Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, host Melissa Swink welcomes Karen Widas, a payment solutions expert. They discuss Karen's journey into the credit card processing industry, the complexities of payment solutions for businesses, and the importance of evaluating different payment systems to save costs. 

Tune in to learn various tools and technologies that can enhance business efficiency, including QuickBooks and ChatGPT, plus signs that it’s time to reassess our payment processing methods!

Key Highlights:

• Discover why your current payment processing system might be quietly eating away at your profits, and what to do about it.
• Learn the crucial difference between flat-rate and interchange-plus pricing models, and why choosing the wrong one could cost you thousands.
• Understand how integrating the right payment solution with your existing tools can transform your business efficiency and cash flow.
• Find out how Karen builds trust with her clients through transparency and customized solutions.
• Get the inside scoop on how combining payment solutions with tools like QuickBooks and ChatGPT can streamline your entire operation.
• Learn why a "one-size-fits-all" approach to payment processing could be holding your business back from optimal growth.

About Our Guest: 

Karen Widas is a payment solutions expert who helps manufacturers, distributors and service-based businesses reduce credit card processing fees and streamline operations. Through her company, she delivers secure, transparent, and customized systems that improve cash flow and simplify PCI compliance.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone. Welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink. And in today's episode, I have a very special guest with me today. She is a longtime client of ours. She also is one of our vendors. I'll share more during the conversation and she's a longtime friend as well. So I'm super excited for our conversation today.

And here's my special guest with me today. a long time friend of mine. She's a former Fiber Finder. She's also Fiber Friend as well. So I was the first to have heard her conversation. Now fact is, this was something that I was talking about after the last Fiber Finder I did was we have a lot of guests who have been on the Fiber Finder.

And I just wanted to say this was something that I was reflecting on after the last podcast recording that I did was we have a lot of guests who have been on the podcast lately. We have more great guests who come and I am being very intentional about who I'm inviting to be on the podcast. I'm inviting people who have stories to tell and knowledge to share that will be beneficial for our audience. There's truly something that

you know, might resonate with you and, you know, some of the stories that they're telling because they also are on a similar path where they are growing and scaling their organizations and they are doing it in ways that are very intentional and very authentic. I also want to say too, because I make sure that at the end of every episode, I make sure that I give our audience, all of you, a chance to connect with our guests. I just want to say like full disclosure, our guests are not being paid to on the podcast. I am not getting

to promote them on the podcast. if you truly are interested in connecting with any of our guests after the show, tell them that I sent you, but by all means, it's all very transparent. with that being said, I am super excited to welcome Karen Wytus to the show. Karen is a payment solutions expert who helps manufacturers, distributors, and service-based businesses reduce credit card processing fees and streamline operations.

you.

know, I love that I said, I hope that you all enjoyed this. So, that being said, I super excited to welcome your advice. So now, I'm to give you this portion of the expert.

I can personally say that that is true and we'll dive into that more during our conversation I'm sure. Through her company, she delivers secure, transparent and customized systems that improve cashflow and simplified PCI compliance. Karen, welcome to the show. I feel like this conversation is so long overdue because we talk all the time.

We do, we do. And I'm absolutely thrilled to be here with you. Like this is really cool. But why am I kind of nervous? Like I talk to you all the time when we talk business all the time and all of sudden I'm in front of a camera. That's true. Good thing they didn't.

Because I think this is the first time we've ever recorded these conversations.

Yeah, some of these we were so you guys we were just chatting about this because Karen so Karen lives like we live within 10 minutes of one another. So we see each other all the time and we get together for coffee wine. We're heading out to lunch with another friend of ours shortly like being super transparent in this conversation. So we're talking all the time and sometimes we joke like maybe we should record some time where we just solve other people's business problems because we're so good at doing that. We were talking.

We just need

You are.

You

my gosh, too funny. Well, Karen, so for those who have not met you, why don't we start by having you just tell our audience a little bit more about you and then why don't we dive into after that how you even got started in the credit card processing industry because that's not an industry that a lot of people are gravitated towards in terms of a career.

Certainly not intentionally, that's for sure.

Right, yes, maybe you get drawn in somehow.

Thanks again for having me. I am Karen Whiteus and I have been married to my husband Eric for 34 years and we actually met back in college at Michigan Tech and we had both earned our electrical engineering degree there. And since then we have built this big beautiful life together with four kids, three daughters and a son and two sons-in-law and our first grandson who's turning two next week.

Well, if you're watching this in July, yes, he's turning 2 next week.

my-

We're recording in July. think this is going to be officially released later this fall. I'll tell our listeners why in another episode, but we are stacking them up. So, so link to at that point. Yes.

There you go. He'll already be two.

I can't say our youngest just graduated from high school, so Eric and I are kind of officially in this next chapter where we don't have the kids at home anymore, so that's going to be exciting. Outside of work, I love reading, love reading, playing golf, working out, going for walks, and as a whole the family likes to play games, and so for any board game nerds out there, we love playing guitar.

Yes, to be determined. Like as kids are fully, you know, out of the house and settled as adults and you do have that freedom to decide, hey, where do we want to live now that we're a little less tied down? Yes, and hockey's been a big part of your family as well.

Yeah. Yeah.

It has been a huge part. Five out of six of us have played hockey at one time. My husband was in adult leagues, I was in adult leagues. Neither one of us played really growing up. We didn't play in high school, didn't play in college, none of that fancy stuff. My oldest, she played for a couple of years at a D3 school and she still plays hockey with the women's league in the area.

and is super involved in that. My second oldest, she is in color guard and winter guard and does a lot of coaching with that as a hobby. But my number three daughter, she played through high school as well and went to college, played club at college and is now just in rec hockey and men's league down in Milwaukee. And my son has played all the way through high school and he's actually moving to Iowa to play on a junior team.

So there's a lot of hockey. In fact, this weekend we're gonna be in Minnesota for hockey. So it's great, we love it. There's a lot of time involved, but it's been a fun, it's been fun with the family. My husband's got to spend a lot of time with our daughters because he coached a lot of their teams, which was kind of cool. So they spent a lot of quality time together, which it was kind of unique. So at least for us, it was cool.

Love it. Yes. And I know even from talking with other friends who have kids in various sports, sometimes having parents involved as coaches can go either direction. I love how that it actually strengthen their bond and not increase maybe the pressure in the sport. I can kind of see it going either way. So I think you guys are very blessed by that.

Yes.

Yeah, it was. I think it was a good experience all around for everybody. I think the kids would agree with that as well. Now that they're grown up.

Right. Yes. Maybe it wasn't so much fun at the time sometimes to have dad involved with your hockey team, but hey, love that. So as you mentioned, you have an engineering degree. now fast forward to however many years, you are in merchant services, credit card processing. So can you tell us a little bit more about what led you down this path? We were kind of joking. Sometimes people get kind of sucked into it.

Maybe not.

Yeah, obviously when I went to school for electrical engineering, this wasn't exactly the path I had mapped out. And it kind of, you know, like anything kind of unfolded over time. So, you know, sort of I think there was sort of an abrupt change and then a gradual change. So I spent many years in the corporate world and the energy sector and the utility business doing, you know, anything from operations to tech to project management, just a lot of different

really cool jobs and found myself in a position where I needed to leave the small company that I had last been at. And one of the things I learned through all engineering school and through the corporate world is that I loved solving problems. Math, technical problems, there was always an answer. There's always a way to.

figure something out and solve it, and especially if it made things easier for people like maybe we could make it easier to do XYZ if we did ABC. You get the kind of get the idea. So when I left the lab, my last company, I started my own business building custom software solutions for a few companies. They wanted something very specific and so we put our heads together, figured out what that was going to be and solve the problem. And I was able to program that and get them some custom solutions built.

Which was really cool and oddly enough that led me down the path into the world of payment processing, which kind of seems weird, but it's about relationships and who you meet and things that you hear. And I started to hear more about the payment processing world. It's very technical and there's a lot of math involved and I thought, well, this is really interesting. And as I started diving into it and learning more about it, I realized quickly how confusing and.

In a lot of cases, unfair payment processing was going to be for business owners for so many different reasons. And I was seeing that many customers were overpaying for things that they didn't even realize they were overpaying for, or maybe they knew it, but they didn't know what steps to take or who to trust to make those changes. And if they did, there were a lot of times where they were concerned that they were going to go from bad to worse. And rightfully so. They've had some bad experiences. So.

At that point, kind of decided that I wanted to get involved and in that payment processing world, but I wanted to do things differently. I wanted to focus on education and I wanted to focus on building relationships so that if somebody wanted to work with me, they knew they could trust me. And ultimately I was able to develop this so that I could bring solutions.

that would fit a business as opposed to forcing a business to fit into a solution I had. And with all of that, I wanted to make sure that I was doing it for the business and with the business with transparency and integrity. So it took a lot of learning and determination on my part. This is a very, it can be a very confusing industry, but it was interesting to me. And like I said, I like to solve problems and.

figure out solutions and so this really was a good fit. really. You know one customer turned into two customers and it kind of just grew from there and I eventually started doing this full time and as my other customers that needed the custom solutions no longer needed my services and just evolved into full time payment processing.

So now it's a whole lot bigger than I had ever expected, but I do have the privilege of serving these businesses all over the country, helping them streamline payments, reduce our costs, become compliant, and just set them up in a way that makes their business more efficient, maybe less cost, know, maybe more cost effective. So there.

love it. There's a lot that I want to unpack there too. So the first thing that jumped out at me and for those watching, you probably saw like a big grin come across my face because you were talking about math, Karen. And I feel like there are two types of people listening to this right now. They're going like, yes, like I'm a math nerd. Like she's speaking my language. And then there's the other half going, thank God for people like you, because I hate math and I never want to do it again.

Thank

Hahaha

12 years at this point. When did you get started in credit card processing? What year was that?

Yeah, I actually got started when we were living in North Carolina and I think I erroneously said we moved here in 2001. We moved here in 2011 and I got started in the credit card processing when I was in North Carolina and when I was in the custom software business, I joined a BNI group.

someone had suggested it and said, know, this is a great way to meet other business owners, share what you do, but then learn what other business owners do. And maybe you can use their services and build some good relationships, which it did. I still have relationships to this day, including one of the office owners that I work with was in B &I. you know, just in talking, he was in the payment process industry and he's like, you know, hey, this, you know, this might be right up your alley. And I'm like, no, I don't think it would be, but thank you.

But then that's when, and talking with him more and helping him out with some, on the technical side of some jobs he was working on, I thought, you know what, as I see more and more, and that's where it became very evident that this is something that I would like, but I can see where maybe I could be useful to people. Maybe I could help them, like truly help them with their payment scenarios. So.

Oh my goodness. Wow. Okay. So the other thing that I was thinking about when I go back to, I started my business in 2012. I met you in 2013. And at that time, if I wanted to accept credit cards as a small business, I think I was using PayPal at that point. So that was a way that customers could conveniently pay me or we could set up automated payments and things like that. Again, I

Mm-hmm.

You guys, I was functioning as like a solo virtual assistant. Me, my clients, I think I'd build them hourly at that point in time so monthly invoices would come out and, I spent X number of hours on your work last month. This is way, way back, early days. And so there was PayPal. There was also, think Square was coming on the scene a little bit more. I was starting to see Square.

You

Mm-hmm.

at different businesses and things. And that was really the first time that we didn't see like your traditional, know, credit card machine with, you know, like the phone connections with it, the, what is the word I'm looking for, like the cash register and all of that. And so, so there's a couple of different things that I wanted to kind of talk about along those similar lines. So obviously now there are many different payment solutions now.

Mm-hmm.

Hans.

on the scene. Tons. Yes, exactly. So can you break down for our audience, like if they're using PayPal, they're using maybe Stripe or Square, maybe they're processing right through QuickBooks, because that's one that's kind of near and dear to my heart. I'll talk more about kind of how my payments have evolved over the years too, since we're on the conversation. Like what might be some indications that somebody

Now, what is now? What is now?

Are you saying? Are you saying?

Thank you.

you

could be overpaying for credit card processing. Like what are some of the key things that might indicate that there might be a better solution out there?

That is a really good question and probably I will try to simplify this down to brass tacks because I could go on for hours as you know. So in looking at businesses that are using Square and and I'm not going to knock them at all because there is a place for Square.

you

And there's a place for stripe stripe is integrated with a lot of software and lot of software is only allow stripe to integrate so and that's that's all fine and well. If you are a retail business, meaning you're taking cards face to face, your customers bring their cards in, they tap, they swipe, they dip. And you are doing more than $2000 a month in processing, so you're you're

Yes.

taking more than $2000 in our credit cards every month. You are a likely candidate for a. Third party processor like myself. There is sort of break even of you know around $2000 for the scene of benefits of taking card presence on a different kind of system than square because square is like a flat rate. Typically.

When you are using flat rate pricing, are not necessary. It's easy and it's simple, easy to understand and simple, but in many cases it's costing you money. It is very convenient, but there are a lot of solutions out there that are just as convenient where you're going to save some money. So if you're in a situation where you're like.

that convenience and that simplicity.

I'm tired of spending this kind of money on payment processing every month. It's something that we can take a look at to see if you could do better with a different system. Many do, some don't, but many do find out that they were. Now that doesn't mean you have to make that transition. You could stay right where you are, but now you know. Now you know that information. So that's the card present. The card not present.

Yes.

where you might be using Square or QuickBooks and you're sending electronic invoices and they're paying through those invoices or you're sending a payment link that they're clicking on and paying through that. If you are using those, is a good likelihood, and if you're taking ACH through those as well, there's a good likelihood that, again, there is room to save some money by using an outside merchant service provider like myself.

Okay.

It comes down to analysis. Who are your customers? What size tickets are using? What's your business type? How are you taking payments? There's a lot that goes into it. It's not cut and dried, but again with QuickBooks and Square, you're paying these higher flat rates for those card not present scenarios. And if you are in a business to business sector like yourself, you only work with other businesses.

Manufacturers work with other businesses, wholesalers, distributors, like you said, service based businesses, social. You might be a social media marketing company again, B2B. You qualify for lower rates because you're accepting purchasing cards and corporate cards and business cards and those qualify for lower rates and you will not realize those rates if you are using square for card not present transactions. You won't realize them if you're using QuickBooks or Stripe.

You just aren't going to realize those rates. So there is a lot of room for improvement. And yes, it's convenient. For instance, QuickBooks payments is convenient if you're using QuickBooks for your accounting. But there are some really amazing, efficient, convenient systems that you can connect to that QuickBooks now that are going to, I mean, save you some, can save you some serious money and give you a lot of, you can maybe get some better support on the back end as well.

Yes.

Yes. Okay. I want to come back to that in like 2.5 seconds because that's a perfect segue and do even just sharing like how the changes over the years and how I personally have been receiving payments for my business. You had mentioned, know, card present, card not present, especially if you're in retail or, certainly B2B like manufacturing. I think you and I have also talked in the past too, like

Companies that are maybe in more healthcare related spaces where they're accepting like HSA cards, FSA cards and things like that. Those have some better rates that they could be realizing as well.

That's correct. So if you're a medical clinic, a dentist office, a chiropractor, a PT clinic, if people are using their HSA cards, those are always and exclusively debit cards. debit cards are, they process at a very low rate. They can process card present anywhere from 1.05 % down to 0.05%. But if you're paying a flat rate on every card,

of 25 or 275 or 289 whatever the flat rate is. I mean that's one to two percentage points that you're paying more than you need to be for those cards. So there's a lot of advantages for that industry as well. So thank you for bringing that up but yes there's a lot of opportunity there for them to save some save on some processing fees as well.

Yes.

Yes, yes. Okay, so I wanted to kind of pick that up because you had mentioned QuickBooks as well. So as I mentioned a few minutes ago, when I first started my company, I was invoicing through PayPal. I think that was one of the only or one of the few ways that I could both invoice clients and for them to be able to pay me with a credit or debit card because that was convenient for them.

You know, just kind of taking a step back. These were solo preneurs who were most of them were new to working with a virtual assistant. They may not have had other team members before. So it's like, well, how do I pay you? How can I afford, you know, making this taking this step of hiring help in my business? Well, we take credit cards. So, you know, so I think that's what I was using, Karen, when I had met you and, know, over the years and I will. OK, so I'll also peel back the curtain a little bit further. So I was invoicing

Thank you.

Yeah.

with a city that is exclusively for...

and taking payments exclusively through PayPal. And then on the back end, because my business was still very small, I basically just kind of kept track of all of my accounting on an Excel spreadsheet. So I basically had like, here's my revenue for the month. Here are all my expenses. Here's my profit or my loss for the month. And I would just, I'll be honest, I wasn't great about keeping that tallied up through every month. So a tax time, time to pull out, here's what I build in.

And basically just kind of catch the fact that I have gone and done an Excel spreadsheet. So basically.

Yeah

PayPal, here's all the transactions from my bank statements, and then I calculate that out. So then once I got to a point where I had kind of grown out of that, or that became unmanageable, I would say, then I navigated to QuickBooks Online. Because for a long time I was told, QuickBooks is more than what you need. I will say that QuickBooks has some very small additions, depending, like if you're brand new and just starting out.

Tapas.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I will say that Quick Look has some voice that is just a thing to kind of just break up. I understand Quick Look's very radius, there's ways that you can just connect your way to the public. Yeah.

I would just get on QuickBooks right away because there's ways that you can just connect to your bank accounts automatically and have them automated and for a very low fee every month. So anyway, I had gotten to start using QuickBooks and I thought that was really slick that I could have all of my accounting in one place. So then naturally I started accepting credit card payments, ACH payments directly through QuickBooks because that's where I started invoicing. And then Karen, you and I started talking, I think, and I did notice that I was spending

Thank

thousands of dollars in credit card fees every year in order to take payments. And I'm one of those people that I just kind of take it as a cost of doing business, right? Because how many other people would not be able to do business with us or would do less business with us because we didn't take credit cards? So that's my opinion. know there's a lot of opinions out there about it. Some people

Mm-hmm.

I even know vendors and team members I work with that they do not accept credit cards in their businesses at all because there's a fee. So I have to pay them, know, ACH direct deposit. That's their business. But ultimately you and I started having a conversation and I'm like, I just don't want to give up the convenience of this. And you're like, no, no, no, no. There are solutions that plug into QuickBooks that will process the transactions outside of the system, sync with the system. So it's very, very seamless.

And I can tell you guys that I save hundreds of dollars every single month by processing outside of QuickBooks. I still do all my invoicing in QuickBooks, but the payments are actually processed by a third party software and everything just syncs perfectly. So, Karen, do you want to elaborate on any of that?

Mm-hmm.

It sounds really simple, doesn't it? And it almost sounds too good to be true. But it is really that simple. What's that?

We're not making this up, folks. I said we're not making this up.

No, no, and we have a couple of different platforms that we can use to do this. Actually, we just got two more platforms that can do this and every platform that we have and every solution we have has a better fit for certain industries. So once again, one size doesn't fit all and I have a huge toolbox for depending on what somebody needs. So but the ones that we're talking about right now really are as simple as a quick connection to QuickBooks online.

You create an invoice in QuickBooks. It gets picked up automatically by the other system. It gets emailed or texted or there's a different maybe notification process that it's going to be auto build on or that your card is going to be automatically hit on the due date. And once that payment is made either by your customer or it's automatically run on the due date.

it's going to mark as paid and reconcile automatically back to QuickBooks. So you're not doing any reconciling. You're not doing anything. And if you want to see what's been paid and what's not been paid, it's really easy to go into that system and go, here it all is. It just syncs back and forth. It's beautiful. And it really is that easy. It really is. Yeah.

Technology is great. Yes, absolutely. So I just shared one of the tools that I use and I probably don't talk about it a whole lot on the podcast just because people are looking for things that involve, you know, productivity and, building teams and things like that. So you guys got a glimpse behind the scenes of kind of how some of the accounting is run behind the team. But Karen, I would love to shift gears and give you an opportunity to talk about

What are some of the tools and things that you use to help you run your business?

Yeah, so

From a tools perspective, I love my, well, I guess my stuff back. do use QuickBooks online. I wanna say I use it, I don't use it. My bookkeeper uses it. QuickBooks has a way of making smart, QuickBooks has a way of making smart people who love math like myself feel not so smart.

Yes, great clarification there. So we have team.

I was like, no, I'm not dealing with this. So I have a bookkeeper, but with that, we also use gusto, which handles like all of my tax filings and my, you know, like the quarterly tax filings and stuff like that. handles all that automatically as well as my payroll. So I really have little to do every month because those two things have like freed up my time tremendously. It's been, it's been great. My CRM that I use is Zoho One and that's been

huge for me because I can customize it how I want. It's got different components. It more and more I'm starting to use it and dive into it. Sometimes it's a rabbit hole for me because again, I like problem solving and I like finding solutions and Zoho one gives me all of that.

And you have that coding background also. So you kind of have like ins and outs of how this all works.

Yes. Right, right, and so I love it and sometimes I have to remind myself to not get too distracted, but that's OK. is that CRM has been very good for me and then I also use OmniFocus, which is a Mac based software. It follows the GTD or the getting things done rules to kind of keep track of that stuff and keep track of projects and where I'm at with certain things and.

That's been really fun to use. I've used that for years and it just keeps getting better and better. I don't know if there's a Windows version. I know that for the longest time it was a Mac only, but you know, look it up. Maybe there's been some changes and then my final one that I've just been using a ton lately and I'm sure Melissa can guess what this is.

actually just thinking I'm like, if she doesn't bring this up, I'm going to

Chat GPT has been incredible and I don't want to use the cliche. It's been a life changer or you know, but it's been powerful beyond imagination and I know that I'm only like you know this much into it, but it's helped me do some things that I was just struggling to do and content I was struggling to put out. Excuse me, itchie nose.

It's just, it's wonderful. It's so good with the prompt and I mean, I got into the pro version for like what, 20 bucks a month? It is worth that and more every month. So that was definitely probably one of the best things I could have added to my software toolkit that I use on a daily basis.

Yes. I don't even know if we can go into the rabbit hole of chat GPT, but yes, just to reiterate Karen's point, I also have the pro version of chat GPT. She and I have been working with the same business coaches, you know, on and off over the last couple of years together. And so they kind of got us into it and showed us like, here's how you can actually really get it to understand you and your company and put it to work for you. And so I think you and I do text regularly.

No.

on like, hey, I just use chat for this. And it's like something, you know, the other person hadn't thought about or like, how did you get chat to help you come up with like a daily routine? like, well, here's the prop that I use. So we do have these conversations regularly. Yeah, 100%. And I even use it not even for some of these bigger things, like certainly these bigger things, it just helped me to create a new referral program that we're rolling out.

and some of these bigger business initiatives. But it's even where I can copy and paste an email that somebody sent me and say, Chat, here's what I want to respond. Like, here's my take on this. Here's how I want to respond. Can you help me draft an email? And granted, I don't just copy paste it and send it. I'll tweak it. But just to get to the point where I am editing and not drafting it from scratch saves me so much time.

Yes.

100%. Well, Karen, I realized that you and I could probably have this conversation for an additional two hours, and I didn't even get through all the things that I wanted to ask you about. But I wanted to give you an opportunity. So we've been talking about really tools for the business, the overarching theme that we're talking about today, different solutions, payment solutions are a huge part of that. So Karen, if somebody was listening and they're like,

Yes, I actually might be overspending on processing fees and I didn't even realize that that might be the case. How can they get in contact with you? Because I know that you are awesome about just being very transparent and having conversations with people about like, here's what you're paying now, here are some of the options, here's what you might be paying if you make a switch. How does somebody get in contact with you to have that conversation? Because it's totally free.

worst case scenario, you're going to tell someone, you know what, I think you're on the right track. I can't save you any money. Or maybe it's here's your opportunity and it's entirely up to them if they want to move forward with that process or not. So no strings attached. No, it doesn't cost anything. How do they have a conversation with you just to get an outside perspective on what's going on?

And we'll have it in the show notes as well. Yes.

He he.

Yes.

Right. Yes, that reassurance. And I do love that. can't emphasize enough, like this is not a hard sell. I feel like, you know, I have, especially, I get this more from my bank than anything else. And I love the bank that I'm at. I won't disclose like who it is or whatever, but they will have a business banker call me every once in a while. They certainly send me emails, stuff in the mail, like, switch to us for your credit card processing and you're going to save a thousand dollars a month. Well, how do you know? First of all,

Yes, but it's like, but it's something that they're constantly putting in front of my face and I'm not interested. But in this case, you you're not going to be repeatedly calling people, emailing people, sending them things in the mail. Like it's just a conversation. You are in full control, the prospect, full control of, you know, the way that we work together.

Absolutely. Well, Karen, it has been absolutely delightful to have you on the show today. Like I said, I didn't even get into all the things that I wanted to ask you about, but I love how the conversation just, again, kind of evolved into different tools and things that are working for us that we absolutely love to grow our businesses. To our audience, thank you so much for tuning in. I really hope that this was helpful for you today. Again, maybe you picked up some ...

ideas for how you might be able to run your business operations more smoothly or to reconsider like, how am I getting paid by my customers? Am I getting paid quick enough? Am I offering enough solutions? Are those solutions costing me? How much are they costing me and all of that? So I hope that this was a good catalyst for maybe reconsidering and having some of those conversations. So I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More, where we're going to talk about tips, tools, strategies to grow your business beyond you.

Have a wonderful day everyone, bye bye.