0 (2s):
Lights that sparked Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like Being Boss. Today, we'll be chatting about getting business owners $200,000 with the ERC credits to drop these value bombs. I brought Josh Zieglowsky into EOFire studios. Josh has been instrumental in getting ERC potentially to a $30 billion valuation. And today Fire Nation, we’re talking about the ERC credits. We'll talk about who qualifies for this credits and how, and where would you start to get this credit Fire Nation and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors. Business made simple hosted by Donald Miller, takes the mystery out of growing your business, recent episodes, like how to attract and retain top talent and how to make more money with your current products are straight fire.

0 (57s):
Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts. Josh say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1 (1m 12s):
What's up Fire Nation. And I would say something that people disagree with is I'm always telling people to take your shot. And sometimes people don't take their shot and they continued to kind of stay in a shell for a long time and they don't take that risk. But what that builds is regret. And I always say we regret things we don't do. We don't regret the things we've tried, even though it's becomes a success or failure. So I would, I would say that's my top one.

0 (1m 37s):
I love that. I took a shot 10 years ago, Fire Nation, and I'm still taking shots every day. And as I mentioned in the intro, we're talking about getting business owners $200,000 with the ERC credits. And I want to just start off by asking what the heck is the ERC credit?

1 (1m 56s):
I think the biggest overview is during the pandemic, there was the PVP and the IDL. This is the last COVID relief fund stimulus package. That's available to business owners yet. I would say 70 to 80% of business owners don't know about it.

0 (2m 10s):
I would say that's probably the case. So let's learn about it.

1 (2m 13s):
Awesome. Love it. How I even really discovered it is I was looking for stimulus money for another business I have, or had per se and Biden. I found out Biden amended this, and I talked to a couple of tax people, a couple of payroll companies, and no one could help me and believe me. I thought it was too good to be true. And then I really dove into it and found out that, you know, there's a, there's billions of dollars around $400 billion. They've earmarked for this yet at the time, this was a year ago, 10 out of 10 business owners didn't know about it. And this has been amended a few different times where you may have been told at one point from your, you know, from your professional that you don't qualify, but because the amendments, you probably do qualify.

0 (2m 57s):
What about people in Puerto Rico? Do we qualify? You

1 (2m 59s):
Do? As long as there's W2 employees, as far as businesses, they would qualify.

0 (3m 5s):
Wow. I mean, Fire Nation, this is something that I would have to say is a no flipping BEarena. So let's go back a little bit. Josh. I want to learn a little bit more about you. I mean, you said you've had businesses in the past and a couple of things along those lines before you got to what you're doing now and your main focus. Tell us your story.

1 (3m 23s):
I was in mortgages before in my early twenties, and then I went to and learned how to be a real estate investor, started flipping homes for a long time. And then about six, seven years ago learned how to do commercial real estate did multi-family. And then I, I got with a really good mentor where I learned how to do commercial real estate on the triple net side, the retail flex industrial medical and dental offices. And, and then I started, you know, kind of diversifying as an entrepreneur about two, three years ago, started for you different businesses, just as a minority owner. And you know how I really discovered this one again is just trying to find extra stimulus because it's an oil business in Wyoming.

1 (4m 3s):
I live in Utah and I don't know if you remember John, but in 2020, there was a day that the price per barrel was negative $30 a barrel. So why oil business was hurting. And, and I was just trying to find extra stimulus for them and come to find out this pack. This program is similar to PPP, but not so much where PVP was alone. That was forgiven later. And you had to specify what using the money for this is forgiven, right? When you receive it. And it's up to $26,000 per W2 employee. And that's why I mentioned about people in Puerto Rico. They qualify as long as they have W2 employees, 10 99. Unfortunately isn't a, this isn't that this program isn't for them,

0 (4m 43s):
Very fascinating stuff. Now, as I'm kind of, you know, doing a little reading through this, and we chatted a little bit about the fact of employee retention credit, what exactly does this mean at the nuts and bolts? I mean, what are you saving on? How are you getting this credit? How are you qualifying what let's, let's talk about a little more specific details

1 (5m 1s):
Because it's an amended a few different times where it started is up to $26,000 per W2 employee there's $5,000 available for 2020, if you had employees during that time. And the term means employee retention credit, and why they call it credit and not a grant is in a grant. You have to specify what you using the grant for, where this, you can use it for whatever you want. And there's 21,000 available up to in 2021. The biggest qualifications is do you have 500 employees or less? Cause this is a small business type of credit. Where are you then? Did you have a 20% revenue loss or have you had a full or partial shutdown or had you had a supply chain disruption?

1 (5m 43s):
And when that supply chain disruption amendment started in about November of 21, that's when, what I always say is the barn door went wide open with this where even Forbes in an article about two months ago saying 80% of businesses qualified for this

0 (5m 55s):
Wow Fire Nation percent because of that third one, right there, that barn door just flew way, the wide open. Can you give us a specific example of a client who you've worked with, who this has been a real game changer for? We don't need specific names of the people or the company, but just like an overall, just have like a real life example of how this has worked for somebody

1 (6m 17s):
We'll come to mind. And the reason why I say to come to mind is people say, okay, well, it's up to 500, but what's as low as it's as low as one employee. As long as that employee isn't the owner, then, you know, you could have one other employee. And what has impacted me is two companies in per se is one, basically she's a food prep company, probably about four or five employees. She got about 30 or $40,000. And she was ecstatic and said, man, this was a game changer for me, Josh, where I I've had clients that, you know, even this is available to nonprofits Baptist church, we just did. That was little over $3 million, had not a huge impact.

1 (6m 59s):
The other one is a local pizza. Joy has about five or six locations. I got them about $400,000 and they were like, wow, we were actually talking about starting an extra store or two. And this helps with that. And what does that do, John? It really adds another 20 or 40 employees because that could be one or two locations. And that's really what the program is for is to re stimulate the economy and help the business owners, you know, get back on their feet based on what happened during the pandemic,

0 (7m 29s):
Fire Nation. If you're not getting fired up about the possibilities of what this could impact your business and how this could impact your business check. So we got some more things we're talking about with the specifics. When we get back from thanking our sponsors customer expectations are at an all-time high and making things easy is how you'll win. If you can accomplish easy, you'll turn one-time customers into lifetime customers. So how can you make things easy for your customers? It starts with knowledge like having a 360 degree view of how your customers have interacted with your business in the past, what their buying preferences are and how likely they are to become a repeat customer. But how do you gain these insights with a HubSpot CRM platform?

0 (8m 11s):
That's exactly what you'll get easy to use tools to give you and your teams, the full picture of your customers. Just one example of how powerful having that full picture can be. Well, HubSpot, intuitive payment tools allow you to help your customers have a seamless purchase experience with full access to payment data, your teams get the full customer story, meaning they can provide the best possible service. And with directly embedded payment links, your customers can quickly and easily purchase and pay from emails, live chats, and more, learn more about how HubSpot can help your business grow better at hubspot.com. Right? Josh we're back. And I know you said the barn door has pretty much been flipped wide open, and I get that, but let's get specific on who qualifies for this credit, you know, beyond everybody beyond, you know, below 500 employees, et cetera, who specifically qualifies for this credit?

1 (9m 4s):
Well, I always tell people this don't pre-qualify yourself. You know, the way we've had our systems set up, John is someone goes on our website, which is my ERC specialist.com/fire. It takes them about five or 10 minutes to go through a survey. And at that point it tells them whether they're qualified or not. So we don't ask for a credit card. We don't ask for money up front. We actually only get paid if they get paid on the very backend, which is a percentage of what they get approved for. So we're working our tails off to get them the maximum amount of credit possible. The supply chain piece is really wide open. And again, I always say, don't pre-qualify yourself. I mean, I can tell you a plumbers, electricians restaurants, what's funny is we've even had attorney firms say, well, my, our supply chain was courthouses.

1 (9m 49s):
You know, they were shut down. And so we're we're we consider that our supply chain, I, when I first heard this, I'm like, oh, supply, that's probably what's sitting at the ports, not being able to come in. No it's whatever, you know, your supply is. And they weren't able to conduct business on a regular basis because courthouses were shut down

0 (10m 6s):
Fire Nation. And again, this is something you can and should get really excited about. He didn't mention a URL that I'll say right now, my E R C specialists, that's with an s.com/fire. So my E RC specialists.com/fire. So obviously that's where we're going to start. If we want to learn more, we're going to go to that URL, which we'll have linked up in the show notes, Fire Nation. We're going to fill out the form. We'll wait, we'll get contacted by you. But what if someone's listening right now? And they're like, I want to know where to learn more. I want to know where to start beyond that first step, what you're going to do.

0 (10m 46s):
What other recommendations do you have for our listeners?

1 (10m 49s):
I always go back to where now, when I started about it, I heard about it. I Googled ERC credit. Obviously there's some advertising companies or whatnot, but after about two, three advertisers, you'll go to the irs.gov website and you'll see employee retention credit. And then you'll think, okay, this is from the IRS. I should have my CPA and tax professional go over this. Well, the reason why they haven't told you about it is because number one, they probably don't do it. But the other part is 90% of CPAs or tax professionals. They do your 10 forties and your 1120s. This is a payroll credit. So 90% don't do payroll. Well then why hasn't my payroll company told me about it. Majority of those don't amend your nine 40 ones. This is technically this program is technically expired.

1 (11m 32s):
It expired the end of quarter three of 21, but we can amend someone's return 9 41 X for three years. So where can they learn more about it? Besides going to the irs.gov website, our website, my ERC specialist.com/fire. We have videos. We have anything you need really, that kind of encompasses what this program is. And so we've made it very simple. You know, we need to up, I was gonna I'm laughing. Cause I'm looking at the website. We need Kenny to update it because we're, we're about $1.8 billion of credit. Wow. Achieved so far in our website right now is at 1.1. So we, we definitely want to help any type of business.

1 (12m 12s):
You know, sometimes people say, well, you probably just want to help the people that have 2, 3, 400 employees, right? No. I told you the story about the person that had, you know, two employees, three employees, four employees to the pizza joint that had 20 to 40. Like those are the, those, the best stories because those ones, those companies, small businesses, very small business were highly impacted by the pandemic. And it definitely gives us a good relationship with them to know that we can help them out and show them something that they didn't know about

0 (12m 44s):
Fire Nation. I'm going through this website right now, too. And there are some really exciting stats. I mean, 6,030 businesses reached $1.1 billion in credit recovery. Of course, that numbers almost double that now, as, as Josh has shared over 108,000 employees qualified, of course, all these numbers are, are much bigger. Now there's a really cool video that he has where you can kind of go through and get a nice little intro video of what's going on. And they kind of go with some details, you know how it's up to 26,000 per employee available for 2020 and Q1 through Q3 of 2021, no limit on funding. An ERC is not alone, which is huge to know it's a refundable tax credits and so much more stuff.

0 (13m 28s):
I mean, this, this is just as frequently asked questions. You could fill the format of course, and learn all of that jazz. So Josh, before we let you go take the mic, take the stage, share with Fire Nation, why you've made such a pivot and a focus into this as your main number one desire to get out to the world. And then we'll say goodbye,

1 (13m 51s):
Thanks John. And I appreciate you having me on, you know, I would say the last summary of all this is I'm a business owner. This was made by business owners for business owners. And I had businesses that did really well. I had businesses that didn't didn't do so well. And the ones that didn't do so well, I had partners in those businesses because of the pandemic. You know, we were, we were having to shut down those businesses down. If I would've known about this prior to doing something like that, I'd probably be in a different point in those businesses. And so this is definitely something that, like you said, it's a refundable tax credit. You don't have to pay it back. It's not alone. And this is something that, you know, could help, you know, if you're a machinist adding more machinery that you've been wanting to update, if you're, you know, if you're a plumber and you want to add more employees or, or a new equipment, it's just whatever it is that could help stimulate and help you get in a better situation.

1 (14m 47s):
We want to be that we have the team in place to get you the max amount of credit possible. If you're hearing this for the first time and you're thinking, oh, I'm going to go see if this person does it. I would tell you if they do it. And they're professional that they would have already told you, you know, we want to help as many businesses as possible. You talked about our websites at 6,000, we just surpassed 9,000 yesterday. And so we want to get up to close to 40,000 business, you know, reach by the end of this, like the credits recovered, the employees qualified that's okay. But if we can get the most amount of businesses reached by this, that's our goal. And so we've made that a precedence that let's work on it doesn't matter how many employees they have.

1 (15m 29s):
If they have two, three and four employees, if they have 499 employees, we had the team in place to help them get the max amount of credit. And again, we don't charge up front. We charge 15% of what you get approved for when the money comes, the money does come in six to eight months from the IRS. That is their backlog. I can't control that. And, and again, John, thanks for having me on, I appreciate you giving me the opportunity,

0 (15m 52s):
Josh, straight fire brother and Fire Nation. You're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with JZ and JLD today. So keep up the heat and head over to EOFire.com, just type Josh and the search bar. And the show notes page will pop right up with links to everything that we've talked about. One more time, that URL myercspecialists.com/fire. That's specialists with an S myercspecialists.com/fire. And Josh, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation today's value bond content was brought to you by Josh and Fire Nation.

0 (16m 37s):
Successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the mastery journal. So you can master productivity, discipline and focus in 100 days. And we're talking, step-by-step visit the mastery journal.com and I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side. Business made simple hosted by Donald Miller, takes the mystery out of growing your business. Recent episodes, like how to attract and retain top talent and how to make more money with your current products are straight fire. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.