359 - Why You Need to Get Off the Carousel of Chaos

On today's episode of the podcast I'm explaining the Chaos Carousel, why you don't want to ride it, and how you can get yourself off of it. 

It's no secret I love branding and cute names. You're all my business besties, my team is Team Besties, I teach about the "WTF happened to my money hamster wheel?" and identifying where our money is going when we make more revenue, the "oh shit cycle" of back taxes which is what happens when we don't keep up with our quarterly taxes and now we are introducing what I call the "chaos carousel of contradictory advice."

The Chaos Carousel happens in all avenues to all of us. 

Stage 1: Not knowing what we don't know. 

Stage 2: Knowing what we don't know. 

Stage 3: Basic understanding. 

Stage 4: You're fully competent and can do it

An example of this is BOI reports (check out episode 337 for all the details). This year, business owners when from not knowing what it is to knowing it exists and not quite understanding it to then getting a basic understanding. Getting to Step 3 can be a mixed bag because it starts with Googling and Googling has all kinds of results and how do you know who to trust? So then you think you might hire someone to help and people give you different answers and you're spinning round and around trying to find a clear answer. 

Getting contradictory advice from professionals happens for two main reasons:

1. They only see one side of your business 
2. They only know what their main niche expertise is. They aren't viewing it from all angles. Sometimes, for example, what's good from a legal perspective isn't good from a tax perspective. 

Contradictory advice doesn't always mean one person is wrong. It's up to you to reconcile this and determine what is most correct for you. And what is most correct for you now may not be most correct for you later. 

A big example is forming an LLC. Even lawyers will vary on the answer. Some will tell you don't start a business until you form an LLC because it's your biggest barrier of protection. Some tax pros will tell you not to form an LLC until you make $30,000 or another arbitrary amount. They say this because LLCs don't have tax benefits so you might as well wait until you can become an S Corp, which makes sense from a tax perspective, but not a legal perspective because your business isn't protected. 

Same with bookkeeping and the conversation around QuickBooks or spreadsheet trackers and when it's the right time to move to a software. 

Same with contract templates. The reality of those is that ant lawyer you hire that's been in business for awhile is going to have all their client contract templates. They may not sell templates, but if you hire them to write a contract for you, the first thing they're going to do is duplicate and edit a contract from a similar contract scenario. And then some lawyers will take these and templatize them. 

Templates can also be extremely helpful to new businesses. For example, if you're a new wedding venue and you hire someone to draft you a custom contract but they haven't worked with a wedding venue before, you'll both be trying to predict potential issues that might happen to cover in the contract meanwhile a template has already addressed all the concerns from multiple wedding venues and worked with that lawyer. (You can get all our contract templates in the Contract Club for just $50 at notavglaw.com/club) 

I also see contradictory information about trademarks which drives me bananas. Why are business coaches giving trademark advice? That's something you want from a lawyer. 

The key takeaway is you want to know the legal and tax basics. My goal is for everyone to get to Step 3 so they have an understanding and know, when you go to hire someone you have the power of knowing if they're the right person to hire who understand what you're looking for. 

The chaos carousel is something that is going to exist in all aspects of life, but we, within our control, can hop off of it and stop the spinning by taking the time to educate ourselves and having the knowledge we need to have. 

If you want to get a baseline of knowledge, check out our book at unfuckyourbizbook.com and if you missed last week's episode, we offered a free chapter of the book which you can grab at notavglaw.com/358