Optimizing Payment Processing and Your Merchant Accounts with Rey Pasinli

Most clients in the smaller the startup, you don't need multiple merchant accounts, you know you have a car, it's got four tires, you can drive around without a spare, right. But if you're planning on doing long distance trips and things like that, or maybe you're going to be an Uber driver driving all the time, it would really make sense to have that spare tire. And so for some of our clients, generally, when you start getting over $100,000, a month, maybe a million a year, it makes sense to have at least two merchant accounts, or three or 14 or whatever, depending on your size, scale and needs. But you know, for an extra 40 $50 a month to have a secondary solution, always available always up processing in parallel. If something happens, a systemic system goes down, you can easily flip a switch and be 100% uptime.

Hey, it's Chuck here. And I'm so glad that you're listening to this episode. And I just want to take this quick moment right now to let you know about our free collaborators toolkits. And this episode is all about partnership and collaboration. And our guests share many resources, tools, and things that you can use to make collaboration and partnership easier in your business. So if you're looking for better ways to grow, and scale your business, through collaborations, and strategic partnerships, this free collaborators toolkit is going to contain the best resources from our workshops, as well as contributions from our guests. And these tools could be the missing link that you've been looking for. And they're going to help you to solve everyday business challenges, and access, highly effective ideas that can help and grow your business exponentially. I know they've helped me and I know they're gonna help you as well. And the best part about these tools is that they're completely free. And our gift to you for being a valued member of our community, and a subscriber to the show. So you can get access to all of the resources contained inside the collaborators toolkit today by visiting the website at WWW.collaboratorsunite.com/toolkit. That address again, is WWW.collaboratorsunite.com/toolkit. Go ahead and register today get access to all the resources, and I'm gonna see you on the inside. Now. Here's the episode.

Hello, everybody, welcome back, Chuck Anderson here. This is the creative collaboration Show, the show that helps you as a business owner, grow scale your business, if we're at whatever stage of business you're at, you could be right at the beginning, you could be late stage, whatever it is, we have something for you. And this one, I do believe is going to impact everyone, regardless of what stage your business is in. If you're just starting out, you're going to want to really strongly consider what we're going to talk about today. If you're in been in business for a while, especially if you process payments through credit cards, you're going to want to pay particular attention to what we have to talk about today, because I have a treat for you. I have here with me. They're rocket scientists of credit card processing. I have Rey Pasinli with me here today. Ray, welcome to the show.

Chuck, thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to share. You know, nobody, there isn't a one minute video you can watch on YouTube to learn everything about credit card processing. So we try and teach and educate all of our clients.

Mm hmm. Absolutely. Well, and there's such an education to be had. And you know, right now, this is this is a year of change when it comes to doing ecommerce business online. And I think this is a very timely conversation, even with all of the recent events that have come on recently, and so we're going to address all of that. But first of all, Ray, who you know, tell your story Who are you and you know, by all means, clarify what it means to be a rocket scientist of credit card pressure.

So I've had a very unusual career path in my former career. I literally used to be a rocket scientist, went to school got a degree in mechanical engineering minor in mathematics, emphasis, robotics and automated controls. And so I got a job working for aerospace. I was a CAD jockey. And so I literally designed products and hardware to put people in satellites into space and into orbit. Did that for a few years hated life as a cubicle monkey. Went back to school. I got the MBA during the dot bomb era, and I fell in love with E commerce. And so I love solving e commerce problems. I'm just a nerd and I just love tweaking out and a lot Seeing my clients get optimized so that way they can grow their business. And so today I take quote unquote rocket science, problem solving, to look at my clients business models, figure out what they're doing wrong, what they could be doing a little bit better, and increase those sales, increase the conversions, increase retention, lower declines, lower chargebacks, lower fraud. And so, in simple terms, sometimes it does take a rocket scientist to figure out how to make things work better.

Yeah, especially in today's environment, where there, there have been a few unusual and unexpected things happen where the very first phone call, someone is going to make or your clients are going to make her to you. And so, so you know, we want to address some of those things. But, you know, talk a little bit about, you know, who you typically work with? And what are you hearing, like, when at what point do people reach out to you and, and get get help? And what are they getting help with?

Great question. So I've been in the payments industry now going on 25 years. And so during that 25 years, I've handled about 70,000 clients, I've handled everything from my smallest client was a small boy scout troop in San Diego, they did about $800 a year raising money for their jamboree fundraising. My largest clients have been enterprise and they started from zero, and have scaled up to a billion dollars plus in annual sales. So in terms of size, we really don't have any sort of minimums or anything of that. Basically, if somebody's ecommerce, come on over, we want to help, we're passionate, we're fanatical, we generally get kind of three different types of clients, we get the newbie, he's just decided to start his business, a friend of a friend referred him to us. And so we're a that's a great client, because we can get everything set up correctly. The second kind of client is somebody who's growing, they're starting to experience some growth pains, some challenges, we will step in and say, Hey, maybe you need this type of Gateway, this type of fraud, scrubbing, whatever, then we get the guys that lit everything on fire, and everything is on fire. And they're like, help fix this for me. And so we will kind of untangle the mess and say, Okay, why don't we replace this, we'll upgrade. This will add redundancy over here. So we get clients of every size type, we get every type of business model you could ever imagine. And then for us, in our staff, we have a network of about 1500 vendors. And so if you need a website designer, you need a shopping cart, you need a fulfillment need somebody handle customs, or accounting or, or legal, we've probably got a vendor that we've worked with that can recommend. On the opposite side of it, we have a network of about 30 banking solutions here in the US. So depending on the type of business that you're running, we'll probably find a good home for your specific business model. So it's all about customization and off the shelf parts.

Amazing. Well, you know, timing couldn't be better way. Because this year, you know, we're only in, you know, beginning of q2 of this year now. And so many weird things have happened, first of all, AI kind of came out of nowhere, and it's changed everything. I know, we want to talk about that. And then you know, and turmoil in the banking world, especially with E commerce. So, you know, I think it's probably good to address some of those things and some of the rumors and that in especially Caitlin's up, setting up an e commerce Store this we're blessed with so much automation, you know, set up a store, click this button, you get a merchant account, and you can start charging money, or use PayPal or whatever, you know, that comes with definite downsides if you don't get real credit card processing, depending on the thing. But you know, talk a little bit about you know, what people need to be aware of, and then maybe we can dive deep into some of the some of the issues that have happened this year, because you're, you know, it could be affecting their decisions or or good and bad taking them in any particular direction. And hopefully, we're staring them in a positive direction. So

Sure, so for clients that are just getting started, you kind of have to decide which path to take. You're at a fork in the road, I need payments. The Easy Software way is going to be going through stripe square, Braintree, PayPal, those are online, fully automated, and you're pretty much guaranteed get get your logins and be able to start plugging in and processing. The downside of that is that there isn't a lot of customization, there might be limitations in terms of features, and good luck trying to get a hold of a live human being. Path number two is to be set up through a traditional merchant account. Those are typically going to come through a big acquiring bank, the Bank of America Wells Fargo, there's about 30 major banks that we connect to that's Much more customizable, it's a lot more flexible, you have opportunity to talk to a live human being. But it's a little bit more tedious in the upfront setup process. So, you know, there isn't one size fits all. So we kind of recommend and offer all of those types of solutions. Likewise, you know, you mentioned AI, Silicon Valley Bank, I mean, there's, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there's every single day, something catastrophic happening on the internet. And, you know, we're sort of at the 100,000 foot view, and we really see everything that's kind of happening in the E commerce realm. And that allows us to be able to educate, guide and protect our clients, depending on what's happening in the underbelly of the internet.

Mm hmm. So Well, I mean, let's unpack some of those things. Because, I mean, they're very, they're very fresh and very relevant. And let's start with Silicon Valley Bank. Because, you know, I myself have had conversations with people who are at various stages of, of doing the business, some startups some that had been doing it for a while, that, you know, believably so are nervous about, you know, am I protected? Am I at risk? So yeah, I may not have had my money in that bank. But, and I, I even found myself googling stripe, because I do a lot of processing through stripe say, how is this impacting stripe? And I was relieved to find out that in this particular case, it didn't. But, you know, what do people need to be concerned about or, or maybe we alleviate some of those concerns right here right now.

So the Silicon Valley Bank implosion created a huge ripple effect, right? Most people knew Silicon Valley Bank as a commercial bank, you put your money in the bank, they do lending and financing, but a lot of people didn't know is that they were also fairly heavily involved in the payment side, they had about 10 entities underneath them, that brought merchant accounts and rough ballpark, we think that they had about 100,000 merchant accounts. So if you were doing your payment processing through an entity under Silicon Valley Bank, you literally woke up on Saturday morning, going, oops, my processing is down. So most clients in the smaller the startup, you don't need multiple merchant accounts, you know, you have a car, it's got four tires, you can drive around without a spare, right. But if you're planning on doing long distance trips, and things like that, or maybe you're going to be an Uber driver driving all the time, it would really make sense to have that spare tire. And so for some of our clients, generally, when you start getting over $100,000, a month, maybe a million a year, it makes sense to have at least two merchant accounts, or three or 14 or whatever, depending on your size, scale and needs. But you know, for an extra 40 $50 a month to have a secondary solution, always available, always up processing in parallel. If something happens, a systemic system goes down, you can easily flip a switch and be 100% uptime. As an example, three years ago, there was a major calamity that hit the internet, a major software system provider, they happen to do a system upgrade, literally in the middle of Black Friday, took the entire credit card system down and at a million merchants were out the door could have processed for like 24 hours. So redundancy, backup failover. You know, when we put something in space, we have triple backup on everything. life support systems, you know, engines. So those are options that you're going to be able to get, and depending on your needs, it makes sense to have that kind of redundant insurance policy to avoid that kind of cataclysmic ripple effect impacting you.

Hmm, yeah, because it really came out of the blue. And to be honest, I didn't even know I've used stripe for so long, I had no idea what their connection with their relationship there. They could have been very well owned by or underneath this bank and could have been affected by it, too. I was relieved to find out that they weren't, you know, a Google that very, very quickly. But

Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of stuff happening in the industry, there's massive amounts of consolidation or reverse mergers, I mean, things that are not above the surface. But you know, I'll give you an example. So right now, WorldPay, who is owned under a big organization called FIS, is getting ready to go public, they're, they're going to take a portion of the business world pay, we're going to put you on the stock market. That's great. But what we're seeing is is massive exodus of people are quitting and abandoning ship. So if you have your merchant account at that solution, you may not be able to call and get a support person on the phone, because everybody has a mandamus ship because they're scared about the stock going south and all this kind of stuff. So you know, having somebody who's kind of in the know that you could just pick up a phone call and say, Hey, man, what's going on? Do I have to worry about this. Can I sleep good at night? No, it's It's nice having that kind of failback failover available to you.

Yeah, I'm sure that was a great comfort to your clients with all of that, because it it really did well,

It's actually the opposite. I've got I've got clients showing up on my doorstep going, oh, I need backup. I want redundancy. Let's get me out of here. So, you know,

Yeah, it's really shines light on the situation? Yeah, they need help.

I mean, you know, Silicon Valley Bank probably had 100,000 clients. So those clients are all going to Google type in merchant account payment solution alternative. And, you know, it all kind of trickles down to a portion of it to us?

Well, it's kind of like what they say about insurance, you can't buy insurance on the day that you need it. And, yeah, so. So it does make sense, especially if you're super reliant, on your credit card processing, if you're doing a lot of volume, you're doing a lot of orders. And you cannot afford for that to go down for even a day. And it does make sense to have some redundancy. And, you know, now,

I mean, generally a merchant account, an extra merchant account will run about 4050 bucks a month, it's a nominal cost. So if you're doing $100,000 a month, is it worth spending 50 bucks a month, probably, you know, if if credit cards are 99% of your revenue source, it's probably worth that kind of money. And they're pretty straightforward and simple to set up. Some of most of our clients, when they come on board with us, we generally get them two or three merchant accounts just to set up all of that and configure all of that for them. So it's, it's a smart move to do.

So let's talk about platforms a little bit, because we were talking about this a little bit before our, you know, our episode. And of course, when we think about e commerce, you know, to two companies come to mind, Amazon and Shopify, I mean, we, we, of course, there's lots of other solutions. But you know, they, they were they got caught up in all of this too. So, and the pros and cons to going that route with with your E commerce and your and your credit card processing. So

Yeah, I mean, so a lot of people do the what's what's cool, are they what's easy, but neither of those may be ideal, optimal or best, right? So there's a third one that you didn't mention, which is WordPress, and WordPress is actually bigger than Shopify. Shopify has roughly about 700,000 Merchant Accounts, we've seen WooCommerce have at 1.2 million merchant accounts and counting. And the merchant, the growth of of Shopify has actually cratered. They're actually losing clients on a daily basis. And so if you look at their financials, you look at their pro formas. And their projections, they're losing traction. And there's a real simple, there's a couple of reasons for that. Number one is Shopify, when it first came out was a real game changer. Oh, my God, I get my, I get my website, I get my content management, I get a merchant account, I get a gateway, it's all integrated. It works seamlessly. I love it. I can do all sorts of cool stuff without having to be a tech nerd. When it emerged seven years ago, that was really a game changer technology. The problem is, is that after they went public, and they're looking at cost cutting, the development of the platform didn't keep up with the times. And so the biggest issue that were the biggest complaint that we see from clients that are on Shopify is their mobile sales are cratering. And the reason being is, is that one Shopify was developed seven years ago, it was, it was 4g, now we're in five 5g, so mobile's load times are not fast enough. And you know, you get a Gen Z, hyper Twitch, you know, two second attention span. If that page doesn't load fast, they abandon the shopping cart. So we've been looking at clients that have moved from Shopify to other alternative solutions, and we're literally seeing a 15 or 18% immediate increase in sales. And so by fixing that one little problem area, we're seeing that clients have been losing 15 to 18% of their sales for months and months because they didn't know and so those little things can be a real game changer. Well, you increase sales 18% I can spend more money on advertising more advertising gets more sales the sales convert better so I get more and more profit. It's really a fun to see the the aha moment when we explain these kinds of issues to the client that they didn't even know existed.

Hmm yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned WooCommerce as well makes make sense and you know, you know, we get a lot of buzz around Shopify and and that but you know, WooCommerce is a good solution. Talk a little bit about security about though because Wordpress and this is we've had clients that have had this issue and they're moving away from WordPress because of some of the security issues. It's constantly updating. There's there's plugs and patches and all kinds of stuff. And yeah, it's not impervious to being hacked.

I mean, I think a comparison is, you know, your Shopify system is a closed ecosystem right there, like the Apple, everything is internal. Everything's internally built, and everything's proprietary, right? Whereas the WordPress slash WooCommerce combo is more like the Google Store, Android opens, you know, anybody can create a widget and stuff like that. So yeah, on a WordPress type system, you're going to have much more maintenance required on it. But the performance that you gain, I think, offsets that the maintenance of having somebody once a week update a patch here and there. And most of the patches are automatically updated. From a security standpoint, and from a exposure to fraud and all that type of stuff we have, you know, we set up the frauds covering we set up the encryption, we set up tokenization, all of that's included. So even if your entire WordPress system gets hacked, you don't have any sensitive credit card data anywhere in your secure online environment that can be breached. So there's no risk, at least, if you're set up correctly, with everything encrypted tokenized, and off your servers.

Yeah, another reason to be connected to or collaborating with someone like yourself, because you deal with this every single day. Whereas a lot of e commerce Store owners, I mean, you do the setup, the most involved you ever are as the store owner is in the setup of it. And then once things are running, you're not thinking about these things anymore. Well, you should tell there's a problem. Right?

Well, and that's really the reality, right? So I'll give you an example. We had a lady who has got a website, and you know, very basic, she's selling some products retail. And on our side, we're monitoring constantly. And we see her transactions skyrocket. I mean, this, this lady was doing maybe 50 transactions a day, she got like 7000 transactions in a very short amount of time. And it was very obvious that she was she was getting hit by an attack. And so we see these types of attacks where, you know, I'm a criminal, I've got a million stolen credit cards, and I'm just going to jam those credit cards into somebody's shopping cart to see if they're reported stolen is the credit card number good. You know which ones are expired, and I can use your payment ecosystem to validate my stolen credit card data. And so you know, left to our own devices, this poor lady would have been stuck for, you know, potentially $100,000 in credit card processing fees, Gateway fees, transaction fees, I mean, there's a cost for all this stuff. So we we identified it closed it locked it down and fixed the problem for this lady. So you know, having somebody that's kind of looking over your shoulder, helps people sleep better at night, and you don't know what you don't know. So you might as well have somebody who does know, in your corner.

Totally makes sense. Well, it fits well with our theme, which is collaboration, which I'm going to get to in a moment, because I will do want to get you to weigh in and collaborate collaborations and partnerships. And you're obviously a great way guy to collaborate with, especially in this area. It's good to have an expert in your corner. But I want to talk a little bit about AI. I mean, this is something that AI is not new. I mean, Google is AI, okay, since the late 90s. But today, it's a buzzword, everyone's talking about it chat GPT kind of came seeing seemingly came out of nowhere in what September, October, maybe November. And then I remember being at Affiliate Summit here, just not that long ago. And that's all anybody wanted to talk about. And it just went from here to here instantly. So I need to ask you like how is AI being impacting e commerce and credit card processing?

I guess the way to compare it is the stone age's versus Star Trek. Like it's, it's unbelievable how much AI is impacting our customers, both good and bad. And I'll kind of give a quick example. We have clients who have some sort of continuity, reoccurring strip, subscription type business model, you know, Hey, welcome to my website, you know, pay a monthly do to get, you know, the recipe of the month or something, right? When you are when your reoccurring ly billing somebody you're sending that transaction once a month to that customer's issuing bank and, you know, 70 80% of the time you're gonna get approved transaction. Well, we've we've now isolated and identified that the biggest credit card issuing banks, which is going to be Chase, Capital One, Citi, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, all of them are using AI, without you the merchant knowing. And so what hit us, what's happened now is that they look at a reoccurring transaction and they're declining almost all of them. Oh, we don't like reoccurring transaction that you know, that might be a fraudulent charge. And that customer is going to charge back and scream at us saying, hey, put the money back on my bank account or credit card. So clients used to be able to get 70 80% of those rebills processed on a monthly basis. Now they're seeing 30%. So imagine, half more than half of your money vaporized because somebody decided upstream to turn on some AI. So that's a challenge, right? On the flip side, we're seeing AI being used in really creative positive ways. You know, any website you go to today, they're going to ask you immediately, can we get a cookie cutter permission, a cookie, cookie, cookie cookie, right? Well, Apple, iOS killed the cookie about three years ago. And if you're an internet marketer, you need that cookie, to be able to retarget offers and day buy one get one free. And it was a really powerful tool for retargeting. Well, now we've got new API that allows us to kind of have a cookie 2.0. And we can really art accurately target customers. And let me give you an example. You have a client who's doing maybe 5000 transactions a month. The reality is that they're having somewhere around 100,000 customers, potential customers, visit the website and abandon that and abandon the order 95% of customers, if not more, abandon the website. So with a little snippet of code, we can retarget that exact customer. And not only that, but the machine learning and the AI gets massive amounts of data. We know it Sally, she's in Spokane, Washington, she's married two kids owns a Volvo. It's VIN numbers, this license plate number and it's white. I mean, like crazy, crazy amounts of data. And the AI decision engine goes, Okay, Sally is a low, medium or high probability customer. So you can spend a few pennies and target that customer and get them to come back and double your sales. So this is really revolutionary stuff cutting edge, that is going to be a big disrupter. And more importantly, the clients that are able to take advantage of this are going to leapfrog their competition, the guys that are not using it, they're going to be left in the dust. Star Trek versus stone age's.

Yeah, I love that analogy. And this is the year to do it. I mean, you know, I've had numerous conversations with some of my other, you know, e commerce and online business buddies. And this is the year if you're not embracing AI. And not just we're not just talking chat GPT everyone wants to talk about GPT. But there's lots of other AI as well. This is the year where there's going to be, you know, innovations, there's new things, there's, this is the year to start to educate yourself and start implementing this stuff right away.

And this is that most people you know, they think, you know, chat artificial intelligence, oh, my God, it's super complex. No, it's literally adding one line of code to a website. And now you have this super powerful engine doing the heavy lifting for you. So it's really exciting times, but it's also really kind of scary times, if you don't know what you're doing.

Well, that's it. And that, and we've seen this happen at certain time. Remember, you know, back at what was it 2008 2009, Facebook was really new social media wasn't really a thing. How's this gonna change Google? Everyone was so like, invested in their, you know, their top rankings with Google? And how's this going to change everything? And you know, and there's been a few moments along, you know, since the late 90s, when I got started till now, where there has been these benchmark moments that have really changed things. Everyone was saying that it was going to be crypto and digital currencies and digital wallets, which still may be a thing that adoption may be very welcoming, but AI is definitely, I think, the focus of of this year, for sure. So I wanted to ask you about, you know, like I said, the part of steam of the show is partnerships and collaborations. One of the reasons I do this is because I want business owners to see you as someone to collaborate with. I think that we've done that I know that I you know, it seems like you're you'd be if you're doing any sort of credit card processing or if you're worried about it, or if you have questions about it, Ray is the guy to reach out to and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you here. You're Ray, but also I just wanted to I want to inspire business owners to stop doing everything themselves. And yes, you know that Do It Yourself syndrome. I'm a recovered, recovering, you know, like, are you ever like a chronic do it yourselfer? I had to learn the hard way not to do that. And so that's one of my, my missions for for doing this show, I wanted to ask you how as collaborating and partnering with others, played a role and an impact in your business.

I've got a perfect example for you. So I've been doing this so long, I've got a network of about 1500 strategic vendors and solution providers, right. So three young guys, early, early, late, early 30s, late 20s, they have a product that they're selling on the internet. And it's a thing called res resveratrol. Okay, they come to me and say, Hey, we need merchant accounts, we need setup. Okay, great. What do you do? How do you do it? Where's your, where's your fulfillment? Where's your supply chain customer service, like, we go through the whole spiel. And these guys are doing pretty decent business, they're doing about a half million dollars per month. But they're literally got their Uncle Tom doing fulfillment, you know, Barry's handling the phones Monday through Friday, 10am, you know, 8am to 5pm. Like they're bootstrap this whole thing, the only thing that they have is they got, you know, the fulfillment guys got kind of a cool system to ship everything out. And I said, Look, you got to have, you guys are going to be spending all of your time doing customer service, and fulfillment and inventory and stocking and all this. Let's talk to some of my partners, get some quotes, see who you like. And let's upgrade what you have to something that's more efficient and more scalable. And so they went with a certain call center, they want with a fulfillment, different manufacturer, all this kind of stuff. So they're kind of chugging along, doing about 500,000 a month. In January of the following year, Dr. Oz goes on Oprah and says you should be eating resveratrol is going to make you live forever. These guys sales went from 500,000 a month to $5 million a month, literally in about a two day span. And because everything that they had already from an infrastructure piece, we went from two customer service seats to 20 Customer Services just by twisting a dial, you know, the the fulfillment company that they were with, had the capacity to dropship 300,000 packages a day. So they could go from 1000 orders a day to 20,000 orders a day, in a blink of a heartbeat. So having the right solution providers does a couple different things. It saves you money because you don't have to build that infrastructure. You don't have to invest money, in a call call center software, and hiring and training and retaining. That's a nightmare. What we try and teach our clients is focus on the one thing that you do, which is sell market and sell products, get all the other pieces of your business out of your hands. At what stage do you do what you know, for a client who's just starting out, money is tight, you know, you're doing five orders a day, 10 orders a day, that's pretty easy to handle by yourself. But if you start doing 25 orders a day, that's when you need to really start looking to outsource. And you don't have to outsource everything all at once. But you know what, getting one customer service seat, you know, low cost, maybe call per minute, is a great way to free up your time to focus on driving the business. I guess the lesson I try and teach my clients is look, we want you to build your business, not build the business. And so and going with vendors that are vetted, trusted, reasonable, ethical, you know, it can be really daunting. And so, you know, that's why generally when somebody wants a vendor, we'll give them three recommendation tires, get a quote, look at their software, whatever, you pick whoever you want. Likewise, when you talk about collaboration, you know, I have this great deep pool of vendors that support my clients and help my clients to be successful. Right, because I am referring and recommending and driving business to those complementary vendors. They also look at me as a solution provider for their merchants. And so we kind of have this collaborative network and symbiotic relationship where, you know, we're just sharing our customers with vendors that can deliver and execute and keep them happy and help their businesses to grow.

Well answered, I have no follow up to that. That's how good that was. And it meets the goal, which is I want to inspire people to stop doing everything themselves and to collaborate and to network and to grow, grow their own database of people that they can reach out You know, who are the experts in, in each of the parts of the business that I need and, you know, so if it's credit card processing, you're gonna reach out to Rey you're gonna get him on on your database reach out to him, we're gonna get your all your, your contact information here in a moment, and we're gonna put it beneath this video, we're gonna put it in the show notes of the episode. So it's gonna be really easy to connect with Rey. But while I have you here, right, okay, this has been an amazing episode so far. And as we kind of bring this in, you know, to a close, I want to ask this something I ask of all the guests, because it's our belief that in order to grow your business, you have to also grow yourself. That can mean knowledge. It can mean skills, it can be mindset, it can mean a whole lot of different things. One of the ways that we do that is through books. And so I wanted to ask you, if there's one go to must read book that you would recommend that everyone in business reads, whether it affects their business or their personal or whatever, what would you recommend?

Well, I read a lot of different books and a lot of different stuff. So there's hard to pinpoint one. But there's, there's two books that I found that were really transformative for me as it pertains to business. The first one a really brief read, it's a Little Red Book of Selling by a gentleman named Jeffrey Gitomer, you can find it on Amazon for probably 12 bucks. You can read it in a couple hours, but it is the manual for somebody who wants to do sales. I think that's, that's the Bible for sales. The most critical thing that you need to learn in order to be a successful business is to manage people, you can't be a successful business if you can't manage people. And I've got an MBA, I teach at college professor level stuff. They don't teach you how to be a good manager. And so the best book I ever read on management is a really fun read, it's called Turn the Ship Around by Captain David Marquet, he's a nuclear missile submarine commander. And he talks about how he changed a top down management to a bottom up, and a completely modified the entire Navy's training program for the submarine missile nuclear fleet. So it's a pretty fascinating read. And that one book helped my business grow 10x In three years, so that's the best bang for buck you can find

Amazing. Well, it's interesting. Now, as I look back over the the number of times I've asked that question in previous guests, just how little duplication there has been, everyone's got their own answer. A lot of the books I've heard of before, maybe I've read before, but these two, you got me, I didn't know of either one of them. And they both sound like ones that I should read this month. So thank you for that. And we'll put the links there for everyone else to go and check those out there as well. So Ray, this has been amazing, thank you. And hopefully, we've inspired people to think about their ecommerce, think about their their credit card processing some of the issues, but also not to try to do everything themselves because it's not necessary. There's, there's help like yourself out there who do this stuff every day. And if people want to connect with you, or take the next steps, Ray, what where would you lead them? What what's the best? I mean, reach you,

You know, obviously I'll put my contact information. I everybody's got my cell phone. So if you got to, if you're got to something urgent to shoot me a text message, I generally respond within the hour. And you know, if not, we'll set up an email and book a call time and do a zoom time will for if we want to get into details. But email, cell phones 24/7.

Awesome. Well, if you're watching this on video, all of that information is right there beneath this video. If you're listening on a podcast, just click into that, whatever podcast listener you're on right now, the show notes there has all of Rey's links and all of that contact information. So, again, Rey, thank you so much. And this has been great information. We've We've traveled a lot of ground today. And I know we've only scratched the surface. tip of the iceberg. Exactly, exactly. But so thank you for adding so much value to our listeners and everything. And if you were to leave everyone here with just one final piece of advice or words of wisdom, what would you say to them?

Get a mentor. Every single business person needs a mentor, because you need somebody to run your ideas by. I can't tell you how many times I've come across somebody like I've got a great idea. I'm gonna sell meat circles on the internet and I'm going to use telepathy payments, like just really absurd stuff. So if you don't have a mentor, you're going to be stuck with your creative ideas that may not be so good. And so being able to run some ideas and challenge and get challenged on that is going to make you a better, more successful entrepreneur.

Well said Great words to end of this episode by, get a mentor, plain and simple. There it is, guys. So Rey, thank you so much for being here. This has been incredible to our guests, to our listeners, thank you so much for being here. As always, I hope that this has been helpful, inspirational for you to, to do a couple of things. Number one, take your credit card processing seriously. And it's not just set it and forget it here. So you know, do reach out and get some help. And and also stop doing everything yourself and your business because there's amazing people like Rey here, who you can collaborate with, partner with and get everything that you need for your business. And so if you have a challenge that you're trying to overcome or obstacle that you're trying to get over, reach out, let's connect you with the person or team or company that can help you to get get that out of your way so that you can get on to bigger and better things. Because I know that you have that big world changing idea, that product that service that thing you're trying to get out there. So never ever let it stop you. Keep moving forward. And in the meantime, keep on doing what you're doing. Until next time, this has been Chuck Anderson with The Creative Collaboration Show. We'll see you soon.