23. Points Sharing for Co-Owners and Business Partners with Dr. Andrea Mabry

Welcome to Point Me to First Class, the only show for employed professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners who are looking to optimize their higher-than-average expenses to travel the world. I'm your host, Devon Gimbel, and I believe that your expenses are your greatest untapped asset if you know how to leverage them. Ready to dive into the world of credit card points and miles so you can travel more, travel better, and travel often? Let's get started.

Devon: Welcome back to the podcast everybody. Today I am very excited to have a guest with me, Dr. Andrea Mabry. Dr. Mabry is a dermatologist and cofounder of Pinnacle Dermatology, a dermatology practice located in Little Rock, Arkansas. As you all know by now, I heartily believe that our expenses are assets when we know how to leverage them to earn lots and lots of points.

business expenses can be an absolute goldmine for points earning. Leveraging your business expenses to earn points is fairly straightforward when you are a solopreneur or the sole owner of your business, but what about when you have business partners or co-owners? When there are multiple people who own a business, the complexity of creating a rewards credit card plan and managing points increases. But there are ways to navigate this so that you don't miss out on using your business expenses to earn points.

that is exactly why I've invited Dr. Mabry here today because she is an expert at creating a rewards credit card and points plan with her business partners to allow them all to benefit from leveraging their business expenses to earn points. Welcome to the podcast Andrea. I'm so excited to have you here. Can you please just introduce yourself a little bit further and tell us a bit more about who you are and what you do professionally?

Dr. Mabry: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. This is kind of like a great opportunity. I get to talk about points and miles with someone who actually wants to talk about points and miles rather than like forcing the conversation on someone. I am in private practice in Little Rock. I have been open about seven years now. It's been a wild ride.

Recently, I got into points and miles. I say recently, within the past year, and I kind of looked at all our personal expenses and how to really maximize the points that we earn and how to utilize those points. But then it was kind of a lightbulb moment where I was like wait a minute. When I'm looking at the pie of expenses comparing my personal expenses to my business expenses, it's like comparing like a personal pan pizza. I have this whole pie over there that's not touched. so then I started the journey of actually implementing this in practice with two business partners.

Devon: So you just answered one of my first questions, which was how many people are we actually talking about here in terms of owning the practice? So there's three of you total. But I'm curious, do you all have equal ownership in the practice? Or the way that you formed your partnership are you unequal partners in that?

Dr. Mabry: Currently, in our current situation, we are all equal owners. We're all 33.33% owners. At one point in time, I had one partner retire. so I was 66 and one partner was 33, but since implementing this, we're all equal 33.

Devon: All right, so I'm very curious because it sounds like you got very interested in earning points, and as you mentioned, using your personal expenses to earn a lot of points, but just over the last year. That you had this lightbulb moment, which I think for those of us who do own businesses, I think it's very common for those business expenses to be significantly higher than what we're spending on the personal side.

so I agree with you, looking at this potential opportunity of points earning can be really, really incredible. But as you mentioned, there are two other people who own and run this practice with you. I'm really curious to hear what was that conversation like when you decided, wait a minute. The business can be amazing for earning points, but did your partners think you were crazy? What was their kind of experience of points prior to when you brought this up? How did you bring this idea up to them? Like, wow, look what we could do.

Dr. Mabry: So I kind of approaching them and saying hey, you should really open up this card as I was doing it for personal expenses. They were not resistant to doing this personally, but not interested in like spending the time to really go after it. One partner had like a Chase Sapphire. She put all her expenses on that and would use it to redeem flights through the portal. So she had dabbled into points.

The other partner had had like a Chase Freedom card since like the 90s, but was not disinterested. They were both like hey, if you want to take this and implement it as long as it's like working functionally and not adding a lot of work to our clinical admin, and you can figure this out, you go for it. You do it. So anyway, so that's kind of the conversation. They weren't enthusiasts, like a lot of people aren't, but they were very willing to dive in. Because they were both in the Chase ecosystem already, I kind of thought that would be a good place for us to start. they were both happy for us to pursue that first.

Devon: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. But where were you in terms of the credit cards that you had started getting for your personal expenses or what credit card points ecosystems were you using for your personal expenses? How did that play into your strategy about which points you thought initially might make sense for your business to focus on earning?

Dr. Mabry: My first credit card was a Capital One card. so prior, trying to figure this out and really dive into maximizing my benefit of doing this, I would just redeem miles on a Capital One portal and cover travel purchases. first started getting into it, I was like I think I need an Amex platinum because that's supposed to be great. like I'd open an Amex platinum.

Thinking back knowing everything I know now, I definitely wouldn't have done the initial cards that I opened. I think my Chase Rewards and building up Ultimate Rewards for Hyatt redemptions and flights and all this stuff. So it definitely fit into my goals as well to pursue Chase.

Devon: So when you were thinking about focusing on the Chase system initially for your business, can we take a step back? Can you give me a sense, first of all, in terms of your business what were you looking at in terms of your expenses? Either on a monthly basis or an annual basis. Kind of what does your business tend to spend money on, and how much does it tend to spend in order to be able to run well?

Dr. Mabry: Yeah, we have a lot of expenses. We have, in total, six providers and two estheticians. Being a dermatology clinic, we have a lot of cosmetic purchases, but we also have medical patients. So a lot of times we do some buy and bill with medications that we use in clinic where you buy them and then bill the insurance for reimbursement of that cost. A lot of pediatric clinics do the same thing with vaccinations. those are huge expenses when they come up.

So for the past seven years, we had used our local bank credit card to put a lot of these purchases on, and we had like a million like local bank miles that we would use and redeem for gift cards to different things to give rewards to staff for pumpkin contests and things like that. That was our only use of it. we were only earning at 1x even with that.

So looking at our expenses, I kind of looked at our credit card expenses from month to month would range widely, but it was usually between about $30,000 in credit card expenses to about $100,000 in credit card expenses per month. that would vary greatly depending on whether we were purchasing medications or if we had some equipment to buy or things like that.

Devon: All right. So clearly, there was some amazing opportunity in terms of the expenses that your business incurs to be able to leverage those to earn tons of points. you had mentioned before that you would initially kind of zeroed in on thinking about focusing on earning Chase points just in terms of simplicity, especially for your partners who already had Chase points earning cards on the personal side. So once you had made that decision to sort of focus in on those Chase Ultimate Rewards points for your business, what happened next in terms of your deciding which business credit cards to focus on? did that all go according to plan once you decided to focus in on Chase?

Dr. Mabry: It did not. in looking at this, I was able to find other ways that other people made it work and kind of created this structure that kind of helped me mentally frame it in the guide that I have where it's like points sharing versus expense sharing. But within that point sharing, I just focused on Chase.

So everything I looked at was like to be a household member. so that was my first hurdle because it says must be a household member to share Chase Ultimate Rewards, and you can only share with one person. I even called Chase and I was like hey, I have business partners. Can I not share points with them? Like I've learned, don't call Chase with a question. Call them with an answer that you already know, and say no, this is what I need.

So I pulled out the terms and conditions of the Chase Inc and read it myself. it says on the Chase Inc terms and conditions that you can share with personal cards, a household member, with business cards, a business partner. so when you open a business card you have partners, you have to list what percentage you own in the company. so I went and I opened a Chase Inc Unlimited first because I was like keep this simple. I don't want my clinical administrator to spend hours picking which card.

So we did Inc Unlimited, and now we have some points. I'm like great, let's share them. My next hurdle, you can only share with one person. I even called Chase, and I was like but I have two business partners. I care about them equally, and they want to take advantage equally. They're equal partners, and they should be able to take it as equally. they're like nope, sorry. That's just not what we can do.

So anyway, I just sat down and I was like what can I do? So I figured out like you can have as many people transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards to you as you want. You can only have outgoing one person. So it's the limitation on the outgoing is where they draw the line. So I was like okay, these are all in the account. What I'm going to do is I'm going to transfer two-thirds of the points to partner number two, and then she can transfer one-third of the points to partner number three.

so that way, I think I called it like trickle down points or something. Basically, you just take the points and you divide. If it’s five partners, you send forth-fifths to partner number two, and partner number two sends three-fifths to partner number three, and so on until everyone gets their equal share. that's working for us. Still complying with their terms and conditions. We're sharing business points among business credit cards. The business address doesn't change from credit card to credit card. we can all three share without violating their terms and conditions, essentially.

Devon: Yeah, so that's helpful. So helpful to know that a lot of the major different, especially when we're talking about the major transferable points, currencies. So Chase, or American Express, or Capital One, or Citi, especially in terms of the currencies that offer business specific credit card products. They're not all going to have the exact same terms and conditions in terms of the points that you've stated. Who can actually share business credit cards or apply for business credit cards under what terms and conditions.

Once you do have cards that collect points, they all have different rules around how can you actually end up either combining or sharing or splitting up those points. so I think one really important thing for anyone to consider who is in this kind of business model where it's not just you who gets to make all of the decisions and collect all of the points is to familiarize yourself first with what are these different terms and conditions of the major credit card issuers so that you can pick one that actually works for you in terms of your structure.

Because it's not just about which points themselves do you think would be either very easy for you to earn based on your business expenses, or most useful for you to earn in terms of how you want to use them. But I think this question of just functionally what does it look like for us, as a group, to earn and share points. It's really, really smart to think about what credit card points currency is going to allow us to do that in the easiest way possible depending on what your setup is. Then however, it is that you and your business partners decide that you want to earn and share points as a group. So I think that that was very, very helpful to hear about.

One of the things that you kind of had briefly mentioned that I think it'd be so useful if you could kind of tease apart even a little bit more for us is you mentioned these two terms or these two ideas being expensive sharing and points sharing. I'm curious if you could go into a little bit more detail about what do those things actually mean? Then how is that relevant for business owners when they are thinking about do they want to set up a plan within their business to be able to earn points for their business expenses?

Dr. Mabry: Yeah, so I mean in talking with other people about how they do it, I kind of put all the different methods together into kind of this flowchart. I kind of mentally broke it down into you can share the way expenses go into credit cards. That is partner number one picks a credit card. All the business expenses go on partner number one's credit card until a set amount of expenses are put on that card, and then you transfer to partner number two. then you keep shifting the expenses to each partners card until the minimum spend is put on those, and then you shift back around.

Devon: So in that system, that set up that you were just describing, it sounds like if you wanted to pursue that system that each business owner independently applies for their own business credit cards. So each one of you independently could apply for the Chase Inc Business Unlimited. It's sort of a shifting type of philosophy where, like you said, business owner number A, all of the business expenses, regardless of kind of where they're coming from in the business, all of them go on partner A's business credit card until you hit a certain threshold you've all decided on. Like X amount of expenses or X amount of time has passed.

Then you automatically then shift all the business expenses over to partner B's Chase Inc Business Unlimited credit card, for example. then you just move your way kind of throughout that cycle over and over as the year goes on. Is that the system that you all chose particularly for your business? Or did you pick a different system to use?

Dr. Mabry: There's pros and cons to doing it that way. Okay. Pro is if you have a partner that wants to earn Amex points, they get to earn Amex points. If you have a partner that wants to get Globalist from spend, they can do that. If you have a partner that wants to earn Southwest Companion Pass, like everyone gets to do their own thing, okay?

The downside is every time you change to a new credit card company or to a new credit card, all your billing has to be updated. Your CFO or your bookkeeper or your CPA and then whoever's managing your money also has to import that new account or new credit card into QuickBooks or your accounting software. So there's a time investment in doing it that way, although you have a lot of autonomy in picking your goals for points and miles.

We have decided to implement this system with only two accounts. So I sat down a few weeks ago and talked with my clinical administrator. I was like so we're still paying McKesson and Henry Schein orders with our checking account. Can we use credit cards for that? She was like yes. so I was like great. For these two specific accounts, we can utilize the spend that's pretty much equivalent to the spend that we're doing on the Chase card right now because those two accounts are a lot of our medical expenses. we're going to transfer the card every 50,000 spend basically. Plus, we're having to transfer the cards so frequently that it's like well, we need to increase.

Basically, I took our annual expenses for those two accounts and kind of estimated them for the year and then divided them by three. So I was like we typically spend about $150,000 over the year. so every $50,000, we're going to change. if we need to increase that number because we're changing too often, we can.

Devon: So that is kind of the expense sharing model that you were talking about where you take the business's expenses as a whole and for a given period of time, or up until a certain amount of spend, you just focus all that spent on one business partner’s particular points earning card. how is that different from this idea that you have that you call points sharing?

Dr. Mabry: So points sharing is where you're putting all the expenses on a set of credit cards or one credit card. then you're taking the points that are going on, and you're sharing the points to individual accounts. You don't have to update every single account every time you want to share points. So there's no like updating payments on multiple portals. You don't have to keep updating QuickBooks links and having your office manager or bookkeeper have to keep track of multiple different accounts. You're just taking the pooled points and distributing.

Devon: Yeah, and I think one of the things that's coming up as I'm hearing you talk about this because even though I have a lot of different business credit cards, I am a sole business owner. So you're touching on so many conversations that I, at least so far, have never had to have because there's nobody else for me to have to have these conversations with.

I imagine that for people who are in business structure where there is more than one business owner, that even just that initial barrier of oh wow, this sounds complicated. To have to have these conversations or make decisions when there is more than one decision maker, I can imagine, would discourage some people from even thinking about doing this.

Because I mean, let's be honest, you're a business owner. You're probably spending a significant amount of your time just thinking about running your own business, growing your own business, and the day to day tasks that it takes for you to be in your business. Right? So I don't think there are probably a lot of business owners out there who are thinking oh, how can I make my business or my life more complicated, right? Like, what can I add to it that's gonna make it more complicated?

Because adding in a credit card rewards points earning plan to a business if what your business has only ever done is pay it’s expenses straight out of a bank account or straight out of just one bank affiliated credit card, as you mentioned you all had done prior to this, that creating a rewards credit card plan for your business with multiple partners is going to add a layer of complexity.

so I think one of the things that I'm taking away from this conversation is that part of the work is to decide upfront okay between whoever the point person is or whoever involved all the different partners want to be is being very clear from the beginning about how complicated or how simple do we want to make this plan so that it works for us?

I want to point that out because that might look very different than what your approach is to creating a credit card paying for your personal spend. You can be someone who's very comfortable having a more complex plan for leveraging your personal spend to earn a lot of points, and that may not be the same exact type of plan that's going to work within your business structure.

So first of all, just being very clear about what are the ultimate goals of the different people who are decision makers in this? Based on their goals or what they want to get out of using points, how can we make a plan that's as simple as possible, not only for the business owners themselves, but as you mentioned for the people within the business who might also be responsible for some part of the managing or tracking of paying expenses. Whether that's, like you said, a CFO or a practice manager.

Depending on what kind of business you have, there may be someone, an employee within your business, who does the actual kind of day to day management of making sure that certain expenses are paid with a credit card or certain credit card. So just being very clear with all of those decision makers and the decision implementers just what is the plan? How can we create a plan that's actually going to be streamlined so it's going to work for us.

Because one of the things that I think about, even for people who don't have any access to business spend but they're only focused on creating a rewards credit card and points plan for themselves personally, is that we all have a different threshold for the complexity that works for us, right? Some of us see the benefit in a more complex system in terms of the value we can get out of it. some of us really value simplicity. We don't want to have 10 different credit cards to manage or four different points currencies to manage.

one of the things I think it’s just very useful to be explicit about is that there is no one right way to do points, either on the personal side or the business side. it sounds like in creating a credit card plan for your business and for your partners that whether you were doing it intentionally or unintentionally, you were really deliberate about creating a plan that sort of worked for your practice in terms of just where it spends money and how it functions. But also works for your partners where you didn't come in guns blazing saying that you had 12 different business credit cards that you were really excited for them both to apply for just because it would mean that maybe you could earn a few more points.

so I just wanted to kind of say that for anyone who's listening and trying to think about okay, how is the information being shared in this episode, how is it useful for me? How can I apply it to myself or my business? So that being said, I'm really interested to hear from you. You mentioned that the first card that you all started out with for your business expenses was that Chase Inc Business Unlimited card. Is that still the main card that you all have for your business expenses? Or have you expanded it all out from there in terms of the cards that you've incorporated into your business?

Dr. Mabry: So right now, most of our expenses go on a Chase Inc Business Unlimited. We also opened a Chase Inc Business. We have that one for just gas for our company car and our cable internet goes on there, which is a huge expense every month too. So we have that one for just those expenses. Then everything else, because it's all under categorized spend, goes on the Chase Inc Business Unlimited.

so, between those two cards, that generates most of our points that we then share. Then, again, in the other aspect, the expense sharing, everyone's getting to pick their own.

Devon: What do you mean everyone gets to pick their own?

Dr. Mabry: So in the expense sharing, partner one is going to start with an Amex Business Platinum card. that is what we're only putting, just for us, McKesson and Henry Schein on. So she's going to use that until we hit $50k of expenses for just those two accounts. then we're moving on to the next person. I think partner number two plans on opening a Southwest business card and getting a Companion Pass whenever it's her turn. So we're kind of diving into both branches of this, at this point, with all of our point sharing being with Chase.

Now, when I was looking at this, I did look at the other options. if you're looking at simplicity, Capital One is probably going to be your best bet. that Capital One, I love how easy they are when it comes to sharing. They're just like share with whoever you want. You go live your best life ever. Share with your best friend. You could share with Ryan Gosling. You could call him up and just be like hey, Ryan, hey girl, I want to share some points with you, or I want to share some Capital One Miles. Capital One is fine with it. Like they're just the best.

With Amex, there's some complexity there that I don't think we're going to implement in our practice. It can be done, but we aren't planning on implementing it in the point sharing aspect. If anyone wants Amex points out of our business, then we're going to use it in the expense sharing aspect because it's just easier.

Devon: Yeah. So that is a really great thing to take into consideration is thinking about, again, based on kind of where your business is in terms of its category of expenses and whether or not you choose to go. I love the way you've separated this into those kind of two main points earning mechanisms of expense sharing or point sharing. even the third option, which is kind of a hybrid of the expense sharing and the point sharing.

Of being willing to kind of iterate and build on that plan as you go along, which I think is very useful to think about. Because you don't have to have, as we mentioned before, a plan that is very complicated from the outset. You can start with your number one priority of just how do we begin to leverage these business expenses? How can we do this in a way that makes sense for our business, in a way that's simple so that people are actually going to buy in to participating in this.

then as time goes on being willing to kind of reevaluate and say okay, what's our tolerance now for adding in a little bit of complexity if we determine as a group, as a partnership that the value of adding that complexity is going to be worth it for us. so the plan that might make sense for your practice doesn't have to look like the same exact plan that could make sense for someone else.

But I think having this framework of thinking about do we as a group want to come in and initially focus on sort of the expense sharing type of model, or the point sharing type of model knowing that we can always combine them over time is really useful to know about. So how long do you think it's been that you've actually since you first implemented using rewards or points earning credit cards in your business? How many months has it been for you all now?

Dr. Mabry: I opened our first business card at the beginning of January this year. So I am, by no means, a seasoned expert at this at this point, but I've just spent a lot of time trying to learn how to make it work for us.

Devon: Yeah. over that period of time, I'm really curious. What have you personally seen as the benefit in terms of the number of points that you've earned or that you anticipate is going to be sort of your portion of the points earned within your business?

Dr. Mabry: So with Ultimate Rewards points, and I don't know exactly how many are specific to what I've earned for the business and whatever earn personally because they all just get transferred to my personal card. I've been able to book a trip to Japan and cover three rooms at the Park Hyatt Kyoto. So I mean, that's huge right there because that's a lot of points. I know one of my partners has booked a ski trip, or both of them have actually booked a ski trip at a condo during peak season, and they covered that expense on points. so they're gonna take their family skiing on points and not have to be out any extra money.

so that's just with splitting the points that we would have earned three ways just out of the expenses that are currently going on credit cards. Again, not even including incorporating the new method, changing out the credit card and doing the expense sharing portion. We’ll be able to get additional benefit from that aspect as well.

Devon: Yeah, do you have a sense that you may not be as compulsive as I am about tracking things in terms of what you booked using your points and comparing to if you booked the same thing.

Dr. Mabry: Oh definitely compulsive.

Devon: Yeah, if I had booked the same exact thing in cash, a sense of how much value am I getting from your points. Not so much for your partners because you may not know the details of what exactly they booked and what the cash value would have been, but knowing how you've used your points. You just mentioned this trip to Japan. I'm curious did you do that math of how much value you estimate that you got out of the points that you used for the bookings that you have made so far?

Dr. Mabry: So far, I have done $95,000 worth of travel with points. I am very compulsive about tracking it. So $95,000 is where I am right now.

Devon: $95,000 in estimated value of what you have saved in cash by using your points instead. I know that you said you didn't completely track in terms of what segment of those were earned from personal spend versus business spend because once you combined your points, they all went into your same Chase account. But do you have even just an idea of 10% personal versus 90% business or vice versa?

Dr. Mabry: The majority of that is from business spend. I have transferred out either too Hyatt or to another person, so it would have been to my business partner, about 800,000 Chase UR this year.

Devon: Yeah, which is not an insignificant number of points. so one of the things that I think is so great to really reiterate is just this difference in potential value. Because you talked before about how pre-using your points earning credit cards within your business for your business expenses that all of you put most of your business expenses or the expenses that you could on your local bank card, and that had its own kind of bank points currency.

I am willing to bet that the value that you were getting from your local bank points when you were redeeming them for gift cards was probably not equating to $90,000 or so dollar’s worth of value per partner over a six month span. but correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe you're walking around with like $90,000 of like Subway gift cards.

Dr. Mabry: Yeah, we don't have $90,000 of Amazon gift cards. No. I mean that was an earn rate of one and a redemption rate of one. So for every dollar, we were getting a penny. at this point, my average cent per point redemption is between six and seven. my earn rate is higher than one. So I'm definitely redeeming at a higher rate and earning at a higher than one rate.

honestly, even if it's just 1.5, at this point, these are expenses that we've got to make anyway, and I've just made it easy. It’s literally a click of the button every couple of months. I send two thirds of the points from the business card to my business partner, and she clicks a button. It was a little bit of a process to get set up, but once it’s set up, it's so streamlined and easy. it's just benefit without thought.

Devon: Yeah, and I think that is just such an amazing example of how much work your business expenses can truly do for you when you are in a position of having high expenses, which I think is an amazing position to be in for this very reason.

Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. It has been such a pleasure hearing about your experience and sharing your experience with all of the podcast listeners. before we wrap up today, I'm just curious if you have any last piece of advice that you would give to someone who owns a business and shares ownership of that business with one or more people in terms of how to leverage your business expenses to earn points or how to make it easier for a group of people to make a plan together that really works best for them.

Dr. Mabry: So I think just sitting down and identifying what each person's goals are. One person may really be uninterested in participating at all, and that's fine. Not everybody wants to do points and miles. That will be true even within households just like it's true within businesses.

if you can at least show them that they can get benefit from it in a way and then make it an easy process for the entire business to implement so that no one person within your business is spending hours of their time making this happen. Again, once it's set up, it's pretty streamlined. you're really just using a different credit card than you were previously. it's all linked. it's just kind of an easy way to generate a lot of benefit out of things that you were gonna have to pay for anyway.

Devon: Yeah, and those are amazing tips. Thank you so much for sharing those with us today. Again, Dr. Mabry thank you for joining me. I have loved hearing about your story and your approach to earning amazing amount of points for your business expenses with your partners.

I'm really interested to have you back in another year or so to hear about if your credit card plan for your business had changed at all during that time, or just what new things kind of come into play when you work on earning points within your business over the long term. So thank you so much, again, for joining me here today. I appreciate it so much.

Dr. Mabry: Absolutely. It was so much fun. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of Point Me to First Class. If you want more tips on turning your expenses into travel, visit pointmetofirstclass.com to learn more. See you next week.