Your First Million Was Hard — Now, It’s Time to Scale

In addition to being an adventurer, athlete, philanthropist, business consultant, and serial entrepreneur, Brad Weimert is also an author. He founded Easy Pay Direct in 2009 to provide online payment gateway services to e-commerce businesses with annual sales of between $1 million and $100 million. With over 60,000 merchants on the platform, the platform serves a wide range of businesses, including clients like Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Hal Elrod, Grant Cardone, and Frank Kern.

It has been remarkable to see how Brad Weimert strives to create extraordinary experiences that allow him to learn and grow, both personally and professionally.

Brad is passionate about challenging himself physically, cultivating meaningful relationships with like-minded, passionate people, and working with non-profit organizations like Explore Austin. And Brad Weimert recently launched the Beyond a Million podcast.

Relationships should be a priority.

“I think it serves you to be deliberate in some capacity when you’re trying to drive an outcome,” Brad says. “And for me, there’s a big conversation here around a sort of what you’re looking for in your immediate future and what will serve you in your immediate future versus what will serve you in the long term, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years from now.” When it comes to relationships, Brad is all about values and how people work, what their internal structure and narrative are, how they see the world, and what they see when it comes to work and family.

He also looks for things that inspire him. “Sometimes those are things that I’m really good at, and I can relate to, and sometimes there are things that I don’t really relate to at all, but I’m impressed by. And they aren’t a part of my life, but I’m impressed by them.” You have to balance figuring out when to prioritize the things for now versus planting seeds for the future and saying, “Hey, this is a person we don’t have anything to do with financially.” And quite honestly, it’s inconvenient to carve out time because I feel so overwhelmed and busy.”

Nevertheless, I think there’s something there for me to add value to them, and they can also add value to me, he adds. “We should spend time together now.”

In short, you should be intentional about who you spend time with.

By assessing and managing risks correctly, additional opportunities and profits can be derived.

Business risk is anything that could prevent a company from making money or reaching its goals.

An internal risk might be someone in a leadership position who has intensified the risk for the business. A threat from the outside could be the price of materials, competition from other companies, or new laws. However, a well-planned risk management strategy can help you navigate these external risks.

To identify potential risks, you need a risk management plan. In order to manage risk, you’ve got to identify it in order of importance, figure out what causes it, and figure out how it could impact the company. You also have to figure out how to prevent it, what to do if it happens, and figure out a contingency plan.

Brad had no problem with that.

As Brad explains, “my world is about risk assessment, and so Easy Pay Direct offers credit card processing for largely e-commerce businesses, but a variety of different types of businesses.” I think about e-commerce risk all the time and what makes it risky or not in e-commerce, he says. As an example of how I explain risk in payments, I say, “Look, when somebody sets up a merchant account for you, what they perceive to be risky is not necessarily the actual inherent risk in your business. It’s a combination between that and their understanding of your business.”

And the parallel and the example that I use is if you asked me to invest in a single-family home in Austin, I’d have a pretty good grip on that, and I’d say, “Hey, I can tell you, yes, I’ll do this or no, I won’t base on the numbers.” If you said, “Hey, I’ve got a logistics company out of China shipping widgets to the US, do you want to invest in it?” I don’t have any idea how to assess that, and it doesn’t mean that that’s risky innately. I can’t assess it because I don’t understand it.

Stand out from the crowd

Brad’s business is unique because it handles what bigger processing companies (like PayPal or Stripe) would consider being “high risk.” While bigger companies can set you up faster, they don’t know your business. As a result, you might find your account closed down without notice, or you could get held up on legitimately earned money. Even worse, this could completely shut down your business.

This problem is solved by Easy Pay Direct, who underwrite on the front end and really get to know how your business works. As a result of this unique differentiation, Brad’s company has worked with over 30,000 businesses, including Tony Robbins, Dean Graziosi, Hal Elrod, Grant Cardone, Frank Kern, and many more.

How does Easy Pay Direct manage this risk? “It’s getting to know who you are, what you do, how you operate, what you sell, how you sell it, how you deliver it. And the more that we know, the more comfortable we can be that you’re not going to have a problem in the future.”

“And if we suspect the problem in the future, we can assess it critically before doing something like holding money or closing the account,” Brad says.

Expand your offerings

Are you familiar with a complementary business strategy? A complementary business strategy means that your new business offers products or services that relate to your existing business but don’t compete with it.

For Brad Weimert, this meant launching his amazing podcast Beyond a Million.

Our EPD pipeline, Easy Pay Direct pipeline, has tens of thousands of businesses that come through, but we only serve a small fraction of them, he explains. I can only ask so many times, “Do you want a merchant account? Do you want a merchant account? How about now, you want a merchant account?” But I am not providing service to them.

“So, we’re launching a podcast called Beyond a Million, and it’s tactics and strategies from seven, eight, nine-figure entrepreneurs that they’re implementing today once they have an established business,” Brad says. Now that they’ve reached a million in revenue, what’s working now, that wasn’t working when they were starting out? In addition, it focuses on sales, marketing, operations, technology, and wealth creation.

With the podcast, Brad Weimert has been able to interview talented people from various industries, including sales, marketing, operations, technology, and wealth building. Additionally, it’s an opportunity for him to interact with people I’m fascinated by and would like to learn from. In addition, he can provide extremely valuable information to business owners that get to hear it directly from the experts.

“And what’s cool about my position is that we see all the financials in the back end, so we know who’s actually performing and who’s not,” he adds. “And that’s both a really fun thing in my life and a challenging one because privacy is such a big deal, and it’s such a big deal for both Easy Pay Direct as a company and also me as a human.”

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Sami Aksu; Pexels; Thank you!