S4E19: Bitchin’ Kitten, German Rex | Coinbase & Stripe Teaming Up | Why Banks Won’t Lend You Money

Disclaimer: The information in this video does not constitute Financial Advice. Consult with a Financial Advisor before making any decisions regarding your finances.

This week, we cover best practices for borrowing money as an entrepreneur. Learn how historical financial statements, solid forecasts, and a strong credit score can enhance your borrowing strategy. We also review Bitchin Kitten Brewery’s German Rex and discuss how Coinbase’s partnership with Stripe is changing Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions. Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe for more business finance tips, and join our Cash Flow Podcast club for more awesome content!

📰 This week's What's News: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/coinbase-and-stripe-team-up-to-bring-the-world-on-chain/ar-BB1p5pVF?ocid=BingNewsVerp

Today's Brew🍺: Bitchin' Kitten Brewery, German Rex

🍻 The P.B.K.P.I (Pam's Beer KPI)Scale ⚖️: 
1. Pam's Not Touching It
2. It's Sippable
3. I'd Drink it Again if You Gave it to me
4. I'll Order it if it's on the Menu
5. I'll Seek it out

About the Brewery: 
The idea for Bitchin’ Kitten has been fermenting in the minds of Michael and Brigitte Crosson for decades. Michael, a beer lover, and Brigitte, a cat advocate, found inspiration in Brigitte’s cat, Shadow, who earned the “bitchin’ kitten” nickname after an amusing encounter with a White Russian cocktail. This incident inspired the name for Michael’s homebrews. In 2019, Michael’s Bitchin’ Kitten beer won second place in a Craft Brewers competition, prompting the couple to pursue their dream. With refined recipes and perfect timing, they brought Bitchin’ Kitten Brewery to life, crafting delicious beers with a touch of feline inspiration.

🍻 Learn more about Bitchin' Kitten Brewing Company: https://bitchinkitten.com/

Transcript

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Which is what your bookkeeper should be doing anyway. And the second is make sure that you take all three things to the bank with you. Just walking in with those three things is going to elevate your presence in that banker's mind from the crowd. Like, you become the top 1% of people they deal with if you walk in with that information. Okay, so that's the first thing, your historical information. Now, part two of that. First point is, is that if you're just a startup and you're literally. Hey, I'm Pam Pryor, and this is the Cash Flow podcast. We're going to talk about everything related to money in your business. Without further ado, let's hop right in and welcome inside. We're so glad to have you. We have a great episode lined up for you. We are going to start with our brews as normal, with a beer called German Rex. Then we're going to move on to a really big piece of news that is making access to cryptocurrencies a lot easier for normal people like us who aren't crypto heads. And then also, we're going to talk in the business section about how to borrow money as an entrepreneur, the best ways to prep yourself for that. So stay tuned, and let's jump right in and talk German Rex. I am really excited about this brew because, first of all, I love the brewery name, which is bitchin kitten. B I t c h I n. Kitten. I love that. Second of all, it's a german style wheat ale, and I love a good wheat ale. And third, these folks are just around the corner from us here in Pennsylvania. So you know how I like to support our local brands. So I'm very excited about this. So the bitchin kitten brewery is owned and founded by Michael and Bridget Crossen. The cool thing about this is, back in the nineties when they met, they met because they had a dream to open a brewery, and they just. Life interfered, and they never really got to it, but they did. During, you know, weekends and fun times, they were brewing some stuff in their garage, and they knew it was good. So in 2019, they entered a competition, and they did really well with one of their earliest beers. So they said, okay, we are just gonna dive in. The kitten story is because Bridget owned a cat when they met, and Michael the cat didn't like Michael, and we know how picky cats are, so he called it the bitch and kitten, and that became the brewery name. So that's kind of fun. Now, getting down to the beer, I love a good wheat ale. And I love anything german because I lived there as a kid for six years, so it always brings a smile to my face when I hear german or just see that something's german based. So this is a german style wheat ale. It's got a 5% abv, relatively low, but not for a wheat beer. And it's described as lively, playful, and distinguished with a nice, golden, crisp look. So let's see what we get here. Get the open. See if there's anything on the back of this that I need to read to you. Oh, I can't read it anyway without my glasses. All right, let's see what we got here. Definitely golden. Liking the golden. Okay, let's see. Oh, yeah, that's a nice, not very hazy beer, which I like. A little bit of haze, but nothing too bad. And. All right, it's got a weird smell. It kind of smell. Kind of smells like dirty socks. Okay, that's weird to get over. Oh, don't sniff this beer. Okay, there's rule number one, but let's see what we got here. All right, that's really interesting in my mouth. So I do get that it's a wheat beer. You can always kind of tell a wheat beer because you can feel the. I don't know how to describe it, but it's almost usually citrusy a little bit, and it feels a little thicker than the other beers do to me. But remember I said it smells like dirty socks? It doesn't taste like dirty socks. It actually is not bad. It's not like it pops with any kind of citrus, but it's just kind of a plain taste. I'm going to say something really weird now. When I take a sip and breathe normally, it tastes awful when I just sip it without smelling it. Watch. It's not half bad. Now, again, you guys know I'm an IPA snob. I love ipas. But for a non IPA, this is a nice, cool summer beer. I think people would enjoy this in the summer. It feels a little lighter, and as long as you don't smell it, it's not a bad taste. So, as far as the PBKPI, which we rank from one to five, and just as a reminder, five is I will hunt it down anywhere. One is, you could put it in front of me, and I could have not had a beer in a year, and I'm not touching it. I'm gonna give this one. I'm gonna give this one a two because it's really hard to remember not to smell it, and it smells weird. So here's my story with this one. I'm holding out a lot of hope for the other bitchin kitten brands. I think they make four or five, and we'll make sure that we cover them here because they are local. But for this one, I'm gonna give it a two. I would not seek this out if it was on a menu. And the only thing there, I might order it. If we're on a menu and there were other things to order, even maybe a Coors light, I might order it because I forget to not smell it when I sip. So there's my pbkpi. And that is what we have to say about bitch and kitchen. I'm going to take one more sip without smelling. And that's not bad. Cheers. Now, hang on, because we're going to now talk about something really cool that's happening in the cryptocurrency world. If you've been on the periphery, waiting to get involved, now might be your chance. See you in the next segment. All right, so what's news out there? There's something really exciting happening. This whole crypto thing with bitcoin and ethereum now getting a little more press in the media, there are a lot more people that want to get involved with some cryptocurrencies, and Coinbase is now going to make that a little bit easier. And they're partnering up with somebody that us entrepreneurs are very familiar with, stripe. So it used to be way back, way back two, three years ago, to actually buy cryptocurrency was a bit of an adventure. Like, I literally had to do research for a week to figure out how to even buy bitcoin. Like, it was crazy how hard it was. And they've been making that on ramp, as they call it, to crypto, easier and easier and easier, literally by the month. And now we've really, really got to see some acceleration here because now if you go to some place like Coinbase in particular, and you say, hey, I want to buy some bitcoin now, it gives you the option of using stripe to either pull in any credit card or your apple pay, and you can just literally right there on the spot, buy whatever cryptocurrency you want that's on Coinbase by simply saying, yep, that's what I want to do through stripe. And it will instantly bring that cash in and buy you the crypto. There used to be pauses and all sorts of crazy things. Now, I haven't tested this yet, but I'm going to in the next couple of weeks because I'm really curious about is, can I pay people this way now? Right. I. So there are ways you can pay people with crypto, but it's not very easy. And when I say pay people with crypto, a lot of times people will think, oh, I'm not going to buy that stuff. It's risky and every investment is a risk. And this is not investment advice by any stretch of the imagination. But there are these things called stable coins that you can buy that are actually crypto, but they're pegged to the us dollar. So you could literally get into Coinbase. Now use this stripe credit card thing. Say, hey, I want to buy $200 of USDC. Is one of these stable coins USDC? I want to buy $200 of USDC and press a button and it will pull it right from your Apple wallet. Okay, now you've got this USDC sitting there in your Coinbase account and say, you want to pay somebody $150, you could do it instantly. Bye. Texting out that USDC to whoever you want to pay. Now, why am I so excited about this? Because I've been spending the last six months in banking hell for a couple of reasons. One is I have a client and we needed to move 30 bank accounts from one bank to another bank. And all of the confusion and complication and delays and paperwork and I signatures that come along with having to do that, it literally took us six months to shut down 30 accounts in one bank and open 30 in a new bank and move the money there. Very easy for me to sit here and say, dang, we could have literally uploaded all the money from the old bank into Coinbase USDC and then downloaded it all in dollars in the new bank instantly. This is something that's going to catch on, folks. The banks have gotten stricter and stricter for very good reasons. You all know I had a fraud very recently, and bank fraud is a real thing, but what it's also doing is really complicating banking life for people. And I think you're going to see more and more, and I will follow it here and keep you posted. Easier and easier ways to do transactions outside of the banking system. Now that we have some of these on ramps like the one that Coinbase and Stripe have just set up. So if you've been interested, or thinking about getting into just buying a little bitcoin or buying a little ethereum, $5 worth, $10 worth, go ahead and get yourself a Coinbase account. It's an app that downloads on your phone, or you can get it on your computer and just go, hey, I want to buy bitcoin. And literally, it'll give you the option to stripe in some money and actually get yourself started in crypto. So I find that to be really, really cool news. I'll keep you posted. Like I said, I'm going to try this thing. I've already got it pulled up on my phone to give it a try, and we will report back. Probably by the time this is produced, Francis will be able to drop into the show notes how it worked or any quirks that I might have found with it. And that's it for this one. But next thing we want to talk about, speaking of money, is how and what is the best way for businesses, for entrepreneurs like us, maybe really small entrepreneurs just starting out or businesses that are ready to grow or scale. How and what is the best way to borrow money? What do you need to do? How can you be the most prepared and ready to have people want to lend you money? Let's hop into that now. All right. In our business clues section, I'm going to start getting really sharp on things that we as entrepreneurs can do. Coming from the questions that I most often get from the people I talk to, like us small business owners, and this one is just common across all of us, is when I need money, how do I get it? And there are all sorts of other ways, but one of the things that we all want to be able to do is borrow money from banks occasionally. Not all, most. And if we're going to borrow money from banks, there are a few things that I can tell you to do right away that will help your case. And there's three that we're going to focus on today with a little bit of reality check in here as well. So pretty much what you need to understand is when banks give you money, really what that is for them is an investment. They're giving you that money. Not just that you can have money for a period of time, but that they know they're going to make interest off of that money. And they're also making the assumption that you're going to pay them back the money you borrow. Right. So if you put yourself in their shoes, what do they want to know? They want to know that, number one, you're good for it. Number two, your business shows that you keep good track of your money. And number three, that you got a pretty good feel for what you're going to do with the money. Now, the most common misperception that entrepreneurs have about what they need to show a bank in order to get money. And oftentimes when the bank gets that thing and says, yeah, no, they don't understand why is the p and L. So, as an entrepreneur, historically, until you work with us, you've run your business from your p and L. And your p and L is your profit and loss statement. And it tells you, when I sell something and it costs me this much, what's left is my net income. So you've got your revenue or your income, you've got your expenses, and then what's left is your net income. And most business owners, frankly, run their business from that piece of paper. And the truth of the matter is, that's not what the bank cares about. Okay. What the bank actually cares about is your cash flow. So what you really need to do is not just show them a strong profit and loss statement, but you need to show them that you completely understand how and when money comes into your business and leaves your business. Okay? Literally, the timing and the amounts of cash that flow through your business, which for the most part will align a little bit with your profit and loss statement, but not completely. So what are the three things we need to do to make that connection for the banker that we're going to go see? The first thing is we need to have solid financials for your business. I'm going to do this in two parts. In the first part, we'll assume you've been running your business for a while and you just need to borrow money to either get through a cash crisis or to scale or something like that. First thing you want to do is walk into that bank with very solid historical financial statements. And what that means is your profit and loss statement, your balance sheet and your cash flow statement, okay? I promise you that if you walk into a banker and say, hey, here are all three of these, and it's showing those things for the last twelve months, they're going to automatically put you up on a list of people they want to keep talking to because you've shown them that you care about the money that you are custodian of. You've shown that you understand more than just profitability, which is what they need to know in order to lend you money. So one thing you can do right off the bat, if your books are not in order, if you've got your receipts in a receipt box, or if you haven't caught up your records for the year, or whatever it might be, create a twelve month with columns, profit and loss statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. Now, if you're doing your books in something like Xero or Quickbooks or Netsuite or wherever somebody might be doing your bookkeeping. That's all happening on a regular, up to date current basis. If you're not doing that right now, it's a very good reason to get a bookkeeper who does that and keeps it current for you so that in an emergency or when you're ready to grow, you can just pull that thing out if 15 days after the last month and you've got the most recent twelve months of activity on all three of those statements. So the cornerstone points there are, number one, have that information and have it well kept and well organized the way that a banker will understand it, which is what your bookkeeper should be doing anyway. And the second is make sure that you take all three things to the bank with you. Just walking in with those three things is going to elevate your presence in that banker's mind from the crowd. Like you become the top 1% of people they deal with if you walk in with that information. Okay, so that's the first thing, your historical information. Now, part two of that. First point is that if you're just a startup and you literally have no cash, we want to rely on a forecast. We want you to know and be able to say, hey, when I get this money, here's what I'm going to do with it. And here's when I'll get the money back to pay you. And here's why I'll have enough money to pay you interest, okay? That comes in the form of a forecast. And what you want to do is project out the next twelve months, okay? Show them why you need it, when you need it, and when you'll be able to pay it back. And that actually looks exactly like the twelve month historical profit and loss statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. But it's forward looking. So we're going to create those three statements in a forecast if you don't have any history to rely on. And again, walking into the bank with just that, if you're clearly just a startup, literally just starting, that sets you up for SBA loan money and puts you to the top 1% of people that they're going to talk to and consider, because it shows that you truly understand that cash flow is not about your dream. Cash flow is not about your profit and loss statement. Cash flow is, I'm sorry, lending is not about your dream. Lending is not about your profit and loss statement. Lending is about a lender feeling very confident that you're going to understand exactly before you even start how you're going to use that money and how you're going to pay them back. Okay? So that's the second thing, because even if you have historical financials, you also want to have a forecast for how you're going to use the money and how you're going to pay them back. So if you're a business that's been running for a while, you want to have, number one, the historical financial statements as we've just described them. And number two, a forecast for the next twelve or 24 months of the same statements, okay? If you're a, that's one. And two that you need to have. If you are a just starting up business and you just don't have any cash yet, then you're going to want to come with that forecast, okay, for the next twelve or 13 months. And you're going to want to tell them, I have bookkeeping in place. We know how we're going to keep track of these things. My bank accounts are set up. I understand that I need to separate my personal and my business, cash, etcetera, etcetera. Okay. So history number one, forecast number two. What's the third thing? The third thing is one that we actually struggle with. And I know in my entrepreneurial business, I've had a struggle with it, and it's the credit score. Okay? As entrepreneurs, we often go way deep in debt. And before we actually get to borrowing money, sometimes people run up credit card bills, multiple credit card bills, roll things from, you know, 10 interest credit card to another to keep the lights on and to keep people paid. This happens in entrepreneurship. If you're an entrepreneur, you know, it happens. And sometimes the necessity of paying people is more important than, you know, hey, this is costing me a lot of money to borrow this or to, you know, use credit cards this way. But at some point you're going to come to where you're ready to say, hey, I'm ready to borrow money in a much more cost efficient way. You're going to need to clean up your credit score before you go down that road. You know, truthfully, you're going to need to be at least at like a 660 or a 670 to be able to walk into that bank and have a conversation. And this is often something that's confused as well. Even though you're borrowing money for your business, the bank is going to ask for a personal guarantee until you are, you know, 1015, $20 million biggest with a three or four year history. And you can get a credit line, those kind of things. You're going to be borrowing with your own personal guarantee, which means if, for whatever reason, the business can't pay the bank back, they're going to have you personally pay them back. And therefore, they need to really understand that you've got a credit score that represents that you've got the financial freedom to do that. So there are ways to work on your credit score. In fact, as an entrepreneur, mine was in the toilet at one point, and there's actually a group I highly recommend called Fortress financial, that if you're struggling with your credit score, you ought to look up. In fact, we'll drop contact information in the podcast notes, because there are a lot of scam artists out there on this, okay? A lot of people who say, hey, we'll collect all your debt, and you'll only have to pay us a quarter as much, and we'll write off the rest. Those things tend to very much damage your credit score because they are actually, like, just not paying things off. And people will go ahead and put the disputes in, and then it's on your credit score even longer. These guys actually look at, hey, they know some tips and tricks, which they've taught me a little bit of, on how to get those credit scores raised without actually changing the hardcore dynamics of your debt situation. And they're really clever about it, and they're really good. They have weekly meetings with you. They make sure that you understand the things you need to do to keep that credit score coming up. So if you're in the situation where it's a bad credit score and you're ready to go to the bank, you have your financials, you have your forecast, and you just have a credit score that's not quite there yet, these folks will help you really increase that a lot more rapidly than history would allow. I remember in the day, it would take people a year to get a credit score back in line, and they would have to have, you know, their credit card pay down plans and be actually implementing them every single month. But now there are some ways that they can fix that credit score or make significant improvements in it very quickly. So don't let your heart sink if credit score is an issue. But once you have that credit score, once you have your books in order, and they actually are financial financials that a banker will understand, and once you have a forecast, you're ready to go, you will get a front seat at the banker's table for that. And that's what we really want. We want traditional lending because it's going to get you the best interest rate. There are other ways to do it. You've heard me talk about some of them here. We can even do some more topics on this Francis on more creative ways to get financing, but those can often run you into some trouble. So this is certainly the best option and the best solution to get a credit line or a loan from a traditional bank. And those are the three ways to make sure that when you get there, you're in the front of the line. So here's what I'd say. I'm really glad you joined me for this sort of smelly beer, but it doesn't taste bad. I really hope that you like subscribe to our channel so that we can make sure we continue to bring you these tips. And we've added a membership. So we're really excited to say that if you go to the link here for the actual podcast that's going to be below or above or around me somewhere, you can join us for the price of a beer. Basically, you can join our club, the Cash Flow podcast club, and there will be all sorts of surprises in store for you if you do that. So I hope you choose to join us one way or another. We really appreciate that you follow us. We work very hard to get these tips out there for you and we want your feedback if it's helpful. If it's nothing, give us the feedback and we'll keep them coming. Cheers. 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.