Allen C. Paul - God And Gigs
I see you, you are serious about your creative craft. You're loyal, you're responsible, and you strive for excellence. Only problem is you're still not seeing the hard earned financial rewards that you deserve. And it's all because of one huge, but all too common mistake that creators are always making. Here's the sad truth. There are people out there right now who actually want to pay you and they literally can't because you made it too complicated for them to actually pull the trigger.
Think about that for a second. How much money have you possibly left on the table because somebody was ready to hire you, book you, or invest in your work, but the path to paying you just wasn't clear? I know because I've dealt with the same thing and creators run into this time and time again. We make people jump through hoops to figure out how to pay us. And then we wonder why the money isn't flowing. Here's the good part. Getting paid isn't about hoping, it's about building a system.
And I'm going to walk you through three specific actionable ways that you can get that system set up. If you're new to the podcast, my name is Alan C. Paul, and this is the God in Gigs Show where we help you to become the creator that you were created to be. And by the end of this episode, you're gonna know exactly how to make it easy for people to pay you so you can stop leaving money on the table.
Allen C. Paul - God And Gigs (01:24)
Three ways to make getting paid as a creator much easier. so many creators have
God-given gifts but feel absolutely clueless when it comes to actually setting up a system to get paid. Now you're probably, if you're a musician or an artist like that, that does a lot of gig work, you're used to getting Zelles I have had so many people that I actually have to pay right now who simply say, hey, just Zelle me. And you'll find out a little later why I have an issue with Zelle.
Why I have an issue with a lot of these payment systems that are just like the banking, hey, just send me this, send me a PayPal, send me that. And again, you'll see why there's nothing specifically wrong in terms of not getting your money, but there is so much left on the table when we don't have a system in place as creators to help us keep this organized. And here's the honest truth, when you're not...
Clearly setting up a payment system Most likely there are people who want to pay you and can't That is the scary part thinking about how much money? Have you possibly lost? How much one of you possibly lost because you have not set up a payment system because when they were ready to pay you they couldn't figure out how to and
And when that situation arises, most people say, well, I guess I can't get this thing. guess I can't get this product. I guess they're not available. I guess I can't book them. And this comes down to stewardship. And I know it seems strange to pivot right to what God says in his word, but it's super true that Jesus was never not putting forward the point of being smart.
and why it's and using money and finances and business as an example of how the kingdom works. So even though it seems strange to suddenly bring out the Bible when we're talking about payment systems, it's also very clear that Jesus was teaching about the parable of the talents. Each of these men that got, you know, five talents and then the only one got two, the one that didn't waste it, both of them got into the marketplace.
and were able to easily, shouldn't say easily, but they were competent in making money using those resources to make more money and to double on their investment. They wouldn't have been able to do that had they not had a easy and clear system to collect the funds that they earned. And it goes over and over in scripture where,
The Bible says, hey, the worker is worthy of his hire. All of these things, you're worthy to be paid. So let's start there. Please don't be one of these people that let other people talk you into thinking you shouldn't be paid, that you should do everything for free. God is not honored by you ignoring the fact that you should be paid for your work. If it's not ministry, if you've agreed to a price, if this is not something where you've decided to do it out of the goodness of your heart, there should be a payment involved.
You should have contracts. You should be getting paid. But then the how you're getting paid is the next step that we want to get to.
So, number one is to set up your payment processor. Now, you might ask yourself, what is a payment processor? And by the way, I'm not a financial guru. I'm not a financial planner. I am not a
Marketing or money specialist. I am just someone who has done this so I want to make sure I help you to do it as well So that's the first question. What is a payment processor? Well, it's pretty simple Who processes or takes the money that people pay you? Who collects it who puts it and it could be like I already said something simple like a Zelle like a bank transfer But it could also be something like Trisha mentioned
a actual CRM customer relationship management system or a payment operator that operates billions of transactions like Stripe, like PayPal, excuse me. I believe PayHip is another one. ⁓ There's so many that I could think of, but the key is all of these organizations have one purpose, to collect money and hopefully,
to give it to you when you're ready for it. That's more important, obviously, but that's one of the things I want to make sure we get right to the point up. If you don't know your payment processor, if you don't have a Stripe account, if you don't have a PayPal account, if you're maybe you're doing things through Cash App, that's technically a payment processor as well. But once again, I'm to tell you why I want you to shy away from these more.
consumer-based processors. And here's the first reason why I want you to get away from Zelle. I want you to get away from Cash App. To a point Venmo, I use Venmo, but any of these ways of collecting payments usually involve something that kind of separates it from business. As a matter of fact, Cash App, I think they have a version for business now.
But Cash App doesn't even want you to use it for business. Oftentimes they say like, actually got my Cash App account blocked because I had the wrong, think it was LLC and it was like the wrong kind of LLC. And they actually took it down. They dismissed my account. So it was super annoying obviously, but it was also assigned that maybe Cash App isn't as business friendly as I thought it was.
And I would say that for a lot of these other things, Zelle especially. Zelle is not a separate payment processor. It's just a way that banks transfer money to other banks. And so the problem with that is, once again, that as soon as you start to try to Zelle in business, you don't have what you'll see later as good a tracking system. And you're really just using it as a consumer. And it's so easy.
to mix those payments unless you have a business account, which is something we covered in last week's discussion of organizing your business. By the way, if you missed last week's live stream, probably a good idea to go check out that one before you even listen to this one. Cause as soon as I talk about business banking accounts, then you're going to realize that, wait, I need to have that first. Yes. You need to have a business bank account first just to set up a payment processor. But the one that most people use, the one that I use, at least in the entrepreneurial space,
Stripe and so you might say okay. what is stripe? Well stripe is once again the back end of Your payment systems and even if you use something like convert kit I said convert kit kit flow desk MailChimp some of these other payments that go through either mailing systems Usually they connect on the back end to stripe so You can have your own account with stripe which I do
And here's the cool thing about having Stripe as your backend and a payment processor that can work with multiple different websites and multiple offers. I get to see a dashboard with Stripe that has all of my different businesses. And if I log into this one and it's connected to Stripe, I get to see the finances from that. If I connect to this business, but they're also connected to Stripe, I can see that. I can see multiple businesses and multiple streams of income.
All tracked and where the payments go inside one place And that's one of the key things about a payment processor that you want You want to have a place where all of the finances are visible or obvious? You know what fees are being charged. You know all the things once again the problem with having a Banking processor that's not really your processor is that you're really not sure of that You don't want to have a system where you don't know exactly what business
is earning the money, where the money came from, direct credit card information that's saved, that's a key one right there, a payment processor saves the credit card information or the debit card information. But if someone is just Zelling you, you don't know their information and you don't have it saved. So there's no payment process where that information is saved. So what you want as a business owner, creator of business, is you want to have access to that payment information.
Now, once again, payment processors can be go through all these different backends as well. I have one for my membership. If you have, me a coffee, buy me a coffee, I think works through either PayPal or Stripe. So I don't want you to feel like you have to have a Stripe account. The key is you need to know how does the money funnel into my bank account besides people just sending me money. That's not a payment process. Well, it is, but it's very unorganized one.
and one that you can't trace, one that doesn't have credit cards or anything like that saved, and one that usually is more of a consumer, ⁓ more of a consumer solution than it is a business solution. So that's number one, okay? So we wanted to set up payment process. And once again, there's so many options that the key is not necessarily which option you use, it's what that option does for you. And so you want it to be a business solution because we're talking about creator businesses.
All right, after you set up your payment processor and you have a connection with one of these, the next thing you want to do, this one is super. I felt I didn't even want to write it down, but let's just be honest. Some people do not realize that if people do not have and a link to pay you, they're not going to pay you. And if you have this long PayPal,
or long link of, go to www.this.pay, most people are gonna be like, I can't remember that. I don't know. And the same thing happens, by the way, with Cash App and usernames. Because people will be like, oh, Cash App me at blank, blank, blank, blank, blank, blank. And I gotta find your phone number and I gotta link your phone number and make sure that it connects. come on, guys.
The harder you make it for people to pay you, the less you will get paid.
So that's why I want to make sure we talk about having that payment link once it's set up with your payment processor.
I hope you guys can see now why it's so important.
to have some kind of system where it's easy to pay. Where people can find his website, where people can say, hey, click here, click here, click here, you're done. So the checkout process, Amazon has made this impossibly easy, right? You don't even have to like log in anymore. You can just tell a smart speaker, hey, I want to buy this. Your account information is already there. It charges it. It sends it to your door frictionless.
So how can we as creators create frictionless payment systems? The best way once again is to make links and buttons super easy. And the real only way to do this, where all those options are available, is to have some type of website integration, something like the kit, a flow desk, checkout. PayPal is also good at this. But again, my key of this is,
to have a easy to find checkout system. Okay? Again, if you go to people and you're like, hey, cash at me here, do this, do that, you're just gonna find more friction. And the more friction there is, the less likely that people are actually going to buy. Okay? So you want to have number one, the skynetist review. I like going over this just to make sure I didn't forget anything. Because I feel like these are incredibly important steps.
First is to set up your payment processor. Once again, you can go through PayPal, you can set up a backend of Stripe, you can use a PayHip, but having a place where people, where your money will be held, and then it's transferred to the bank. Then after that, you make your payment options easy to find. Check out easy to do it like this when you have kit. You can check this out at guidinggeeks.com slash kit. By the way, if you're interested in trying kit out, especially,
when it comes to their commerce, because that's what I'm using here is Kit Commerce. Okay, but we do have to think about one more thing. After you've got their payment links, easy to find. And after you have a payment processor set up, we have got to do this and you might think, this is not as important because it's already cut the money. It's super important that you track your payments and automate the followup. So let me tell you a little story of why this is important.
Musicians we deal with this all the time with people paying us just by check No invoices are sent. We're just waiting for money and the most annoying thing for all of us when it comes to that is When's the check gonna come? When are they gonna pay? I'm waiting I'm waiting And I'm waiting and there is no indication
when the money's coming. That is the worst feeling in the world because you know you are owed something and yet the only way for you to get paid is to keep going back to them and texting and calling and musicians. If you guys are in the building, you know what I'm talking about. We are notoriously bad at this, setting up systems are being paid. This is why I'm really, one of the reasons I'm doing this live stream is because I want to end the...
Assumption that we should only be paid under the table with cash all that stuff Which doesn't really validate our profession and I'm talking to all creators as well If we don't do things more like business people business people will never respect us like business people and so when we simply say ⁓ Just you know write a check whatever and we don't have an invoice. We don't have a contract We give people the permission to say, okay. Well, they're not tracking it so I can pay it whenever
And I'm not going to get an invoice reminder. It's not a net 30. It's not a net 60. I don't know. You know, they're really care when it goes, I'll send it whenever it's That is the net result of not having automated followups and tracking payments when you're paid and knowing how much you were paid and why you were paid for it. Once again, this is why I'm railing against being paid by Zelle. I'm railing against being paid through just bank transfers.
because I don't think it incorporates these three things. It's not technically a payment processor. It doesn't make payment links easy and it does not allow you to track your payments and then make sure if you don't get paid, automate the follow-up to make sure that you get paid. So once again, I could probably do this through an example. I could say through our membership, got in Gix 360.
If there's a problem payment, I don't have to worry about it. Mighty networks sends an automated feed up fat follow up. And then if someone doesn't pay eventually it says, okay, well your membership is no longer active. And I don't have to worry about that. Same thing is true with a lot of the membership subscriptions through kit. It will send an automated follow up. It'll say, Hey, your, your card was declined. Something happened. All of these things are based on the
follow up not being you having to chase customers down. Even the relay, think relay, which we use for our business making, will do a automated follow up if you ask it to to send an invoice again, if somebody didn't pay it. That is a key element of getting paid because we all know if something happens, it's out of sight, out of mind. People don't remember to pay, they forgot, you sent the thing that many didn't go through.
You need to have that automated so that you can actually get the money that you're due. And you know, it's called receivables for a reason. You're supposed to receive something. So that's one of the things I want to make sure that it's very, very clear. You've got to track your payments. You got to use a business banking software. You got to use QuickBooks. If you don't know QuickBooks, if you don't think you can learn all that, either look for someone who can be your bookkeeper, hire one, or at least do it digitally. I definitely use systems like a Hurdler, like
Nav that I'm going to talk about a little later so that I can keep up with my payments and like see who did what and know my expenses and know my income. But the key is you've got to track it. You've got to track it. So this was an important discussion. I hope this has been helpful. I want to go ahead and go one more time through all three of these statements. Set up your payment processor, preferably one outside of your bank where you can have a place where all your payments come through. Then make your payment options easy to find.
Make sure that you know where you're supposed to be paid. Make those links or buttons. Or if it is something online where people have to like go into, I don't know, maybe they see like a QR code, whatever. Make sure that is very clear that people can see which options they have to pay and they don't have to go looking for it. And then finally afterward, track your payments and automate the follow-up. And a lot of software will do this for you. But once again, the idea is not to chase people down for money, but to make it easy for them.
to follow through and pay you.
