Entrepreneurial News®

When Those Immigrants Show Up at Your Business

Courtesy of the Biden Bunch, we’ve got about 10 million illegal immigrants to the country who committed a crime just by illegally crossing the border.

About 1 million of them are criminals of one sort or another, so they’ll eventually wind up in one of our prisons. So they don’t count.

The question arises: a lot of these people illegally immigrated because they want work in the United States, and many of them have useful skills.

You, as a potential employer, have to find out if they’re legal, or in the process of becoming legal.

So, at first, you want to find evidence that they’ve registered with some US entity, such as Immigration and Naturalization. If they have a Social Security card, odds are it’s fake. So fakes don’t count.

You only want those who have or are making an attempt to become legal.

If they are, you can run them through the procedures in our School’s hiring course, ‘Hiring Right the First Time’ .It’s not culturally adjusted, but you can find out if the immigrant has any useful skills. Dishwashing and landscaping are always needed.

As far as we know, no one in Federal or state governments has profiled anything like this; they’re too busy just trying to find them.

We don’t see any in Home Depot parking lots looking for work, as happened the last time, so that’s a good sign that those who want to work are finding work. And we, in Arizona, are at ground zero for immigrants and we have a lenient governor.

Tom Holman and Secretary of Homeland Security Noem are certainly making a good faith effort to find everyone. We will probably do a Tweet to do some fact finding.

In the meantime, do your best if the immigrants come knocking on your door.

2025 Tax Outlook

I realized that, in reviewing what we’d written that we made a big omission, which we’ve corrected in our 2025 Forecast course that we did for the www.bizsuccess.school: Taxes

Federally, there are three pieces to think about:

  1. We think the Trump tax cuts enacted in 2017 will be made permanent, which means the overall tax rates stay at 21%.
  2. Accelerated depreciation remains from earlier years, but we don’t think it will be increased.
  3. Trump would like to decrease the corporate tax rates to 15% to make us more competitive internationally. We don’t know if Congress will enact this, but it’s likely to happen in the 2nd quarter, because Trump has flooded the zone with so many other ideas to fix government.

State tax trends are towards elimination, but you readers should know what you’re paying in your state.

We only twist political arms in Arizona, but John Heinrich went to Wharton with Trump, knew him, so has some level of influence.

The state and local tax deduction, which is an issue only in some states (New York, Illinois and California) will probably be retained, but check with your CPA.

Lastly, the 87,000 IRS agents that Biden wanted to hire don’t seem to have survived the budget cycle, and Trump threatened to put them to work as border agents, so the issue has probably gone away.

Our 2025 Forecast for Small Business

Many have asked what our forecast for 2025 is for business success, and we say ‘Trump’. The positive attitude that has permeated the economy since his election is great for entrepreneurs.

We are told that job creation is starting to go positive at 200,000 position (no revisions downward so far) which means that you should try to hang onto the good people you’ve got.

We think economic growth will be higher than people think, overall maybe 3% this year nationally. There will be regional spotty areas, such as California and New York. We’re sitting in Arizona, which is quite good.

If you’re employing immigrants, you should try to get the ones you want to keep and train, and turn the rest of them into ICE for deportment.

Sharpen up your promotional avenues, particularly your website to ensure that it’s performing well. Sharpen up your sales closing skills. Your competitors will.

Make sure that you’ve got enough financial capability to accommodate growth…banks should be accommodative, and we don’t see increases in lending rates, or restrictions on the amount lent.

Trump’s tax cuts will be make permanent, and then cut later in the year, a cut in corporate rates.

Lastly, go join a peer support group. We happen to have one (Solutions Forum).

Start That Business! Trump Economy Will Boom!

Trump had a great reception at the New York Stock Exchange this morning, and it looks like his economy is blasting off.

So, get your share!

Start that new business but review your idea and start procedures at www.bizsuccess.school before you do.

Develop a plan: look for our 10-10-10 guide to doing a plan in the near future. Suzy Welch, Jack Welch’s wife developed the idea for personal relationships, but as you’ll see, we think it works well for business. We presented our business ideas to my local SERTOMA club to applause, so we think the process has merit.

One of the things that emerged from the SERTOMA talk was that a business owner might have multiple businesses that he/she is examining. We would advise picking the best one, based on risk-adjusted returns. We don’t yet have a course on how to do risk adjusted returns, but we will, and in the meantime, you can Ask John Anything about it. $87 well spent.

If you will need people and supervisors and money, we have courses in all that in the school.

Don’t analyze your idea to death, either. If it appears that your risk adjusted plan is over 10% cash on cash return, do it, because that’s higher than what you could earn in a mutual fund on an equivalent risk adjusted basis. You can and will refine details after you launch the business.

Lastly, get yourself into a business owners’ group, if you’re not already in one, because the good ones add value. Solutions Forum is one such owners group, and we work from London to Stockton, CA. and in all company categories, from startups to established businesses, and we create millionaires.

You Might Have to Give Back Those Loans

Fox Business is reporting that there was so much fraud in the payroll guarantee program (the PPP program) that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is considering auditing and clawing back some of the grants and loans that were originally given to guarantee payrolls for American business during the pandemic.

Because the application and approval process were so flawed, we have heard that up to 25% of the grants and loans (especially the grants) were given to fraudulent companies.

You know what documentation you had to provide to get the original grants or loans, so make sure no one has thrown it out. Hopefully, you’ve got the application, too, that was approved. The profit and loss statements and the balance sheets should be part of your tax packages, so you shouldn’t suffer too much angst.

Unless you obtained the grant/loan under false pretenses. Then you’ve got a problem.

If you can’t come up with the money to return, or the documentation, you’re probably gonna have a problem but we don’t know yet what might happen (the recall was just announced on October 20).

We’ll update this post or do new posts as information comes available to us.

 

Techniques for Selecting the Right Supervisor to Improve Employee Retention

Big topic, one of the two courses that we first developed when we started the www.bizsuccessl.school.

The reasons was pretty simple: companies we surveyed were telling us that they didn’t have promotion plans, and employees were quitting, or the plans they had weren’t effective. Hundreds of thosusands in costs were being incurred that didn’t need to be.

Everyone else on the internet will give you10-12 techniques to use in supervisor selection, with no recommendations as to what works and what doesn’t. But, it’s Chat/GPT, so that’s what you get…

We  give you two or three techniques that have worked for clients over the years.

And if ours don’t work, jus say so and we’ll refund your purchase price, as long as we have an account to send it to.

So, get out there and make it a great day.

How to Pick the Right Employee

This is a topic which has been troublesome to many small business owners, and we did a course on it at www.bizsuccess.school.

Failed employee hires cost the small business owners millions each year, which is why we did the course.

We don’t want to repeat our School course on hiring, but there are some facets that we should amplify, such as retaining employees once you’ve hired them.

If you follow our hiring guidelines, you should retain about 90% of those employees you hire, but what about the other 10%?

There might be a jewel or two in the other 10%, and there are some things you can do to keep the 90% happy:

  1. Show some attention to them by walking around their workspace and chatting them up;
  2. Memorize as much of their personal and family lore as you can;
  3. Frequent performance reviews, about once a quarter.

On the 10%, do all the things above, but it will just happen that you can’t please all the employees all the time.

  1. Some employees may not like you, your company or your company culture (yes you have one) and they’re worth listening to, because you might find things that you’ve got to change.
  2. Some of the 10% might be among your most creative employees, too, so you want to try to accommodate them.
  3. Some are just chronic malcontents, which might not show up in their hiring process, or their DISC profile. You probably want to fire these people.
  4. By all means find out why people leave. It’s not usually about money.

Our Project 2025

We are expecting Donald Trump to be elected President in November, as long as the swing states don’t cheat again. If they are found to be cheating, cut off Federal funds.

We are borrowing Heritage’s title for our business oriented Project 2025 goals that we think Trump should follow:

  1. Deregulate all forms of energy, such as gasoline, diesel, LNG, etc. Goal is a 25% cut in costs by end of ’25, since it will take time for the cut in crude and other fossil based fuel prices to work through the distribution system. Start exporting to Europe by end of ’25 if not sooner.
  2. Close the remaining portions of the border, even if the Texas chicken wire solution has to be used at first, and replaced by the steel towers later. Threaten recalcitrant states (AZ, NM, CA ) with cutoff of state aid from Federal government if they won’t go along. Reinstitute Remain in Mexico program, jawbone Presidents of Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela.
  3. Cancel all Biden executive orders until further review.
  4. Eliminate two federal agencies (Education and Homeland Security) entirely and ask states if they will fund any of the eliminated functions. Cut the remainder of the agencies 10% across the board, primarily in personnel. Federal workforce is bloated and unmotivated. Issue an executive order that all government agencies are to be incompliance with the Supreme Court decision on powers, e.g., if a function isn’t in your charter, it will be eliminated by end of 2025. All DEI and CRT laws are to be removed, and personnel in these endeavors released.
  5. Cut some taxes on corporations, that were imposed by Biden and Democrats, but our impression is that most of the tax cuts remain. The goal is to have the lowest corporate taxes among industrialized nations.
  6. Empower local and state police to arrest and deport all illegals who are not grainfully employed.
  7. Tariff all Chinese-made goods as they were prior to 2020. Probably 25%.
  8. Restart on-shoring of American companies. Accelerate depreciation allowances.

Have at it, boys and girls.

The McRaven Rules

ADM Bill McRaven was a former commander of the Navy Seal Teams. I worked with a couple of his teams and have always admired him. Below are 10 Life Lessons delivered to U of Texas graduates in 2014, which are pretty good rules for entrepreneurs:

  1. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you do another task and another and another.
  2. For the boat to make it to its destination, everyone must paddle.
  3. Measure a person by the size of their heart, not the size of their flippers.
  4. Sometimes, no matter how well you prepare or how well you perform, you still end up as a sugar cookie. It’s just the way life is sometimes.
  5. Life is filled with circuses. You will fail. You will likely fail often. It will be painful. It will be discouraging. At times it will test you to your very core…. but if you want to change the world, don’t be afraid of the circuses.
  6. If you want to change the world, sometimes you have to slide down the obstacle headfirst.
  7. There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with them.
  8. Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission, is the timee when you must be calm, composed — when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.
  9. If I have learned anything in my time travelling the world, it is the power of hope. The power of one person–Washington, Lincoln, King, Mandela, even a young girl from Pakistan, Malala –one person can change the world by giving people hope.
  10. In SEAL training, there is a bell. A brass bell that hangs in the center of the  compound for all the students to see. All you have to do to quit is ring the bell. If you want to change the world, don ever, ever, ring the bell.

‘Chevron’ Impact on Business

‘Chevron’ so named for the oil company that originally ran afoul of the EPA, will have a major impact on business/ administrative state regulations.

In our opinion, the two agencies that have committed the most infractions on the new Chevron doctrine, which says agencies can’t go beyond their enumerated powers, are the EPA and OHSA.

In our opinion, the EPA problems go back to the issuance of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. The EPA has said that cars and light trucks must average X per miles per gallon, ignoring a particular manufacturer’s mix of cars and light trucks (heavy trucks are exempt). When I was at Ford, I went through the EPA law and found that the law said nothing about CAFE, only that certain tailpipe and crankcase emissions were going to be regulated, which was within the scope of the law. Ford elected to not challenge the EPA, but had difficulty complying because it sells a lot of light duty trucks (i.e., F150s) which don’t get as good mileage as their cars. And this problem continues to this day. Ford has survived the increases in CAFE with sort of a wink/wink, nod/nod approach…they’re doing the best they can.

One of my companies also ran afoul of the EPA over water quality, but we settled it in our best guerilla war fashion, by exposing what the EPA was doing to a prominent employer to a friendly local TV station, which didn’t like that a prominent Reno employer was being hassled. And then we moved most of the offending division to Mexico, which cost a few US jobs.

For small businesses, the OHSA (Occupational and Health Safety Act) has been a problem, because the OHSA has routinely overstepped its boundaries in regulating workplace safety conditions. Several of our Solutions Forum clients have collided with OHSA over the years, and lost cases.

Unfortunately, Chevron does not allow for recoupment of past damages suffered from adverse OHSA or EPA rulings.

There are probably thousands of past OHSA and EPA transgressions that could be litigated, and I’m sure that they tort lawyers will put a word in, especially under a Trump administration.

So, the business world won one for a change.