S5E8: Sierra Nevada Brewery Returns | NFL Teams: The LA Rams vs The LA Chargers | Fair Compensation

How much are you paying yourself? How much do you need to be paying yourself so that I know you are going in 200% on this thing and you'll kill yourself for it and not be worried about money? Yeah. And that's just something that we often don't grasp early on. And as you, as the owner of the business, need to be holding yourself to that same fire. Yeah. Because if you're sitting there worrying about how you can put food on the table, you're not going to be running the business the best way you can. Yeah. And if you're also living with all those burdens and the stresses of putting all that time in and not seeing an ROI for your time, it becomes an issue. It becomes something that, like, do you want to continue this as a business? And you'll find a lot of entrepreneurs hit that point. Hey, welcome back to the Cash Flow podcast with me, Pam Pryor. Glad to have you here, where we talk about everything money related in your business. So without further ado, let's hop right in to. And welcome back to Cash Flow. So excited to be here right after football weekend. Look, I just said it in time for us. It's beginning of September. We just had our first games. We're going to talk a little bit about football in the news segment, then we're going to pop right on into our brew review where we're going to bring you a great IPA. Well, I don't know if it's great or not. An IPA from Sierra Nevada, which we visited before in North Carolina. And then finally, in our scale or fail, hopefully scale segment, Frances and I are going to talk about how we're going to get paid out of this partnership that we've put together. So this is something of interest to you as well. So without further ado, let's jump right on into our news segment. All right, so if you have $6 billion burning a hole in your pocket, you could buy a football team. But while you're considering this, I want you to think about the fact that for just another $2 billion, you could buy a completely different football team in exactly the same neighborhood. So here's the scoop. The La Rams and the LA Chargers are both teams that play at Sofi Stadium in Laden. So you'd think they're going to be worth about the same amount of money. Well, the fact of the matter is they're not. And there's a big reason why. That is something every entrepreneur can learn from. And you've heard it said before, you'll hear it again but it's real estate. So here's the scoop of these two owners, the Chargers and the Rams. The guy who owns the Rams also owns the stock stadium they're both playing in. I don't know if you've heard about this Taylor Swift concert thing, but apparently she's got a few concerts this summer. So she played at Sofi Stadium. I'm trying to remember how many concerts she played there, I'm not sure. But the truth of the matter is, every time she does one of these concerts, it leaves about $4 million in the pocket of the stadium that hosted her. So when this happens, only the owner who owns the stadium gets the benefit of those kinds of proceeds. In addition, even during NFL events, even during a Chargers game, the Rams are collecting on the luxury suite, food and all that all over the stadium. So what's the lesson for entrepreneurs real estate by owning that stadium and frankly, using other people's money to buy it. This owner of the Rams, and I forget his name. His name is Stanley. Stanley Kroneckey. Stanley Kroenke. Stanley Kroenke. That's what it sounds like. But because he owns that stadium, he's getting essentially rental for it. He's getting all of the entertainment revenue for it. He's sure paying a lot of interest, I'm sure, on that loan that he used to buy it, which was, I think, $3.5 billion is the loan. But on the other hand, he's making more money than he's paying in interest. And that's the whole game when you start to do passive income. So here's what this means in his whole model in valuing that whole Rams franchise. Now he has some passive revenue. That happens just because he owns the stadium and he has his normal low revenue stream, which is being a football team that plays every week and generates revenue through sponsorships and tickets, et cetera. So it's all about buying a little patch of land. Not investment advice, just something to do if you got six to $8 billion burning a hole in your pocket. Now I think I need to drink to that. So stay tuned for our brews segment. Welcome to our brew section. To know we haven't had a sip yet. I was gonna say, did we start a little early today? I have not opened the bottle yet. Maybe I should. This will go better after I open the bottle. We are back with one of our favorite breweries, Sierra Nevada, which we've covered before. But I'm kind of excited because I got a twelve pack of these torpedo IPA's and one of them is cryo. Is the cryo peel. Is it called cryofresh? Cryofresh. And I thought, well, that's really kind of intriguing. So let's talk about what that is. Like, its name. Basically, they capture the hop at its height of freshness and ripeness and freeze it. Oh, wow. And then they can pull back and open these up and use them anytime they want to use them. It's really kind of cool. On the website, it walks through the process of when they pick it, when they freeze it, which is kind of cool to get it just right. That's fascinating. And that's how they create this IPA. Now, this IPA is not as bitter on the scale as some. It's only a 45 ibus. Okay, so I might like this IPA. You may like this one. Yep. And it does have a some malts in it that are actually listed ahead of the hops. Wow. Which is unusual with ipas. So we're gonna give it a shot. The hops are citra fresh cairo, which is one of the ones they freeze. Mosaic fresh cairo and simcoe fresh cairo. So we tried the mosaic and the Simcoe hops before, but have never had them. Cairo. So I'm kind of cryo or excited. Cairo. Cryo. Cryo. That is a word I can't say. It's a hard one. I mean, it's a small word, but. Cryo. Cryo. Cryo. Cryo. Cry. Okay. Holy. I can't. I will probably do it again. Okay. But who knows? Cryo, frozen in time, hopes the hops are the most intense right when they're picked, but they fade fast. So our friends at Yakima chief hops, which is where they get these, set out to keep them fresh by freezing them. So using the freshly picked, picked hops, still wet, so they're not having been dried yet. And straight from the field, they run a patented cryogenic process to separate the hop cone and then isolate what they call the jackpot, which is inside. And that's the pure, what they call lupulin, which has the most of the aroma and flavor in it. I'm learning a lot. So lupulin is our word for the day. Lupulin. Lupulin. L u p u l I n. That's harder to say than cryo. I don't know. I'm going with cryo, Chiro. I feel like George Bush. All right, I am ready now. I can't open this. So you, with the spoon trick, must do the opening try. Yeah, I think we give it a try. Okay. So, like, again, you put the. Basically the cap right on the inside here. And then you want to get this finger so it's right below. So you can use that as a fulcrum. And then you go in and just lift. And then you just lift. Are you left handed or right handed? I am left handed. So you can do it on the. Right hand side, too. So I leave this out for fulcrum. This tight here. Yeah, tight. And then you want this finger a little bit higher so that you can use it to be the fulcrum. And you want to get it on the right. On the lip there. Yeah, right there. Yeah, you can do it. Is the fulcrum my finger or. Yeah, the fulcrum is your finger. Not the thumb? No, not the thumb. Oh, you got it. I think I did. There you go. That was awesome. Look at me opening a beer with a spoon. All right, let's see what we got here. Looks a little hazy from inside the bottle. It's got a good color. Not a massive head in that pour, but. It smells like an ipair. Does it? Yeah, you get fruity or piney or. More fruit than pine. I'm getting grapefruit. I'm getting. And then grapefruit's my favorite. Yeah. A little bit of a citrus scent. In there, but it's not overpowering. No, it's just got like a nice. Oh, that's a beer thing. All right, well, cheers. Let's do what we think. Cheers. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Now that's ipa. I like that. That's just ipa. Okay. That's got a really good taste. It's hopping. The thing I like about hops when they're really good is that they hop on your tongue. Yeah. One we had last week was interesting, but it just kind of went flat and died on your tongue. This stays hoppy again. It's like pop rocks in my mouth, and it's just continuing. Honestly, this might be a bold statement, but this might be my favorite IPA like I've ever had. That is a bold statement. Yeah. I'm not like an IPA guy, but I could drink this. This is delicious. So my PBK PI on this one, quite honestly, on our range of one to five, where one is, I wouldn't order it. If you opened it and put it in front of me, I wouldn't drink it. And five is, I travel the world to find it. Yeah, this is a solid four. It's a five for me. It's a five for you. Okay. So you'd hunt this down. Yeah, I mean, I'll go and. Go out and grab some for Kaya to try. Kaya's such a big. Like these two. Yeah, yeah, no, that's really good. That is really nice. That's a winner. Yeah. Well done. Cheers. Cheers. You gotta give this one a try. The Cairo really does capture the flavor. The cryo captures the flavor. And that's a wrap on the brews segment. On that note, I think we need to talk about scaling or failing in the partnership next. Stay with us. Awesome. How you doing? So I am good. We had a really good week last week. We made a lot of progress, and we had a really good business meeting on, what was it? Tuesday. On Tuesday we did. We had our first official sort of management meeting on Tuesday, which is a lot of fun. One of the things, interestingly, about this partnership that's fascinating to me, and we talked about this in depth, is this is, in our case, a 45 55% split. So I own 45, you own 55, and we did it intentionally. It's really your passion, and you're going to be doing the lion's share of the work. Yeah. And I'm, as I'm thinking through things, they went, I know how this works, but it may not have occurred to you how we pay things out of this company. I mean, it was always something that I wondered, like how it happens, but I knew that you were on top of that, so I just kind of let the ball roll for you. I'll get a check someday. Yeah. I love it. So. Well, what I did was I drew out a little picture of this thing that I think helped a lot. And to describe it, what we're really saying is you're two things at this company. You're both the owner, so you're going to get 55% of all the profit that we generate. That's the easy part. I get 45, you get 55. But profit is what's left after expenses. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot of expenses. There's a lot of expenses. But what's one of the key expenses in a business, in any business? Time. Paying for people's time. Right. And so you're both the owner and the manager of the company, really the CEO of the company, doing most of the work. I do a little bit of admin. Stuff, like you, all the frustrating admin. Stuff, the really not doesn't take a lot of time and energy, just kind of do it. And we're supplying a lot, some of the resources, etcetera. So we've talked about that, but like, one of the hardest things for me was, well, I'm just going to make money off this thing. I'm not doing anything. Well, that's kind of not true, because here's how this works and what makes it sort of fair. You're going to draw a salary or a 1099 payment out for the work you're doing in the company. So you've got these two roles. And what we figured out was we said, okay, when the company has made $100,000, what do we want your pay to be? When the company's making a million, what do we want your pay to be? When the company's making 5 million, what do we want your pay to be? So what we had to do as partners is come up with an agreement of what should your salary be under each of these scenarios. So we're putting together a little bit of a forecast, and we agreed it's going to start it. You get x when we're at $100,000. I'm not going to use our real numbers, but I'll just lose the example. Let's say when the company makes $100,000, we're going to give you a $20,000 salary. When the company makes a million dollars, we're going to give you a $200,000 salary. And anything over $2 million, you'll get a $350,000 salary. Because what's so important about that is when the business makes a million dollars and we have expenses of, let's call it 200,000, and then we have your salary of 200,000 after you take the million, minus the 200,000 for expenses, minus the 200,000 for your salary, what's left then is the profit that gets distributed. So it's kind of like you get a share for the work you're doing right off the top. And that's how this thing kind of works, because nine times out of ten, somebody's working in the business full time. For me, it's passive income, but for you it's active income. So that's something I want to make sure you, we don't forget in the partnership and wanted to make sure everybody was clear on it. But in any business, when you're figuring this out, you have to, I know you've got a couple other businesses you work in. You really need to make sure you understand when you're going to pay people. Yeah. And that's one of the things I know that you really try to hone in on and make sure entrepreneurs are aware of is paying yourself, because otherwise it's great to have passion and it's great to feed those passions. But if you're not paying yourself out of this, then it really is just the passion, it's just a hobby. The other thing as well is if you're feeding the business and the business isn't feeding you, that, there's a big red flag there, you know, and over. Time, else would go up and down. Yeah. It's normal. And it's interesting. And I'm sharing this out of full transparency in priorities, which is my primary business. I didn't pay myself for probably two years going in. Wow. And then when times are hard, I don't pay myself. Not the right answer. Okay. So this is one of those classic cases of do as I say, not as I do. Yeah. And we will not run forward press, media that way. Yeah. Because it's so. And as an owner. Right. This is what, this is the thing I want to really drive across to entrepreneurs. I'm a partial owner in this business. I am putting all my eggs on your talent and your ability to build this thing. No pressure. I want to know. No pressure at all. I want to know that you're not worried about putting food on the table, that you're not worried about a car payment. So. And any investor or anybody you're going to want to sell your business to or provide ownership to is going to want to know that as well. Yeah. Right. So really good investors, and this is something to keep an eye out for as you work out in the world, should be saying. One of their first questions is, how much are you paying yourself? How much do you need to be paying yourself so that I know you are going in 200% on this thing and you'll kill yourself for it and not be worried about money. Yeah. And that's just something that we often don't grasp early on. And as you, as the owner of the business, need to be holding yourself to that same fire. Yeah. Because if you're sitting there worrying about how you can put food on the table, you're not going to be running the business the best way you can. Yeah. And if you're also living with all those burdens and the stresses of putting all that time in and not seeing an RoI or any sort of. What's the word? Reciprocity. Yeah. Cryo. Cryo reciprocity. If you're not seeing any of that for your time. Right. It becomes an issue. It becomes something that, like, do you want to continue this as a business? And you'll find a lot of entrepreneurs hit that point where they go, you'll probably go through this at some point where you're like, I just, I'm gonna just lay it all down and go be a consultant. Because it's a lot now. It's fun, right. And it's challenging, and it keeps us excited and. But you do have to pay yourself, and it does get to be pretty defeating when you're not doing that. So it's just something I really want people to keep at the forefront. And if I can influence the next generation to do that, not do what I do, but do what I say, I think that'll be a huge contribution. Yeah. Because then you, it also gets you thinking, okay, maybe I don't like, we've bought a camera within the company. Yay. It's our first big equipment purchase. It's right there. That camera right there. So that's why these things look so awesome now, because I rent them from the company. But you, we need to think about, do we buy a lot of equipment this year, or do we get you paid a little bit and then buy some equipment the following year? Like, in the beginning, it's nothing. A salary. Like, I'm gonna be able to support myself on it. We're a startup. Yeah. But there's no reason not to escalate that as quickly as possible so that it becomes, that's a non, it goes. From kind of like being a bonus to an income being to the income. You can count on. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things I do want to kind of add on to this is I'm also in the process of having conversations with other entrepreneurs at this point where we may be going into other business partnership deals, partnerships and as well. I know. I'm excited about that. Those should be cool. But this just the conversation from Tuesday that we had when we sat down over this weekend to kind of discuss a little bit more of the intricacies that are going to be going into this. It helped me outline this for other entrepreneurs who don't have this on their radar as well, because we know so many entrepreneurs in our circle, in our network, that this isn't necessarily something that they were taught. And they are, they might be supporting the business from their personals, they might be having issues and having struggles in this way and being able to share this and educate them on this early, early, before we kind of get this. Like, this was the first conversation we had was, one, what are our offers going to look like? And then two, how do we structure this so it makes sure it makes. Sense for everyone that it's fair and that you're compensated for the work you're putting into. Exactly. And I love the way you phrased it. You basically said, right now we're feeding the business. You in particular are feeding the business. But the idea is the business is going to feed us in the long run. Exactly. So if you lose sight of that just by giving, giving, driving, driving. We had a conversation, we actually had a conversation today about it's not one we're doing with this business, it's something you're doing with your. Another one of your businesses is I want to donate some work to charity. Yeah. And I said, that's really good. And think about it also along, along the lines of, if I donate this to charity, this is time, I can't make money. Right. So you need to be aware of what that value is for two reasons. One, because you want to get what's called a donation in kind letter, which allows you to take a tax deduction for anything you do for free for anybody, which is huge. Guys, don't ever donate without getting. Don't ever donate your time without getting a contribution in kind if it's to a not for profit. But the second thing is you'll be able to get some marketing leverage out of this. So my challenge to you in the conversation was do you feel like you would invest this much in marketing? And is that where you want to put the money, to a donation, to a not for profit? And this happens to be a not for profit that serves military. One of you guys is military, so. But, yeah, we really want to do that. So that's just awesome to me. That's so helpful as well, though, because that wasn't something I even knew existed. I know that you can get write offs for donating to charity, but I didn't know that time. Time, yeah, time counts. Absolutely. And it kind of also is just helpful to have, I mean, if you don't have a pam, try to find a pam. Just watch our podcast. We'll cover it eventually. But it's just so helpful to have a mentor that you can bounce these types of things off of in this world. World. So that's like, also just another big piece of advice for entrepreneurs out there. It's find a friend. Yeah, find a friend. Find a person that you can trust to have your back in the foxhole. Yeah, we like to call it. That's what it is. And find somebody that you know you can count on to always say it straight and then continue to push you to make sure you're getting the value, even if you're donating to charity. So even if you're doing something along the lines of a pro bono type deal, find somebody driving gives you the benefit. Yeah. Because it's great that you can do those things, but also you can benefit from that on your side of, on the business side of things as well. Without feeling like you're taking advantage. Right. Somebody's taking advantage of you. Yeah. Either. But also like that you're taking advantage of. We can donate so much to charity in there. You know what I mean? Yep. Yeah. It's got to make business sense. It really does. It's a. Because it's very easy to get caught in because people will call you all the time. Yeah. And ask you for stuff. So I love the way you put that. And keeping in mind that this needs to be a beast that feeds you. Yeah, exactly. At the same time. So kind of cool. But it's been exciting week. I'm really excited about the conversations that we've had and the developments that we made for the business, for our partnership. Yeah. And I think, like, one of the things that really stood out was just all the things that we ran through on Tuesday were things that, as a business owner, you think about, but they're not really, you don't even know how to formulate. Never get questions. Yeah. You don't know how to formulate these questions. And if you have just a bookkeeper that you may be contracting, they're not. Going to raise those. It's not on their radar in any way. No. And that's actually a really good point. I would say any question you have, as you're going through thinking about the business, you're often going to go, well, that's a silly question. I'm sure that's an easy answer or whatever. You'll try and dismiss it or that's stupid. I shouldn't be asking that. What I would say is you said something so important, we're not taught this in high school, we're not taught this in college. We're not taught this on the streets, how to really run a business. And what all the things are, what you'll find is the entrepreneurial mind like yours is going to come up with these questions. They're all legitimate. Yeah. So one of the big suggestions I'd make as we go into this next week of adventures is when you have stuff like that where you just got to go, huh? Write it down. No matter how stupid you think it is, there's no such thing. Yeah. Because a lot of the stuff I probably just take for granted and don't even think I need to really tell you, oh, this is how we're going to do it and it's just administrative crap. But what you're saying is true. If you just have a bookkeeper, nobody's addressing this stuff that it can up and bite you come tax time or when you make a decision about spending money. Like, one of the things that also stood out was we were talking with these people that I might potentially be partnering up with about one of them has somebody that they 1099 contract. Okay, cool. And. But they're using them sometimes 40 to 45 hours a week. Okay. And one of the things that you had mentioned was make sure that when we're hiring people, if we're hiring people, that we do it in the right way. In a certain way. Right. So that if I'm only a 1099, they should only be a 1099 as well, where certain time balances different things along those lines. And then also when I switch from being 1099 to a w two, how that works, those are all things that a lot of people, I think just. We should cover that next week. I love that as a topic because there's so much to that, both from a regulatory standpoint, sure, but also from a tax standpoint, there's a lot, when you're an entrepreneur, about when you switch from 1099 to w two for yourself. But then also there's a lot of, do you pay yourself or do you pay an entity? Like, one of the things we've often talked about is setting ourselves each up a holding company so that we'll hold our individual interests separately. And there, once you get bigger, you have enough of them. It becomes very smart to do that. But secondarily, when you start to hire people, what are some of the things to be aware of? It's different state by state, but there's some kind of big red flags to help stay away from. I love that topic. I think that'll be a really good topic for next week's episode. Will you remember that? Because you know me, I will not remember. It's all up here. I love it. And so we have our continuing checklist going. Right? And one of the things that I will commit to add as a link for us is that spreadsheet that kind of does that waterfall we just described. So, like, here's revenue, here's expenses, here's the salary. You're going to pay the lead person in it, or maybe even another person. And then boom, here's how you distribute the proceeds so that everybody can kind of drop their numbers in and see what they think. We'll have a. Here's a hundred thousand dollar example. Here's a million dollar example. I love that because it's so easy to have a conversation, but seeing it in front of you on a screen. And this is how this works. Yep. It puts it all together for you and it makes it so much easier to understand and comprehend if this isn't something that you just naturally know or taught. You know what I'll do with this? When we do the link, I will go ahead and do a little loom video on how to use. I'll just walk through it with a loom video. I love that. So we'll do one of my calculators. I'll do a little loom video. We'll drop that in the, in the podcast, in the notes down here. So whether on YouTube or wherever you're listening to the podcast, click on that and you can go figure it out for yourself. The cool thing is, even if you're 100% owner, you're not in a partnership. Yeah. It'll still be useful because just you happen to get 100% of the proceeds. Yeah. So it's your. What is it? Owners draw. It would be an owner's draw. Dividend depends on how the company's set up. But, yeah, for us, in our partnership, it'll be, I think they call it a distribution to partners. Gotcha is the official term. We can talk about all that stuff in another episode. Yeah. When we close the books for the year. Oh, that's. I can't believe it's almost December. I know. I can't either. It's really, like, crazy. Coming in on closing the third quarter. That's wild. Yep. So that's another big little tip for people. Big little tip is as you're getting ready to go into year end, there's a couple things you want to do. And the most notable is let your tax accountant know if you think you're going to be making net income in your business, especially if it's going to be significantly more than you had last year. Gotcha. It's time to raise your hand to your accountant, because if there are some strategies, you got a quarter left to get them, get most of them in place. There are some strategies that over the end of the year, you can still do stuff for anything that relies on cash moving. This is the quarter you want to have that conversation. So make sure to check in with your tax professional. If you don't have one, call me. I've got tax professionals. But you don't want to be taken blind into the new year. Yeah. I mean, like, that's how a lot of people get screwed, especially entrepreneurs. And you're so excited about making money, you have about five minutes to be excited, and then all of a sudden, you have to pay taxes you didn't save for. Exactly. So, yeah, that's. That is. That's one of those things I'm hoping. That we can avoid that first year. Well, you did something right off the bat that I loved, and you got even more aggressive than I am with it. Or conservative, I guess, is every dollar we're getting in revenue. Just as a reminder, Francis is carting off a third of it. Yeah. Right off to a savings account. Man, is it painful to see that money go into there. But we distribute money. Exactly. I know that it's worth it in the long run. And it also. I have always been somebody. One of the things that honestly held me back from doing business in the past was the fear of, if I make this, I don't know how to manage the taxes for it. You know what I mean? So that's. I don't even know what to do with that. But now that I know it's okay, I'm taking this. I'm separating it. We're all good. We're all good. I don't have to worry about it. I'm not losing the nights of sleep. I love that. And the third is, the 30% we're doing is probably too much. Yeah. In fact, I know it's too much, but we want to know how much it's too much. And what it's going to allow us to do is if that we don't need it for taxes, when we do our distributions, which we won't need all of it, we'll have more to invest in the business if we want to, or more to distribute at that point. So it just opens up. It approaches it in a way that becomes, if anything, a good surprise, and at worst, neutral. At worst, we were right. Yeah. The cost of peace of mind is always worth it. That's something. I don't remember where I've heard it, but it's something that's always stayed true. Exactly. The cost of peace of mind is always worth it. Priceless, as they say. 100%. I love it. Well, cool. So, next week, employees and paying ourselves. And how should we do it? 1099 or w two? Yeah. All right. In the meantime, you all have a fantastic week. I'm so glad you joined us. Got a great news update in case you got a few billion burn in a hole in your pocket. I would love to buy an NFL too. You definitely want to cryo your hops the next time you have an IPA. And then how to pay yourself all really important things in a good day's work. Awesome. I'm excited for the next one. All right, see you soon. See you soon. Thanks so much for watching the Cash Flow podcast with us. We want to bring more and more of this to you, so please like share, subscribe, comment so that we can keep bringing more of this content to.