Entrepreneurial News®

Rich Habits

Mary Hunt, writing for Epoch Times originally uncovered the work of Thomas Corley on how the rich behave, and he’s written two books on the subject. We will, as Mary did, gist some of his habits of the rich and you entrepreneurs can use.

  1. Same house, same spouse. As you become wealthier, either stay in the same house, or modesly upgrade. As for spouses, divorce is a serious impediment to entrepreneurial riches. It’s not very romantic, but get a PreNuptial agreement if you can. If your intended has some money, she’ll probably agree.
  2. Associate with people you want to be like. This is difficult, because you don’t want to be seen as snobby, but you can learn a lot from the sons and daughters of the rich.
  3. Understand the habits of the rich. Corley has about 200 habits of the rich he’s profiled, and we’re trying to get a license to use them, and the profile of their habits from those who are middle class or poor and strikingly different.
  4. Rich people are not necessarily smarter, but they mostly earned their riches, and do work harder than the non-rich.
  5. The rich do a better job of networking with other rich people, either in person over lunch, cocktails or dinner, or just a simple ‘check-in’ phone call.
  6. The rich create daily goals, and pretty much stick to them. They’re not rigid in accomplishing them all on a given timetable but they don’t lose sight of them. They probably use 10-10-10 goal setting, although Corley doesn’t mention it.
  7.  The rich read, and devote at least 30 minutes a day to self-improvement through reading, online courses, etc.

There are more, but start with the above and take them to heart.

Steal On, China

Intellectual property theft by China has been going on for years, maybe a couple of decades.

However, according to the July 30 issue of Epoch Times, Beijing has now ‘clarified’ a law that formally allows Beijing to steal intellectual property, under the Anti Foreign Sanctions Law, which allows the theft of property such as ‘cash, bills, bank deposits securities, fund shares, equity and intellectual property rights, accounts receivable and other property’.

I’m shocked, but I don’t see that anyone in the Trump administration is doing anything to at least slow down the theft.

I would think Ambassador Perdue, our ambassador to China would take this up with the Chinese, and President Trump should take the matter up with Xi when they meet.

In the meantime, I’ll put out a Tweet to Trump, which might stir up something. I’m not sure Kelly Loeffler, the Director of the Small Business Administration could do anything, but I’ll include her on the Tweet, too.

The Big Beautiful Biz Bill

We took some liberties with the title, but not a lot, so we’re going to remedy that deficiency.

First, the corporate tax rates stay the same permanently, at 21% of net corporate income. No increases at the end of CY 2025.

Second, there is 100% expensing of plant and equipment where prior you had to depreciate plant and equipment. The cap on first year deductions is increased from $1.5 million to 2.5 million, so there are limits to expensing, but an improvement. This is worth a lot, but individual circumstances vary. Reportedly there is already an upswing in capital expenditures.

Second, the small business exclusion rises from 20% of income to 23%, a welcome improvement.

Third, tax preparation for businesses is supposed to be simplified by the above provisions.

Fourth, there is  an e permanent extension of opportunity zones. These are regulated on a state basis but locating your plant or warehouse there carries special tax treatment.

Fifth, there is simplified international taxation, relating to foreign derived income and global low taxed income. These are arcane, so make sure you consult your CPA.

The bill also includes provisions related to business interest deductions, charitable contributions and the treatment of employer provided meals.

All in all, very welcome changes; we got a 250th birthday present a year earlier. Thank you to all who pushed for these changes…. you didn’t get enough thanks in the media.

The Trustworthy Company

I’m reading a book called “Who Believed in You” by Dave and Dina McCormick, and one of their first tenets is to become a trustworthy individual.

I think you can extend this logic to your company, to become a trustworthy company, by following these principles:

  1. Do what you say you’re going to do or explain why you can’t.
  2. Personally, operate according to the highest personal standards.
  3. Enforce 1, and 2. for all your employees and suppliers.

There is probably more to this idea, and I’ll report on it as I read more. I commend the book to everyone.

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.