. Um, just like like very unprofessional jobs, **[00:02:00]** let's put it sales stuff when I was 18. Um, yeah, started my first business when I was 19. Um, didn't do very well. Started another company when I was 20. Also didn't really do very well. I started something else when I was 21 that did pretty well that I later sold when I was uh 30 something 33 maybe something like that 33 34 so I had at like 12 or 13 years during that time I had bought a couple of other competitors kind of rolled them up into one company um I also separate from that but in the same time period I bought and sold a restaurant um and I was in real estate business for a um had a lot a lot of stuff going on and um yeah, I ended up in my late 20s. I had like uh you know, pretty decent income and you know, some decent assets and ended up hiring somebody um you know, basically a little bit like me to help me structure my business um and asset protection stuff like that. And I was pretty fascinated by the process we went through and he's a good dude. And I went back to him and said, "Look, I got some friends in a similar situation. Can we work together on them?" And he said, "Sure." You know, we'll just split the money on the uh the fees and stuff. So, um it kind of became, let's say, kind of a very small side gig for me back then, working with a couple of clients along along with this guy. And then that just kind of grew a little bit over time. And then in my 30s, I like at this point I'd already sold the restaurant. I got uh got really lucky on timing. Got out all the real estate between 2007 and 9. Um, literally I sold my last property in September 2009. For anybody that knows history, you know, October 2009 is when basically the economy like crashed **[00:04:00]** to the ground. So, I got extremely lucky. Whoever bought my properties got extremely unlucky. I would love to say I did all that because I was a genius, but nah, just pure luck. Um but got out all that stuff and then from from that point I started doing the consulting thing which is my other company global wealth protection. I started doing consulting like asset protection planning, tax uh tax structuring, uh tax advising, stuff like that. And that business grew and during that period of time, I decided to kind of change the way I lived my life quite a bit. And I started traveling a lot, living in different countries. So I've since I've lived in I think 11 different countries. Um, wow. Maybe 12, 11 or 12, something like that. I've lived in a lot of different countries. Traveled around. I travel a lot. I mean, even now I've lived between three countries. So, I spend usually mentioned in the pre pre-call I uh usually live in Mexico during the winter time. I live in Europe in the summer. And then I have a place still in in North Carolina that I go to in and out of North Carolina. I have a home base there as well. Um, but I spend most of my time between Mexico and Europe. And um yeah, over time I just I got super intrigued with living in different places and all all my businesses work like I I work remotely. Everything I do >> amazing >> is is done remotely. So I can work from anywhere. I've lived a lot of places. Estonia, Latia, uh Italy, Turkey, Georgia, u a few Latin American countries, Caribbean, um you know, a bunch of different places. And so in my consulting business what happened was I had registered a lot of companies in the **[00:06:00]** US for clients uh over the years US companies over the years and the renewal of all those companies the like sending you know we for example we'd send you like if you were a client we would send you an invoice to renew your LLC and you would get the invoice you'd have to fill in some like fill in some blanks so we could file your annual report for you and then you'd have to click the button to pay and then you'd have to click another button to pay the state fee and bl you know and depending on the state maybe you'd have to go somewhere else and pay the like the franchise tax or whatever like every state's a little bit different and that got to be super tedious on our part because what happens is we send you the emails to do that and you ignore them like you ignore every other email like everyone ignores all their emails, right? And and then your company doesn't get renewed. You end up with late fees. You end up with reinstatement fees. You end up with big penalties and stuff like that. And it got to be really tedious because like my team was like sending out invoices and then like as deadlines are approaching, we're sending more and more and more emails or and you're ignoring them. So then we call you like, "Hey man, you know, pay your bill or your company's going to not be renewed." and it just got to be super tedious. So, I hired a developer to build a software platform to automate all of that. Um, so I I jokingly say this, but it's not really a joke. I built this uh out of laziness just because I got really tired of dealing with uh the the tedious parts of it. So, it kind of built out of laziness. And once we built the platform, it it worked pretty well. So and I decided actually this looks like a better business than my consulting business. So and then we then I spun that off as **[00:08:00]** Business Anywhere. So that's how Business Anywhere got started. We added a lot of different products and features to it over >> over time. Now we do the US company formation registered agent service. We have a virtual mailbox product. We're in um I think 30 some odd locations now in the US. We do all your company compliance. Everything's fully automated. Like literally you log in takes you like 10 minutes to register the company and after that it's fully automated. Like you all your state compliance you get a you'll get an email. It depends on the state like for example uh I don't know California for example has a a franchise tax. So, you get a notification in advance of that saying, "Hey, we're about to bill you to pay your franchise tax for you." Or, you know, uh, Delaware has a franchise tax. You get a notification on the before the deadline on that. We're about to bill you on that. If you don't want to renew your company, click here to cancel service or click here to dissolve the company. Um, otherwise, we automatically bill it and file on your behalf. People tend to like it because they don't have to do anything. M >> they want to most people renew their companies. I mean some people of course they don't renew because they're not in business anymore. Um didn't work or something like that. But most people just renew and they like it's automated. So that's kind of how how it came to I know that was long-winded but that's uh how it came to be. It it gives a lot of context because just starting a website and uh telling people that you're doing the service is not the same as having done it for for a long time, doing the steps manually, figuring out the pain point and eventually creating something that both solves your painoint than the customer's painoint at the same time. I think that's that's really valuable. So you you talk about it being created out of laziness and to to a point, yes, but that isn't that really where **[00:10:00]** automation and coding really comes from. That's that's a real benefit of it. It's like you want to stop doing something that's repetitive that you now understand the flow of it. So automate, why why do you want to do it by hand when it when it takes longer, two is prone to errors, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean we like I mean we're essentially a software company. I mean I mean there's the the service that we provide itself is not like registering your Wyoming LLC is not exactly what I would call software >> but the and I like it's slim. It's not it's not exactly what you call a SAS business software as a service. We're more like we're kind of the other way. We're like service as a software. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Um a little bit like that. But yeah, we automate we automate a lot of that stuff. But even internally within our business, I mean we're we're I mean I personally uh wrote a uh an automation tool yesterday >> for my business. Like I completed I I wrote a software program yesterday to automate some piece of our business that we had been doing manually for a while. I mean, we do this like every every week just about now like um like most like for us the delivery of the product or service uh I mean as long as you do it well you're doing like you're doing fine like and we do it very well. We deliver like on time or even ahead of schedule pretty much every order we get unless there's a problem. Um it it's funny because like the delivery of the product and service is the easiest thing that we do. Um it's everything else like marketing and automating task and building the software and maintaining the software and all that stuff. That's like the the **[00:12:00]** difficult stuff. Um, and that's the part that like the client doesn't really see, but it is the part that the client feels because we >> for for me like my one of my like I'm I'm a like devout like my religion is capitalism. Like free market capitalism is my religion. I am a devout believer that entrepreneurs and investors are the economic engine of the world. Nothing happens until an entrepreneur builds something, innovate because we're innovators. Entrepreneurs are innovators. We we make things better. We find solutions to make it better, faster, cheaper, new, you know, like that. Nothing happens until an entrepreneur does that does that. So from my perspective and and the reason we do what we do is we make the entrepreneurs's job so much easier on the tedious things that take their time and take time away from the innovative process in their business. So like every entrepreneur, everyone you, me, every entrepreneur that opens their eyes every morning hates doing the tedious things, right? No one likes doing bookkeeping. No one likes doing con reading contracts. No one likes dealing with uh government agencies and the filings and all the tedious things. We all hate it, right? What do we all want to do? We all want to deal with the next sale, the next hire, make the next deal, the next trade show, the next product launch. It's always forward thinking. Entrepreneurs are always forward thinking. Forward thinking. Let's look at revenue. How do we increase revenue? How do we increase traffic? How do we, you know, make the best hire? How do we train our employees to make things much better? How do we do like R&D on a new product launch or or develop a new software? We're always forward thinking and we always think, "Yeah, I'll deal with the bookkeeping later. I'll deal with that state filing later. Uh, I'll deal with that franchise **[00:14:00]** tax later." Stuff like that. And those are tedious things that take time, but they're also necessary. And so I don't know, it's a bigger kind of a bigger view of mine, but I want to make that piece of entrepreneurs businesses like mind-numbingly easy that they don't even have to touch it. So they can put more energy and effort into the creative process of their business because that creative piece of their business is what makes the world a better place. >> You you're right on track. That's that's just what we dislike doing. It's a you can have as an entrepreneur this magical drive that you could just barrel through anything and invent anything and just and and try and fail and do try again and do this other thing like you spoke at the beginning. But that other stuff that you're talking about, yeah, I think there's a big chunk of entrepreneurs and founders that just >> Yeah. >> No, I mean, yeah, you put it off or when you actually do it, >> it's at the last minute or it's something that you just have to do or late or late >> or late. Yes. And and it's problem because that one is is stressful. Two, it can cost you a lot of money when it's late or when it's incorrectly done. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And and three, like the amount of time and energy you're spending on it because it's because of something you don't like, it's even more energy that you're using. And the time spent on that could have been used for something productive, >> right, >> for the business. Like I'll give you an example like Florida Florida if you register an LLC in Florida the renewal fee uh to to to file your annual report and renew with Secretary of State. It's about 140 bucks. >> Um and then you you need to pay like in most cases you need to pay for your registered agent service. Um that kind **[00:16:00]** of thing. So that's another 100red or 200 bucks a year. If you are one day late >> one day they had a it's a $200 fine. >> Oh wow. If you go beyond the um the grace period, it's another $400 fee. Um and I forget in Florida, I think it's 60 days that it goes into administrative dissolution. I don't quote me on that, but it's something like that. And now you're another $400 fine. Well, I can't tell you how many before we built the software, how many people would just kind of ignore those emails. One day late, 200 bucks. another 60 days late, another $400. Okay? So, because you have to pay the 400 bucks, what they call a reinstatement. So, you have to pay the state fee for a reinstatement and then you have to pay the late fee because you missed the deadline and then you have to pay theund it's about 140, not exactly 138 or something like that. Wow. >> Um, yeah. So little things like that and you're an entrepreneur and you're like you've got, you know, 287 emails in your inbox on Monday morning and you're like like everyone else, you're like, I'm I'm dealing with this in order priority. Okay, here's a customer service issue. Let's deal with these. Oh, here's a revenue issue. I got like sales inquiries. Okay, let's deal with these. Here's uh you know you know I don't know. My wife sent me the grocery list. Oh, I better do that because like she's going to kill me if I don't pick up groceries. You know, you go through your stuff in order of priority and everything else is like push push, but you miss that by one day. It cost you a ton of money. >> Yeah. >> Delaware Delaware is the same way. It's a you you don't file an annual report with Delaware, but there's for an LLC, but you do there's a $300 franchise tax. You miss it by one day, it's another $200. >> Wow. >> So, um you know, stuff like that. And you me you mentioned the point about like with entrepreneurship. I I just want to make a note about this entrepreneurship, you **[00:18:00]** know, you fail and you start again and you fail and start again. My view on entrepreneurship is all you actually do is fail. That's it. Um and then you know out of sheer luck once in a while you get something right. Like that's that's all entrepreneurship really is. Um, and people listening to this, like I don't know if if you have a a job and you're thinking about going into entrepreneurship, maybe that sounds a little negative, but I I I'll give a great example of this, but basically the idea is you entrepreneurship is just about pushing through the adversity until you find something that works. And then you you fail 20 more times in a row and then you find something that works again. And then you like maybe you already have your business and you launch a new product. I mean, oh my god, how many times have I launched a new product and been so excited to think this is the greatest thing ever and you launch it and nothing nothing of nothing happens like no one wants to buy it because in my mind it's amazing you know so you know and I know like tons I have tons basically all my friends are entrepreneurs so like I've heard this story a million times but the best example I had of this Um I've I host an entrepreneurship event uh as well. I have an entrepreneur community. It's kind of a hobby project of mine. But um years ago we had one of our events and a guy was giving a presentation on this topic and his this is a long time ago. This is probably 15 plus years ago. But he was giving a presentation. It's good friend of mine. And he was talking about what he was doing in business. And what he was doing is he would go and buy like a bunch of e-commerce dropshipping sites. Now that's not really a big thing anymore, but back then it was. And like single **[00:20:00]** sites that sold like one product or one small line of product or something like that and then you basically take the order. If you don't know what a drop shipping site is, you have a website selling, I don't know, let's say sporting goods equipment and you receive the order. you send the order to usually the wholesaler. Wholesaler fulfills it. So you don't actually ever inventory a product. You're just kind of a sales channel on the front end. >> Um and so he was going and buying a bunch of drop shipping websites and he didn't care what it was. What he was looking for was distressed properties. So maybe somebody had built one, it didn't do very well. It had kind of fallen because they weren't putting attention on it. they maybe they they weren't doing the SEO was terrible. They weren't running ads. They didn't have any good deals. They lost a they lost a contract for one of their good products or whatever the problem was. And he would go buy a bunch of them, turn it around, make make it like profitable, and then he would sell it and he'd put it on like one of these sites like um like one of these business broker sites. I'm trying to think of them right now, but anyway, he'd put it on there. Maybe, for example, he might buy one like that somebody just like just take it like 10 grand or 20 grand or something and he'd turn it around in six months or 12 months and then he'd sell it for 100k or 200k or something like that if it was doing well like they weren't big businesses but he was doing a lot of them and he was giving a presentation about this topic and a guy in the audience stood up and said the guy giving presentation his name was Bill uh and this guy stood up and he goes hey Bill I got a question does Okay, what can I do? And the guy was like, I'm doing the same thing you're doing, Bill, but I just can't find any deals. Like, there's just no deals to be had out here. Like, I'm looking everywhere. I'm sending offers on deals. Like, I'm getting nothing. I've been doing this for like months and months and like I'm not getting anything. And **[00:22:00]** Bill goes, "Okay, yeah, tell tell me a little bit about he told him a little bit and he said,"How many offer or how many like offers are you looking or how many deals are you looking at and how many offers are you making in a given week?" And the guy goes, "Well, last week, man, I probably sent 10 offers last week." And Bill goes, "Well, there's your problem." And he goes, "What do you mean?" He goes, "Well, last week I sent a hundred." And he goes, "You sent a hundred offers?" He goes, "Yeah." He said, "I'm succeeding where you're failing because I'm working harder and I'm not afraid to fail more." >> Yeah. >> And that's that's it. He He's just not afraid to fail more. He's It doesn't hurt his feelings when somebody ignores him or doesn't doesn't take his deal or whatever. It doesn't hurt his feelings. He's just like, "Okay, fine. Next one. Next one." Whereas the other guy that only did 10 deals, he gotten discouraged over the past few months. So he's doing less and less and less because, you know, it was an emotional hit to his, you know, it was a hit to his ego to get no, no, no, no, no. Right? Kind of like dating, too, right? If you keep getting no, you give up on it, right? Some people or other people, they're like, I don't care. Let's keep going. >> Um, and I think I mean that's that's what entrepreneurship is, is you you just keep blasting through failure till you get lucky once in a while. And >> and I I jokingly say lucky, by the way. I I jokingly say that. I don't believe in luck. Luck luck happens from, you know, persistence. That's that's it. >> Yeah. And and also there's the the whole learning aspect of it. So you fail, you fail, you fail or you get nose, you get nose, etc. But you're you're learning ways not to do it, right? You're you're getting >> Oh, yeah. >> that knowledge that nobody takes away from you. 10 years in, maybe suddenly you get a hit. But it's not because that one was easier. It's because you've already had all that that you learned **[00:24:00]** from the previous tries. >> It's it's like the Edison quote, right? Like when they say, "Man, I can't believe you tried this light different filaments in the light bulb a 100 times and kept failing." And Edison goes, "I didn't fail 100 times. I found a hundred ways 100 filaments in a light bulb that didn't work." And I had to keep going until I found the thing that did work. Yes. >> Yeah. So, you keep learning. You as long as you're learning from mistakes, sure, you tweak it, you get a little bit better. But I don't care. I don't care if you're 60, 70 years old as an entrepreneur, you're still going to be failing every day. like >> well >> in little ways hopefully not big ways >> but but it's but it's good that you call it out because yes some some some people see the entrepreneurial journey especially they if they just have always been in a job and it sounds like something appealing which it is it's wonderful it's fun it's a roller coaster of course but but some people if you see gurus online etc you'll be like they're all yeah it's go for it it's amazing and but at the same time You do have to say things like this where it's like, yeah, really you're going to hit the wall a lot of times, but the the rewards that you're going to get if you keep going are much higher than anything else, but it's not for everyone. Like it's a it's still like >> definitely not like it takes a like you said, it's a roller coaster. like it takes a pretty let's say a pretty good intestinal constitution >> to uh to to withstand being an entrepreneur and like you said the gurus you got to understand when you're on whatever Tik Tok or or Instagram or whatever you're watching like uh Grant Cardone or Alex Formoszi or any of those guys keep in mind if they're a guru in social media They're selling you something, right? They don't want to sell you on **[00:26:00]** the million times they failed to get where they are because that doesn't sell courses. That doesn't sell books. That doesn't sell the the agency service they're pitching or whatever. That doesn't sell the thing like no one buys failure. Um the the only guru and I don't even really call him a guru, but he's also kind of in this space. The only one I know of that talks about all of his failures is a guy named um James Altucher. I don't know if you know who James Altucher is, but he's very transparent and talks a lot about his failures like on his podcasts and in his books and all this stuff, but most of them like Grant, you're never going to see Grant Cardone get up there and say how he failed 50 times in a row and lost $5 million. Like he's never going to do that because they're pitching something, you know? You're never going to see the the Instagram lifestyle, you know. You see all the guys like um I don't know the 26y old guy with three supermodels sitting on the hood of a Lamborghini, you know, pitching his like how to get rich course. Well, that is a lifestyle that they're portraying for Instagram. That is not real life. First of all, it's probably complete He probably paid three models for one day and he rented the Lamborghini for a weekend like to to do the video shoot. That's how most of that stuff happens. >> Um but like you just got to understand when you're that guru thing like you see the guru what what is their intention? What is their purpose of being on Instagram? I mean I I have an in I mean I have I'm on Instagram too. I have a YouTube channel, all that stuff. And what are we doing? We're selling. I mean, we're literally selling our product and service. We're not selling a lifestyle, but like I'm like, if you watch my YouTube channel, guess what? I'm not there because I think I look great on YouTube, right? I **[00:28:00]** mean, I'm not I'm not there like, you know, to satisfy my own ego. Like, I want you to buy LLC's for my company. like we're trying to give you information to help you make good decisions and you think we're better than the other guys so you buy from us. Like that's what we're doing. Um and that's what they're all doing. So listen to what they're saying but understand like the guru what they're there for. >> I think you make a valid point. The some of the advice is good, some of the advice might be bad. You don't know. You can still listen and figure it out for yourself. But I think the important thing is like you said figure out what is their end game and if their end game is to sell courses etc then take it with a grain of salt right but like I I you mentioned Horosi I think if you look at what they are doing he owns acquisition.com and so all the content that he makes they don't sell courses and things they have some some workshops and things but everything they make is so that businesses grow because they own acquisition.com which buys companies and so their endgame is for everyone to actually do better in their business such that their business grows enough and then they can buy it >> from these people and so >> of course >> and then oh okay good then that makes sense and so they they pump out all this all this content and I I like that approach because like it's very transparent and he said like you said like he says exactly why they're doing that, why they do the the the free videos and the things. And I mean, that's the endgame and you know it up front if you listen enough to it and uh whether you want to trust their judgment or not, it's it's up to each individual. But I think it's very important to yeah take that into account because otherwise you can get fooled into **[00:30:00]** >> following steps that might not really help you >> and and just spend money. And I think all the lawsuits with with Cardone recently, I I've not read too much into it, is related to people being angry with and not to him specifically, but in general, like with some of these creators that then might have been doing amazing stuff at the beginning, but then it got diluted and people were angry because they kept having to buy more and more and more and more courses and workshops and and masterminds and things and they weren't actually getting results and so they felt sort of betrayed in that sense. So yeah, >> I'm I wasn't disparaging Hermosi or Cordome like I I was just using them as an example because they're they're gurus that everyone knows who they are >> and like you've got to understand what they are talking about when they're giving you know their when you see their YouTube video or their Instagram channel or whatever you've got to know like what is their goal for being on Instagram. >> Yes. Okay. If like for me, I'm very skeptical of people selling bisop courses >> online. Like for example, I'm not going to pick a name here, but let's let's say you got some like a guru selling a bisop course on uh I I guess I should clarify for anyone listening that doesn't know what that means. Bisop is business opportunity. It's a money-making course. Very often they are get-richqu schemes. Um, and very often they are completely and utterly useless. Um, and the only way the person that's selling the course makes money is selling you the course. >> Yeah. >> Right. They So they tell you, "Hey, listen to me. I know what I'm doing. I've made millions of dollars doing X, whatever the bisop thing is about." But in reality, most of their money comes from selling you the course on how to do **[00:32:00]** X. So, Bizop is something for me that's very uh I'm very skeptical about that stuff. Um, you know, like especially like the one I see a lot is people selling real estate investment courses. >> Oh, yeah. There's a lot. >> There's a lot of those um real estate investment courses. And I don't know, I look at it like this. If you're so good at making money at real estate, why would you put so much time and energy and effort into building out courses to teach people how to make money at real estate? Because number one, literally what you're doing is training people to compete with you on deals. And if you sell that course in a big way, like let's say you have 50,000 people that buy that course, you literally just train 50,000 people to come in and compete with you on deals. And the more people competing on deals, you know, the the the profit gets squeezed on those deals, right? So why why would if I'm very very good at making money in real estate investing, the last thing I want to do is teach you my tips and tricks on how to make money on real estate investing. I want to hide that secret and make all like I I want to take advantage of a you know some little loophole I found in the marketplace. Well, if they're selling the course to me, all that means is the loophole doesn't really work. So, they pivoted to try to find another way to make revenue. Maybe it worked at one point, but now it's squeezed and they don't make any money doing that, whatever that thing is anymore. And now they pitch this uh bisop deal on real estate investing to try to pivot and make money in a different way. But they can use their, you know, I've invested in real estate for 20 years. I have 2,000 rental properties. and they can use that historical success to pitch a deal, but it's not really like a real **[00:34:00]** business opportunity anymore. Not a legitimate thing. So, I don't know. I'm very skeptical of a lot of gurus. >> Yes. >> Online. I actually like it better if I'm watching a YouTube channel or Instagram or Tik Tok or whatever and they're straight up telling me what they're selling me. >> Like, don't don't screw around with me. What are you selling? Like just tell me what you're selling. Don't tell me don't sell me a dream of, you know, Lamborghinis and 20,000 foot houses. Like what's what's the product or the service that you're selling me? Get to the point. >> I believe that there are some people that that do it. Let's say one possibility is like a pivot, right? like you said, like maybe they were doing well, but they all their time was taken and they're so busy that they're like, "No, no, no. I want to retire. I just want to tell people how to do it. I'm not going to be in that space." Okay, respectable. Like you said, they're just getting out of it then. But that's not the majority. But but it's a possibility. But on the other side, just like you're saying, like it the unfortunately the info products market is so profitable if you're selling that it it lent itself to a lot of schemes and scams and um people can fall for it because if you have a very good video sales letter and you're touching all the pain points, etc., people are like, "Yes, I need that. It's going to help me when it might not." And so, yeah, I think it's a just keeping an eye on on the why, like you're saying, how how did they get to the point that they no longer want to do it? They just want to teach you how to do it. If it makes sense, great. And if not, then >> well, and in some cases, to your point, okay, they built this portfolio of 2,000 rental houses and now they're like, I don't want any more rental houses. I have all that I want, all that I need, **[00:36:00]** and I can pivot and sell thisformational course, and I can scale my business faster with info than I can with adding another 2,000 houses to my portfolio, and I want to retire. I'm 50, 60, 70 years old. I want to retire. Let's let's sell a course. Sure. But my point is know what their intention is >> when they're like understand read be able to read between the lines and understand the intention of the person that you run into. So yeah, I'm info products has like especially the past like five plus years maybe 10 years has really blown up because info products there's no barrier to entry on info products. I mean, literally anybody can put a a site up, website up. It's it's limited to your creative thinking ability to uh build a site and sell an info product that that speaks to the right audience. And it you do a little bit of research, you find the right trigger words, you find the right way to write content and, you know, copywriting skills and stuff like that. You can build an info product that's easy to get into. like it's super easy to get into and but the flip side to info products is it's super easy to get into but there's a million people in it. So the only way you really make money in info products is marketing >> which and when marketing is expensive. So you usually spend a ton of money on marketing. Um, I mean, maybe you have an 80% gross margin on your info product because you have very little input, very little cost of goods sold to produce the product. But then you end up spending >> 65% of your revenue in marketing, running Google ads, Facebook ads, stuff like that. Um, so very low barrier to entry, very **[00:38:00]** difficult to convince people you you know what you're talking about. Um, and it's and it's proliferated in the past several years because now everyone can work remotely and >> you know live and travel and be in different places and we have all the tech tools especially since co we have all the like it goes back about 20 years. the remote work um experience is kind of started about 20 I would say it started exactly 22 years ago. There was a key thing that happened 22 years ago that created remote work. Um but during COVID the past 5 years it really blew up because it kind of uh like it skyrocketed that because basically all these companies said yeah go home work from home and and then you had a bunch of people working from home going >> well I can work from home why do I still live in you know New York City or San Francisco or downtown London I can go live someplace I'd go live at the beach um or in the mountains. or you know have a better quality of life or a lower cost of living and and then the next thing is if I can do this working for at my job I could probably do this freelance or start a small business or whatever >> and it just kind of >> snowballed. So yeah the barrier to entry is very low for info products but the the marketing aspect of it is enormous. >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah, cuz there's nothing to fall back on, right? Like if you are a local business, well, you have the brick and mortar and you have the building, you have the machinery, and so people can trust a lot faster cuz you're there. It's a thing where whereas with info products, you better have done your your homework very well in order to convince people >> to buy it. So it's you make an excellent point that it's it's not costly to enter but it's costly to market unless you are an amazing marketer or or influencer **[00:40:00]** etc. or you have amazing experience. >> Yes. But but that you have an experience right. So you still >> but even even with experience you still need the marketing skills like you could have been the greatest real estate investor of all time for 20 years. Yes. If you don't know anything about marketing, you still don't know how to convince people you were the greatest real estate investor for 20 years. >> Like it's it's a very difficult hurdle to overcome. Marketing is a difficult thing and everything is online now, which means everyone is marketing online and everyone is fighting for eyeballs online. and we have a million different channels to catch people's eyeballs to convince them you know what you're talking about. Um >> so and and this is where like like in my business a lot of our budget goes towards marketing just because >> our product delivery our service product delivery is amazing. >> We just have to convince people it's amazing. >> We have to convince them. I've got a long history of experience in this space, but convincing people that I do, that's not the easy that is not easy. Like that's that's difficult. Well, and it's it's a very valid point because nowadays with the AI allowing you to build websites and software and everything that everyone can do, then it's no longer the difficult part to create the software or create the tool or there's still like if you really get into it, yes, if you want to make a big tool, you have to know what you're doing, but still you can you can pretty much create everything yourself. And people are like, "Oh, okay. So now I'm just going to remake this other application and and I'm going to be rich." Well, yeah, but if you don't know how to market it, it doesn't matter. You can make a hundred tools this week. But if you don't understand marketing, you're like, it's going nowhere. Nobody's going to know about it. >> I'd like to know the data on how many **[00:42:00]** people launch an app on the Android or the the Apple App Store >> uh on a regular like on a weekly basis. And and like I'd like to see the data like how many get launched and how many actually get downloads like There's yeah there's >> I bet it's a very tiny percentage >> of uploaded apps that get any downloads. >> It is a small percentage and and a lot of them then get abandoned after a while cuz they don't keep trying especially now like before it might have cost you a lot of money to create an app and have a developer team and all that and so you push you're like oh let's keep trying and they try different channels and they try marketing etc. now that it's so easy to create one. Oh, it didn't work. And like two weeks later, you just abandon it. >> All right. I mean, I I built an app yesterday myself in like 20 minutes. >> Um like literally I built an app yesterday. I mean, it's a basic app, but I built an app yesterday in like 20 we just internally for our business, but >> it's so ridiculously easy now >> to to build an app like Yeah. to your point length. So, everyone launches one. They're like, "Let's see what happens." You know, it's the uh well, what's it called? It's the the the strategy of throwing against the wall and seeing what sticks. >> And you've you've you've got to try. Now, the good thing is you can build faster, so you can iterate faster, too. So, it's nice like if you get some feedback, if you get a feedback loop going, you'll be able to get something out there that people actually want, which is which is amazing. Like there's a lot of opportunity nowadays for people, you just still have to put in some of the work. Like they already took away a lot of the work now. Put in some of the work to actually get it out there. Go to market, I think, is the big the big thing right now. Um, >> well, like we we call we call we don't do it every day, but we call regularly. We'll we'll pick up the phone and call **[00:44:00]** all of our leads. So, we'll do this every couple of months and we'll take like a oneweek period where we'll call all of our leads that come into our CRM. >> And we'll call the ones that didn't buy and ask them why they didn't buy. That's right. >> And then we call the ones that do buy and ask them why they did buy. And that's how we roll out new products. And that's that's how we tweak our service. So the ones that say we didn't buy, we'll ask them like I mean if you get them on the phone obviously it's hard to get them on the phone but we always get some on the phone and we'll ask them like when you were on our site what was the thing that made you not buy and so we got we're taking notes on everything and we we collect that data and then that we use that data to tweak like okay they didn't like this thing because this process was too slow. Let's let's make that process easier. Let's make it simpler. why did these people did buy? Oh, they like this and this. Okay, let's double down on more of this. But we do that. We do that all the time. Um, and that is the part about doing the hard work. Like literally picking up the phone and calling them. Like you can't rely on technology for everything. Like you can't rely on emailing out a job form and hoping they >> fill it out or you know sending them a survey and like couldn't no but who fills out surveys like >> nobody fills out surveys. It's it's actually the same thing with reviews by the way. >> Reviews who gives a review? Somebody who's extremely happy or somebody who's extremely off. M >> most people don't like how like think about it Armando when you go to a restaurant you find oh here's an amazing taco shop >> and you're like this is the best tacos I've ever had in my life you know what I'm definitely going to leave a review right and then if you go to I don't know um a pizza place and the service is absolutely terrible and the waiter are rude what's the first thing yeah screw **[00:46:00]** these guys I'm going to leave them a bad review but if it's in the middle no one's like, you know, this is pretty good. I should probably leave them four stars or three cert. Nobody does that. So, like, you got to do the hard work. You got to push. Like, we call we call our clients that ask for reviews. Did we do a good job for you? Um, we incentivize all of our team members. >> Everyone on our team gets a bonus based on how many reviews mention their name. >> Oh, nice. >> Um, and we have we have a competition every month. So they get a bonus for every review like on Google or Trustpilot if they me if they get their name mentioned in the review and then we take the one that wins each month with so we do it like this. So we have a a formula that cuz not everyone is full-time in the business. So basically you take the number of reviews you got in the month divided by the number of hours you worked in the month and the person with the highest ratio gets the monthly reward. Um, so it's a big another bonus every month that they get another bonus. So we incentivize our team to literally call like, "Hey, if I did a good job, here's the link. Would would you mind clicking this and leaving a review and please mention my name?" So if you go to like our Trust Pilot, you'll see like uh Cara did a great job. We really appreciate her. Or Jessica was amazing. She did everything we needed, like you know, stuff like that. They almost all of them mention our people's names. you you know it's hard work to do that but and it's not a there's no technology tool that does that. You have to talk to the client on the phone or or email or something like you have to communicate one- on-one with them. But that little those little things do do add up. They do make the difference. >> They do and and those are great tips. We were talking about that was about three episodes ago. We were talking about all the like the local map pack and stuff like that especially for for like home services business that sort of thing. And uh you see it like the people it's very plain to see who is reaching out **[00:48:00]** like you said either via tools, via emails, via texts, via whatever but the ones that are reaching out and asking for the reviews whether they're positive or negative, they've got thousands of reviews and then everyone else has like 62, right? And it it makes a world of a different for the consumer as well. So yeah, you've got to you got to put in the hard work. E even then, even if I call a thousand people, we're lucky if a hundred of them actually leave a review. >> I mean, like I said, most people only leave a review if it's amazing or it sucks. Like, that's you'll you'll see like go look at anybody's reviews on any business. It doesn't matter. Like, pick your local pizza place. Look at their like go to Google Maps or whatever. Look at the reviews. It'll be like if it's good, it'll be like 91% five star, uh 8% one star, and then less than 1% it'll be two, three, and four stars. >> Yes. >> Like no, nobody does the middle ones. Almost nobody. >> Yes. Yeah, that is true. That is that is a good way to to think about it. I've I've got a few questions here regarding specifically like setting up right so you help people through Business Anywhere right for the name sort of implies right so some people as you were saying are digital nomads or they they just want to run their business from from elsewhere or maybe they are from elsewhere I don't know so setting up a business for some people even though they might have an idea maybe they even got some clients lined up they're like okay but how do I actually start the and it sounds scary like where do I go and the secretary of state and then the bank and then all that all that stuff right and what's the registered agent and do I need address I don't want to put my home address etc so how how does someone get act to actually create a business and are there many hurdles to do that or does a service like yours sort of just **[00:50:00]** guide them in in in what they need to do to just get rolling >> literally it you if you go on our website businessanywhere.io and then you go to the business registration page, you can see every in every every piece of information on there about what the things are you need to start. Um, and you can register it on our site. Literally, it takes like five maybe 10 minutes. So, like if you walk through the process, the first line is let's do a name search. Let's check availability of your name. >> Oh, man. >> Um, is the name available? It'll do a quick search. Yes. No. If it's available, then you start the process and then you create your account and then each step we take you I think it's seven steps or seven or eight steps I forget. But each page asks you a couple of questions. We have a video on each page >> that's one to two minutes long that goes indepth into each thing on that page. So if you don't understand like like for example do you want us to reg do you want us to do your EIN application for you for example we have a page for that. Um we have a video there that's about one minute long that explains what is an EIN, why you need it, who needs it, who doesn't need it, all that stuff. So you can just watch this one minute video and then you're like yes I need an EIN. Yes. Okay. >> Um and then we have a video about So we have five banking partners in our dashboard. So once you get your company formed and you have your documents, you can click in our dashboard and go through the account opening process. We have a video on our bank opening page that walks you through the different platforms we have for banking and what what it needs to do. Our if you were to watch every one of the videos, it it couldn't take you more than 15 minutes to go through the process. Like I don't >> I mean I don't know. It depends on how **[00:52:00]** much you procrastinate, I guess. But if you go through each page and watch every video, like you watch the video, you answer the question, you go to page two, watch the video, answer the question, page three. If you did every single page, every video, it might take you 15 minutes. Um, and that's the whole point. That's like why we built it like that, to make that process easy so you don't have to jump through all those hoops. And then, you know, we get people like I see this especially on Reddit all the time. They're like, "Yeah, but I don't need somebody to register. I'll just do it myself. I'll do it myself free on the Secretary of State's website." Well, and you can definitely you can go to the Texas Secretary of State website and do it yourself. No problem. You can absolutely do that. But then you mentioned before, do I use my home address? Well, there's you're going to get to a point when you when you're filing the um articles of organization with the Texas the controller, the secretary of state, you're going to get to a point where it's going to ask you what's the address of your business? What's your legal address in the state of Texas? Who is your registered agent in the state of Texas? That's a legal requirement in all 50. Actually, it's a legal requirement in every country. You have to have a registered agent because if your business is registered in that jurisdiction, you have to have a legal address and a legal representative in the jurisdiction where the company's registered. >> Pick a country, they're all the same. You register a company in France, exactly the same. You have to have a legal representative and a legal address. >> And so the registered agent address actually is a very specific thing. And a lot of people don't understand it what it means to be the registered agent. It means someone has to be at that address from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday to receive legal mail on behalf of that company. >> So that could be a notice from the Secretary of State, the tax office, the state tax office, the IRS. It can also **[00:54:00]** be what we call SOP mail, service of process mail. Um, that's basically mail you have to sign for. Like for example, you get sued and a process server shows up, someone has to sign for it. So if you try to be your own registered agent, but you never at home or let's say you pick like, oh, I've got this address uh of some building I never use. I'm going to make that my registered agent address. You can get away with that for a little while, but the moment you get a what what we call a piece of SOP mail and no one is there to sign for it, it gets returned back to sender and then a notification gets sent to the secretary of state and then they will administratively dissolve your your LLC or your corporation. >> So, they'll they'll actually dissolve it and you won't even know it. You'll get well, you won't know it because that piece of mail goes to your legal address. No one calls you or emails you. It goes to your legal address. And if it gets returned, they're going to administratively dissolve it and send a notice back to your legal address, which gets returned. Okay. >> Wow. >> So, some people are like, "Well, I'm just going to use my home address." Well, you can. You can't get away with that. But then the problem is a privacy issue. You're the the legal representative of the company and your home address. So, imagine now you're you get sued. Well, process servers really love showing up at dinnertime cuz they're trying to catch you at home. So, now you you've got process servers coming to your house at 6:00 or 7:00 in the evening knocking on your door. Um, your address also just went your home address just went into public record. Number one, it it associated you directly as the owner of that company. So, you lose any privacy you might wanted associated with the business. Number two, you just expose your home address. Now, maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I'm a big privacy advocate. I don't use my home address in public records anywhere ever **[00:56:00]** for any reason. Nothing. Okay? Because you never know what people really intentions are. Like, let's say, I mean, this is like a really nasty situation, but let's say, you know, are you married? >> Yes. >> Okay. So, let's say your wife has a stalker. You never want that, right? But let's say your wife has a stalker and he finds out she's married to you. He does a record search and finds your name in the Secretary of State's website cuz it's easy. Like literally, it takes 5 minutes to do this search. And he finds your name associated with Armando LLC in the state of Texas. Oh, wait. Armando is the legal representative of this company. Wait, here's the address. Boom. They have your wife's home address now, right? I mean, obviously that would be pretty nasty, nefarious intent, but guess what? People, some people are people, right? Like it it's it's a real possibility. Um, there's all kinds of crazy things that can happen. Like I never want my home address to be a public record. I don't want anybody showing up at my house unannounced. If somebody shows up at my house, it better be because I invited them over. >> You know what I mean? So, and if you do it yourself, if you're like, I'm just going to go on the Secretary of State and register my business. You're going to come to that section in the form where it says, who's your legal representative? You don't have a registered agent. You're like, I'll just write my name in there. I need a legal address. Oh, let me just put my home address in there. Or your office address. Maybe you have an office and you put your office address. And now you've got process servers showing up uh giving lawsuits to your assistant or your secretary or somebody else in the office. And now now your secretary is like, "We're being sued." Oh no, what do we do? Like you you can panic your whole office staff because guess what? If your **[00:58:00]** secretary receives SOP mail that you just got served a lawsuit by lunchtime, everybody in the office knows your company's getting sued, right? like it's probably by the time that process server gets to his car, everyone in the office knows your company just got sued, right? So like you lose all these privacy things um by doing it yourself and why literally what does it save you $200? Like >> so so someone let's say you live in Colorado and you live there, you have your office there, it's still a good idea to use a service like this for the privacy that it provides plus whatever other features that that but just for the privacy thing it makes sense even if you have presence in that state. Is that >> absolutely like literally the worst thing you can do? Okay, not the this is not the worst thing you can do. There's there's other really dumb things, but when you're talking about the the actual formation and structuring of your business, the number one worst thing you can do is do it yourself. Full stop. That's the worst thing you can do. Um, go go read on Reddit on some of these like subreddits about LLC formations. There's like a whole the whole concept that it's stupid to hire a third party to do this for you. Why would you ever hire anybody when you can just do it yourself on the Secretary of State's website? That is the most dumb advice you can have. I don't it it blows my mind that people still think that's smart to do it yourself because I mean literally what are we talking about? It's like 200 bucks. You're starting a business that is supposed to provide for your family and create an asset and build wealth for you. And if your hold up is an extra $200 at the beginning of this startup, **[01:00:00]** maybe you shouldn't be starting a business. You know what I mean? Like that's that's a very nominal price for like >> the best insurance you let Let me give you an example. Let me give you a great example because in my consulting practice because I do a lot of asset protection planning by the way and a lot of people say, "Oh, but you're a registered agent. You you sell registered agent service. Obviously, you believe that way." No. Let me explain this. I did not do this before. I did tax consulting and asset protection planning before and I saw this as being a major problem with clients who were DIY. The problem is why I started the company. This is the reason I started it. >> I'm not in it. Like I don't say this because I do it. I do it because I said it before. Okay. But I'll give you an example. >> In my consulting practice, I was like I do asset protection planning um for clients and I had a client a few years ago actually. So I I love this example because the timing of it and like it's the perfect example of why you don't do this yourself. Okay. >> In one month, I had two people call me. Okay. One person was, by the way, they were both almost identical situations. Okay. Both people in Florida, both people had a Florida LLC, both people with a supplement company in Florida, both people had a class action lawsuit against them. And this happened in a one-mon period of time. Okay? Now, if you don't know what a class action lawsuit is, maybe you know, but maybe your audience doesn't. What a class action lawsuit means is well, I'll tell you the surface level what it is and then I'll tell you what it really is. So, a class action lawsuit is when a bunch of people get together and say, "Hey, we think this product or this company did us wrong with this product. Let's get together and sue them and collect a bunch of money." That's **[01:02:00]** what on the surface level it is. What it really is, it's a law firm that specializes in class action lawsuits and they go find targets to go after and they find a target that they think they can get money out of. And then they go find customers of this client and they say, "Hey, would you like to participate in this class action lawsuit? We're going to get you free money." Well, who doesn't say yes to free money? Everybody's like, "Sure, I'll sign one piece of paper that gets me free money." So that law firm goes and sues the company and maybe gets, let's say, a million bucks out of them, but they've got a thousand clients that they represent, right? >> And they're always a contingency lawsuit. Usually they the law firm gets about half of the the money from the lawsuit and the other half spreads across all the clients. So just on that math, you got a million PE or a million dollar win. The law firm gets $500,000 from doing this. The other 500,000 spreads across a thousand people. So each person gets 500 bucks, right? Well, you're like, "Cool. I get 500 bucks. Amazing. I only spent $30 for those vitamins anyway. So what the heck, I'll take a free 500 bucks." But that's not what it's about. It's about It's a law firm's business practice is to go find targets to sue. It's some of the dirtiest, shadyiest form of legal practice there is is class action lawsuits. Now, not to say there aren't valid reasons to have class action lawsuits. Sure, we've all seen Aaron Brochovich from the ' 90s, right? But like like in reality, this is how it normally works. It's >> Aaron Brochovich was a you probably know the movie, right? Um yeah, it's a dramatized thing. you know, they're out there saving the world from bad companies, but that's not how most class action lawsuits work. It's mostly **[01:04:00]** targeting a company to get money out of them. >> Um, so these two clients, both of them had class action lawsuits against them. Same thing. They had a bunch like a law firm targeted them and found the clients. Okay, I I don't want to talk about whether they were right or wrong. it it that doesn't matter for the point of this. But what happened was the first one called me and said I just got sued for I don't remember it was a couple million dollars. I got just got sued by this class action lawsuit for a couple million dollars and they named me and my wife personally in the lawsuit and they have served us at home and they have our home address. Is there anything I can do to protect myself? And so in about 3 minutes, I went on the Florida Secretary of State website or Sunbiz. Um, for those of you that know, I went on the Sunbiz website >> and I found out why he registered the LLC himself. And when you put in the form, who is the registered agent? He put not only him, but he put his wife's name on there, too. >> He named him and his wife as the registered agent. He used his home address as the registered address. Okay. And so when that happened, the class action lawsuit or the law firm, they did the record search on the company they wanted to sue. They found out they their names and their home address. So instead of only suing the company, they added them individually >> to the lawsuit as well. >> Okay? Because they're like, well, we're and this happens all the time. This is normal. if they can find in these lawsuit these types of lawsuits they will always name the human being individually with the company. >> Now whether the court proceeds with that or not like the judge could say no there was no personal negligence involved so we're going to take the humans off but they always name the people always. If they find the human they name the human in the lawsuit **[01:06:00]** always. And the reason they do that is because they know in the company it's gonna you're limited to take only the assets of the company. But if we go after the human now we have access to their homes, uh their investment accounts, their their vacation property, their cars, their personal bank accounts. They have access to their other assets if they name the human and they win obviously. So in this scenario they named both him and his wife and they were serving them at home. Wow. Okay. And I told him, I said, "Look, there's really nothing we can do here. You've already been sued. Like, this thing has already happened. If we change anything now, then we risk a thing what's called fraudulent conveyance. Like, we change everything after the fact." I said, "We can restructure your business to protect yourself in the future, >> but I can't fix the thing that's already happened." Like, >> I mean, leg legally that can't be done. If we do something, then they risk a fraudulently conveyance claim, which is a whole another type of lawsuit. >> Um, so hold that one for a second. Let's call that person A. Person B within the same month calls me. Same thing. Florida LLC supplement company. Um, by the way, this person was already a client of mine. We were the registered agent for their company already, and their name was not in public record. >> Mhm. They got sued, but the company got sued, not them. They didn't name them personally. We got the the SOP mail because that's what the registered agent does. We received it. We forward it to them. >> He gets on a consultation call with me and says, "What should I do? My company just got sued for whatever a couple of million bucks." >> And I told him, I explained to him about like what a class action lawsuit is and how it happens and blah blah blah. And I said, "My recommendation to you is honestly I would ignore it for a couple of months because, and I'll explain why, class action lawsuits, again, the law firms get paid a contingency only if **[01:08:00]** they win. >> But if they don't win or if they can't ever collect, they just put they just spend a bunch of billable hours in their law firm between partners and parallegals and all this stuff that they're never going to collect." Okay. So, if we ignore it for a couple of months, very often they go away because if that law firm because they're I mean they're predators. These law these law firms are complete sharks. They're predators. >> And very often what happens is if you ignore it, they don't want to keep throwing money at billable hours paying their staff and parallegals and stuff. And so if they don't see, you know, if they don't see like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, they tend to give up >> after a couple of months. Okay? But person A, they already saw the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow because they had the human >> attached to it. And it's easy to go put a lean on a bank or a piece of real estate that they own or a car or whatever. Okay. So, to contrast the two situations, person B ignored it for a couple of months and the and the and the law firm gave up. They stopped sending them the letters. Like, it literally just went away. Okay. Person A ended up settling for $800,000 because they had attached them personally. And by the way, and I'm not going to say it works out like this every time. Obviously, not >> the the c the the law firm for person B, they could have kept pursuing. And if they did kept pursuing, then yes, he would have to go hire a lawyer to represent him in court to fight this thing. But the benefit is the the lawsuit would have been contained within the entity and not attached to personal assets like the other one. >> Okay. >> Okay. Yeah, that's I think I think that is very important for for people to hear because >> let me let me sorry to interrupt but the one thing the the funny thing I did find here this is just a kind of a an aside **[01:10:00]** but the funny thing is is person B he was already a client like we actually I can rewind actually he bought that company from somebody else another client of ours who's actually a good friend of mine he bought that company and so we stayed on as registered agent cuz he bought the whole entity itself. Okay. >> And it stayed with us. So we had been registered agent for that company for years. >> So there was a long history with that company. >> And so he continued with us and actually we ended up doing some more work for him to kind of protect his assets a bit more, tidy up a few things. Um, the other client, person A, he hired me for just one hour, a 1-hour consultation. At the end of the consultation, I explained all of this to him and he told me, he goes, "Yeah, but I don't really want to pay, you know, the 150 bucks a year for registered agent service. It feels like a waste of money to me." I'm like, >> "Wow, >> bro, do you understand what I just told you? Literally, if I would have been your registered agent from the beginning, you would not be settling this personally for $800,000. And the company was like 5 years old. So 150 bucks a year for 5 years is what? $750. So you would have paid me $750 a year for 5 years to keep your name out of public record and keep your name off that personal lawsuit or you just settled for $800,000. I I mean, >> yeah, >> I'm not a math wiz. Like, don't get me wrong, I'm no like MIT math wiz, but it seems like a pretty good deal to spend 750 to save 800,000. >> You know what I mean? Like, that's kind of a funny, it just turned out to be super funny in the end because in the end, like I I gave him a plan that we could move forward with to protect him in the future and he's like, "Nah, I don't I think it's a waste of money to spend that. like I I don't think I **[01:12:00]** should have to pay for a registered agent since I live in Florida. I'm like, "Okay, okay, man." >> Wow. Well, but but I think that happens a lot. Like that's the Reddit thing that you mentioned. It's clear that people still think that way and they don't want to do it. But but I think most of them, well, they're an exception, but most people if they knew how much it would cost them for the issue if something happened, not only in money, but also like personal well-being. Um, it's uh, yeah, I think it's a no-brainer. I'm glad you brought it up. Yeah, it's >> obviously not everyone gets sued for 2 million bucks and settles for 800,000, right? I mean, >> he's one out of >> Well, in in the supplement business, that's actually kind of a high-risisk business. They they tend to get hit with a lot of class action lawsuits. >> If you're in a supplement business, like there's a there are certain businesses that are higher risk. People think like I just sell vitamins online like they don't think it's high risk but actually it is very high risk business because it is a it is a heavy target for class action lawsuits because they'll they'll take your product and say oh you don't really have 50 milligrams of ginkoa in there and we're going to sue you because you misrepresented the product or you know things like that. Yeah. Um, but there are some things that that people don't understand that are high risk that really are like events businesses are high risk. Um, like supplement businesses are high risk. Anything real estate related, like it blows my mind when people own like uh like rental properties and don't and have them in their own name and they're like, >> "Oh, I'll just have insurance on my property." Like that's the dumbest thing you could possibly do. Like I don't mean having insurance. you should have insurance. But the problem with owning it in your own name and only having insurance, the problem is insurance contracts, if you ever read one, there's like 75 pages of fine print. Every line on that fine print is a way for the **[01:14:00]** insurance adjuster to exclude your claim. That's the whole point of all the fine print is to find ways to exclude your claim. Like I had a guy in Texas one time who owned 10 rental houses and in my consulting business and he owned all of them in his own name because he thought it was it was stupid to have 10 LLC's for his 10 properties and it was a waste of money. Well, he ended up having one of his his tenants decided to be entrepreneurial and was selling meth out of the kitchen and they blew the house up and and somebody got hurt and the family sued him and won and they uh and the insurance wouldn't pay anything because in the fine print they don't cover illegal activi damages from illegal activity. Well, selling meth, guess what? It's illegal. Okay. Um, and he lost all 10 of his he lost all 10 of his properties. All 10 of his rental properties. He got sued and they took all of them. >> Wow. >> All 10. He went from a very good comfortable income from 10 rental properties to zero. lost all like this is I don't it's been a couple years but three or $4 million worth of assets boom gone overnight from a from a lawsuit because he thought I don't need LLC's it's a you know that's a waste of money >> if he would have had each house in its own LLC he would have still probably lost the one house >> I mean he lost the house anyway it blew up but he would have lost that property cuz they would have taken that property but it would have been limited to >> the asset of the LLC because he would have segregated the asset But people think like, "Oh, I don't I don't need to do this stuff. I It's a waste of money. It's a waste of time." And to be fair, that's also an anomaly. Like that's a very small situation. But rental real estate is a very, very, very high-risisk activity because you go rent a house to somebody, you might do great due **[01:16:00]** diligence on them and they're the best family ever with a 12-year-old son. Well, guess what? 12-year-olds turn into teenagers. You know, teenagers are and they do dumb things, right? And like they can have parties and like somebody gets hurt in the house, the the family of the other kid that got hurt sues the family. You know what I mean? Like there's crazy things that can happen. >> Yeah. >> And you think like, "Oh, I don't need I don't need this. I I I'm not a risk. I don't have these risks." But there are things that you don't understand that are high risk that are very high risk. and things like segregating your assets into LLC's. It's like cheap insurance. It's really ultimately that's what it is. It's cheap insurance, you know? >> And nobody buys insurance like health insurance. Nobody buys health insurance thinking, "Man, I sure hope I get cancer so this thing pays off, right?" Like, >> and it's the same thing with putting your property into an LLC or putting your business into a properly structured LLC. Nobody thinks I hope I get sued to prove this thing works, right? It is an anomaly. It's a one out of 50 or one out of a 100 situation. Well, it depends. Supplement business is probably more like one out of 20 you're going to get sued. Real estate, it's like one out of five. But, um, still, you know, you have a lower probability of that thing's going to happen, >> just like I have a low probability of getting cancer. >> But I don't buy health insurance hoping I get cancer for it to pay off. You know what I mean? >> Right. Right. Right. Yeah. This this is uh something that people need to hear regardless because it's uh not not if you don't look at these examples and you just see the the $200 when you're starting off. It's like no no I'll figure it later. But then it might be too late later as you've just >> It's definitely too late. Okay. Let me explain that to you. It's definitely too late because if you, let's say you're like, I don't **[01:18:00]** want to spend the 200 bucks. I'm going to create Armando LLC today. I'll do it myself with the Secretary of State. I don't want to spend the money. Oh, okay. Okay. Well, I got to put my name on here as the legal representative. Okay. I got to put my home address on here. It's fine. Maybe I'll fix that later. You don't understand. That becomes a permanent record forever and ever and ever. The first LLC in the United States was created in Wyoming in 1977. You can go right now to the Wyoming Secretary of State website and look up the details from the very first LLC created 1977. It's still there. The record is there forever and ever and ever. Even if you decide later, I'm going to close this LLC and start a new one the right way. >> You can, but it doesn't prohibit somebody from looking up on the state website and finding your home address. >> Right. Right. All right. So, the privacy part, it's like he'd have to do it from the start to do it, right? >> You have to do it from the start >> unless you move. Well, in which case, okay, but still >> doesn't matter. Let's say you let's say you move to Florida. I can do like I have a tool we built our company built a tool that allows me to do an entity search in all 50 states from one one. I can type it in. I can type in your name. I can type in your company name. I can type in your home address. I can type in like it'll pull any data and it'll tell me, hey, you can be living in Florida and it can find me your old LLC in Texas. Now, obviously, you don't still live at the house in Texas, right? But there there are ways to find information. >> You have the information. Yeah. Well, that that that all makes sense. I think it's a it's a like a must. like it uh and it's a no-brainer especially like I think anyone starting a business expects there to be some expenses and setting a business up is one of them. Now this sounds much better than going and hiring **[01:20:00]** an attorney that's going to charge you $300 an hour just for the talk and a bunch of other things. Whereas this sounds like maybe you pay for something you know how much it's going to be and you just do it and you're done. Right. I I I haven't seen a lawyer in the US now charging less than 500 bucks an hour for anything. Okay, maybe maybe uh a traffic attorney that shows up to represent you for a speeding ticket, but no one I haven't seen anyone 300 bucks an hour in years. Like like the I've got a close friend of mine who's um a a family attorney in Connecticut. His hourly rate's $1,200 an hour. $1,200 >> dollars an hour. Um, by the way, like, and I'm not pitching us, but we we don't charge anything to register the entity, and we even give registered agent service for free in the first year. Now, we do have add-ons. If you add on different things, you have to pay for those add-on things. Um, but if you just do the basic service with us, you only pay the state fee >> in the first year anyway, and you eliminate all of the mistakes you could have made. >> Yeah. um on the registration because I mean we've done this a gazillion times. >> Um obviously if you pay for like a if you want a virtual mailbox with us, you pay for that stuff or you want like a legal documents or something, you pay for that stuff. But if all you need is the basic formation, we don't even charge registered agent in the first year. You do pay it in the second year when we renew. >> Um but the reason we do that, I mean, for two reasons. The reason we do that, it's it's a good hook from from a marketing standpoint. Um, but also it it reduces your cost in startup and we want to incentivize people to start businesses. That's literally my value system is for people to start more businesses. >> That's amazing. If people want to learn more about Business Anywhere, they're interested in what we're talking about today. They're like, "Okay, this sounds scary. Let me just do it right the first time." Um, you mentioned the URL before. I'm going to put it in the show notes, but uh can **[01:22:00]** you tell them what what the best place specifically on the website it is or or how what's the best way to reach you and get more information about uh doing something like this? >> Sure. So website is Business Anywhere.io >> particularly.io not.com. I wish we had com. But there's a company that owns that URL that has gone out of business and I've tried to buy the domain and they don't no response. called them, emailed them, like they happens. They they are >> poof, you know. I've tried I've offered to buy this thing. Zero response. Um you can go to Business Anywhere.com. It redirects to a different website, but the website it redirects to is a company that's out of business. >> Um so we got um and we we I mean we have a contact form on there. You can even schedule a 15-minute call with one of our team members on there. We have a chat chat function on there. You can click a chat thing in the bottom right and have a chat with us there. >> We also have an ungodly amount of information on our I think we have like 2,000 blog posts at this point. You can go to our blog and search like whatever, >> you know, like I live in, you know, Texas LLC formation and you can read probably 30 blog posts about Texas LLC formation. Like we even have a blog post that literally tell you step by step how to do it on your own if you don't even want to use us like step by step how to do it. I don't again I don't recommend that but >> the info is there. >> The info is there. >> Nice. Excellent. Well, I'll put that in the show notes as well because uh again this is this is super important information for people to hear to know to listen to these examples of like fishy situations that uh you can avoid completely if you do it properly. So, Bobby, it's been a pleasure. I really thank you for coming on to the show today, sharing your expertise with us. And for anyone else who's listening who **[01:24:00]** has not liked and subscribed to the show, please do so because that way you'll be the first to know whenever we have an excellent episode like this one with Bobby Casey from Business Anywhere. Thanks again, Bobby. And >> cheers. Thanks for having me. >> It's a pleasure. We'll see everyone in the next