If you don’t want to read it, you can watch this video.
This video is all about going to jail and how being a business owner can land you in jail. This video is about a fucked-up subject. I’ll just get into it.
Many many years ago I was coming home from working on Saturday and I got pulled over by DeKalb County Police. I wasn’t speeding. My license plate was fine. I didn’t even know why he stopped me.
When he pulled me over he said, “There’s a warrant for your arrest in Stone Mountain.” I said, “No, there’s not.”
So, I get arrested and I spend two days in jail. I had the bail money but they wouldn’t take it because Stone Mountain had to take the money. My partner tried to find the cop and pay the cop, but he wouldn’t take the money. On Monday morning, she goes down there and pays them and then they send notification to the jail and I get out. This whole time, I don’t know why I’ve been arrested. I had no tickets or anything, right?
So, a few weeks later, we go to court. It was a real kangaroo court. People had gotten tickets for having their car facing the wrong way on the right side of the street. This was the kind of court it was.
They called my name and I came up to the front of the courtroom. The Judge says, “So what are we here for?” I said, “I don’t know.” Then the code enforcement officer pops up and says, “You failed to pay for your business license.”
I said, “I spent two days in jail for not paying a business license when we moved two years ago?” The courtroom got quiet. The Judge got scared. The code enforcement officer would not even look at me. I said, “We moved and this fool over here was actually in the parking lot when we moved out.”
The Judge said, “Dismissed. You should have put your forwarding address.” Why did I have to put my forwarding address when we didn’t do business there?
The reason I’m telling you this is because I’ve been very successful online. There are many people who are intellectually impotent and unsuccessful. Because I was arrested, I have a fucking mug shot online. People like to point that out.
Just to get ahead of that on this channel, I’ll let you know what the deal is. I got a failure to appear warrant for not renewing a business license for a business that had moved two years earlier. Yeah, I’m still tight about it. It should have never happened.
It took them six weeks to refund my money. This was all about money. This is something that can happen in these little towns. If you start a business in a small town that is dependent on business revenue and taxes, you can have some strange things happen.
As a business owner with a physical location, there are many fucked up things that can happen to you. If you have an office and people are coming in for administrative work, you typically don’t run into these types of problems with office space.
If you’re renting warehouse space, there are many rules. Did you know, depending on your space and where you are, many of those spaces aren’t allowed to be open to the public. You can be breaking laws and not even know it. If you have a physical storefront, there are so many “gotchas” with it.
With my main channel, Hustler’s Kung Fu – I tell people not to open up a physical store. If you’re selling products and you can get around opening a physical store, do a warehouse instead and sell as much as you can online. That’s how my partner and I spent our last three or four years before we got sick.
Sometimes as a business owner you feel like you’re always fighting with the government to make money. That’s how bad it can be. It’s really a sad testament to how business is done in this country.
I’ll give you another thing that happened in DeKalb County, Georgia. One of the things they do is layer on a lot of things you have to do to get a business license. When we were getting our license for the warehouse, the holdup was we didn’t sign up for trash. You had to sign up for trash before you got your license.
If you open up a physical location, you have to rent it before you can do anything else. I know of a friend who had his store set up, he was getting ready to open. He had radio advertising and flyers out. Then the fire marshal comes out and tells him his transaction counter does not comply with the American Disabilities Act. He had to rip that out and build another one before he could open.
So, for those of you out there who are thinking about a physical location, talk to business owners in that area whose doors are open already and ask them what they went through. Don’t listen to the government. They will lie to you.
That’s why I tell people to start small. Hustle. Do not get your LLC and business license. Hustle and get cash flow first. Then when you open in a physical location, you have cash coming in. You know how to make money and you can deal with this stuff.
When you close a physical location, take your cell phone and go down and record yourself turning that license in, just in case you need to prove it in the future. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about money. These governments are thirsty for money. They are always going to be after you for money.
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