RPS Training Course Live Training Sessions June 28, 2023

00:00:15 Brian Anderson: Everybody, welcome to the call. Sorry we’re a little bit late. I was locked. I had to go to webinar locked up it was. I’d forgotten the time. So that was on me, the delay here. I know Syd and Vanessa and the team were trying to get in. Thank you guys for being patient. We’re going to get started in just a minute. Give me a one if you could hear me or see me okay and let’s get this thing rolling. All right. Hey, Doug Starks, let’s see who else is here. Norma, shout out to Norma. Look at man. All the winner after winner Doug Norma, Bill Brown, Richard, Reggie Thomas and all that Christy Pepperdine. Look at this, you guys. Awesome guy. Good day, all. Hey, I was looking at everybody’s Commission this time. I don’t know if this person’s on the call, but let’s see what was his name? There is a guy that had a really nice deal this time. Let’s see. Catholic Church. I was just looking at this. I’m going to trigger all the payments. See. Mark Sullivan, are you here? I’m going to trigger these right now. Let’s pay these people right now. Mark, you’re not here. Kendall Hendricks, I ran down. Or with Syd’s help, I ran down the issue that you brought up to us. I think they got that addressed. But yeah, Milton. Milton Williams, if you happen to be here. I saw you had looks like a Catholic Church multiple 5 figure deal. So shout out to you a lot of good deals coming in this round. It looks like. So super exciting man. I see restaurants, I see country clubs seeing some fascinating deals, food, pantry. I’m seeing law firms, Barber shops.

00:02:06 Brian Anderson: Restaurants, restaurants, manufacturing, home, healthcare, contractors. That’s what I’m seeing right now. This, this. Go around. All right, I’ll turn my camera off. Hang on. It’s blocking me, too. I see it. It is in the way. Stop sharing my camera. Awesome, you guys. All right, Vanessa. Syd, are you guys going to join or nobody’s joining. At least Niki showed up. Slackers. Yeah, Niki, thanks for not being a slack. I don’t know what the hell those two are doing. Slack, Slack, slack. Let’s see you guys. Here they come. Now they’re going to have an excuse. Y’all watch these excuses that start flying in a minute. Let’s see. All right, all right. I’m just skimming everything. You guys any pressing before we? I’m going to turn over to Syd, but before we do anything pressing that we should talk about, any hot items, anything we can update you on maybe outside of the norm that we don’t always talk about? Is there any hot buttons that we need to talk about? Let’s see. All right. Yeah. Yeah, Doug, that’ll be the excuse. So true. Vanessa’s like 15 feet away. I don’t know what she’s doing, but my office door shut is soundproof at some level at least. So she may not know. Yeah, our lock box is working. There’s a good one from George Rogers. Hey, George, our lock box is working well with the IRS. Yeah, they are about 93% of the deals. 93, almost 94% are working as planned. We kind of always knew that.

00:03:59 Brian Anderson: It would never be 100% perfect. It is what it is, right? But yeah, the vast majority of the lock boxes are working fine. You. You know what it is, if you can do everything right. But at the end of the day, remember, we’re still dealing with a government agency that they move in their own sweet time. My first job at an undergrad, I worked for state government for two years. And I got a case study on how inefficiency really worked. So pretty crazy, but yeah, good question from George. Lock boxes are working fine. It’s never going to be 100%, but the vast majority like north of 90% are flowing through. Now I will tell you that I’m seeing issues operationally on our side that I’m going to have to. We’re gonna have to make some changes on our team. Some of our team members are, candidly they should work at a government office. They haven’t lived up to expectations in terms of timeliness and stuff, and some of the management team needs to do a better job pushing them. It’s Syd and I are getting a real world lesson. In the struggle to find quality employees , that’s probably the best thing I could say. For every great employee we have we have 5 that are not great and we do have some great ones don’t get me wrong but we have some that I would like to level up and all we do is just try to watch carefully and really watch like Hawks to fix those kind of things. Yes support teams pretty solid. You guys in general, I’m going to give Guy a nod.

00:05:49 Brian Anderson: Guy Bergstram just said I want to shout out the support team for all their help and patients. Yeah, they do a fabulous job now. I will admit they’re here. Hey Syd, there you go.

00:05:59 Syd Michael: Let me log in through my computer. It’s on via phone, but all good.

00:06:03 Brian Anderson: All right, awesome. So Doug, Doug gets the prize. Doug said they’re going to claim that they couldn’t log in to go to webinar. And I said I bet they do. Doug, I love it. No. And let’s see. Yeah. So I think, Vanessa, I want you to unmute and sit, and I want, I want everybody to hear this. Guys, Yesterday I found, like, this is the kind of stuff I find. Like, it’s a big believer in transparency. So am I. I get a message from Vanessa last night. Who’s running down a problem for Shoot, whose problem was it? Kendrick, I think. Right. Kendall. Kendall Hendricks. Sorry. And I found 64 deals. I didn’t find them. Vanessa did 64 deals that should have been called, but they were like three or four days. Is that right, Vanessa? A couple days passed when they should have been called. A few days passed, Yes, Sir. But did you ever figure out why they didn’t call? There’s a conversation behind that, but yes. Yeah, so. So there’s little things like that. We’re constantly having to monitor not only the people making the calls, but the managers for performance. I removed one of the guys off the phone who is on the calling team because we have a QA person now who’s listening to calls. And I read her analysis, her reports on one of the people and she graded this person and the grades weren’t up to par and I just said you got to take that guy off the phone.

00:07:43 Brian Anderson: Now, I didn’t mean you didn’t have to call people, but you couldn’t have that guy on the phone till he got retrained. I believe he’s back on the phone now. That was last week. But there’s a lot of little things like that. And I definitely am seeing the need to communicate better. I saw Christie’s comment, I am pushing people as hard as I can on that. It’s interesting. It’s like if I could do every little thing myself, I would. And Syd tries to carry the ball and do everything himself in a lot of areas as well. I know Vanessa’s guilty of it also. I mean it is frustrating you guys because the Syd and rocket science, it’s not rocket science really.

00:08:24 Syd Michael: And it’s going to make us buy laundromats.

00:08:29 Brian Anderson: Yeah. The running joke is we’re going to have to get some businesses with no employees in the future. But you know, but like look there’s plenty of good employees. It’s just there’s plenty of others that man, I have some stories over a beer that I can tell you but I shouldn’t say it on a recorded webinar. I have some crazy stories that I have learned firsthand about all kinds of things that I shouldn’t say. Let’s see, Reggie said. OK. I’m working some of Bill Macintosh’s phone leads in various territories outside of the US So I knew Bill was doing Guam and other places as well. We do have AEs that speak Spanish. We’ve got, I don’t know how many, but we’ve got multiple. We had one person at first, but at this point I want to say half the team might even be bilingual. It’s. The beauty of Tampa is there’s a lot of multicultural, multilingual people. I don’t know how many we have Reggie, but we definitely have them. And he’s asking what about on the front end when speaking first with prospects? Well, if you’re calling Bill’s leads and say Guam or Puerto Rico, they for the most part I’ll speak English as well. I can’t help you on the front end on that. I would actually defer you to Bill on that one. I and I actually just spent a few days with Bill down in Miami at this event we were at. But the feedback that I’m seeing on Bill’s leads is a lot of deals are getting done, they’re moving through. So is it possible you’ll get one where the person just doesn’t know, doesn’t speak at all? Maybe I’m not that Privy to that because I’m not personally using them right now.

00:10:21 Syd Michael: One of the greatest ways to get their attention immediately, Brian, is just to ask them, have you gotten your ERTC check yet? And people naturally get inquisitive and go, no, but how do I get it and say, I know it sounds too good to be true, but it’s very true. It’s a legitimate program. I was, you know, pretty blown away when I found it also, But it actually created us where ERT c.com, one of the top submission companies in the country.

00:10:43 Brian Anderson: Stop for a second. I love it. So let’s set it up. We’re at the automotive show last week. Syd did the Presession. And at the end of the early session before the event started, we got feedback instead, that was the number one line that got people’s attention right? I mean, dude, you guys say it really slow for everybody because they’re going to want to write it down or go really slow on that because that. And don’t remember, don’t talk about your T c.com, talk only about have you gotten the check. So this thing worked. Like gangbusters in Vegas last week. So I’m going to turn it over to Syd. You want to pay real close attention to this one line.

00:11:25 Syd Michael: So you just say, have you received your ERTC check yet? And everybody’s naturally, and we’ve trained this in the past weeks but everybody’s naturally inquisitive about that because immediately nobody wants to turn down or say I’m too busy to hear about getting a check, right. Everybody loves getting a check. So the best starter phrase is have you gotten your ERTC check yet? Depending on the response, I sometimes eliminate the objection right out of the gate by saying, listen, I know the program sounds too good to be true. That’s what I thought at first also. But it’s very real and it’s very true. Perhaps you could say, and correct me if I’m wrong, Brian, I’m an agent for ERTC Express. We’re one of the top submission companies in the country to immediately establish yourself as authority. We not only do. Complex submissions. But we do, we do very highly complex submissions, which makes me different than most of the competitors. And here’s why. Most of the time. And I go ahead and hit the objection right out of the start in my pitch because it really helps move forward. And I just, I don’t want to have to combat this when they all come to this conclusion, right. So I’ll say. Like me and my competitors, you might have been told or you might assume that you can only qualify through lost revenue and that’s not the case. You’re just talking to the wrong submission company. We’re able to qualify you not only through lost revenue, but also through limited commerce such as social distancing, supply chain issues and government mandated shutdowns. And if these are one of the leads then that.

00:13:05 Syd Michael: Bill McIntosh got you. They’re all in areas that were government mandated shutdown. Every single one of those are highly qualified leads as far as qualifying for ERTC Express fact, right. So you want to put that knowledge in front of them, right. So you let them know through government mandated shutdowns and then ask them were you shut down at all, You know the answer. They’re going to say yes and go awesome. Well, listen, it’s a very complex process, but it’s very simple with us and I’m here to make that simple for you. All we got to do is upload a few documents and that’ll be That’ll give us a chance to calculate your credit. You don’t. I’m not asking for any money out of pocket to calculate your credit. However, once you do figure out your credit, we do charge a fee, but only after you know exactly how much money is on the table. Then you can make an educated decision moving forward. It’s best for us just to now get your credit started. Are you sitting in front of the computer? Can I help you do it right now? And then there’s you want to take them as far as they allow you to take them and if they start pushing back on, well, I’m busy right now or hey, I need my wife or hey, you know whatever reason your mission to pivots. Your mission then is to pivot and to 1:00 making it interesting enough for them to show up for the next appointment. So tell them what they should expect, right. Oh, I need my wife. Well, great. You know what time would be best to get your wife so I can jump on a call with you and explain it to her also. I’d love to do that. Right. Hey, by the way, we’ve seen these credits range from 20,000 to $3.3 million. I can’t wait to see how much you’re going to get, right. Put the, you know, put the sizzle on the state. Do not start going so in depth and detail that you overwhelm them because then you’ll start getting responses like, well, this is a lot of work. If I’m only going to get 10 or 20 grand, that’s a direct indicator that you built no value.

00:15:01 Syd Michael: And that you made the processing too complex for them as a direct indicator that you over talked just so you know when you get that response you talk too much. Is everybody with me on that, give me a Roger that if everybody’s keeping up with me on here.

00:15:17 Brian Anderson: Yeah. And Syd went much faster than we would on the other calls, but you guys have been around the longest. You’re the, you’re definitely the most seasoned and savvy I was with. You said it made a lot of sense to me. No, I followed you.

00:15:29 Syd Michael: Yeah so that that that’s exactly how you should handle those calls and Brian we’re scheduled to role play next week and do a couple things so you know bring everybody bring their headsets and I’ll role play with each and every volunteer that we have. I’ll role play with you until the end of time. I’m more than happy to do so.

00:15:48 Brian Anderson: Well hey, I just put this on the screen you guys. I put this in with some of the field agents were asking. I’ve posted this online before, but look. There are other companies out there, right? So if somebody’s asking about other companies, really a bunch of easy questions, if you know if they’re any good. Does the company have CPA’s on staff that do the work, ideally American CPA’s. That’s a yes or no question, right? What’s the right answer to that question? You want it to be Yes, right? Yes. All right. Next question, Does the company have the accounting work outsourced offshore or use software? You want that to be no, right? This next one’s a big one. The radio guys, the ones that are all over the radio are #3 here. Does the company ask customers to attest that they are eligible? Syd, your business was affected by COVID, right?

00:16:59 Syd Michael: It was.

00:17:01 Brian Anderson: Yep, in 20 and 21, right?

00:17:05 Syd Michael: Yes, it was.

00:17:07 Brian Anderson: Okay. Perfect. I just need you to sign this, right? And then I’m going to ask Syd to sign a form where he formally attests, right, Legally states that he’s eligible. All right, this is a big issue. Big, big issue. And we’ll talk about this one in a minute. Does the company tell a business they are automatically qualified for all six periods or they’re going to get them qualified? If they do, it’s another issue. Can’t do that. You’re either qualified or you’re not guys, right? You’re not automatically qualified. All right, this number five, I’ve continued to improve the process here. Does the company provide a real audit package? Including right if it wasn’t a revenue decline situation doesn’t include the specific government mandates that had an impact on the business like state, Georgia, State law 123-689 for these dates. This is the name of the law and maybe the other three laws right then is there some kind of write up narrative that explains and math calculations? That help detail that there was an impact more than a nominal impact. So the answer to #5. If the answer is not yes, you don’t want to work with that company. I don’t care if their fee is free. I don’t care if it’s free. You’d rather pay more to get #5. You do not want to file for ERTC if the company doesn’t do #5.

00:18:52 Brian Anderson: So I gave a presentation last week at the automotive meeting and it was painful, you guys. It was in a ballroom, Syd. Honestly, one of the most painful presentations I’ve ever done in my whole life.

00:19:05 Syd Michael: But let’s tell him who came up after your presentation.

00:19:10 Brian Anderson: That’s the point, right? I’m in this meeting. Nobody’s watching, dude. It was in the ballroom, you guys. Nobody’s flipping paying attention. Hardly. I mean, nobody, like. Honestly, I’ve done thousands and thousands of webinars and presentations and stuff, but this is up there on the list of possibly worst experiences. However, after the call, hold on, let me. Let’s see, Vanessa. If I let me see how I can do this, I happen to have a picture. I’m going to put something on the screen. I think this is. Hang on, let me pull this up. A gentleman came up to me after the meeting. Oh, I can AirDrop it to my Mac. Hang on. Let’s see. AirDrop waiting. All right, where is it? All right, I’m gonna put this picture up there. Is it showing center?

00:20:08 Syd Michael: I can’t. I’m on via phone because it wouldn’t let me log in.

00:20:12 Brian Anderson: And you all see the picture. Somebody give me a one if you can see it. Trying to clean up the garbage. Are we getting any feedback? Is anybody alive on this call? I’m getting a few ones. Yeah, you gotta wake up. Come on. All right. Points to Paul, Lopez and Thomas. All right. Can y’all read who that is? Can you read the badge of the guy to the right of me? I can’t zoom in anymore. It doesn’t look like. Let me see. Yeah, I can. Oh, no. But then it’s off screen. Hang on. Oh, man. I can get it here. Yeah. Richard Furlong, Can you read his company below his name? Richard Furlong. Correct. Well, I can’t zoom in you guys, unfortunately, but say, tell him the good news. You took it. You took the picture. Yeah.

00:21:08 Syd Michael: All right. Well, I also said.

00:21:09 Brian Anderson: What do you do his best? But tell him. Tell him where he works because you can see it. IRS They’ve seen it now.

00:21:15 Syd Michael: The Internal Revenue Service.

00:21:18 Brian Anderson: Revenue 30 minute presentation on ERTC to the IRS. Well, let me let me.

00:21:27 Syd Michael: Preface it, let me preface it a little bit. The guy came up and said I’m very relieved and we’re like, oh gosh, and he was like he goes, I was so scared of what kind of ERTC company, what somebody was going to say and he goes, Brian, you were dead on everything you said. He was like, I was. It was awesome. He was like I was because I was trembling on what was going to come out of a submission company’s mouth, right. And basically said everything Brian said was dead on. In fact he’s like we need to educate consumers more and I would love to work with well, you tell Brian.

00:22:06 Brian Anderson: Yeah, so yeah, I tried to get him to do a webinar, you guys. I tried hard to get him to do a webinar, but I don’t know if you’ll believe me but he was unlikely to do a webinar. They’re not allowed to do that. But Syd’s right, He said, yeah, everything you said was right. And funny enough I was talking to a tax attorney at our booth when the guy walked up. The tax attorney was trying to solicit business from us, really. And the guy walks up. And he said what Syd said and he said, I just want to tell you such a great presentation. It was everything was factually correct, blah, blah, blah. And he went on and told us all kinds of other stuff. But man, I tried hard to get him to do a webinar. And I’m working on a backdoor way to get him on a webinar with me. So I might be able to pull it off. But he basically told me they’re going after. I’m not going to, I’m not going to say who, he said. But they’re going after some of these other companies. Think about this. They’re going after some of these companies criminally, criminally. So you guys, we’re never going to be the cheapest. But when I started talking about the audit package, I even showed him one of my audit packages. He goes, yeah, that’s what we’re looking for. He said, no, you’re good, you shouldn’t, you don’t have to worry about anything.

00:23:38 Brian Anderson: He said when we find these companies that are guaranteeing all six periods, we go after every file they’ve ever done. When we find companies that have no audit package that are doing this for clients, we then are going to audit every file they’ve ever done. Think about that for a minute anyway. It was crazy. I don’t know how long we talked to. I think we talked to the guy for an hour to an hour and 30 minutes. Yeah, hour and a half maybe. So we hung out at our booth with the IRS talking about ERTC compliance for over an hour and candidly it was really positive. He was very, very.

00:24:19 Syd Michael: Positive. I thought he was going to ask you for your content. For him to create compliance videos is what I felt like they were. He was going to ask.

00:24:28 Brian Anderson: Yeah, you guys, I can’t give you this guy’s picture and name and let you mark it with it. I would love to do that, and personally would love to. Syd and I tried to figure out how to pull that off. Now I can probably come up with the one we can probably come up with A1 liner, but the reality is it’s only going to draw unneeded attention on us.

00:24:49 Syd Michael: Yeah, we got to be careful of that.

00:24:50 Brian Anderson: But. Yeah, I thought the same thing, Thomas, if somebody had been recording when he first walked up and said it, it’s the best sound bite of all time. I’m going to get with our lawyers and see if I can, if I can quote it because I mean, I can quote him & it. IRS employee. And then if somebody tried to audit me, I can show the picture and the guy’s name because it’s factually true. I mean, it’s.

00:25:15 Syd Michael: The thing is, the guy was so candidly honest with us about stuff, I almost don’t want to disrespect him that way. You know what I mean? Because he was very candidly, openly on very.

00:25:25 Brian Anderson: Open, he shared. And he told us a lot of stuff that was going down. He told us all kinds of stuff and it was fascinating. And I just said, look, we’re never going to be the biggest. I said because I don’t guarantee you, I don’t guarantee you eligibility and I don’t qualify them in eight minutes. He goes 8 minutes and I go, yeah, and he goes, weren’t you in that New York Times or the guy said this to me? He goes. Wasn’t your company in that New York Times article? Yeah, I said yeah, we were. If you go back and look Richard, we were right after the company in eight minutes where the New York Times said we had a 30 day rigorous process. He goes, I remember. So I want to tell you it was quite an hour, hour and a half a conversation with this guy. And I will be honest though when I realized the guy was at the IRS, I’m like. Here’s what went through my mind. Did I say anything stupid? Because sometimes I shoot my mouth off. I don’t mean to, but I do. I’m like, did I say anything stupid? And apparently not. Apparently wasn’t too bad. And we stayed, we stayed on track. You know, we stay on track. Yeah, no, I kept his business card. And I’m working an angle to do a webinar back door with like a little back door strategy if I pull it off. I’ll obviously invite everybody for sure. And I told him, I said what would be fabulous, as if the IRS on their own did a webinar and recommended you know things like my questions like CPA should sign the returns. The IRS should say that you should come out and say customers should not attest that you guys should come out and say that people need to be.

00:27:15 Brian Anderson: People need your guidance. You should come out and say this thing about having an audit package, say these things. That’s what people.

00:27:24 Syd Michael: Want to do? Let’s just clarify. Nobody screenshot or market that guy’s photo or name.

00:27:29 Brian Anderson: Or anything. I will disavow anybody that does it. It’s on you. But yeah, that’s obviously that’s the guy that we met with and you can see me standing there and.

00:27:38 Syd Michael: We have to, We have to protect that guy. Because he was good.

00:27:42 Brian Anderson: Fabulous guy and but he shared a lot of compliance enforcement stuff going on and honestly it just made me happy because there was nothing he said that we didn’t do, which was awesome. There was nothing he brought up that we weren’t doing and we were chatting about some other companies leaving the names off. We were talking about the lock box model. Who brought that up a few minutes ago. Somebody did and. And he loved that. And I said, well, we use your vendor and the accounts in their name because we don’t want to go collect these fees. And somebody said, well, I heard the IRS said you can’t charge a percentage. Well, they lost in court and they lost on the appeal. So I don’t think they’re playing that anymore guys. So suffice to say the IRS is paying attention. I think that was a take away I got. Suffice to say, they like the model that we outlined. They really like what we’re doing and they want businesses to take advantage of the program as long as they’re eligible. They just don’t want people to be misled by these. I don’t even like the word filing company because when I hear filing company, I think ERC mill and you know if we just wanted to automatically approve everybody, we would be doing triple the volume we’re doing, we would maybe quadruple. It wouldn’t take, it wouldn’t take three to five weeks to finish stuff, if we were doing that at all. So anyway it’s just goes to show you never know, right? Get out there, have conversations, talk. But it was a fascinating experience to say the least, completely fascinating. And I expect we’ll get more out of it.

00:29:35 Brian Anderson: Probably with like 3 months left in the program, we’ll have the IRS doing a webinar, right, three months left in the program. You know that’s just kind of how government is you guys at the end of the day. So enough. What else do we got? Let’s see, Can you update us on the number of cases we’ve submitted? I want to say we’ve got 30 or 40,000, Laurent, I don’t know the exact now. I quit looking at that a long time ago, but it’s a big number, 10s of thousands. Oh, it’s a good one from Reginald Marshall. Reggie said anything about refund turnaround time is improving. Now he did tell me this, you know, there’s this article that came out about a week and a half ago. Two weeks ago it said there about 600,000 files behind. He told me out of that 600 and something thousand, about half are ERTC applications, amended applications. So in terms of being behind, they’re really only 300 and something thousand behind, he told me they’re definitely getting a significant amount of work and some of the larger deals are getting put through additional scrutiny and larger being like quarter million plus 1/4 a period. So I asked him to speculate on how many files would be audited. I said you think it’s gonna be 5-6 percent. He goes, no, probably will be less. He said it’ll probably be 1% of the smaller ones. Now the larger files, it’ll be A, it’ll be a higher percentage. But he thought 1 to 1, 1/2% of the files overall, and out of the really large ones, those will get audited at a higher rate.

00:31:22 Brian Anderson: And if they were to uncover ERC mill that was kind of doing unscrupulous activities, they may audit all those people’s files. So I don’t know, I mean it was a lot of good stuff you guys. Let’s see what else. Yeah, Christy said the, the, the market, the program like the day before it ends, which is so true. I don’t know. I mean it was. It was fascinating. I will tell you that now’s the time if you haven’t kicked it into high gear, and a lot of you have on this call. I see a lot of names that we’re always paying out. If you haven’t kicked it into high gear, if not, now when you guys, you got to do it. You can rest assured. Is it perfect? Nope. Is it being done right? I feel really good. After the IRS conversation, I went from, oh I’m scared. I’m scared to think about what this guy thinks to wow, this feels really good. It was like the rest of the day. The rest of the day got better. And I’m going to tell you, we had a crazy event. We screwed up, one of our team made a mistake, and the person who was giving us the schedule of where we had to be when. I want, I want you to imagine we spent 50,000 to go to this event, maybe 75. And then one of the things we paid for was $20,000 and it was the keynote introducing the keynote speaker, right? It was one of the things we had and our team gave us the list of where to be when, hours and all that. And they left that out. So nobody showed up at the keynote speaker.

00:33:09 Brian Anderson: It really started, I’ll be honest, it started on a sour note, didn’t it? Yeah, it was bad.

00:33:16 Syd Michael: I thought that was right. That’s why I sent you that picture, because I was like, man, that they can’t, can’t know about this.

00:33:26 Brian Anderson: Yeah, Herb saying with 300,000 case backlog, what is that equating to in weeks and months? I think best case we’re looking around 4:00 or five months right now. The bigger ones are longer. It’s kind of weird. I saw one the other day that was 11 weeks, literally 11 weeks from state of submission to 941. But my gut, my, my personal guess is five to six months realistically that that’s kind of what I’m seeing. I know the big one that Norma had, that giant one, I want to say that was five or six months and that was a. Multiple $1,000,000 deal. So it’s hard to say. I mean I read the same release as everybody else does where they put out facts and stats, but we are seeing stuff come back in three months. But it’s the anomaly. Most of them are longer than that. If I had to answer a Herb’s question, I would say five to six months. If I was telling a customer, I would probably tell him expect six months from the time it sent in. He used the word I believe in our conversation, 20 plus weeks. So that’s five months. So here’s what it is. It’s a bit of a black hole. It’s so silly that it, you know, with all the money and technology available that it’s such a black hole. That’s shame on the government here for sure. Should not be like that, all right.

00:35:04 Brian Anderson: What can we do about a deal that is almost a year old Burgess, you should immediately put in a ticket and Vanessa please check on it. Year old. We have a little bit of ability Burgess. So we can do things like this. We can see was the power of attorney accepted this form 2848 What date was accepted Now the 941s are not electronic. They get sent in, mailed in so to speak. Right. So we look for any flag in the system, right. We have the ability to log in and do certain things and we want to see do the 941 show, the amended 941 show received. We want to look for indicators like those. Burgess, that’s about all we can do. Yeah. Norma just said her big deal took five months that just paid out recently. Yeah, that was in May I think. Yeah. Here’s a fascinating 1. Craig put in a ticket on this too. Craig Duran just said my client called the IRS and they could not find her file by EIN Syd. We get that one all the time and then those people get paid like a week later sometimes. Sometimes we end up having to refile them because we can’t find any record either. So it’s frustrating. I mean Syd, how many of those do you get on a regular basis?

00:36:30 Syd Michael: Several every week.

00:36:32 Brian Anderson: Several every week. So I think the, the, the one thing you can do Craig, on that is just put in a ticket and let us see what we can, what we can see. And my general answer has been, if it’s been long enough and it doesn’t show, I’ve refiled them again based on what the accountants suggest. Remember we’re dealing with the black hole in the American government, just remember that.

00:36:55 Syd Michael: Brian, can I point out one thing though, If a client does contact you like that don’t, don’t get weak, don’t, don’t act like, Oh no, what’s going, you know, don’t act like that, you need to know that they are getting filed. The IRS is the one that’s lacking in this situation 99.9% of the time. So what fuels that fire is if you roll over and get weak when the client questions they want to hear. You confidently give them a response regardless what the response is. So just if that makes sense, don’t, don’t just roll over. When somebody calls you with something an issue like that, make sure that you’re very clear and very precise on how we’ve seen the IRS say they haven’t received it yet. Somebody gets a check a week later. So you know, does that make sense? Yep.

00:37:56 Brian Anderson: Once Okay, here’s a good one, Laurent said. Once reviewed by ERTC Express, the CP A’s and submitted to the IRS, what percentage of submissions are approved and funded at that? At this time, it’s probably 99.1 or 2%. Laurent, there are a few that get kicked back, not the entire filing, typically 1/4. And for instance, we had one kickback last week because. They never filed the original 941. Little things like that have happened, but in the grand scheme once it gets sent in virtually 100%. But it’s not 100, it’s just below are approved. And I suspect that’s true of any ERTC company, Loran, not just us. K if I had to guess. Let’s see. Didn’t someone get paid, though? And the IRS said they didn’t have their file? Yes, that’s happened a bunch of times. That has happened a bunch of times. So all I’m saying there is, hang on, I’ll, I’ll put the questions on the screen. Hang on, sits on his phone. Hang on, you guys. Hang on. This is Donna’s question. All right, is it? Shawn said.

00:39:25 Syd Michael: I’m not able to see the screen.

00:39:27 Brian Anderson: I forgot about. I see it now on my second screen. Yeah. So we’ve had this happen. It’s weak. IT weak, weak systems. Now, is it possible that it’s our fault sometimes? Yep. In November and December. We had two employees in the closing team. I won’t bash these two guys. They weren’t bad guys when they worked here but they would just send in files in batches of 20 or 30 in the same envelope and many of the ones that went in that time frame had to be refiled. I imagine, I want you to imagine being an IRS agent and you get 30 in an envelope all like clipped together. They probably just said screw that and threw it away. So we definitely had that happen on some files from that time frame. All right, I’m going to take the next one. Let’s see. Here’s a good one. We’d mentioned a while back about the possibility of a Commission payment being advanced or paid out through the hedge fund. Yeah, So here’s what we’ve done. We. We ceased or terminated our relationship with the hedge fund because they’re working with one or two of the competitors that are doing this unscrupulous stuff. You know the, for instance, the hedge fund we were working with was also working with the company that is all over the radio and doing the customer attestations. We just didn’t want to be connected into those people at all, in any way. No, we wanted no connection point.

00:41:17 Brian Anderson: So we’re doing our advanced funding through banks, community bank, state, state chartered banks, there’s a couple thousand of them. We have a lead bank that we have a relationship with in Texas and that bank is doing advances on some of the deals we send. So for instance, the bank is. If the deal is 500,000 or less, they don’t have any tax liens. They’re not complete. They haven’t filed A/B K and they filed all their other tax documents. They’re eligible through the bank. I want to say it’s prime +4, so which is basically 12. So we are doing those and if those get funded in advance, David, then you get paid. The whole thing gets paid. So what’s cool about that is you’re not paying a giant part of your Commission, You’re not losing a giant part of your Commission. Does that make sense? So if the bank funds a deal and the whole deal funds out, you get paid and you don’t have to pay. The hedge fund was going to charge this monster fee, but that isn’t the case here. So let’s see and here’s the one from Andy Lowry. Let me put Andy’s up. Andy, good to see you. Let’s see. This is a good, this is a great little timeline that I think kind of let me put this up. Andy has one and I just took what he wrote six months ago, Saint Louis Inc. So it must be a company that has filed with the IRS after four months.

00:43:21 Brian Anderson: Saint Louis Inc called the IRS to find out how it’s going. He is called multiple times. Customer calls? Call one tax season, call later. Call 2 claims they lost the paperwork. Call 3. Check will go out on May 15th. No check the 4th call. IRS claims it wasn’t supposed to go out on May 15th. I think that’s par for the course. Cool. That’s interesting feedback. And it and it pretty much says all you need to know about dealing with large U.S. government agencies. I mean, I don’t know what else to say about that. Vanessa, why don’t you answer this one? This is about a portal question from Paula.

00:44:18 Vanessa Roberts: Yeah, Paula asks. She has a deal that’s in the portal that is noted as waiting full deferral payment, But the percentage of completion that is reflected in the portal says 88%. She wants to know if that’s a problem. And no, that is absolutely fine. That percentage is just how many questions in the application have been answered so that internally we can gauge how engaged and how far along a deal is. For quick reference, but since not every question in that application is mandatory for every business, we don’t need 100% completion to get a file done. If it’s in full deferral, you are locked stock ready to go, Everything’s complete awesome. Or Herb, that’s a good one. How do we find out if their tax liens on the business so?

00:45:13 Brian Anderson: This is an area of improvement on our side for sure. We have a new team that’s basically we spun up that’s now going to be running the tax lien search form before the end of the process. So here’s what’s going to happen. We already collect the form. We hadn’t been running it before. I don’t really have a reason why. I don’t know why actually. But now it’s going to be run and let’s say Herb’s client had a lien. Let’s say they’re getting back 100K and have a lien for 70K. We’re going to only offer them an upfront payment. There’s not going to be a deferred pay option if they have a lien. We’ve probably been, we’ve probably been bid about 8:00 or 9 times on this on the lien issue. And you know, fool me once, twice, you know the story, right? So our new team will be checking the lien status. It’s a Form 8821 on the front end. And if they have a lien, there will be no deferred option for that person. It is what it is, right? There’s nothing we can do about it. We definitely don’t want to float somebody that’s never going to get the money because the IRS is going to garnish the money. Burgess and George were asking about the bank. Yeah, the way it works, Let me, I’ll just put it up there. George Burgess. I’ll just put y’all in no certain order, All right? I just put it on the screen. I don’t know who asked. What? I grabbed him out of order. How’s the decision made?

00:47:16 Brian Anderson: Well, the business has to decide they want the money one and is there a minimum? No, but there’s a maximum there. There in theory is no maximum, but there’s a simplified approval process 500,000 or less. If it goes over that amount, then it’s more of like a full bank loan underwrite, if that makes sense. Up to 500,000 Look at the audit package. They look at all the stuff. I will tell you this, before the bank agreed to loan this money, their CPA’s and their attorneys put our process through the ringer and we had one change we had to make as feedback out of their process and it only made us better. They had eight other vendors apply to work with them Other your C companies. None of them passed. None. I was fascinated by that. The decision is made if it’s 500,000 or less, there’s a team at Express that will call and offer the business the option to do that. If it’s over 500,000, right now, we’re not calling those businesses. Doesn’t mean that they couldn’t qualify, but it’s a different approval process. Does it make sense to have the bank offer advances to delayed legacy deals? I mean maybe we just, we’ve just been doing it on deals moving forward. I mean I thought, I definitely thought about it don’t get me wrong, but none of the legacy deals had the tweak that the bank wanted if that makes sense in them and it doesn’t mean we can’t go back and do it, which is kind of the plan, but they just didn’t have them out of the gate.

00:49:09 Brian Anderson: So right now we’ve been doing them on new, new deals that have come in, Let’s see, on the portal. Is there a way for us to see the e-mail correspondence that is going, Vanessa, do you want to talk about this one? I’ll put it on the screen. This is a portal question from Lauren. Let’s see, right. All right, I’ll put it here. You see it? Let’s see. I see it. So Ron is asking, is there any way for the e-mail correspondence between the AE’s and the customer? And I’m guessing I’ll put words in this sentence for you. Also, our automated 8 e-mail campaigns to be included in the portal and no.

00:50:00 Vanessa Roberts: The various e-mail systems are not integrated into the portal, but you do have access to the internal notations. Whenever there is a communication with the AE’s to the customer, it is notated and our phone system is integrated. So whenever there’s an internal or outgoing call from our system to the customer or from the customer to us, the. The record of the call, not the content, but the record of the call and the duration of the call is automatically added to those comments. So all actual contact communication and phone attempts and live connects are all recorded for you to track that communication between the AE and the customer. Nice. OK, here’s a good one from.

00:50:56 Brian Anderson: See Reginald, is the SDR working a new team, working old account. So yeah, so we have these sales development reps or appointment setters, lower end account execs, no disrespect man at all. They’re on a very specific job. They are working old, stale, dead, whatever leads and it and this goes to show you, right. 50 to 80 appointments a week coming out of the stale deals. These are your leads that we’re trying to reactivate for you.

00:51:32 Syd Michael: Fine, but not just stale. If for any reason AE doesn’t contact them within nine days, they get queued back up with the SDR’s. Also, it’s just a double coverage.

00:51:40 Brian Anderson: Yeah, it’s the whole thing, it’s just protecting everything. And we’re managing them pretty tight. We just whacked three of them. They just weren’t doing a good job. It’s a hard life, you guys. I mean you want the same thing Syd wants and I want, right? I asked for 150. This is what I asked for. You tell me if this is fair, honest, and tell me if I’m wrong. A lot of you are outspoken. Give me your honest feedback. I want 150 dials a day and I want 3 hours or more on the phone. It’s an 8 hour day, eight or nine hour day, right? I’m asking for three hours on the phone. Is that reasonable, you guys? Or am I, am I in La land because I fired three of them in the last week who weren’t meeting that criteria? Let’s see what people think about that. Yeah. Reasonable. That should be a bare minimum, Frank. I agree. Definitely reasonable. Reasonable. Yeah. I’m just if they don’t meet that, then they’re just, they might be great people. They’re just in the wrong job, right. That’s all it is. And some I’ve taken and moved them somewhere else. But I’m not in the business of finding, you know, jobs for people that don’t do the job they are hired for. So either it fits or doesn’t unless there’s some opportunity, so to speak. All right, What else this falls into, I don’t know answer, Antoine, but I’m going to put it up there.

00:53:15 Brian Anderson: I have a multiple business deal that finished a couple of months ago, was sitting in deferred yesterday the businesses got moved to disqualified. Yeah, I have no idea on this. So I would ask you to get with Vanessa or Nicole and the team and let’s just run this down. This is one of those we got to really drill down and figure out the answer. It does seem odd, right? It doesn’t make sense. So I don’t know what’s going on. Let Vanessa, can you help figure that out because. Obviously, there’s something going on. Absolutely. Yeah. So I’ll leave you with this. I don’t want to belabor anything you guys, but we’re trying to tighten the process up. The tax lien thing is new. You know, we built it from the beginning. But I will admit, left hand didn’t know the right hand, wasn’t even ordering them. Truthfully, I’m not going to lie to you. We’ve been collecting that form from the beginning, but the lovable morons on my team weren’t running the tax lien search. I don’t know what to say about that one of the accountants. So none of the people you guys know, one of the accountants just wasn’t doing it. So there’s little things like that that continue to come up over and over and over again. Syd, what’s something you see over and over again being down there that you’re you guys have been tightening up?

00:54:41 Syd Michael: Well, we tightened up with the Scr’s first just because sometimes deals would get stuck for 14 or 15 days. And granted, the AE’s, we’re just trying to get the docks, but we still rerun them. You just got to put accountability and scarcity in there. So yeah, that’s the main thing. We yeah.

00:55:01 Brian Anderson: Yeah, we’re moving to heavy metric based evaluations. I take the emotion out of it. I don’t care how much I like the person. Like I recently had to let go of somebody I actually really liked. He or she just wasn’t doing a good job by the numbers. And not one week over like 7 weeks. And at some point it’s not about that. I like the person. I had another person cheating the Commission plan last week. The way they were compensated, they were getting a different person who wasn’t compensated in the same way to pass some certain things that triggered payouts to them.

00:55:39 Syd Michael: And it sucks because I really like that guy, you know?

00:55:41 Brian Anderson: Liked it too. I liked him a lot. I had another person that was stealing one and two W2 deals and sending them somewhere else. So I called the police and prosecuted him and I’m filing a lawsuit against him and the company that he did that with and he wanting the brightest bulb out there, you guys. This rocket scientist did it all under his primary e-mail. He’s a rocket scientist of the highest order.

00:56:15 Syd Michael: We had a complete conversation file, basically recorded calls and emails.

00:56:23 Brian Anderson: I mean the rocket scientists abound. Let’s just say that tomorrow we’re interviewing 6 new people. Hopefully I’ll hire at least four of them next week. On the 5th we have at least four interviews I see already. We’re just trying to grow the team challenging. So challenging Thomas B on your deal specific one. Vanessa, can you help him or create a ticket and like let’s solve that, Let’s at least run that down for you. Thomas, let’s see. No, Lauren, thank you so much. It’s truly we appreciate that. I hope you have a great day. Where are you based out of Lauren? I can guess, but I don’t want, I don’t want to guess on this one. Calgary Okay. Yeah. I mean, you guys, we’re not perfect. But I’ll tell you this, we fire managers too. We fired the sales team lead. I fired. We had to fire people because they weren’t leading the charge. It’s too important. I don’t care if we like somebody. I like everybody we hire in general, right? I wouldn’t have hired them, but. We’re not scared to replace and get rid of people that aren’t meeting expectations. And I think it’s like one of the most important things, very, very important. So we’re going to keep doing that. We’re going to top grade the people that aren’t performing. Like every day I see how many deals each person got done. I see how many calls they made, how long they were on the phone. I see how many contracts are signed every day.

00:58:05 Brian Anderson: As a percentage of calls made, I see all these metrics and I’m able to compute all those numbers. No one really sees this but me. But I compute all those numbers into a single score, like an efficiency score. You fall below the line, You get fired. Not in one week. I’m not an idiot, but if you’re below the line consistently, you can’t be here. It’s not fair to you. It’s not fair to Syd, our team. Anybody else? That put in the work, so it’s not fair to their colleagues. We try to do things to build morale with the team. I know John, the CEO has been buying. We bought a lot of sporting tickets and we gave them out to the team concert tickets, dinners, we try to do positive team building things. We try to pay about 15 to 20% higher than the market rate. We buy lunch and dinner for the team. If you’re working through lunch or working through dinner and you stay to 8, you get free food, said. What else we stock the restroom, the restroom. We stock the lunch room for the sales team that they can, they can kind of be on the phone, keep working, man.

00:59:18 Syd Michael: You just now caught me in the pantry myself.

00:59:23 Brian Anderson: So funny.

00:59:24 Syd Michael: I didn’t see what new stuff they got there.

00:59:31 Brian Anderson: Scott, you’re not kidding, dude. But if somebody isn’t performing one week, we try to build them up and help them. If the second week we still are working with them, we don’t fire them right away. We’ve already invested in them. But if they’re not able to make 150 to 200 calls a day and be on the phone at least three hours out of there 8 or 9 hours, you got to ask yourself, is that the person we won in that role? How would you guys feel if your deals were going to somebody that was only making 40 calls a day and he or she was on the phone an hour a day? You wouldn’t like that. We owe it to you to get rid of those people. I personally feel indebted to each and every one of you, and if I see somebody that’s dropping the ball, it’s not me. It’ll be somebody else that gets rid of them. Syd told me about somebody else that’s about to be let go performance. And I hate it because I like some of these people. But it’s not personal. It’s strictly business. And it’s not rash. It’s not an instant, Oh, you had a bad day. You don’t get fired for a bad day. We’re not jerks. But if you’re a pattern of consistent underachieving, we move them on out, let them go to the other companies, let them go somewhere else. So yeah, we’ll do. There was a question came up in the group. What about deals? And I’ll. I’ll end with this because I want you to know we ain’t playing. What about deals where the IRS didn’t send to the lock box? Let’s say the eight percent, 7% of the deals where it went, they skipped the lock box. The payments were made to the business. We have a lawyer or I guess she’s an employee with a law degree. We have an employee and a team that runs those deals down very firmly. She’s in like a prelitigation.

01:01:24 Brian Anderson: So we’re not playing. It’s your money. It’s our money. I had to pay all the work. I had to pay for all that work. So we’re not going to just say, hey bygones, yeah, screw us over. Herb doesn’t deserve to get his $18,000. We’re Herb. Herb does deserve the money. And if that company didn’t pay, we’re going to escalate through a series, starting with. Starting with calls and letters ending with federal lawsuit and it and it. Most of the time they won’t get there as the lawyer gets real as they just as they find out like these couple people what time it is, most of them don’t want to go to war. We have a pretty good rest assured we have a pretty good war chest to take those guys out. We have a contract signed 99% of the time. They sent us work. We have recorded calls where they agreed to do XY&Z and then and then all of a sudden they don’t. They’re in a really weak position, Most of them. I am seeing it happen right now. I don’t know. No, Julisa’s not here. She’s down there. But Julisa told me the other day there are three or four of the, we call them our problem children. Three or four of the problem children paid in the last week because they didn’t want to go to court. They know they’re in the wrong. They tried to skate out on paying, stealing from you and from the company, but eventually when they got called out on the table, they paid. That wasn’t me. Scott Hall. All right. No, thank you guys so much. We appreciate you. I’m going to turn it back over to Syd. I’m slightly under the weather today, so if I sound kind of off, I’m man, I’m just fighting.

01:03:17 Brian Anderson: I don’t know, exhaustion I guess. But it’s everything’s good. We are running as a company. You guys radio ads. We are doing marketing from a company level. You’re going to see some YouTube videos that I have out there, some Facebook videos. I encourage you, don’t. I encourage you to be like the platinum agents. You know what those guys are doing, right? And I collective guys, guys and gals. They don’t quit. Guys like Antoine Kerb, Rawlings, Mark Frank Sullivan, there’s so many Christy, there’s so many of the team in the platinum group, they’re no smarter than the next guy or gal. They’re just putting one in front of another. And you know what? They’ve had adversity. They’ve had deals, not going quit. So. So I encourage you not to quit. Think about those two guys in Europe. I don’t know if they’re on the call. Paul Baker and Bjorn. The Dutch, they could. The Dutchies, right. Think about those guys. They don’t quit. So I really encourage you. We’re paying out $1,000,000 if not more different months. Get your piece. I mean, there’s no reason that everybody here can’t make obscene money. If you’re not good at the marketing side, just stop in. Have a conversation, Syd’s, one liner, work like a charm at the trade show. So, all right, so I’m passing it back to you, man. Thanks.

01:04:47 Syd Michael: Yeah, And you know what? Brian’s saying is basically what we’ve been talking about. Showing up and being consistent, that’s the secret to success. I’ve watched many people have success over the years with it. I’ve watched even Bryant have success with it. Consistency is what he’s mastered, I think, personally. But anyways, I’m good. Is everybody ready? Ready to rock’n’roll? Let’s make some things happen. Vanessa, you got anything?

01:05:15 Vanessa Roberts: I’m letting everybody know that I’m about to walk next to the office next door and make Brian take some emergency. We’re going to keep him healthy, guys.

01:05:24 Syd Michael: There you go. I’m a big fan of emergency, so he definitely needs to take all that to the airport. Takes it out of you. I spent three days in the airport this week. It was miserable. But anyways, hey, let’s rock’n’roll. See everybody. See you.