Episode 109: ERC Tax Credit Update

Episode 109: ERC Tax Credit Update

Brandon Condrey:
So the employee retention tax credit, people call it ERC, ERTC, whatever you like. But this was a pandemic era subsidy that was put out there by the feds. And so the concept is if you lost money over a certain point or if you were closed by the government over a certain point, you got this tax credit, a refundable tax credit for every employee that you kept on staff. Man, we had stars in our eyes and we heard about this because when you did the math for where our headcount, we have a high amount of employees for a cleaning company I think. And so for the headcount, we were looking at something like 1.3 million bucks potentially, which would've been crazy. We didn't get that Spoiler alert, we did not get 1.3 million bucks.

Announcer:
Grow your cleaning business, make more money, have more time. This is the Profit Cleaners podcast with your host Brandon Condrey and Brandon Schoen.

Brandon Schoen:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Profit Cleaners podcast. The only place where you can learn from the top 1% of cleaning business owners from around the world to take it to the next level and win.

Guys, you are in the right place and in the house listening to Brandon Condrey and Brandon Shane, I'm your host, Brandon Shane. I have with me the magical number spreadsheet ninja, Randy Condrey in the house. He's pumping out numbers, pumping out Profit margins and getting us more efficient all the time. So just wanna shout out to you Brandon, thanks for being along on the ride with us and today guys,

we have a very awesome show. We're gonna talk about a little update some of you've been asking, Hey, I heard you guys talk about some one of these episodes, a few episodes back about the E R C, which is the employee retention credit or something like that. We're gonna talk about it, we're gonna tell you what happened and what kind of funding we got from it and possibly there's still some money out there for you to go grab for your business.

So I think this will be a fun episode. Just update on what happened there and what's transpired since then and what we're gonna do with the new funds that came in. So yeah, thank you guys for being here. Brandon. Let's tell 'em about this E R c update, the story and how it's come full circle. It's pretty cool. Yeah,

so the employee retention tax credit, people call it E R C E R T C, whatever you like, but this was a pandemic era subsidy that was put out there by the feds. And so the concept is if you lost money over a certain point or if you were closed by the government over a certain point, you got this tax credit, a refundable tax credit for every employee that you kept on staff.

Man, we had stars in our eyes and we heard about this because when you did the math for where our headcount, we have a high amount of employees for a cleaning company I think. And so for the headcount, we were looking at something like 1.3 million bucks potentially, which would've been crazy. We didn't get that spoiler alert, we did not get 1.3 million

bucks. But what happened in the beginning was our accountant automatically ran the numbers for us. We just straight up didn't qualify on the face. Face of it, you do not qualify because we didn't have every single quarter, we actually jumped over the pandemic. We grew during the pandemic because we switched our marketing to, we're part of the solution with sanitizing and disinfecting and we never got shut down cuz we were an essential service.

So how on earth did we qualify for this? Here's the journey. Our certified financial guy, Brent told us that one of his clients told him that every single business qualifies if you had to change the way that you did business. So like we, our justification was a couple things. Any way that you changed the way you did business during the pandemic.

So what we did was we switched from in-person estimates to digital estimates on Calendly, on Zoom. We had to pay for, we didn't have to, we chose to pay for employee covid testing. We bought gloves through the roof, we bought Schoen booties, we bought temperature sensors. We went above and beyond. We were trying to make sure our customer base was safe and our employees were safe.

So we talked to our Brent about that. Brent didn't actually know how to execute the thing in the end. He was just like, someone's gotta be able to do it. And unfortunately the employee tax retention is one of these areas that has been latched onto by the shadiest of shady like telemarketers. I get no joke, probably three spammy voicemails every single day.

That's an automated thing. It's like, hey this is Julie Smith on March 2nd and I'm just calling to tell you that you qualify for the E R C every day even though we've already done it. But they're not checking that, they're just spamming everybody. So I would recommend not calling back one of those phone numbers. I have no idea who you're talking to when you do that.

So what we did was we went hunting like how can we do it? And we talked to our accountant about it. She was like, this is kind of a gray area for us and we're out. So she said they did not wanna proceed. So we went looking for it and tell 'em how we found these guys Brandon. Yeah. So this is the beauty of masterminds and plugging into business groups.

But in my business group's called the Artes Syndicate, there's a a bunch of amazing business owners and people in there that obviously all help each other. That's why we create masterminds. That's why we why we have masterminds on the back of our stuff as well. But collaboration, everyone's sharing resources and this exact thing came up, I was like, has anybody dealt with this?

Has anybody experienced this? Several people in the group were of that mind like that had businesses that were doing this for businesses already in our group. So that's how we came across the guys to do this. And we're gonna share those contacts with you guys. So if you can find the guys that can actually do this that are not the shady characters. Because what's happening is,

what Brandon said is there's a lot of people that saw there's a lot of money to be had here, but what they're doing is they're, they're contacting businesses and taking a cut of that and just kind of doing it. I don't know, there's roundabout ways they're doing it, but the guys we found are awesome. They're very much legit, they're very upfront with everything and everything's legal and we're not getting put in a a pile I think is what's happening with a lot of these other people where the IRS or whoever was like,

oh these guys are going through these guys so we're gonna put 'em on this back burner and they're not gonna get their funding as fast. And so doing it this way is, is a lot more legit. I would, I was surprised at how fast we're able to do it and how fast they got back to us. And you did a lot of the talking Brandon like working with them.

So you can tell 'em more of that story there, but I'm just excited we're here man. Like we took action, we did it. We're like eh, probably won't work. Like we grew, why would they give us money? And they did so we'll tell 'em Exactly. So in the end we went with a trusted source that came from a mastermind.

This is a social proof thing. This was recommended to us by someone who had already done it. So that's why we went with them. So I reached out to these guys, we made contact, told 'em our story. They wanted to know specifically how we changed business, how did we do it. I explained all those things that I just told you guys.

Temperature recording things, testing materials, we really had to switch doing this. We had to buy masks, blah blah blah. Across the board, right? Then they're like, okay, give us your financials. So that was easy. Okay, here's our, they wanted 9 41 reports. So the, that's what your payroll provider's gonna generate your quarterly 9 41.

So it was seven quarters over 2020 and 2021 that qualified. And so we gave them 7 9 41 reports, technically seven and a half and then our Profit and loss for all of those quarters as well. And then obviously we didn't qualify in the Profit and loss side of things but they were able to qualify us for two of this seven quarters. And I actually pushed back on this,

which I can feel a little bit bad about in retrospect, but they sent us back the thing like, congratulations, you qualify for this much. I was like, man, I was really hoping to get like the whole thing. I got told that it was gonna be all of it and the c f O of that company actually replied, he was like,

Brandon, you doubled in size over the pandemic. He's like, it's really hard to make a hardship case over that but I got you two quarters. And I was like, all right man, fair enough. Sorry. So I didn't do anything. So like me telling you this story is boring because Brandon found the guys. I sent them seven sheets of paper and they sent me back a form that says congratulations,

you're getting $120,000. So that's what we got in the end. We got 120,000 bucks and what we paid for it and this is why we paid our accountant, what is it gonna do this for us? And I didn't know how to do this cuz there's all kinds of IRS forms you gotta fill out making these justifications, you pay a service to do it.

That's the guys that we'll tell you about here at the end. But they did all that work for us. What did we have to pay for that? They called it a success fee. So we had to pay a 15% success fee and we only paid it if it worked. There was an upfront application fee, which I think was $500 if memory serves right?

So we paid 500 bucks for them to comb over the data and you don't get that back if they go over the data and decide that it's not gonna work at all. Like sorry we kept your 500 bucks to pay the bookkeepers to look at it, totally fine, but it did work. And so they tell us the amount. Next question obviously is when,

when do I get that money? They're like, it really depends. We've seen customers get one big check, we've seen 'em get a check for every quarter and they quoted us between three and 10 months. Like that's a huge timeline. 10 months. I'm like, all right, well we'll just count on it. And in, in my mind, I still wasn't excited.

I was like, I'm not gonna be excited until this money is in my bank account. And so then you're like, yeah know you send 'em like an update a month in like, hey man, what's up? And then they told me this was actually really cool. This is part of the 15% success fee that you check. They assign it to a person in-house who calls the IRS weekly,

asks what's the status of this one? What's the status of this one? What's the status of this one? They're making sure that someone on the other end is paying attention to that thing, which was huge because I don't wanna call the IRS and they have someone's direct contact info to call, Hey Profit Cleaners, if you're interested in growing your cleaning business and joining the top 1% of Feeny business owners,

well now's the time We're launching our new business out in Texas and documenting everything. So you're gonna want to join us and you're gonna see how six and seven figure cleaning businesses are built from the ground up so that you can do it too. To get started on this journey with us, head over to our free Facebook group now and watch the masterclass pinned to the top of the group.

Just look up top 1% cleaning business owner club on Facebook or go to Profit Cleaners dot com slash facebook and watch the free masterclass pinned to the top to learn more. So we kept checking in, kept checking in. In the end it took nine weeks. So not even the three months on the low end that they quoted us, it was nine weeks between when they said you got 120 grand and when I actually received 120 grand.

Now how did I know that was gonna work? I got an invoice for the 15% fee and I was like, Hey man, I don't have this money. They're like, oh, we sent that to you because the guy who calls the IRS told us today that yours was processed. So that means that the check's in the mail, man, sure enough,

three days later we got two checks. So we got two checks that added up to the one 20 deposited that paid them the 15%. So what did we net? I think we ended up with 1 0 4. So we ended up with $104,000 and we used that to do a couple things. I paid back myself, my wife and I loaned the company a bunch of money when we were in startup mode in the form of charging a bunch of stuff on our personal credit card to keep us afloat at the very beginning and then again during the pandemic.

So I felt really good that my company paid me back. So thanks company. And then with the rest of that money we are expanding. We could have taken that Brandon and I as an owner, this is literally a tax refund. This was money that we already paid in the form of payroll, wages, wage taxes, we got all that back Brandon and I could have taken,

well I don't know what that is, like 40 grand a piece and bought new cars. But instead we worked on revamping the Profit Cleaners course for you and more importantly expanding into Texas and into Santa Fe. Yeah, Absolutely. So we're doubling down on what's working guys and taking like make that money work for us. You know, like we could go buy cars or something that would just fizzle out and actually be a liability,

but instead taking that money and creating an asset out of it, right? Creating another business. And so you guys have been hearing us talk about that a lot when we're in the midst of it. Right now we've just launched Santa Fe or in the midst of launching in Fort Worth, Texas, but it's really nice. We would've been able to do it anyways but,

and we had access to other funds but it's just nice even have this and to, you know, more flexibility to work with and I'm just like really excited how much further and faster we're gonna be able to go. I'm having access to that. So it's a huge win guys, we wanted to share that win with you and tell you, if you haven't looked into this yet,

like definitely look into this tax credit, we'll actually give you on the show notes, we'll just put in the show notes, Brandon a spot where they can enter their info. We'll send you guys the details and you guys can get in contact with Them. Yeah, so you just need to give us your name and email. The guys we're working with,

they don't have like affiliate marketing or anything like that. So the way that we worked it out with them so they know that it came from Profit Cleaners specifically is that we're just gonna collect all that info for you and then we will pass you off as a list and then you will get a reach out from one of the contacts there. And I just go fast.

I don't dilly Daly getting in the documents. It shouldn't be the hard to get it to him. It's just you pull reports from QuickBooks, you pull reports from your payroll provider and then send them off and they will do it for you. And essentially they're filing amended tax returns on your behalf. There's a power of attorney you gotta sign, there's a bunch of documents you gotta sign.

But if it means that you get six figures in the mail nine weeks later, sign me up man. I'll do that all Day. Yeah, I was actually, I remember Brandon called me up and we were doing this and I was on my trip last summer, I was up in Michigan actually at the time and he was like, Brandon, I need you to sign this power of attorney in the middle of my trip.

I was like, well heck yeah, let's do it. Because money's coming in and as we always say, money lacks speed guys. So you know, take these kind of actions and go quickly. Don't delay, don't think about this stuff. If there's an opportunity, if you were in business at all during the pandemic and you had employees and you grew or didn't grow,

there's a great chance that you have money just sitting waiting for you. If you're putting in your business and having that money work for you, grow your business, get more customers, acquire another business, set up another location, whatever it is. So there's money floating around everywhere. That's what I always like to say. There's no shortage of money. The only shortage is your time and the most valuable thing you have is your time and attention.

So how do you get more of that, invest that money, make you go further set up systems, build a business that can run without you, which is what we're working on. And if you guys wanna come with us, like come alongside us, we're doing it right now. Like let's give 'em a just a quick update. Brandon, what are we doing right now in the midst of all this?

We're setting up stuff, we're building out stuff we just launched. It's a crazy time right now. Yeah, right now we're on week two of cleaning inside of Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and that one's kind of off to a slower start, but this is why we're testing it out here before we take it to a different state and a whole new business.

And so that's getting updated, trying new marketing things across the board. Had some hiccups in there which we'll talk about as well. We talk about those things in the Facebook groups and then really a lot of time and efforts being put towards this new location in Texas. So as we do things in Texas, like setting up a new L L C record,

like getting new websites, picking logos, getting cars, hiring managers, all of those things are being recorded and documented as we do it live. And they're being put into the all new refresh of the Profit Cleaners course, which is out now. You can do it. It's everything we've done. It's one big course. It's a one stop shop. Yeah.

So if you guys want to check that out, the best way to get in, well first of all go join our free Facebook group, it's Profit Cleaners dot com slash facebook. That's where a lot of the actions happening. A lot of people are getting in there and just asking amazing questions and getting a lot of help and surrounding themselves with people up in their standards and getting around mentors like us.

But go watch the masterclass. So at a Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass that's gonna show you guys that it's just a new case study of everything that we've done over the years. And like Brandon said, it's packaging everything into one place. Cuz before we had a few different products out there. People were like, which one do I need? We just made it easy for you guys.

Everything's in one place. We had a coaching call earlier this morning, it was awesome. A lot of new engagement, a lot of people in there. It's been really fun. So we do those every week. Now we're up in the value. That was another thing people really wanted is you guys are like, well great, I have the systems and stuff,

but I need a sounding board. I need someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of. Like constant communication, right? So that is what the group is for. There's a paid group for members of the course on the back end of that. So there's more pointed questions and more targeted information if you need that as well. Yeah, just get in there guys,

go watch the masterclass and just start taking action. Like this is a great time to up-level your business. If you've already been in business, maybe you've got some teams going like you need some marketing, you need some new strategies, some new mindset like, like go back and rebuild some of that stuff. If you're getting started brand new from scratch, this is an amazing time.

Not only for the economy and the world right now when everyone's slowing down like speed up, but also the spring rush. This is like the best time of the year. Like get in front of those customers. Everyone's coming outta hibernation, they're looking for cleans and they're like, where do I go? So be the one that they wanna work with. Be visible,

get noticed and get out there so you can dominate your market. We're gonna show you guys how to do that. We're gonna start from scratch. We've already dominated the market in in Albuquerque, we're starting a new one, but the one in Texas is totally untapped. So we're gonna show you guys how we do it. Some of those things are gonna be really big wins.

Some of those we're gonna probably flop on our face and it's gonna be like, hey, you know, this is just part of business, you just gotta keep going. So it's gonna be a real world business class I think like a masterclass in business in general. But go check out the master class guys, Profit Cleaners dot com slash masterclass, get in there,

book a call with me, with Brandon, with someone on our team. Actually Brandon and I are taking the majority of the calls right now. That might not be forever. So if you wanna talk to us, like specifically like hop on now and you guys will get a talk to us, we'll do a strategy call with you, we'll see where you're at with your business and get you set up for success.

That's what we always say. So set yourself up for success and hit the ground running. So I'm really excited about it and I think if you go use one of these resources, like the employee retention credit, if you were in business, there's more fuel for the fire. So go apply for that. There's free money floating around, just go grab it.

You know? So I think that's pretty much it. Brandon, anything else you want to add in the midst of our crazy launch and our climbing up the mountain here? Brandon, No man. I mean life's fun. We're challenging ourselves with a bunch of stuff right now, so we're launching two cities at the same time. Essentially we'll be in three locations.

The Profit Cleaners course looks entirely different than it did before. So if you were hesitant to give it a chance now it is a lot more organized than it was before. And for those of you who bought beforehand when it was maybe a little bit disorganized, thank you so much for that early support. You were all grandfathered into the new ones. So congratulations.

If you haven't logged in in a while, go log in, go check your email. There's some different stuff to check out And yeah, the coaching calls that we do for the Profit Cleaners course stuff is every week now instead of once a month. So every Thursday, man, jump in the Facebook groups, Brandon and I are in there, we'll talk to you,

we'll chat you up, we'll hit you up to register for the course cuz it's cool. You should check it out. But yeah, I mean that's pretty much It. That's it guys. So get out there, get excited for the spring rush position your business for that amazing, amazing momentum that you can create from just getting in front of that wave.

And yeah guys, set yourself up for success ultimately. I've been talking a lot about you guys on the phone the last week or two and it's been really cool. So a lot of you have have mentioned over and over why you're doing this. Business is ultimately for freedom. Like that's why we're building this business is to have more freedom, have a business that runs without us,

have that lifestyle, have the ability to go skiing or like Brandon's gonna go skiing tomorrow, I'm gonna go on a field trip with my kids tomorrow. Like there's things that you can do when you get that time back that you could just never do when you are a slave to a job or a slave, even to your own business. So get out of being a slave to your business.

Own that business. Like don't let it own you. And the way you do that is with systems and with getting a mentor, getting support and modeling success and putting yourself in a place where you can up your game, raise your standards and get to that next level. You're not gonna get to the next level doing the same thing you did yesterday. You gotta put on a new mindset,

new strategies to get to that next level. So that's what we're all about guys, man, that's what you're gonna find in the group. So go join the group, go watch the masterclass and take it to the next level and win. That's what the Profit Cleaners are all about. So we'll see you guys on the next podcast. We'll see you guys in the group.

And until next time, Thanks for joining us today. To get more info, including show notes, updates, trainings, and super cool free stuff, head over to Profit Cleaners dot com and remember, keep it clean.