Episode 111 – Naresh Vissa

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Automated Transcription

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Naresh Vissa 0:00
Basically right now, our economic leaders, they just want to put money. They want money flowing through the economy. And if that means giving people free money, so that they’ll put it back into the economy. That’s okay. That’s what they want. Because we’re facing some very big inflationary pressures, and so there’s a very good chance if you’re a business under $5 million in revenue, and if you file payroll forms, payroll tax forms, quarterly, annual, you will qualify for the PPP. So how do you get started, whichever bank, your business banks with, your business account is hooked up to just contact that thing because they’ve already got all your information, they’ve got all your financials, so it should be much easier. If you for whatever reason, aren’t approved by them. Check out the website: Kabbage. That’s with a K. So K-a-b-b-a-g-e. Go to Kabbage, fill out an application, and there’s a very good chance that you’ll get approved for the PPP. For the EIDL, this is meant for businesses that don’t have payroll. So my real estate company is an LLC, most LLCs do not have payroll until I applied through the SBA disaster relief site, then you can just go to Google type in by … EIDL. It should be the first or second thing that comes up. And it was a 5-minute application, I want to say maybe 10 minutes, fill it out, upload all your information. And all of a sudden, money showed up in my bank account. There was no email or anything it just showed up in my bank account 6 weeks later, it took a while because there were 10s of millions of people all around the country applying for these things. So I think it’s slowed down. But … Look, there’s no harm in applying, put in the 30 minutes, apply and take advantage of the programs that are available and Google is your best friend. If you have any questions about what I’m saying during this podcast episode, just go on Google do a little bit more research.

Richard Matthews 2:17
… 3-2-1.

Richard Matthews 3:12
Hello, and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. And today I have a special episode for you. We have a returning guest from Episode 31, Naresh Vissa. Naresh, are you there?

Naresh Vissa 3:24
I’m here. Pleasure to be back on.

Richard Matthews 3:27
So glad to have you back and get a chance to talk to you a little bit about how your business has been dealing with our crazy world in 2020. I know it was August last year back when the world was normal last time we got to talk. So tell me a little bit of – just real quick, remind the audience what it is that you do. And then tell us a little bit about how you guys have been handling 2020 so far.

Naresh Vissa 3:49
I was on about a year ago. I think it was Episode 31 and I’m the founder and CEO of Krish Media & Marketing. It’s an online and digital marketing agency. So we provide solutions that have to do with online and digital, anything and everything online and digital just today alone, we’ve been working on probably 4 different projects: a web design project for a new client, an existing web redesign for another client and then a design project on a book cover, and then an Amazon bestseller campaign to sell a book for a client. And then actually, there’s a fifth project that we’re working on, and that is pay per click advertising on Google, Facebook, and Amazon. So that’s just the 5 projects I’ve been working on today. And that gives an overview of all of the different online and digital services that we offer. Now when we spoke last time, Richard, we talked in-depth about the online and digital economy, why businesses need to go online and digital and I made a prediction back then at the time in August 2019, that the next recession was going to force businesses to go online. And it would also force businesses to trim the fat, to move away from commercial real estate and these expensive office buildings, and to start having people work from home, and also to start finding talent overseas or independent contractors domestically, instead of having people come into the office. And so in a matter of 1 year, all of those things have happened.

Richard Matthews 5:40
All it took was 1 global pandemic to completely change the course of the business industry and it’s changing a lot of things but particularly in business. A lot of things are moving digital. A lot of things we had trouble getting on the Zoom recording because of how much their servers are being strained is happening right now.

Naresh Vissa 6:01
And I think first off when I said this has all happened within a year, it actually all happened within 6 weeks, not even a year because life was completely normal through January and through February. It wasn’t until about mid-March around March 15 when this started. And about by the end of April of 2020, that’s when the businesses, that’s when the economy realized that this was a major transformation. And look, we can actually talk about – I want to talk about a couple of things today. I want to talk about – not necessarily the pandemic because it’s not the pandemic that has causes. It’s the lockdowns. The lockdowns are what’s caused the changes everywhere because there are countries that did not lockdown and their economy has just continued to chug along. But it’s the lockdowns that have caused all this. And so I do want to talk about the economy as a whole and what we can expect moving forward. I also do want to talk about our tech workers, people like you and me, who work in technology, are IT workers – they’ve really been, I think, the real frontline heroes, because they’ve been able to save and salvage whatever they could, or whatever is left of this economy. You take away the tech folks, the IT folks, and you’ve legitimately –

Richard Matthews 7:43
Our economy would be gone.

Naresh Vissa 7:44
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And so I want to talk about that and also just the future of this new abnormal, that we’re going to be living, moving forward.

Richard Matthews 7:58
One of the things that really strikes me is how much businesses were putting off this whole – it was an inevitability that the world was going to become more distance work. It was going to happen at some point or another. And our pandemic really sped up that timeline, like you said, just seems like 6 weeks it went from we had our normal economy where everyone’s driving into the office to now no one can drive into the office and I had a client who was – his business life went from doing the normal business to spending 12 hours a day trying to get their thousands of employees to be able to all work remotely. And that’s what his whole life has been for 3 months is getting every single one of their employees to be able to work remotely and keep their business going. And he was in charge of that. So some of the projects we were working on, had to be put on pause so he could go and do that and help his employees get remote work set up. And I’ve got a couple of projects we’re starting, where we’re actually teaching local businesses how to offer some of their services digitally. And how to continue to see patients and how to do some things in their spaces. We’re actually doing some high-level things with a few clients. So it’s a huge push to change our economy from being – well not necessarily change it but to take advantage of the new virtual first economy. And so anyways, how have you guys been dealing with that yourselves?

Naresh Vissa 9:24
Well, we have a common question that I get from a lot of people and it’s how has your business been affected by this? And it’s actually done better than – I was looking at my spreadsheets in our books in January and February and comparing those books to March, April, May. And there’s a sudden jump in and cash flow and clientele and revenue between those first 2 months and the last 3 months, and I think it’s largely because so many clients are coming our way who have realized or been forced to go digital. Previously, they may have been brick and mortar or they just didn’t take e-commerce or digital, that seriously. And then now all of a sudden they knew about me. I knew some of these clients for 3-4-5 years and they never jumped on it. And they were just Oh, yeah, that’s a guy who does the IT stuff. And then all of a sudden, the phone line, the emails started hitting me up saying, hey, can you create this website? Can you create this shopping cart? I want to start taking online orders. I want to start marketing online. And so my business Krish Media & Marketing has been chugging right along, doing just fine. And we’ll see how the end of the year turns out but it could be our best year ever.

Richard Matthews 10:51
Ours was a little bit different. As soon as a pandemic hit, we had a couple of clients that stopped. So we had a month and a half of revenue dropping. But within 3 to 4 weeks, we had a lot of new clients coming in. And since a lot of the clients that had stopped working with us were like, okay, we’ve got our bearings under us, have come back. So we’re actually further ahead than when we started, but there was definitely a little bit of – it was a hiccup when people were hit with the pandemic. They’re like, Oh, no shutdown, all things we’re not sure we need to use.

Naresh Vissa 11:25
It’s interesting because we didn’t lose a single client. And I’m definitely thankful and fortunate for that. But you did bring up a one and a half month timeline where things were slow. And I think a lot of that has to do with the funding that businesses got from the government. So you have the PPP and the EIIDL funding. I don’t know what happened there, but –

Richard Matthews 11:49
Kicked us all out. So you were saying the PPP and the EIDL funding, let’s start from there.

Naresh Vissa 11:54
PPP and EIDL. So the PPP program – by the way, during this pandemic, I should preface this, in mid-March, I had a buddy who works for the NBA, the National Basketball Association. He called me and he said that they had just forced their corporate offices to start working from home. And he said look, I know you wrote a book on podcasting. Your company does a lot of work on podcasting. You need to start a podcast on working from home. So literally overnight I told my team Hey, you know what, I need to start this podcast on working from home. So we came out with our own podcast called the Work From Home Show. And so the website is https://workfromhomeshow.com/ and I bring this up because, well, first off, we publish 3 days a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We talk about everything you need to know work from home and we’ve been guiding and coaching our listeners through things like the PPP, the EIDL, how to start a home-based business, how to work from home more efficiently, and we’re interviewing the foremost experts on working from home. And so when it comes to the PPP and the EIDL, these are both government programs to help small businesses. The PPP is really for companies with payroll that stands for Payroll Protection Program. The EIDL is meant for non-payroll companies and they’re literally the government is literally just giving away money. they’re not even loans really. They’re just giving away free money. And so, obviously, the goal is –

Richard Matthews 13:30
We got turned down for both of those. We applied for both of them, they turned us down.

Naresh Vissa 13:35
How did – do you have payroll?

Richard Matthews 13:38
So our payroll is, most of our people are international. So that is probably why the payroll was turned down. And then the SBA Disaster Assistance Loan Recovery Program, the EIDL. They just said, we’re sorry, we’ve looked at your application, you’ve been rejected. That’s all it said.

Naresh Vissa 14:00
That’s really strange. You’re actually the first person I know who outright got rejected.

Richard Matthews 14:06
I just got a straight rejection letter that said you’re not getting it. And I was – but I also applied really early and I was told maybe I should try to reapply, but I don’t know. So I haven’t tried again.

Naresh Vissa 14:16
Well, there’s still PPP funding available. And I know they haven’t run out of money there. And I expect another round of funding to come at the back half of this year, probably right before the election; September-October, where they will do another round of small business funding and also stimulus checks for people. But the key with the PPP is you need to have payroll. So I have an … corporation. I have payroll, even though I only have 1 employee. I’m the only full-time employee. You’re still able to take as long as you file the payroll forms, payroll tax quarterly forms, you should be able to get it. In my case, I said, Krish Media & Marketing has been doing just fine. But the funding has allowed me to grow my business and to market it and to hire more people and to do more. So it’s been beneficial for Krish Media & Marketing and for my real estate investment company, Krish Capital, it’s provided that cushion just in case my tenants aren’t able to pay rent. Like I said, knock on wood, hopefully, they’ll continue to pay rent. I haven’t had a single tenant miss. But you just never know because recessions don’t come and go. You look at the 2000-2001-2002 recession, it lasted, generally, they last 3 calendar years, maybe about 2 and a half years total, but they’ll touch 3 calendar years. So we had Y2K in 2000; 9/11 in 2001; and then the aftermath in 2002, Enron and WorldCom going under. Then you look at 2007-2008-2009, again 3 calendar years. 2007 was the beginning of the housing collapse. 2008 is when several of the banks went bankrupt. And then 2009 is when the stock market saw its incredible lows and the aftermath. In this case, I don’t think this is going to be much different. You look at every recession throughout history, it’s basically how it goes. So this is 2020-2021 and I think it’s gonna be part of 2022 as well. That’s why the Federal Reserve came out and said that they’re not lowering interest rates through the end of 2021. And then they’ll reassess in early 2022 to see where the economy is. Because this is going to have profound impacts across every industry, for better or for worse. And I just want to say that recessions are healthy. Yes, it’s unhealthy to see –

Richard Matthews 16:51
It cleans out businesses who shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Naresh Vissa 16:55
Exactly. Well, it does that. Number 1, it cleans out employers and workers who probably shouldn’t have been hired in the first place as well. And look, this sounds, I know that there’s going to be a large percentage, probably not of your listeners, but there’s gonna be a large percentage of people who hear this, they’re gonna say, oh, you’re heartless. You don’t care about people losing their jobs, and they have families and they have to eat food and all this stuff.

Richard Matthews 17:23
But it also builds new good companies that come in and creates better jobs and other things.

Naresh Vissa 17:28
Exactly. And that’s where I was going next. Recessions are healthy because number 1, it trims off fat. Number 2, the greatest innovation occurs during and after recession. So we look at the last recession. The iPhone was barely out. The app store was not out. So we didn’t have Uber. We didn’t have Instagram. We didn’t have Snapchat. We didn’t have many of the things that have kept this economy alive today. We didn’t have 10 years ago.

Richard Matthews 17:57
The whole sharing economy was invented post the 2008 recession.

Naresh Vissa 18:01
Yes, yes, absolutely. Exactly. And a lot of these – talking about you said most of your workers are international. Talking about hiring international workers and freelance workers and gig workers. These websites like Upwork, Fiverr, Freelancer.com. They weren’t around 10 years ago. So it’s recessions that are healthy over the long haul because that’s when innovation is created. That’s where innovation is created. And things that people taking their time chugging right along, collecting their paycheck. Now, all of a sudden, it’s we’ve got to come out with that autonomous vehicle as soon as possible. We’ve got to come out with that vaccine as soon as possible. Amazon’s got to come out with those drones as soon as possible. We’ve gotta stop. We’ve got to innovate our pharmacies and make them more digitized as soon as possible. Now everything is we need to go digital as soon as possible because we can’t Have people walking around with face masks and touching things and being close to each other. We need technology technology technology to come and just take over. And so 10 years ago, very different already brought up the examples of what wasn’t around. 10 years from now is going to be even more different. And that’s why I’m just so bullish on the US economy. I’m bullish on stocks. I’m bullish on just innovation in general. Moving forward, I think. I think we’re going to go through some bad times over the next few months, but I’m definitely along with digital on the economy.

Richard Matthews 19:44
I’ve got a whole set of friends and my mastermind group and some other things that – I am obscenely optimistic about where we’re going and what’s going on and some of the stuff that’s happening financially, and they’re like, I don’t understand why you’re so optimistic about all this. And I’m like, well, there’s a lot of things. A lot of things that you just said. The recession is like exfoliation – you take off the dead skin, the new skin grows back better and stronger. So there’s that aspect of it. But then we have things that are happening; the bilateral trade agreements, instead of the global trade agreements that are happening all over the world that are leading to far more of the value in exchange for value instead of the top-down, this is the trade agreements that you have to deal with whether or not it makes sense for your country. So they’re gonna, I think there’s gonna be a lot of positive uplifting things happening in economies all over the world, which is just going to help support a lot of that innovation. And anyway, I just think there’s a lot of really positive things coming out and I think the world 2-3 years out from now is going to be significantly better than it was when we started out on the coronavirus pandemic in the beginning of 2020.

Naresh Vissa 20:50
And just remember, this was actually a man-made recession. Again, this was not a natural business cycle recession. It’s the lockdowns that caused the recession, not the virus.

Richard Matthews 21:01
There wasn’t a waning of demand. It wasn’t like everyone suddenly was like you know what we don’t like restaurants anymore. That wasn’t what happened. It wasn’t – the car came along and then suddenly we have no interest in horse-drawn buggies. There were no natural market forces. It was an artificial suppressing of actual demand and when you remove the suppression the demand is going to come back and in some cases, I’ve been using the example of when those little squeezy stress balls. When you squeeze a stress ball, some of the pieces that are not being squeezed will bulge out. So, you have increased demand during the squeeze. So, we have increased demand for digital services like Zoom, and you have increased demand for PPE, and other things for personal protection equipment, and increased demand for certain things. And then other things are are their demand is squeezed. So restaurants and movies and events, those demand for those things are squeezed but when you release it, it’s all going to come back because it’s an artificial squeezing of the demand, if that makes sense.

Naresh Vissa 21:59
I think part of it I’m not sure if the demand is going to completely come back. I think part of it is people are being introduced to alternative ways of doing things. So for example, going to the restaurant was the previous way of doing things. And now they’re being introduced to Uber Eats and takeout and DoorDash and all these other ways. They don’t have to go to the restaurant anymore. The same goes for movie theaters may have gone. The movie theater industry was already struggling,

Richard Matthews 22:26
I don’t know if they’re gonna survive.

Naresh Vissa 22:28
I know some players definitely won’t survive. It could end up being some kind of oligopoly or monopoly where you just have one, like AMC buying everyone else out, and they’re just gonna have to consolidate and figure out what to do. But movie theaters are another great example where people are realizing, Hey, you know what, I can just buy a nice surround system and a nice TV and get Netflix, Amazon Prime and boom, there’s no need to go to the movie theaters anymore. Even the gyms are shutting down left and right being bought out by other gyms. People are realizing, hey, I can work out at home. The home has become the central location for almost everything. And I think that trend is going to continue. I told you I started the Work From Home Show. And it was unheard of for the older generation to be working from home. But now the home is where your kids are being taught, where you’re doing work, where you’re watching movies, where you’re working out.

Richard Matthews 23:30
You work in the real estate space, and I’ve got some clients that do a lot of training in real estate space. I’m pretty familiar with it. How do you think that consolidation into the home being – So the home has always been central to the American family, but there was always -like I said, you go out to the gym, you go out to school, you go out to the restaurants, you go out for entertainment, you go out to other things and now with a lot of those things being brought into the home, does that change the way homes physically look and are built and are thought-about into the future, do you think?

Naresh Vissa 24:01
Well, the first thing it does is it creates demand for homes, single-family homes. It does not create demand for apartments, one-bedroom studio. It creates demand for, now all of a sudden, you need that extra space for the home office, you need that extra space for maybe working out, you need that extra space for homeschool room or whatever. So now all of a sudden there is a lot more demand for that home, you need that extra bedroom. So what does that mean for residential real estate? That means that’s a hot spot to be because that’s where the demand is. Commercial real estate including the gym locations to retail locations to office buildings. The demand has shifted. The problem with apartments again, apartments are still decent because they provide a place to live. The problem is apartments are built to be on top of each other, so there isn’t much social distancing happening. There isn’t much privacy happening. They’re just piled on one another. That’s the issue with multifamily, but that single-family house, now you got the privacy, you’ve got the land, you’ve got the space. And so I think that demand is going to continue. We’ve already seen the numbers where there has been this migration out of densely populated cities like DC, New York, San Francisco, and they’re moving to less densely, but still populated places like Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Utah, Arizona, Nevada. So we’re already seeing that and so yes, I do think –

Richard Matthews 25:47
I think a lot of the rioting and stuff you’re seeing in the big cities is going to help fuel that move out of big cities as well.

Naresh Vissa 25:54
Yep. And look, the rioting is – the media hasn’t been hovering this but the rioting is a result of the lockdowns. The rioting did not happen because of a black man who died in Minnesota. That was a spark that set off the riots. That was well, the spark, but it was just the world was just waiting for some spark to –

Richard Matthews 26:20
Catch on fire.

Naresh Vissa 26:22
Exactly. And so when you tell billions of people across the world that you need to stay in your house, you can’t leave, and they’ve lost their jobs, and their livelihoods have changed and they’re uncertain about the future. All it takes is some spark to set off a mass domino effect, and that’s what’s happened.

Richard Matthews 26:46
I completely agree. And it’s really interesting to see because I think it’s it’s gonna have dramatic impacts on a lot of the stuff that we’ve been talking about, the demands to live in a city and live close together and one of the things that – I’ve never lived in a big city. We’ve visited a lot of them on our travels. But all the people I know who live in big cities, they love – they have easy access to all the things we just talked about, they can walk to their school, they can walk to their work, they can take their bike down to the gym, or whatever it is. And it’s that’s part of the draw of the big city is that everything is close. And one of the things like … pandemic, that’s not a draw anymore. You don’t want it to be close. You want it to be further away.

Naresh Vissa 27:24
Absolutely. Absolutely. So it all just makes sense there. And the other thing that I just quickly want to discuss again is is the whole IT technology space. If we look at – without getting political, I don’t know how this has turned political but without getting into a discussion on death or the effects or the results of the virus. If you look at the number of states that have actually been affected by this only a handful of states have been affected by this virus significantly. I would say right now as of this recording, over 40 states, it was barely a blip on the screen. And so you see that our health care workers our so-called frontline workers. They’re getting a lot of notoriety in the press by the public. But again, in reality, most healthcare workers didn’t – they basically got the entire month of April off across the country. And my wife included who is actually a physician who works on COVID patients, and she is she basically got the entire month of April off because there weren’t that many patients and all the other patients that she usually sees, they stopped going to the hospital. So she was coming home at 1 pm every day.

Richard Matthews 28:55
If you weren’t in the hotspots if you weren’t in New York or in Chicago or in Miami, Florida.

Naresh Vissa 29:03
Exactly, exactly. And so we need our frontline workers are incredibly important. They need to always be on standby. But if you look at the financials, the health insurance companies, United Healthcare posted record earnings for the first quarter of 2020 because they didn’t have to pay for any. They were just collecting premiums from their customers, they didn’t have to pay out any claim, barely any claims. And that’s continued for q2 2020. So the point here is the IT workers, they’re the ones that nobody has given them any love. Nobody ever gives the IT guy any love. They’re the ones like I said, who have saved whatever’s left of the economy. They’re the ones who have innovated, who have been able to keep things afloat digitally and online. And they’re the ones who are propelling us into this new abnormal of the online and digital economy. And by IT workers again, not just the SAP Java people, but really anyone who works in technology from the designers and the developers to the guy who’s setting up printers and computers in people’s home offices, all those people, my heart goes out to all you guys because you have not gotten the respect and the accolades that you deserve.

Richard Matthews 30:30
And I know, personally, because we’re in the same line of business is a lot of my clients, they turn around to me and they’re like, we need to make some changes. You’re our guy. How do we get these things implemented? And we spent a lot of time on our side, helping them get their content machines going. So they’re actually marketing and doing all that stuff online. Have it going really strong and it was. It’s interesting because that’s the technology that we built. We build a lot of the systems and processes for that and the demand for it went up immediately. And we were able to respond really quickly. And there’s just so much that’s happening in that space. So I mentioned to one of my clients – he went from being the CEO who was working on growth to now he’s got to help all thousand of his employees figure out how to use Zoom to continue their normal operations. And it’s an interesting thing that the people who were the most important to keep businesses alive, are the people who know how to use the technology.

Naresh Vissa 31:32
You’re absolutely right about that. Absolutely correct. And I just think it’s very important. I’m not taking away from our first responders. I’m not taking away from the health care workers. I’m just looking at the data and saying, look, if you we’re to actually quantify the livelihoods that have been saved, the GDP that’s been created it’s because of our really the tech workers.

Richard Matthews 32:01
It fits nicely into the the the whole premise of The Hero Show, which is that we rightly call a number of people heroes like our frontline workers on other things. But we have a subset of individuals who are not rightly called heroes. And generally, it’s the entrepreneur. And we’re just saying, hey, a subset of those entrepreneurs are the tech workers, they are heroes, especially in this space. So anyways, I think that ties nicely in with our message.

Naresh Vissa 32:24
I think entrepreneurs who need to be applauded because my LinkedIn blew up over the past 3 or 4 months. I’ve had students reaching out who lost her internships or they lost their full-time jobs that they were supposed to take over after graduating from school. I’ve had other people, retirees, reach out saying that they wanted to get back into the workforce. I’ve had baby boomers who have gotten laid off or taken exit packages, saying that they were now unemployed and basically people reaching out to me saying, hey, if you hear of anything, let me know. Can I intern for you? Can I work for you? Do one of your clients – are they hiring? And that goes back to the entrepreneur, being an unsung hero because when things get tough, who are people reaching out to find the jobs? They’re not reaching out to the doctors or the employee at a company, they’re reaching out to the actual folks who hire. The actual folks who are creating wealth and who are putting money in people’s pockets. I’ve always maintained, since I became an entrepreneur, the most virtuous thing you can do is not donating a bunch of money to put your name on a building, or going to some country and feeding homeless people. The greatest gift you can give to people is putting money in their pockets through work, through entrepreneurship, and through work, because that’s what drives all the other things. It’s one thing to just write a check to somebody who’s in need and then you’ll never see them or hear from them again. It’s another thing to employ them and actually have them create value because that’s just going to create more value and it’s going to also help them in that process.

Richard Matthews 34:07
Absolutely, I couldn’t agree more.

Richard Matthews 34:17
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Richard Matthews 35:49
So I have one more thing I want to talk about before we wrap up this interview and that is suggestions for – because most of our audience is going to be fellow entrepreneurs, people who are listening to this. And trying to get that whole mental picture in their head about being a hero being an entrepreneur. You said on your show, you’re talking a bit specifically about some of the PPP and the EIDL stuff. Do you have any specific suggestions for the self-employed entrepreneur or the one who’s got a small team or maybe international workers, or just they haven’t engaged with some of the finances that are currently available? What are your recommendations? Where should they start? Who should they talk to? What’s your recommendations on that stuff?

Naresh Vissa 36:38
That’s actually a really good question and topic that needs to be discussed because I’ve learned coaching, helping some of my friends. People, they’re not paying attention. They’re not paying attention to the news. They’re not paying attention to the programs that are available. They’re just not and they’ve missed out on thousands and thousands of dollars worth of free grants and funding. And I actually took it seriously because my father told me at the beginning of this pandemic, he said look like in 2008-2009, the Obama administration had some programs, and I just didn’t pay any attention to it. And I realized months later that I missed out on 10s of thousands of dollars that I could have gotten for free. But I just never paid attention because I thought it didn’t apply to me. And so that’s why I’ve taken this very seriously. And so basically, right now, our economic leaders, they just want to put money. They want money flowing through the economy again, and if that means giving people free money so that they’ll put it back into the economy. That’s okay. That’s what they want. And because we’re facing some very big deflationary pressures, and so there’s a very good chance if you’re a business under $5 million in revenue, and if you file payroll for forms, payroll tax forms, quarterly, annual, you will qualify for the PPP. So how do you get started, whichever bank, your business banks with, your business account is hooked up to just contact that bank because they’ve already got all your information, they’ve got all your financials. So it should be much easier. If you for whatever reason, aren’t approved by them. Check out the website, Kabbage. That’s with a K. So K-a-b-b-a-g-e. Go to Kabbage, fill out an application, and there’s a very good chance that you’ll get approved for the PPP. For the EIDL, this is meant for businesses that don’t have payroll. So my real estate company’s an LLC. Most LLCs do not have payroll. And so I applied through the SBA disaster relief site. Again, you can just go to Google type in: apply for EIDL. It should be the first or second thing that comes up. And it was a 5-minute application, I want to say maybe 10 minutes, fill it out, upload all your information. And all of a sudden, money showed up in my bank account, there was no email or anything. It just showed up in my bank account 6 weeks later. It took a while because there were 10s of millions of people all around the country applying for these things. So I think it slowed down. But it takes a while. Look, there’s no harm in applying. Put in the 30 minutes, apply. And take advantage of these programs that are available. Google is your best friend. If you have any questions about what I’m saying during this podcast episode, just go on Google do a little bit more research.

Richard Matthews 39:44
Absolutely. And I think I’m probably gonna have to try and reapply for the EIDL, see if it was – just got rejected from whoever was looking at applications that they didn’t like my name or something. But anyways, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of this stuff. I know it’s been a really crazy couple of months for everyone in the entrepreneur space and watching our economy get shut down. And now, a lot of stuff we’re seeing with the riots and everything. It’s It’s interesting. I think we’re gonna see a lot more interesting stuff over the next few months as we get into our presidential elections and whatnot.

Naresh Vissa 40:16
I agree. It’s the craziness is not over by any means.

Richard Matthews 40:20
It’s not over. But it’s cool to me is we’re sitting on the – we’re sitting on the front lines of history. It’s like being there when the iPhone was announced. That was really cool. It changed the world. There’s some world-changing stuff going on. My recommendation for people is pay attention to what’s happened this year because you’re probably going to tell your grandkids about it someday.

Naresh Vissa 40:39
That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. It’s for a lot of people, they’re like, oh, I hate what’s going on. 2020 needs to be over. And look, I get it. People are getting the virus, they’re getting sick, they’re dying. People are losing their jobs. It’s a very very tough time. But part of being an entrepreneur is going through that journey and going through the experience. And this is quite the experience. Your 2020 has been really an experience for probably for worse. But me personally, I’m all about the experiences, for better or for worse, and you just cherish it. And like you said, I already know that our grandkids they’re going to be reading about this in the history books. And they’re going to be like, oh, what was it like, being locked down in your house for 6 months and restaurants being closed or only doing takeout and people wearing face masks and afraid to touch each other. And that’s going to be – that was unheard of. If you told me that a year ago, and it’s going to be unheard of 100 years from now, too.

Richard Matthews 41:46
I think what’s really crazy too is thinking about just our conversation today. The people the history books are gonna look very very kindly on the entrepreneurs who made the economy live through this because that’s gonna be – it’s what’s gonna make everything happen is the entrepreneurs who make who saw us through this.

Naresh Vissa 42:07
Absolutely, completely agree. So, Richard, thanks for having me on the show. Really appreciate it for those who want to check out our website http://www.krishmediamarketing.com/ and http://nareshvissa.com/ that’s my personal website. And I’ll be glad to send your listeners a free book. All my books are available on Amazon in http://nareshvissa.com/ just contact me through the website and tell me what book you want. I’ll send you a free copy.

Richard Matthews 42:34
Awesome. And if you are new to the show, and you haven’t heard Naresh’s original – his whole story that we go through when we first bring someone onto the show, that’s Episode 31. We’ll make sure a link is below this episode here. And Naresh, thank you so much for coming on for the show today. Really appreciate it.

Naresh Vissa 42:50
Thanks a lot, Richard.