The real reason businesses do cash only is to avoid paying sales, state, and federal income tax. Between those 3, that’s around a 30%-50% savings depending on your states sales tax, state income tax bracket, and federal tax bracket.

Many businesses get nailed for tax evasion not by the IRS, but by state sales tax audits.

Credit card fees are really inconsequential relative to the tax savings of not reporting cash sales.

I give the option to pay with a check in advance or pay with a credit card plus 3.5%. People don’t seem to care about paying 3.5%. Must just be a convenience thing because sometimes we’re talking about $2500 to $3500 charges.

Stay at your soul sucking job until you know the new business can support you. That’s what I did. After about 2 years of doing both, I finally quit and did my side gig. That was 14 years ago.

Had a guy who always wanted me to do things outside of scope, and then would play dumb. He would send passive aggressive emails asking for things that they knew were not included in my services.

I tolerated them for a little while, and then when they came back to me for additional work I told them I changed my pricing and jacked the price way up. I secretly call it the asshole tax. He got all indignant and I never heard from him again.

If you’ve got steady income you might be better off just saving the money yourself. Not a lot of commercial lenders are going to get excited about a $9,000 loan.

How big is the purchase? If it’s not a lot of money, earn some karma points and help the lady out.

My guess would be that people who are interested in that price point would probably just use one of the plug and play providers like wiz or square space.

Personally I would not trust someone who called me out of the blue to offer me web services. Actually it happens almost every single day. I don’t trust random strangers with something as important as my website. If I’m going to put you in charge of that, I really need to trust you.

You may want to consider doing some work for free to build a portfolio, and then after that charge a reasonable amount. You need to make the case while you’re worth it.

Write lots of original high quality content, and post consistently.

There are some tricks that I’ve learned along the way that speed up the process. Any article you want to write, you can start by doing a voice memo on your phone and then running it through software that will convert it to text. I find it easier than using voice recognition on my phone because sometimes I’ll talk for 10 minutes straight.

I copied my competitors SEO strategy. Wherever I saw them post an article, I posted an article. I used some online tools to see what keywords they were using and began pumping out content using the same keywords until they overtook them.

Be prepared to spend money on marketing. Even 7 years in I still invest at least 1/3 of my gross profits back into advertising.

I’d just add that I viewed paying for marketing as “priming the pump” while I also worked on my SEO. I operate in a very small niche so I don’t pay for marketing anymore and all of my leads come from organic search and other online platforms.

The idea was that since coinstar charges like 12%, you would exchange the coins for equal value but it would be in the form of a gift certificate to a local restaurant.

Turned out that Amazon was offering gift cards at equal value so that kind of killed that particular angle.

What about ketchup and mustard in the same bottle?

I mark as spam without opening. Otherwise it’s triggers the next email in the sequence where the “manager” sends a follow-up. I want their email tracker to mark it as unopened and classified as spam so they take me off their list.

Have you collected customer data at the point of sale? If so, maybe a strategic discount to past customers would be helpful.

If you want to be really aggressive, ask them to fill out a short survey in exchange for a discount. Within the survey see if you can get to the bottom of why they came once but haven’t come back again.

You didn’t invent Bitcoin though, you were just trying to mine it. That was an intentional feature of Bitcoin that the creator built in. There were huge companies that invested in mining too.

The ascent of robo calls and the do not call list has pretty much ended cold calling. You’d need an opt-in list.

This is like the 5th mention of the jump to conclusions mat. Lots of Office Space fans around here!

This will not make you rich. You’d have to recruit thousands of people to set up websites with YOUR referral code. And even then, they could change the referral program terms and you’d be out of luck.

There are few shortcuts to success, my friend.

I’d bet the customers would really suck.

Poop scooping businesses exist all over the place