Ask a Credit Expert! A Q&A with Daniel Rosen

Daniel Rosen  0:00  

Hey everybody, I'm really excited because this is going to be a very special podcast episode. I reached out across all our social channels Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and LinkedIn. And I asked everyone to send me their burning burning questions about entrepreneurship, bootstrapping a business from nothing credit repair, or even juggling, and I'm going to answer as many as I can on today's episode, so you better stick around. So the big question is this, how can we take our passion for helping people with their credit, and turn it into a successful business without taking loans without spending a fortune by bootstrapping it from nothing? So we can help the most people and still become highly profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Daniel Rosen, and welcome to Credit Repair Business Secrets. Here at Credit Repair Cloud, We love answering questions. Now. I've received a lot of them. So I'm going to choose them here at random. And before we get into this, I should tell you, this podcast is brought to you by the Credit Hero Challenge. If you want me to hold you by the hand, as you launch your very own credit repair business, go to credit hero challenge.com and sign up now. Oh, and I love this part. Every episode, I'm featuring one of our credit heroes inside our Credit Repair Cloud Facebook community so that you can see firsthand what real people are doing as they launch and grow their business. And today's spotlight is on Nate with Sager. Nate is a 60 year third generation realtor and the next broker in line for his family brokerage. He recently joined the community and he posted that he never thought about getting into credit repair. He said it never crossed my mind. But I'm always looking to add more value to my clients and friends. He said awesome things about this podcast and our software. And he said he looked forward to doing credit repair full time with a full list of personal friend affiliates. I messaged him with some helpful suggestions to get him started. But the one thing I forgot to mention was that he had already found one of the best tools that we have to offer our credit repair cloud Facebook community, he was already there engaging the community and using it as a resource. Well done, Nate. And I know that by adding credit repair to your real estate business, you are going to sell so many more houses. And I'm really excited to watch your business grow. Okay, let's

get into this. This episode is Ask me anything. And the first question we have here is from Scott on Facebook, who asks, what is the realistic amount of capital that will be needed to start a credit repair business? Great question, Scott. That's actually a tricky question. Because you can spend as much or as little as you want. Now, there are a few must haves, and I'll get to those in a second. But here's my opinion, credit repair is a lot less expensive than most businesses. For example, if you want to start a Subway restaurant, subways franchise fee is $15,000 plus startup costs, which could be as much as a quarter of a million dollars, plus you've got rent, employees, payrolls and all that jazz. It's a huge, huge, expensive undertaking, whereas credit repair doesn't have any of those costs, you can save money. And you can bootstrap your business a little at a time with very, very low expense. So if you are just starting, you don't need all the bells and whistles, you just need to get really good at what you do, and spend the minimum amount to be legally compliant. And then as you start to get clients and results and referrals, and you start to make a little more money, then you can reinvest that into your business and slowly start to get more bells and whistles. For example, I started our business here from literally nothing. I slowly figured out what I was doing. I made a tonne of mistakes along the way. But I learned from all the mistakes and the business slowly started to grow. And as the customer base grew, I was able to invest more into the business. In the beginning I had no money for advertising. So I would just stay up all night and I would write articles which helped me to stay Are to appear in Google searches. Now back then I couldn't afford to hire a team. So I would wear all the hats and I'd pretend to be different people. I was Phil on sales. I was Tammy on support. And it was really, really hard work. But I believed in it, I had a big vision of what I wanted it to be, I had a mission of wanting to help people and change lives. And very, very slowly, I grew it by investing $1 at a time, they say a journey of 1000 miles starts with just one single step. And it's the same for a business. If you do just one thing every day to move your business forward, you will always have momentum. It's about keeping consistent. So let's go back to the beginning of this question, let's talk about starting with the bare essentials that you need to start your business and what those things might cost. First, you have to learn your craft. That's the most important thing, the fastest. And the most effective way to learn your craft is to take the credit hero challenge that costs $47. During the challenge, you'll have live training for mentors, you'll get certified in disputing you'll get your first clients and you'll fix your own credit. Now, I highly recommend the challenge because it speeds up the process. But if you don't have the $47 to take the challenge yet, just get my book for free. And you can get it for free at credit repair cloud.com/free book. Okay, the next thing you might need is software. So let's talk about software and what that costs. Now, you can certainly start a credit repair business without software. But that's going to be really, really time consuming. What takes hours and hours to do manually can be done with just a click of a button with software. Tracy Arnett is a great example of why the software really saves you. On a podcast interview with me, he talked about how he had piles and piles of papers and no life because it took way too long to process every client. But once he got our software, he could do in five minutes, what you said take them a whole day plus, it really foolproof the process for you. And it guides you through it. So that you can really become an expert to your clients, even if you're just starting out. So for the costs, your first month of credit repair cloud is free. And during that month, you can import reports, you can run audits, you can do everything that you need to do for any client during their first month. And you can do that on your free trial, you can even run a business on it. And after that it's 179 a month, which is affordable, because having just two clients should cover that. And then all the rest is profit. Now how about a website? Well, you don't have to have a website, you can start with just a Facebook page. But a website is nice because you can get leads from it and you can sign up people on it. And so for a website, you need a domain. And that's going to cost you $10 a year. And you can register that at my credit repair site.com or wherever you like. And then you need to build a website. Now hiring a web designer can cost 1000s and 1000s of dollars, and it can take months to build. But in the beginning, you just need to get up and running and save money. So if you really want a site, you can get a pre designed site for $20 at my credit repair site.com. It integrates with CRC very easily. And you can get a website up and running in under 15 minutes, and then slowly make little changes to the text and images to make it unique to your business. How about an office? What does that cost? Well in office, it could cost you hundreds or 1000s of dollars a month. But guess what? You don't need an office. Nobody does. It's perfectly fine to work from home. The pandemic changed everything. You can do meetings and client consultations on Zoom. It's awesome working from home. But for safety, you might want to get a virtual business address which you can get at the UPS store. And that starts at around $25 a month. Now what about other hard costs to start a business? Well, you'll need to create a business entity. But this doesn't have to be expensive either. You can start as a sole proprietor which costs you nothing or you can be an LLC or a corporation. But those are going to cost you money. This is all up to you. But if you're just starting, I say, save money and get your LLC or corporation later, when you're making enough to need the tax benefits. Now you can start as a sole proprietorship, and then the only requirement is to have your full name in the business name. For example, if my business is called credit Avengers, then I have to file a DBA. But if I call my business, Daniel Rosen, credit repair, or Daniel Rosen financial services, then it doesn't cost me anything. And in most states, you can start a sole proprietorship without even registering with the state, but Your state may be different. So check with your state. Okay, you can Google that you could do this with a basic Google search. And if you do want a business name that's different than your name, just file for a DBA. With your county, here in LA County that costs about $30. See, this doesn't have to be expensive. Now once you have the business entity sorted out, you'll need a business checking account. And the good news is, many banks will give you a business checking account for free. Next, you'll want to find out if there are any costs to being compliant in your state. Now a handful of states require state registration. And those fees are usually in the range of about $100. And we have a link that has all the laws for every state. So you can look that up at credit repair cloud.com/all-states. Now you might need a business licence for your city. Er is here in LA, it cost us $90 For our first year. So this is not expensive. Now let's talk about bonds. This is the wildcard because some states require a bond and some don't, they're all different. And then the prices are all different. If your state requires a bond, don't freak out. If you go through a bond service like bonds Express or surety one, the amount that you pay is just a fraction of the total bond amount, it's usually between one and 3% of the total bond amount. So in most states, that cost is in the range of a few $100. Now for a small handful of states, it might be $1,000 or more. So check with a bond service, or even your local insurance agent. And also know that the amount that you pay is based on your credit score. So you're gonna pay a much lower price if you have good credit. So this is all the more reason to be your own first client. Business cards or flyers might be nice. They're not required, but they're inexpensive. You can get these cheap at Vistaprint for well under $20. How about a business phone? Well, you don't need anything complicated or expensive for that at a service called call eight, which is spelled K L L. And then the number eight, you can get a toll free number for $5 a month that you can afford to your cell phone. How about a merchant account? Well, if you want to take credit cards, you're going to need a merchant account, and a payment gateway and a payments platform. These all have fees, yes. But you don't need these at the beginning. If you want to save money, start by taking cash and cheques and then get the merchant account and all these add ons later, when you've got enough clients to justify the expense. How about marketing automations? Sure, these are great, but you don't need these at the beginning. Okay, think about this later, when you have enough clients to justify the investment. It's not important having these at the start. And those are all the basic parts, that wasn't a lot of expense, right. And again, you don't have to have a lot of money for this business. The most important thing to have is a passion for helping people. And that's free. You can learn credit repair and you can learn how to run a business. But if you don't have a passion for helping people and changing lives, than this is not a business for you. If you're just in it for the money, sure you'll make money, but you're only going to get so far and you probably won't have a very fulfilling life. But if you truly have a passion for helping people and changing lives, that is when you're going to have the biggest success. All the people who have gotten into our Millionaire's club, they love helping people. That's what grows a business and that's what you need the most Wow, that was a lot. I hope that answers your question, Scott.

Okay, let's move on to question number two. And on Instagram asks, How do you balance work and regular life as a CEO? Do you balance it? Ha, that's a great question Anna. And the truth is, no, I don't really balance it. I love what I do so much, I can't stop thinking about it. 24/7. So, I'm not the most balanced person. I love helping people grow businesses, I love seeing people's lives change. I love seeing people make a million dollars, because I know the impact that they're making in the world, and all the lives that they are changing. So that's what I'm really excited about. And I can't turn it off. But I do, I do work less now than I used to. In the beginning, I worked around the clock, it was very stressful, I didn't sleep. And I gained over 100 pounds. And that was really, really unbalanced. But it was also the only way that I knew to get my business started. I honestly don't think you can get something really big off the ground without going unbalanced for a little bit. But the problem for me was, I live that way for many years. And it was really, really unhealthy. And if I hadn't stopped, it probably would have killed me. But now I tried to take care of myself, I work in exercise, I walked to work while I listen to business podcasts. I have date nights, a few times a week with my girlfriend. And the biggest thing that gave me some balance is having this office to go to. So what I do now is I try to leave my work here. And then when I get home, I unplug and try to not look at any of my devices until the next morning. And then on Sundays, I ride my Harley with another friend who also has a business and we ride and then we sit and we talk about our businesses. And it's a whole lot of fun. And it's a break from the work. But I'm still a weirdo who works an awful lot but it's definitely a lot more balanced than it used to be. And it feels healthier. Okay, next we have Mike from LinkedIn. And Mike asks, Do you like tacos? Well, Mike, of course I love tacos. I'm in LA it's kind of a law. There are tacos everywhere in LA. There's a taco truck around the corner from CRC. There's a well Hakan restaurant across the street that has goat tacos. There's a place a couple blocks away where I could have fish tacos and listen to mariachis. And there's even a place a few blocks away owned by a famous chef named Roy Choi, where they have amazing Korean tacos, and I love those. So thanks for asking Mike. Great, now I'm hungry. Okay, here's another one from LinkedIn. Dina asks, What is your best money saving tip for a new business owner? Great question. Dina.

Here where I'm sitting. Credit Repair cloud is now a big organisation with over 100 employees. But I come from nothing. And I build credit repair cloud from nothing. I didn't do it on credit. I don't have wealthy parents. I don't have a fancy degree. I didn't even graduate high school. So I build credit repair cloud from nothing by bootstrapping it on a shoestring. So all the years I was built to get I lived on top ramen for 20 cents a meal. And I learned how to save money while building a business $1 at a time, and if I can do it, you can do it. Now, I imagined money's tight for you too. So like I said earlier, here's the big money saver. Don't try to do everything all at once. Don't be in a hurry. Don't get all the bells and whistles. Just get the bare essentials and work on your craft and especially get really, really good at customer service. Because if you give amazing service, people will talk and your business will grow. I hope that helps Dina. Okay, next up, Tony from Facebook asks, Should you start your business even if you can't get test clients to show results? Well, Tony, here's what I think. Having test clients first is always good. If you can't get test clients, here's my suggestion. This is the surefire way to get test clients. If you are on Facebook, and you have friends post exactly this on your homepage. I'm learning credit repair now so I can help people raise their credit scores to help people save money on loans and qualify for their dream car or home before I start charging, I need to find a few people willing to let me experiment with what I have learned. I won't charge anything, comment or message me if you are interested. And you don't have to change one word, if you post exactly this exactly what I just said, you will get test clients. Now many people want to skip this step. But here's why this is important. The reason for test clients is to learn your craft and get your processes down. It's also to learn how to deal with people, and to get results that you can show in testimonials for your site. And this will help you to grow your business even faster. But if for some reason you cannot get test clients to show results, you can certainly start with yourself as your own case study. And many people do that. They start posting and sharing their own story and their own results as their own credit increases. And many of our credit repair millionaires started that way. Nicole actually started that way. She had a credit issue, she started learning how to repair her own credit, she started posting on Facebook showing her scores going up. And then suddenly everyone in her Facebook feed wanted help with their credit. And once she started to help a few people, and they began to refer their friends, then she started to post their results online. And soon she had an avalanche of clients all wanting her help. And now she's making millions of dollars. So here's what this means to you. If you do awesome work. And you really give value to those test clients, they will become your best advertising. And then later, whenever you have a client and you get them awesome results, you do two things, you get them to give you a testimonial to put on your site or on Facebook. And next you offer to pay them 50 or $100 for each paid client that they refer to you. And they will always know people who need your help. And since they're being referred by a friend who already got results from you,

it's an easy sale. So keep working hard, Tony, I believe in you. Okay, this one is from Zandy on Instagram, and Zandi asks, did your friends and family support you starting a business? And if not, how did you deal with that? Hey, Sandy, great question. Well, my friends and family they all thought I was insane. People told me it wouldn't work. People told me all kinds of negative things. But you know what, I didn't care. I didn't care what they thought because I saw a need. I had an idea. I wanted to help people, I saw a way to do it. And I just kept pushing. And eventually, by being consistent, and working through it every single day, and learning from the things that went wrong. I eventually got there. Now if you have a dream like this, of starting your own business, your friends and your family, they might not understand. Maybe they care about you. Maybe they're jealous. Maybe they think you should be like everyone else. They might tell you that you need investors or some fancy college degree to start a business or to be successful. They have their reasons for wanting you to think that but it's not true. Here's what matters. If you've got a passion for helping people and changing lives. And if you're willing to work hard, your persistence and your success. It's going to convince them. Thanks for the great questions, Andy. Okay, here's another one from Instagram. Sean asks, Are we supposed to add the state provided CRO disclaimer in our CRC contracts? Okay, Shawn, great question. First, I have to add my disclaimer, I am not an attorney. And I cannot give you legal advice. But what you're saying is what most people do see the agreement and CRC is a starting point, and you need to personalise it for your business. And you should run it by an attorney. And what many people do is they set up a different agreement for each state. So the state requires a particular disclosure. You add it to your agreement for that state. And again, we have a link where you can look up the laws for every state and know if they require a special disclosure. And you can look those up at credit repair cloud.com/all-states I hope that helps. Thanks for reaching out, Shawn. Okay, the next question comes from Darren on tick tock. And Darren asks, What is your favourite toy on the wall behind you? That Uh, hey Darren.

Well, I have a lot of stuff on the wall here. I have Beatles stuff. I have a signed record from Little Richard from what I used to open for him. I've assigned album from the Dell Rubio triplets who I did Golden Girls with. I have an album signed from the Smothers Brothers who I used to open for I have a floppy disk signed by Steve Wozniak, creator of the Apple Computer. I have a whole lot of robots here. And I have a whole lot of lunchboxes. I have a lot of stuff here from my old comedy act like this electric guitar that looks like me, and I have a million business books. Now. My three favourites are these three books from Russell Brunson. And all the secrets that we use to grow our business are here in these three books. But my absolute favourite toy out of all of them is my giant, Bob's Big Boy. It's the one thing that I always said I would have if I ever got successful. Some people want a Lamborghini. I wanted a Bob's Big Boy. Thanks for asking Darren. And here's another one from our Facebook community. David asks, how can we tie in a good email marketing platform to create newsletters for our clients whose emails we have on file? Well, David, the best solution for email marketing for credit repair is Active Campaign. It's awesome software, and it integrates with credit repair cloud, so it'll sync your clients, your leads, and your affiliates. With your Active Campaign, you can definitely use it for a newsletter. But even better, you can set it up for drip email campaigns. For anyone listening who doesn't know what a drip campaign is, or some people call it a nurture sequence. Here's what that means. Not everyone is going to sign up the first time they visit your site. But if you have a form on your site that people fill out to get more information, or to get a free consultation, or maybe you have an e book or a white paper that you give away, you know, like, get my seven easy steps to improve your credit score, and you give that away for free in return for someone's email address, then you can start sending a drip campaign to them, which is a series of timed emails. Now the important thing is that these emails are not ads, okay, you don't want them to look like ads. Okay, that's just gonna look like spam. No, you want them to be entertaining, and, and full of useful information, you know, like tips on how they can improve their credit. And that will show them that you are the expert. And eventually, they're going to lose patience and trying to solve it for themselves. And then you slowly reel him in. And we do exactly this here at credit repair cloud. You know, you download something from our site, and we start sending you friendly, inspiring emails. It's like having hundreds or 1000s of phishing lines, all reeling in at the same time. And doing this is going to get you way more paid clients. And this isn't just for leads know also, as your business grows, you may eventually want to have email nurture sequences for your clients to keep them engaged, and also to your affiliates, to keep them motivated to continue sending clients to you. If you want to learn more about setting up automations. We cover all of this in our masterclass and you can learn about that at credit repair cloud.com/free training. I hope this helps you, David. Okay, I think we have time for one last question. And Hayden on YouTube asks, you said that you change your business a lot since you first started it. How do you know when to change? Well, Hayden,

I changed my business a lot. Because it failed. It failed miserably. I started out selling this little download to consumers. The software worked, it did what it was supposed to do. But no one bought it. And no one cared. In a good week, I could make $40 It was a terrible, terrible business. And for years, I kept trying to force it to work when it never, ever would. If you look up the definition of crazy, there should be a picture of me because I kept trying the same thing again and again, expecting a different result. But over time, I started to pay attention to what was going wrong, and what people were really wanting and needing. And then slowly I started a pivot to creating a better solution aimed at businesses, but even that business failed at first, but what I did learn how to do was fail faster and to learn from each mistake that I made. That is the biggest secret I learned Don't fail faster and learn from each mistake. I'll tell you an interesting story related to this, Thomas Edison who invented the light bulb. His teachers said that he was too stupid to learn anything. And he was fired from his first two jobs for being non productive. And as an inventor, he made over 10,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When he was asked later, what it felt like to have failed so many times, he said, I didn't fail, I just found 10,000 ways that won't work. And businesses work the same way. You fail, you learn something not to do, and you pivot a little bit. It's a million small adjustments. And then after a years of that, you're an overnight success. I hope that helps you, Hayden. Wow, those were some great questions. That was fun, right? I should do this more often. And I still can't believe that taco question came from LinkedIn. I mean, tick tock, or Instagram, maybe, but not LinkedIn. But that's what's great about having an awesome community, you never know what type of support you're gonna get. So if you're not fully involved in our credit repair cloud Facebook community, what's wrong with you, you're missing out on an amazing free resource. And if you don't already have a credit repair Cloud account, check it out. It's the software that most credit repair businesses in America run on. And you can sign up for a 30 day free trial at credit repair cloud.com/free trial. And if you'd like me to hold you by the hand, as you launch your very own credit repair business, check out our credit hero challenge. It's a live experience that has helped tonnes of credit heroes to get their first clients to get certified in disputing and to gain confidence as they launched their credit repair business on a solid foundation. So they can change a whole lot of lives and make a great living in the process. We're starting the next challenge very soon. So you want to join before the doors close. Otherwise, you're gonna have a long wait until the next one. So sign up now at creditherochallenge.com. And if you're finding value in the things that I'm sharing on this podcast, be sure to click below to subscribe, okay, and rate me and review me Give me five stars. And most importantly, leave me your comments and your questions, because I read each and every one of them. And I will see you in the next episode. And until then remember, keep asking questions and keep changing lives. 

Want a fast track to creating an amazing business that helps people changes lives and makes you a great living in the process that I'd like to invite you to my free online training at creditrepaircloud.com/freetraining. In this free training, you will learn how to get clients willing to pay you even if you're just starting out how to get easy credit repair results without being an expert, and how to get all the clients you'll ever need without paying for advertising. Again, this training is absolutely free. Just visit creditrepaircloud.com/freetraining