In this significant episode, we discuss PPP (Paycheck Protection Programs) and what it means for you now, and more importantly, what this program or these programs mean for you and your company’s future. We dive into this topic from a user’s standpoint. Now that you have read all of the emails and information you can find: How do you apply, and how do you use this program? What are qualified expenses, and what are not qualified expenses? Rich and I discuss this not from a banker, accountant, or attorney point of view, but from an owner’s perspective in the manufacturing world and how we are strategically planning to capture talent now that just a month ago would not have been available.
Rich sent me this message two days before our podcast, and I couldn’t agree more.
“The need to project business impact and plan financially for survival and a strong re-entry into a very different market when the economy is re-started is critical. Assuming the underlying economic strength before the pandemic allows a true V-Shape rebound, the competition will be feeble. Thus there is an opportunity for growth for companies strong enough and strategic enough to come through stable and with a plan to serve clients well and with new models and tools.”
Resources:
SBA Columbus Office: 614-469-6860, 401 N. Front Street Cols 43215
David Townsend (key contact)
Jill Nagy-Reynolds – 614-940-8124
http://covid19relief.sba.gov/#/
http://www.sba.gov/page/coronavirus-covid-19-small-business-guidance-loan-resources#
https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans
SBA Funding Paycheck Protection Program: https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options/paycheck-protection-program-ppp
SBA Coronavirus Guidance: https://www.sba.gov/page/coronavirus-covid-19-small-business-guidance-loan-resources
BioOhio tools – Great comprehensive list: https://www.bioohio.com/covid19/
Just released from SBA:
disastercustomersservice@sba.gov
If you have any questions, comments, or topics you’d like to hear about in future episodes, please let us know!
Contact us at: info@mfgmonkey.com.
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Paycheck Protection Programs With Rich Brown: MFGMonkey Episode 6, Part 1
Rich, welcome to the show. I appreciate you coming on. We are doing this show first time social distancing. You’re in your office. I’m over in the basement of my home.
Live from the bunker. Good to talk to you, Dustin.
Rich Brown, the Executive Vice President of Compass Tech, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
We are a technical staffing and recruiting firm primarily focused on manufacturing with a central client base in automotive but also in pharmaceutical. We’ve got food brokerage, food products, some consumer services, and technology companies we support. Our employee base is around 100 employees. Most of those are engineers or recruiters on our staff. In our world, Honda is our biggest single client. We’ve got over 100 live Tier 1 suppliers to Honda and some Tier 2 and Tier 3 as well.
When Dustin and I set this call up originally, it was a very different market, where our topic was going to be how to apply lean practices to recruiting and retention in a full labor market but we’ve had 2 different announcements from the Department of Labor totaling 10 million people going on unemployment. That formula and problem are altered massively.
We do some project management as well. I’ll premise this on explaining my business because everybody that is in manufacturing is going to be facing some version of this unless they’re making masks, shields, or gowns. The economy that we’re serving is all going to change. In our world, if people don’t buy cars, Honda can’t keep producing cars because they have nowhere to put cars. Backlogging them doesn’t make any sense because they’ll get too far ahead of consumer demand and future models. Therefore, everything, as people are not out looking at cars, grinds to a slow halt.
I’ve got 61 engineers. I was going through these numbers for my application for the Paycheck Protection Program. That could be 50, 4, or 0, depending on what happens with our clients. Depending on how quickly that V-shaped curve on the economic rebound is, most or all of those could be back to work in 1 month, 2 months, or 3 months. It could be none of them or somewhere in between, which is probably closer to the target of somewhere in between as the economy quickly ramps up.
By some miracle, they get the treatments or vaccines in place quickly enough to allow society to resume normal operations. We are a staffing recruiting firm. We do project management but we’re a manufacturing company that doesn’t produce anything ourselves in our building but all of our people do. The last recession is coming right out of it. It was the same cycle for a different reason.
It’s been a while. Your guys’ business plan has always intrigued me, especially with all the engineers. You and I fired up another conversation on a different topic, education, the lack of employees in the workforce, and so on. We were planning on having a very different conversation. If we had recorded this when we were supposed to the first time, we would have had a very different episode.
You and I talked and decided that this topic is so long that we will hopefully keep it to 45 minutes to 1 hour and do maybe a couple of these in a series but one of my girls who helps with marketing emailed me and said, “Are you still going to do the show through the Coronavirus?” Rich, I told you this. I was taken aback by the question. I responded to her and said, “Yes, we’re still going to do it but the topics are going to be a lot different.”
You and I had talked about a book that I had read, Great by Choice, with Jim Collins. Everyone knows Good to Great, and probably most people have read those. There’s an emphasis on two explorers who are racing towards the South Pole. To make a long story short, one of the explorers was very methodical. What he did every day, he and his team got up and did the same thing, the same way every single day. They beat the other explorers to the South Pole by 34 days, which is astonishing.
If you take that lesson and apply it in the business, as long as we’re consistent every day through the great times and we get punched right in the mouth, it’s the whole saying with Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” The other explorers, if the weather was bad, hunkered down and didn’t go anywhere.
I feel like in this environment, and you hit the nail on the head, the people that are staying consistent through this and are going to apply some of the programs that we’re going to talk about, and get up and go to work every day, as business owners, we set us up for success in the future, we’re going to get to the South Pole faster than everyone else is. Unfortunately, the other explorer, on their way back, the entire team died because they were exhausted. They didn’t plan properly or do anything. They had 34 extra days out. They were 10 miles away from a post depot and the last person on the team died.
Going forward, what we’re going to talk about with this SBA program and the EIDL programs is important. You, Rich, have done so much research on this and you’re so passionate about it. You sent me an email saying that you were nerding out over this. I’m like, “Let’s talk about it.” Full disclosure, neither one of us are attorney or banker. This is just us talking about how we plan to use the program as business owners and how we think others could use it.
Not to get on the wrong side of the bar association, anything I discuss will be from the viewpoint of what I’ve been doing myself to apply to my company so that we can get through this difficult time. When we first met in the last recession, we had great growth coming out of that. All of our competition was extremely vulnerable because they didn’t manage that crisis period well.
They lost their best people. Their momentum and relationships with their clients changed. They went from helping because they were making money to ignoring their clients. There was no money to be made where the opportunity there is to step out and go way above and beyond when somebody might not be able to pay you but needs your help.
I’ve never been fond of being an unpaid consultant. It’s a bad business model but this is a time when you figure out where you can help those as they start to grow again that you’re going to rely on and your relationship will be better than it ever was. It’s a matter of getting up every day and pretending nothing changed in terms of your behaviors.
The best sales tool on earth is education. We all can agree with that. If you’re educating and passing along information, then people want to work with you because you’re helping them out naturally. It doesn’t have to be a paid consulting deal. I had somebody contact me. There was an attorney and they’re like, “We can help file all this stuff for you.” I’m like, “Yeah, $200 to $300 an hour.” The applications aren’t that difficult. The process doesn’t appear to be that difficult. You’re going to speak to that a lot more than I am because you’re a lot further down this process than I am.
The best sales tool on earth is education. Share on X
The Key Points
I’m going to start that discussion with probably the key points that I learned. The first estimates of demand for this program were put forward by the FCA. The funding for this program initially is $349 billion in forgivable loans. That’s at the tail end. That’s not how much they would loan out. That’s what this program is. The Paycheck Protection Act is not a grant. It’s a loan. Whatever you use for what qualifies for forgiveness is what will be forgiven at the end of a two-month period.
What they’ve allocated in the law that passed through Congress was $349. I’ll use $350 billion as a round number. The anticipated demand is $1 trillion. They’re roughly underfunded by 1/3, meaning those first in the queue will be able to access that first bundle of cash. Until and unless Congress goes back and writes another check to fund the treasury for this, you could end up having a perfectly valid good application, and the application process is extremely simple, much easier than an original FBA loan. It won’t help you unless they get more funding. I don’t ever like to count on politicians as part of my business plan again. Anything could happen.
The process is easy, starting with a four-page, very simple application form that doesn’t ask you for much of anything. You do need to get a handle on what your payroll is over the last 12-month period and create an average of what a 2-month average would be on payroll so your monthly average over that period and then multiply 2 months of that times 2.5, and that for the payroll side of it is what you’re applying for, and it does include payroll taxes withholding. You don’t have to clean that up.
For a lot of companies that have executives or ownership that exceed $100,000, and we’ve got a number of other employees, particularly in high-tech areas, that are paid in excess of $100,000, you have to scrub them out of that down to $100,000. There’s an adjustment that has to occur. As we were going through that, it was a matter of taking the total for the whole year of payroll over that 12-month period we’re using and then taking each person that qualifies as over $100,000 and backing them down to that in terms of payroll.
That was the easiest formula that made it very simple to say these seven people all made this much in addition to $100,000. We’ve got that piece of the pie. We’ve got a million four out on overage that gets backed out of the total payroll. That’s the number that they’re looking for to establish a 2-month average times 2.5.
The question that comes to mind is when you calculate that, you back their salary down to $100,000. Did you account for their total burden on top of that? Can you add in the employee taxes, health, retirement, and things like that on top of that $100,000, or is that all-inclusive?
In different categories, you could only apply for the withholding of $100,000. The rules are still being written. They had a big rule writing session and did more announcements out to all the SBA-approved lenders. That’s why I got some more information. Things are changing and they still could change. What I know from the example that I’m following was the simplest way for me to go. You bring it down to that number and apply it.
Things are changing, and they still could change. Share on XWhen you talk about 401(k), which the original draft said 401(k), that doesn’t cover everybody’s plan. If your company is an ESOP, for example, or in my case, we’ve got a modified plan called a cash balance plan, that got written in later than the original draft. That’s still a tricky one. I’m still working on figuring out how you apply what you do with the funds you get from that. For round numbers, let’s say you drew $1 million from this program from your application in terms of what you’re asking for from the SBA via your SBA lender. In my case, that’s Heartland Bank and they’ve been awesome.
We use Heartland Bank also. That’s awesome.
It’s a great resource. They’re very responsive. In the first two days of this week, they didn’t respond to anything. I didn’t get upset because I understood what they were trying to do which was to figure this all out. On Wednesday morning, it’s been within a few minutes of responses on everything. They’ve been great.
We work with some of our leases over there. Who do you work with? I’m curious.
Laurie Pfeiffer. She’s a VP of Business Development but that’s always been my liaison as we’ve got an SBA line of credit already established with them.
They’re super good. Marlyse did the same thing. She emailed me Wednesday morning. She replied and said, “We don’t know a whole lot yet. Give me a couple of days.” On Wednesday morning, she responded and gave me some more information about the applications and so forth. They’re releasing the “approved” vendors.
Any previously approved SBA lender, you could use.
I thought there were a certain amount of SBA lenders that were launching this, too.
It was 1,400 SBA approved roughly in the United States is my understanding. The Feds are going through and putting in additional community banks. All the monster banks are SBA lenders. Most people are already doing business with somebody who’s an SBA-approved lender. They’re going to add to that to try to make this available broader. My guess is if that’s who you’re relying on, though, those $350 billion in our initial funds will probably be gone before those people figure out what to do. I would not follow a path other than to the door of an SBA-approved lender.
It was the first day that you could officially apply, correct?
We are on day one.
That’s what I thought. I’m asking questions that I am getting caught up to speed mainly through you. This is a question that came up on the Webex that I did, the EIDL or Economic Injury Disaster Loan.
That’s a $10,000 quickie. It’s a separate program in my understanding. I’m not applying for that. That money could go after but I don’t know much about that because I’m not focusing on that as a need.
As quickly as they had to throw this all together, it seemed pretty well put together. Would you agree?
They’ve made it incredibly simple to try to remove obstacles to people being able to get in that funnel as quickly as possible. I’ll walk back a little on what the whole point of this is. As a business owner who’s fiscally conservative and looking at life, the debt that the government’s piling on is scary as heck. As you look at our company and say, “I could go from 61 engineers plus 39 plus other well-compensated professionals, bilinguals, purchasing agents, sales engineers, all kinds of other people, highly skilled, particular administrative folks with multilingual capabilities and a lot of different people,” all of those folks could be gone in a month, not employed at a client site.
The idea here, as I understand it, is whatever we can do for a two-month period while the economy is at a standstill, keep paychecks going so that those people can pay their bills, pay their mortgages, not put credit card debt through the roof, don’t have all that stress in play, and get through that two-month period. Governor DeWine extended the stay-at-home rules, the social distancing rules for Ohio through the end of April 2020. They do go out and hit the car lot and say, “What I was planning on buying back at the end of March 2020, I’m going to do it now because I’m still flush.”
As the economy stalls, keeping paychecks flowing is crucial. This helps people meet their bills and mortgages, preventing a surge in credit card debt and reducing financial stress. Share on XThe economy ramps up. We get that V-shaped curve that’s going to allow us all to hold onto our businesses and not go into a very deep recession. I look at myself and our company as a vehicle for that ancillary. This is where the two political parties come to a conclusion. Democrats want that money in the worker’s hands. The Republican side is like, “Let’s make sure the businesses are viable so we can come out of it and get the economy back going again so that we can sustain it and get the tax base back up again.”
We are a vehicle to deliver that money out. I don’t apply for this and I don’t get this grant in place. I have 100 workers who no longer have a place to go and then put my staff on top of that. We don’t have roles to recruit for. I don’t have a way to stay to keep that going. I’m going to be laying everybody off except for the most critical employees because I have no choice. I have no funding. My liability becomes unemployment insurance. I’ve got to hang on and pay my rent and utilities and hold my breath.
Using this two-month window allows all of my employees, those hundred people out there plus, to keep paychecks going whether they have a job to go to or not. That’s also going to allow us to retain those workers. Certain fields that are booming might otherwise look for and take jobs to my most viable people to get plucked to other companies and would be much more likely to also leave under those circumstances if they’re on unemployment. The best are going to be aggressive and try their best to find a home instead of sitting there and waiting.
That is also part of our discussion. This is the best opportunity I’ve had in the last decade to recruit awesome talent. Jack Welch is saying, “What do you do when you look at each year and you knock off the bottom 10%?” It sounds a little cold but it’s reality for growth. If everybody knows the expectations, all the tools are in place, all the support, the mentoring, the coaching, progressive discipline, nobody should ever be surprised if they fall below that 90% mark. This is an opportunity where I’ve got people sending me their resume updates that I could never have recruited for the position that I could recruit them for if I’m solvent to do that.
The Talent Market
Your clients were probably putting people in seats that they were like, “This is our best option. This is what we got.” They hired them because they needed a body. It may have been a C player or maybe even a D player, where probably the A++ players are. Employees are going to hang on to those folks no matter what or at least attempt to. They’ll try like hell but there’s going to be a lot of good talent out there that do become available. You hit the nail right on the head.
I’ll use my example for that. I’m going to end up with twelve talented, extremely well-trained recruiters with very few positions other than a few. We’ve got some pharma and healthcare-related, some other companies that are doing good. Our concentration is going to change to those clients when all the rest of the jobs fall off. If I were to have them off the payroll, nobody’s doing anything.
The big focus is quickly going to be what positions are going to ramp up the fastest as soon as the economy restarts so I can assign recruiters not to work on an open position but to reach out to talent that we are going to want when nobody else is doing that. Getting them in the queue so the moment a job opens up, I’ve got relationships and the information/
the big focus is quickly going Share on XWe have a cool analytics tool for capturing data on jobs. If somebody was paying $80,000 for a job because of the tight labor market, what they were writing up, what they needed was $105,000. The prevailing wages are to get exactly what they’re looking for. We’ve got a powerful tool that uses binary code in Excel to grade out how people score. It spells out what the talent metric looks like, who’s best qualified based on what they said they needed, and how they fit into a compensation grade so they can see if they’re low exactly where the pay meets the talent on a very clear-cut scale.
When we’re dealing with engineers, which are most of our hiring managers, they get it. It’s using the tool they use more than anything else for communicating information within operations. That grid fell off the map. Everything changes. That talent’s going to be available for the wages. They can go back and look at the talent that they were $10,000 or $20,000 under, and that talent’s going to be available.
I didn’t even think that the amount that people were making was going to go down because naturally there were going to be more people in the market period.
Supply and demand are the basics of the economy.
Have you already had manufacturers reaching out to you to try and capture some new talent or is everyone in shell shock, and they’re trying to figure out the next step?
They’re in crisis mode. They’re still trying to manage it. They’re worried about their employees and what’s coming. I’ll take us back to when we met in the last recession, Dustin. We came out of that and grew nicely. We’re a very niche player. We know exactly what we want to be. We’re not trying to be a deco and the air techs of the world. The funny thing, those giant multi-billion-dollar companies can’t get this support. They’re hosed. Every liability they’ve got for the next two months, they don’t have an out for this.
It caps out at 500 employees. Is that what I read somewhere?
Correct. There are some exemptions to that, depending on your corporate structure but the base number is 500 employees or less to qualify for the SBA program. As such, we know exactly what we are. We sit under those criteria. By being able to retain our best people and grow that, we’re going to be in a great position the same way we were. We didn’t have any extra stimulus funding at that time but we applied the same lean principles of how we come out and plan and arise, and we did. As all the recruiters that we used to compete with were sidelined, it took those companies quite a while to gear back up and get their systems and their talent in place. We were ready to go.
How many recruiters back then did you see go away?
Almost all of them got laid off. There was no job.
How many recruiting firms shut their doors and went away?
Quite a few but understanding our model, it’s not hard to keep a C corp or an S corp going. It’s just that to do that, you have to slice all your overhead down. We’re not sitting on infrastructure, buildings, or equipment. We’re worrying about depreciation schedules and our overhead structure for companies. Our field, fortunately, is much different than most of our clients. If you’re smart about it, and I know a lot of recruiting firms aren’t, we’re not carrying a debt load. We’re solvent.
I’m not sitting on any debt at all. We’re in a great position. That’s part of a strategy to come through a situation like this. Those companies who didn’t think that way and got a lot of debt accumulated, you can factor in our business and say, “What’s your employee’s headcount?” You can draw money pretty easily in a good economy.
There’s a lot of companies that have done that. They have massive leases, new buildings, and all kinds of other things that don’t allow them to be nimble in downtime. To me, it wasn’t a question of who went out of business last time. It’s what did their business look like when they emerged. The need to reorganize isn’t quite the same when you don’t have that massive, fixed debt.
It’s not a question of who went out of business last time. It's what did their business look like when they emerged? The need to reorganize isn't quite the same when you don't have that massive, fixed debt. Share on XWork Capital Loans
I pulled up some notes from the EIDL to go back on that real quick to let everyone know. What it covers is work capital loans up to $2 million. The rate for that loan is 3.75 for-profit and 2.75 for nonprofit. The terms are 30 years with 1 year deferred. It looks like small businesses, landlords, most nonprofits, and EIDL advance, which is what you were talking about, a $10,000 advance on your EIDL award. That’s the quick money. Get it in your pocket. Some notes of what it’s for are fixed debt, payroll, accounts payable, and utility insurance.
It has others, which is interesting because I don’t know yet. What it says is that it’s not for dividend payments, disbursements to owners, or repayment of stockholder loans, except as a result of the disaster facility expansion, refinancing of loans, physical damage, or payment of federal loan debt. I read this somewhere. Any lease that you want to put in here has to have been signed and committed to before a certain date in February 2020. For some reason, February 15th, 2020 sticks in my head if I find it all.
They don’t want you planning for this to be strategic to abuse the program.
They don’t want you to use this to grow, which makes sense.
The last stimulus was a lot of corporations bought stock back. One of the last hurdles that the bill passed between both parties was no stock buyback period.
Do you know if 501(c)(7)s are available? I’m not even sure that I know what a 501(c)(7) but that was one of the questions that was asked that I don’t know that got answered.
That would fall into the category of my resources. My existing accounting firm has been good over the years but I can see they’re building outside of my window in Dublin, which was Rea & Associates. Doug Houser over there is amazing. He does not have my business. He’s done more than about anybody else to answer questions well and research stuff using his staff. He’s a tremendous dude. I very well may have him handling our business after we’re done through this tax season fully.
The extensions were offered so we took it. We could hold onto money a little longer. We did that. I usually hate to do extensions because I don’t want to take any chance on raising audit liability. Heartland’s been great. Our law firm is Carlile Patchen and Brent Rosenthal is our contact there. All have been good, those three. That’s where I would ask that question.
The best firms in support here aren’t charging you for this advice. They’re giving it to you on basic things you need to know. If they are charging you for it, they shouldn’t be your client. That’s not where your business should be going. If they’re queuing it up in six-hour increments and sending you a bill, that’s probably not where I’m going.
Are most of your employees W-2 or 1099?
All of them are W-2, health and dental, and profit sharing.
That was one of the questions that came up. “Can I add our 1099 employees to the payroll calculation?”
You can and there’s a formula for that. It is fully allowable. If you are a 1099 yourself, that opens in a week. It’s for people who fall into that category. They have to apply separately and next in line so they’re not first in line.
From what I understand, the PPP program is set aside for the US native people.
Foreign-owned companies do not apply.
I was having a brain fog and was not able to get that out of my brain through my mouth for some reason. I appreciate it.
It’s a US-domiciled company. When they go through the four pages, they get your EIC number, that basic information, and they can check it against your incorporation quickly and easily. If you’ve got a relationship with an SBA lender, they already know that or they should. They should have copies of your documentation for your incorporation paperwork in one shape or form.
SBA Links
One of the other questions that was asked was SBA links. When anyone’s trying to do anything good, there’s some scumbags out there trying to scam people. It was a great question. “How do I know what’s real and how do I know what’s a scam?” The SBA.gov/Disaster is a great resource. You’re going directly to the source. You can read about what you need to do there. That’s probably the best source to start, especially if you’re trying to figure this out.
There’s another version of that, which is SBA.gov/page/Coronavirus-COVID or SBA.gov/Funding-Program. If you get into there, it’ll queue you up to go into the coronavirus, the PPP, and the other programs. It’s all set up there. I’m in Central Ohio so the SBA Columbus office is on the front street. They don’t want walk-ins for social distancing reasons but David Townsend is the key contact. Jill Nagy-Reynolds has been the most responsive. I’ve got her number, (614) 940-8124. The main number there is (614) 469-6860.
Wherever you are, if you’re in Dayton or Poughkeepsie, it doesn’t matter. Look up your local SBA office and reach out to them. They’re well-staffed. All the people that were doing different things were only doing this thing. You can go to LinkedIn and look up your SBA. It’ll automatically find the people closest to you if you’re vibrant there and you can easily identify them. I built my little generic welcome to put in with an invite. I had everybody I could find in the Columbus office with a barely customized me. I plugged their name in. “If I need resources, can I please reach out to you?” About half of them responded quickly.
Paycheck Protection Program
Our primary topic became not lean practices in a tight labor market but the Paycheck Protection Program so I’ll hit from the top to make sure I didn’t miss anything. This is designed for payroll costs, including benefits. They don’t want people to lose health insurance, dental, or whatever they’ve got. That is covered. When you go back for loan forgiveness, that’s part of what is in the current law that you can apply. That’s in the funding formula for how much you get on a loan. After 60 days, the bank should come back and you should give them a 60-day report on exactly how you applied everything. It’s not even with their money. It’s, however, you spent money in those categories, what applied for it.
Everything that applies in there includes interest on mortgage obligations incurred before February 15th, 2020 on the average they’re looking at. The formula is rent and utilities. This will still get clarified. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some changes go through on how the bank in the end allows you what money to use. My biggest one there falls into the retirement funding. You can use that to apply for loans.
You can use retirement funding to apply for loans. Share on XIf you follow me on this, I should be able to paint a good picture. I’ll use a round number and say, “If your company’s retirement payout for the year is $500,000, an arbitrary number, if you break $500,000 into 12 bits per month to come up with a 2-month average over your last year, the way it’s written and the way I’m submitting it, I’m putting that number in so I can get that as part of that loan.” What I’m not dead certain about is if I can pay out to fund the year going forward at that same level and claim it against what is forgiven.
This is where I want to be careful in this economic time. If I fund it at the same level I did last year and they don’t forgive it, that would become a loan. Would that be a decision I would make knowing it was a loan? There is a six-month forgiveness and the interest rate is very low. Having that capital and staying flush to me isn’t a scary thing. It’s a good thing to keep that flexibility but that needs to be a calculated decision on anything that you might spend on monies you get. You don’t think you’re the college kid who got a credit card from the student union with a $2,000 limit on it. This is not the time for that.
Even for me, I’m looking at that carefully. Until and unless I get a clarification that I could use that money specifically to fund our pension, cash balance, and profit-sharing plan, I’m not going to do it because I want to stay liquid. I can fund it later in the year if things bounce back. That’s the only thing in all of that that I don’t feel 100% clear on because I’m getting different things from different people, including the SBA where for them, it’s more like rule writing. There’s still stuff going on where now it looks like it would qualify but I’m not sure in two months that it will.
As we discuss this, people are going to have a ton of questions. We encourage you to reach out to us. You can email us at Info@MFGMonkey.com. I can forward those emails to Rich as well. When we do our next session of this, we can certainly answer those questions and give anyone any updates that we learned over. Rich, why don’t you tell everyone what your website is and how they can find you? How many followers on LinkedIn did you tell me you have? Is it 30,000 or something?
We’re pushing over 30,000. Top 0.2%, I think.
Rich, tell everyone how they can find you if they are not already connected to you.
The one last little warning I put in is to make sure you’re looking at this. Not more than 25% can be non-payroll-related. Look at your payroll and calculations. Know the bigger you apply for the more money by applying as much as you can, you still have to be careful of what converts to a loan by not overdoing it. You have to keep it at 75% within that key category and the SBA has great tools for that.
75% has to go to payroll and then 25% can go towards fixed operating expenses.
Other approved costs, which is probably the best way to say it because it could still be a moving target.
In this webinar, they put utilities, insurance, and others. Hopefully, they’ll launch what the other is so there’s no gray area there because everyone likes to use the gray area.
I’ve had some experts throwing rent in and others not throwing rent in. I’m going by SBA because it says rent.
It does say utilities, rent, and insurance. All those things get figured in.
Also, 401(k). I’m scared of that one. I’ll answer to your question. Compass Tech International is at www.CompassTechIntl.com. You can reach out to me via Dustin or directly at RichB@CompassTechIntl.com.
We could talk about this for another hour or two but we’ve thrown so much information out there. We’re at a pretty good stopping point and people can absorb what we’ve told them. Maybe we can jump back on. You and I can talk about that offline if it’s a week, sooner, or whatnot.
I can only watch Dave Chappelle for 45 minutes. Reading this has got to be like going to the dentist’s office.
You are right on there. That is funny. I appreciate you. I have conversations quite often. It’s fun to record them and share your knowledge with everyone. I appreciate it. We’ll jump back to another session here soon.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
Important links:
- Compass Tech
- Great by Choice
- Good to Great
- Paycheck Protection Program
- Heartland Bank
- Rea & Associates
- Carlile Patchen
- SBA.gov/Disaster
- SBA.gov/page/Coronavirus-COVID
- SBA.gov/Funding-Program
- Jill Nagy-Reynolds – LinkedIn
- Info@MFGMonkey.com
- RichB@CompassTechIntl.com
- SBA.gov/Updates
- http://COVID19Relief.SBA.gov/#/
- https://www.SBA.gov/Funding-Programs/Loans
- https://www.BioOhio.com/COVID19/
- https://www.SBA.gov/about-sba/sba-newsroom/press-releases-media-advisories/sbas-paycheck-protection-program-small-businesses-affected-coronavirus-pandemic-launches?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery
- DisasterCustomersService@SBA.gov