A Guide for Brothas and Sistas on How to Get Money
A lot of brothas and sistas love to talk about getting their money on but do not know how to conduct a financial transaction. Most of us been conditioned to only see deposits in our bank account from our payroll or the IRS or a lottery winning. School did not teach us that money can come from all kinds of opportunities and only told us to get good grades and we’ll get a good career.
In all realness, you and me should have absolute disgust that we were not taught that money is made based on supply and demand and don’t let our kids fall for that trap either. Money should be piled up like squirrel pile up acorns and nuts and come from different revenue sources. Also, we got a lot of jive Black leaders and Black folks running around fronting about money and just want to make it seem that only they are good enough to get money and try to put it in your face wanting you to be jealous of them.
No, it is essential all brothas and sistas know how to get money. Because getting money is not something to brag about, that’s a damn survival skill! So screw any Black media that want to brag about people getting money instead of put the focus on making sure every brotha or sista know how to get money and get theirs. So we going to talk about the various ways you get money when you run a hustle.
Overall, you better have a well-written and documented strategy on how to process a payment and get the money. I don’t care if you do not have a business plan, don’t care if you don’t know what you are doing or know what you even selling but you better know how to get the damn money.
Getting Cash
Getting cash payments appear to be what most brothas and sistas like to think about when doing business. They dream of getting cash from the customer, paying off their employees and keeping the rest of the cash in a deposit bag that they deposit in a bank. Most brothas and sistas do cash business like operating a night club or a underground party, used store that take cash payments, do hair style or sell quick service fried food.
The key thing to getting cash payments is you have to have petty cash up front, a lot of cash of lower denominations to provide change for cash transactions. Most people go to ATM machines and they give them $20 and they come at you with $20 and that means you going to see a lot of $20 so you better have a lot of change unless you charge $20 for something. So that means having 100 $1 bills, 50 $5 bills, 50 $10 bills and so on.
Of course there are risks and that’s cats giving you fake money, you need to determine if the money if fake and there are additional steps you have to take to validate if the cash is real – awkward! The next thing and any cat who take cash payments can testify this – you will start having characters hanging around your cash business trying to ask you for money. They assume you can break off a $20 since you got all that money or you can afford to lose $10 out of your cash register.
But the most dangerous is cats want to stick you for your paper. Cats see you doing cash and they want to ambush you so you better know how to watch your back and not be naïve to the streets out there. Trust me, cats be watching you take cash two to three blocks away and be talking to their boys while getting high about hitting you up. You need to make sure at all cost if you have a real protocol to watch out for cats and have a real exit route when your cash.
Keep in mind cash cost money to handle. You have to store it somewhere for transactions and while a cash register is what most people think, a secured cash drawer is what the professionals use. Then cash for the registers are stored in a safe that is very expensive. If you are running a big cash operation, you are going to need cash logistics such as a armored car service – having your homeboys try to protect your money is crazy and you might as well call them Scottish because they will definitely get kilt.
Cash ain’t anything to mess around with – you better be a hard ass person you want to operate a cash-based business. You will lose your life very easily being Black and operating on a cash basis so you better realize the game you getting in. Personally, most of you cats even at the ground floor level need to think twice about cash option as a transaction because you have to bring cash to the table to change the bigger bills they bringing to you.
Cashing Checks
One thing I’m going to say about cashing checks – don’t you ever in your life fulfill a transaction until the check clears the bank! Checks are better than cash because you can take the check to the bank that the check belongs to and cash out and tell them to run the money through the money counter to make sure the money is right. However, there are different type of businesses you have to run that involves checks.
Running a side hustle at work and church, you can take checks because you see these people regularly. If you are doing work for a commercial operation like cleaning services or building and maintain web sites, you will likely have to take a corporate check as that is the way they pay their vendors. Or you are a landlord. So there are still viable business operations where you going to have to take checks and keep in mind, some of these checks will have a lot of zeros on them depending on your hustle.
The way to accept a check is you usually have to invoice your client and tell them how to make a check payable to you. You can get OpenOffice and they have invoice templates or you can buy Microsoft Office and make invoices and they have programs that help you create invoices to send to your client. So you send the invoice and they have 30 days to pay for the service.
Now the problem is and this is what happened to me earlier in the game – I had cats who talked much ish about being rich and successful and I find out the check bounced or take it to the bank and they cannot honor it because the person don’t have the money to cover it. So that is why you must be very careful about accepting checks as a payment. If you are selling goods, you do not accept checks until they clear the bank. If you are selling services – invoice them but use your discretion whether or not you start the service.
One way to mitigate check problems is to require a deposit written in a check and you keep the voided check on file. Cashing checks is a way to do professional business and hide your income from cats outside and handle your business discreetly.
Processing Credit/Debit Accounts
Processing Credit/Debit accounts from EBT to prepaid to debit to credit cards involve having a payment processor that is also known as a merchant account. The thing is everybody is processing their payments in this fashion and it would be unwise not to accept this form of payment if you really want your business to take off. The problem is the payment networks charge money to process your payment and those charges add up fast.
The way accepting credt/debit accounts works is the customer swipe their card against a card processing terminal you have next to your register, you get back a confirmation that the payment was either accepted or rejected and you have them sign the credit card receipt and fulfill the transactions. In some cases and this is the part I don’t like at all – it can take up to 45 days to get your funds from the credit card transaction.
New credit card processing schemes like Square make it possible for you to get funds sweep to your bank account the same night. To be honest, Square would be the best option for any brotha or sista starting out and handling transactions and I recommend it strongly, especially over checks. Just have your iPad tablet or iPhone or iPod touch and process the credit card transaction because most cats do not carry cash. You do not know how many times I heard someone say they don’t have cash and I whip out the Square and they give me their card and go through with the transaction.
The big risk is you can employees skimming your customer’s cards and that ruins your rep and your hustle. The other thing is cats be lying to their credit card company contesting payment after you done service and your payment is delayed and you have to do paperwork to get your $27.
Processing credit/debit is a necessary evil because this is the primary payment scheme of customers in the 21st century. Tell the customer you can process their card payment, take the card, slide it through and the payment should be in a month or so. So that means you just have to wait for the money unless you get a scheme like Square to pay you the next day, which is what I prefer as the killer choice if you going to do merchant accounts.
Deposit a Direct Debit
Direct debit is best known to you in America as a recurring subscription fee. Netflix is an example of a direct debit transaction where they withdraw from your account every month and some health clubs are setup that way. The type of business models you do with a direct debit are subscriptions or monthly billing services. This is the most perfect business model because you just getting their money without even having to deal with the customer.
The most lucrative of this business model is the health club or the membership club with the monthly fee. You know cats just want to pay to pretend they go to the gym and only a few pay and it is common to have only 30 hardcore everyday users and 400 paying subscribers a month for a gym club. You don’t care if they show up, you just care that you got the direct debit payment from them.
Direct debit is not cheap in terms of processing fees if you just doing one or two people, you need to have a nice volume of customers to make direct debit viable if you going through the bank. Paypal and other payment processers do direct debit but their signup is pretty cornball and out of your control for customization. For example, a cat can easily cancel with Paypal and you ain’t even in the loop to try to save the customer.
The way direct debit works is you sign up customers and give them a discount to do direct debit. You offer services such as paid content, membership/club services or whatever and charge them the first of the month. At the first of the month, you run all of your customers for processing and get your $40/month fee off your 200 customers and you made $8,000 that month in revenue. Hopefully, that covers the bills for the rest of the month which is why most people focus on paid content/automated content subscriptions for the biggest profit margins, like butt model web sites or dating web sites.
Transferring a Peer-to-Peer Payment
Peer-to-Peer payment is the same as mobile payments and Paypal where either a phone number, email address or some other identifier is used where one person send a payment to another party. A debit is taken from one account and credit applied to another account. This is the next generation payment model with mobile phones.
The huge advantage is this has the same effect of cash of instant fund transfers and the ability to recycle money faster in a regional location. This is why I stated over a very long time on this blog and covered mobile payments to death on this blog so brothas and sistas realize why we need to start the mobile payment business in our community and not let anyone else do this.
Accepting payment via this method is not here yet and the problem is banks, telcos, internet service companies and payment processors are all trying to do their own thing. Things like ISIS are moving slow and may not be fast enough to implement versus a more nimble competitor. I’m hoping that nimble competitor be your Black ass and seize this opportunity, real talk.
Mobile payments require another peer who accept mobile payments to work. This will work as the replacement of cash where mobile devices secure the transfer of funds between two parties. A third party validation will have to occur such as the user face will be displayed or the user can use their fingerprint to validate they are the other party or a physical passcode spoken has to be used.
Mobile payments will work as a hybrid between cash transfers but have the same technology workflow as a credit card processor. I’m speaking of this now because you will see real implementations of mobile payments soon on the market. My belief is mobile payments will take off in the Black/Hispanic community before taking off among mainstream America. The reason why is the same reason mobile payments is taking off in Africa because the unbanked will see this as a new financial channel while others see it as a tech novelty.
Summary
Learning how to accept payments and get money is a survival skill. They did not teach this to me and you back and school and they are not teaching your kids how to accept payments because they don’t want them to survive, let’s be honest and frank here. In addition, you have Boule Blacks and other phonies who are more interested in talking about how they getting paid and want you to admire them or be jealous of them.
Every Black person, including you needs to learn how to accept payments and get the money and get your paper on. F*ck being broke, let that last generation of shallow, materialistic, selfish Black folks be the ones that grew up broke and busted and ended up still broke and busted – nah, we getting our money up and need to learn the basics of getting dough.
Write down in painful detail and step by step how you plan to get money. Research other web sites and other business operations on how they sign up cats for direct debit, how they process credit card payment or how they invoice client and find web site and existing services. Write it all down and document – I don’t give a damn what you take serious in this world but I hope you brothas and sistas take getting money to put food on your table, put nice clothes on your back and get a bunch of champagne bottles popping at the VIP while you ball hard because you understand and mastered the basics on getting the money.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/07/a-guide-for-brothas-and-sistas-on-how-to-get-money/
A lot of brothas and sistas love to talk about getting their money on but do not know how to conduct a financial transaction. Most of us been conditioned to only see deposits in our bank account from our payroll or the IRS or a lottery winning. School did not teach us that money can come from all kinds of opportunities and only told us to get good grades and we’ll get a good career.
In all realness, you and me should have absolute disgust that we were not taught that money is made based on supply and demand and don’t let our kids fall for that trap either. Money should be piled up like squirrel pile up acorns and nuts and come from different revenue sources. Also, we got a lot of jive Black leaders and Black folks running around fronting about money and just want to make it seem that only they are good enough to get money and try to put it in your face wanting you to be jealous of them.
No, it is essential all brothas and sistas know how to get money. Because getting money is not something to brag about, that’s a damn survival skill! So screw any Black media that want to brag about people getting money instead of put the focus on making sure every brotha or sista know how to get money and get theirs. So we going to talk about the various ways you get money when you run a hustle.
Overall, you better have a well-written and documented strategy on how to process a payment and get the money. I don’t care if you do not have a business plan, don’t care if you don’t know what you are doing or know what you even selling but you better know how to get the damn money.
Getting Cash
Getting cash payments appear to be what most brothas and sistas like to think about when doing business. They dream of getting cash from the customer, paying off their employees and keeping the rest of the cash in a deposit bag that they deposit in a bank. Most brothas and sistas do cash business like operating a night club or a underground party, used store that take cash payments, do hair style or sell quick service fried food.
The key thing to getting cash payments is you have to have petty cash up front, a lot of cash of lower denominations to provide change for cash transactions. Most people go to ATM machines and they give them $20 and they come at you with $20 and that means you going to see a lot of $20 so you better have a lot of change unless you charge $20 for something. So that means having 100 $1 bills, 50 $5 bills, 50 $10 bills and so on.
Of course there are risks and that’s cats giving you fake money, you need to determine if the money if fake and there are additional steps you have to take to validate if the cash is real – awkward! The next thing and any cat who take cash payments can testify this – you will start having characters hanging around your cash business trying to ask you for money. They assume you can break off a $20 since you got all that money or you can afford to lose $10 out of your cash register.
But the most dangerous is cats want to stick you for your paper. Cats see you doing cash and they want to ambush you so you better know how to watch your back and not be naïve to the streets out there. Trust me, cats be watching you take cash two to three blocks away and be talking to their boys while getting high about hitting you up. You need to make sure at all cost if you have a real protocol to watch out for cats and have a real exit route when your cash.
Keep in mind cash cost money to handle. You have to store it somewhere for transactions and while a cash register is what most people think, a secured cash drawer is what the professionals use. Then cash for the registers are stored in a safe that is very expensive. If you are running a big cash operation, you are going to need cash logistics such as a armored car service – having your homeboys try to protect your money is crazy and you might as well call them Scottish because they will definitely get kilt.
Cash ain’t anything to mess around with – you better be a hard ass person you want to operate a cash-based business. You will lose your life very easily being Black and operating on a cash basis so you better realize the game you getting in. Personally, most of you cats even at the ground floor level need to think twice about cash option as a transaction because you have to bring cash to the table to change the bigger bills they bringing to you.
Cashing Checks
One thing I’m going to say about cashing checks – don’t you ever in your life fulfill a transaction until the check clears the bank! Checks are better than cash because you can take the check to the bank that the check belongs to and cash out and tell them to run the money through the money counter to make sure the money is right. However, there are different type of businesses you have to run that involves checks.
Running a side hustle at work and church, you can take checks because you see these people regularly. If you are doing work for a commercial operation like cleaning services or building and maintain web sites, you will likely have to take a corporate check as that is the way they pay their vendors. Or you are a landlord. So there are still viable business operations where you going to have to take checks and keep in mind, some of these checks will have a lot of zeros on them depending on your hustle.
The way to accept a check is you usually have to invoice your client and tell them how to make a check payable to you. You can get OpenOffice and they have invoice templates or you can buy Microsoft Office and make invoices and they have programs that help you create invoices to send to your client. So you send the invoice and they have 30 days to pay for the service.
Now the problem is and this is what happened to me earlier in the game – I had cats who talked much ish about being rich and successful and I find out the check bounced or take it to the bank and they cannot honor it because the person don’t have the money to cover it. So that is why you must be very careful about accepting checks as a payment. If you are selling goods, you do not accept checks until they clear the bank. If you are selling services – invoice them but use your discretion whether or not you start the service.
One way to mitigate check problems is to require a deposit written in a check and you keep the voided check on file. Cashing checks is a way to do professional business and hide your income from cats outside and handle your business discreetly.
Processing Credit/Debit Accounts
Processing Credit/Debit accounts from EBT to prepaid to debit to credit cards involve having a payment processor that is also known as a merchant account. The thing is everybody is processing their payments in this fashion and it would be unwise not to accept this form of payment if you really want your business to take off. The problem is the payment networks charge money to process your payment and those charges add up fast.
The way accepting credt/debit accounts works is the customer swipe their card against a card processing terminal you have next to your register, you get back a confirmation that the payment was either accepted or rejected and you have them sign the credit card receipt and fulfill the transactions. In some cases and this is the part I don’t like at all – it can take up to 45 days to get your funds from the credit card transaction.
New credit card processing schemes like Square make it possible for you to get funds sweep to your bank account the same night. To be honest, Square would be the best option for any brotha or sista starting out and handling transactions and I recommend it strongly, especially over checks. Just have your iPad tablet or iPhone or iPod touch and process the credit card transaction because most cats do not carry cash. You do not know how many times I heard someone say they don’t have cash and I whip out the Square and they give me their card and go through with the transaction.
The big risk is you can employees skimming your customer’s cards and that ruins your rep and your hustle. The other thing is cats be lying to their credit card company contesting payment after you done service and your payment is delayed and you have to do paperwork to get your $27.
Processing credit/debit is a necessary evil because this is the primary payment scheme of customers in the 21st century. Tell the customer you can process their card payment, take the card, slide it through and the payment should be in a month or so. So that means you just have to wait for the money unless you get a scheme like Square to pay you the next day, which is what I prefer as the killer choice if you going to do merchant accounts.
Deposit a Direct Debit
Direct debit is best known to you in America as a recurring subscription fee. Netflix is an example of a direct debit transaction where they withdraw from your account every month and some health clubs are setup that way. The type of business models you do with a direct debit are subscriptions or monthly billing services. This is the most perfect business model because you just getting their money without even having to deal with the customer.
The most lucrative of this business model is the health club or the membership club with the monthly fee. You know cats just want to pay to pretend they go to the gym and only a few pay and it is common to have only 30 hardcore everyday users and 400 paying subscribers a month for a gym club. You don’t care if they show up, you just care that you got the direct debit payment from them.
Direct debit is not cheap in terms of processing fees if you just doing one or two people, you need to have a nice volume of customers to make direct debit viable if you going through the bank. Paypal and other payment processers do direct debit but their signup is pretty cornball and out of your control for customization. For example, a cat can easily cancel with Paypal and you ain’t even in the loop to try to save the customer.
The way direct debit works is you sign up customers and give them a discount to do direct debit. You offer services such as paid content, membership/club services or whatever and charge them the first of the month. At the first of the month, you run all of your customers for processing and get your $40/month fee off your 200 customers and you made $8,000 that month in revenue. Hopefully, that covers the bills for the rest of the month which is why most people focus on paid content/automated content subscriptions for the biggest profit margins, like butt model web sites or dating web sites.
Transferring a Peer-to-Peer Payment
Peer-to-Peer payment is the same as mobile payments and Paypal where either a phone number, email address or some other identifier is used where one person send a payment to another party. A debit is taken from one account and credit applied to another account. This is the next generation payment model with mobile phones.
The huge advantage is this has the same effect of cash of instant fund transfers and the ability to recycle money faster in a regional location. This is why I stated over a very long time on this blog and covered mobile payments to death on this blog so brothas and sistas realize why we need to start the mobile payment business in our community and not let anyone else do this.
Accepting payment via this method is not here yet and the problem is banks, telcos, internet service companies and payment processors are all trying to do their own thing. Things like ISIS are moving slow and may not be fast enough to implement versus a more nimble competitor. I’m hoping that nimble competitor be your Black ass and seize this opportunity, real talk.
Mobile payments require another peer who accept mobile payments to work. This will work as the replacement of cash where mobile devices secure the transfer of funds between two parties. A third party validation will have to occur such as the user face will be displayed or the user can use their fingerprint to validate they are the other party or a physical passcode spoken has to be used.
Mobile payments will work as a hybrid between cash transfers but have the same technology workflow as a credit card processor. I’m speaking of this now because you will see real implementations of mobile payments soon on the market. My belief is mobile payments will take off in the Black/Hispanic community before taking off among mainstream America. The reason why is the same reason mobile payments is taking off in Africa because the unbanked will see this as a new financial channel while others see it as a tech novelty.
Summary
Learning how to accept payments and get money is a survival skill. They did not teach this to me and you back and school and they are not teaching your kids how to accept payments because they don’t want them to survive, let’s be honest and frank here. In addition, you have Boule Blacks and other phonies who are more interested in talking about how they getting paid and want you to admire them or be jealous of them.
Every Black person, including you needs to learn how to accept payments and get the money and get your paper on. F*ck being broke, let that last generation of shallow, materialistic, selfish Black folks be the ones that grew up broke and busted and ended up still broke and busted – nah, we getting our money up and need to learn the basics of getting dough.
Write down in painful detail and step by step how you plan to get money. Research other web sites and other business operations on how they sign up cats for direct debit, how they process credit card payment or how they invoice client and find web site and existing services. Write it all down and document – I don’t give a damn what you take serious in this world but I hope you brothas and sistas take getting money to put food on your table, put nice clothes on your back and get a bunch of champagne bottles popping at the VIP while you ball hard because you understand and mastered the basics on getting the money.
http://dreamandhustle.com/2012/07/a-guide-for-brothas-and-sistas-on-how-to-get-money/
