How to turn your passion into a business! | Biz To Biz Podcast | Episode 237

You are now watching the Biz to Biz podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Rodney Dangerfield of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman.

No respect, no respect.

In, in today's podcast, we're going to be discussing how to turn a passion into a business. Might not be the greatest successful business, but it'll be passionate. You'll be passionate about it. Hopefully you'll make a little money along the way. How you doing, man?

I'm doing good. Little bit busy this week. You know, that's good. Making the year go by fast. How's your week going?

Fantastic.

All right.

So yeah, man, what's your, what's your big passion that you'd turn into a business?

So I already did it. So I want, you know, I loved cooking and I worked in restaurants and I wanted to have my own restaurant. Probably wasn't, I made some money, so that part was okay, but I didn't, wasn't able to I was, you know, I was able to do what I wanted. My restaurant that I had in Boca was named one of the 10 best restaurants in Palm Beach County, so that was pretty cool. And, uh, you know, I got a lot of reviews in the newspaper and things, but I wanted to make the restaurant bigger because I may— I should have shot a little higher from the beginning on a larger space, but money was an issue. And, uh, I wanted to make the restaurant bigger so I could have out, you know, liquor, full-blown liquor, because I didn't have liquor. I just had beer and wine. And, uh, that was— that probably held back on, like, additional revenue. So when I tried to expand, I ran into a bunch of problems, and then Ended up in the credit card processing business. So, you know.

How did, I mean, how did you go about getting your restaurant started?

So, I mean, well, I was in the restaurant business.

How long ago was this?

So I opened my restaurant, I moved back to Florida in '92, I opened my restaurant in—

So this was like 30 years ago.

Yeah, 30 years ago, '95. Yeah, it was a while ago. Yeah, I'm doing this for a long time, so it's '23, '24, '25. So yeah, around '95. Yeah, I was out looking at, uh, space, you know, spaces that were former restaurants, and I found a couple of spaces, and, uh, and I just went for it. Took the, I didn't need that, this one particular space, I didn't need a lot of money to go in there. Just the money for—

I mean, 30 years ago.

Yeah, 30 years ago. Well, you know, if you have a landlord, you know, today, I mean, I'm watching these, there's one restaurant guy on Instagram or TikTok or whatever that I watch, not a restaurant guy, restaurant broker. And there's, you know, and I watch for restaurants going out of business 'cause then new people will come in. You know, if a landlord's got an empty restaurant and all the equipment or most of the equipment's still sitting in there, you know, and it's sitting there empty for a year, right? Mm-hmm. You know, they could be a little desperate to get somebody in there and give them a few months rent. And you're in the door. And so, you know, get a, you know, you can get some credit from different places maybe. And, you know, I was able to leverage some of my, you know, past relationships 'cause I was in the business and I was able to get the business started on a shoestring. You know, you know, I was doing a little catering beforehand, but it's, you know, restaurant business is a rough business. Any business where you have a physical location with— you're going to have overheads, you're going to have rent, taxes to deal with, employees in the restaurant, all the payroll taxes that go along with that, insurances, business licenses. So that's one thing to consider when you get into any kind of a business is if it's in a physical location, what are those bills gonna look like? So that particular spot, I didn't have a big nut to crack. So it worked out pretty well for 3 years and then it, lease was up and I wanted to get the spot next door so I could expand and get liquor, and that just didn't happen. So I was like, not gonna do this, and I was out.

There you go.

Yeah. And then I got in this business totally by accident, you know. But someone, you know, people have a passion. I mean, they start businesses all the time, but you got, you know, you have to, you know, you just— but today I think it's a little easier to start businesses because there's so many things you can sell online, right? You know, but then you still have to think about how are you going to market that, you know, how is that going to translate? Like, oh, I'm going to go design some cool t-shirts use like Printful, right?

I mean, I, I don't know if that's a great business model right now. I think with the t-shirt idea, the concept is you need to find the demographics. You need— there's a lot of— you need to do your research. Oh yeah, I'm just saying, like, I'm just saying, it's going to print 2 shirts and then starting a Printful account, you're setting yourself up for failure.

I get it. No, I'm just saying that you see a lot of people trying to do these kind of—

yeah, I mean, print on demand, you know, I mean, yeah. But I don't know, for me, I, I think like one of my passions, uh, is like health and fitness, and I've been really doing some research on how to like, you know, get in into that. And, you know, the first thing I would say is for like, if you want, you know, if you are passionate about health and fitness and that's something that you look at, the certifications aren't that cheap. I mean, they're not that, they're not cheap, but they're not like going to college expensive either. So to get like a personal trainer license, start your YouTube channel, you know, train one of your family members for free or something till you see you got good video content, create your, all your social media channels, design yourself a logo, you know, build yourself up and create a brand around it. A friend of mine, Chuck, his brand is called Rebirth and his hashtag is #GettingCutWithChuck. You know, it's just, it's smart. It's friendly.

It's catchy.

It's catchy. And then he started a whole meal prep side business to that. So not only are you his personal trainer, but he's cooking the food for you too to keep you lean or to get you, you know, if you're trying to bulk up, you know, and he's creating content for all that constantly. You know, he's doing it every time he goes to the gym, 3 times a day, at least. So like he's creating content and storylines between behind it. You know, he was overweight, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, man, I mean, I think that's probably one of my next, I want to, you know, I don't know how exactly what I would do with that, but the The personal trainer thing looks pretty cool.

Yeah, you see a lot of these like smaller like gyms opening up. Seems to be like a pretty big trend. Like whether it's yoga or like boxing or a 40-minute workout, you know, like these circuit training gyms. And it was like popular probably like 20 years ago. Kind of faded out. Now they seem to like popping up a lot.

CrossFit gyms, you're talking about?

Yeah, but they're small. It's not like the size of LA Fitness or—

Oh yeah, no, but they're still— those are places that are expensive.

Yeah, that's what I mean. You have a physical location. CrossFit, those guys go into like a warehouse. They don't even care. There's no air conditioning.

No, but yeah, I think that's a, you know, That's one way, Ryan. And cooking, like Allen was talking about, if you're passionate about cooking, you know, the meal planning, that's a huge business right now because people like have to work like 7 jobs to live. So like the meal planning videos, I mean, business that's really taken off. I know a bunch of people who are doing that and I'm not saying just like come buy a plate, you know, on some hood stuff. I mean, like, real organized. They're in, you know, plastic containers.

Yeah, that you can heat up either in the oven or the microwave, right? And, uh, yeah, I've seen a bunch of new companies doing that. One place took out a storefront near my house, and you can go there and they have different ones— keto, Weight Watchers, right? You know, whatever you're following. They don't make anything there. It's just the just a storefront setup so you can come pick the stuff up.

One thing that I'm, I've been, I'm almost done. I just need to, to put it all together and like spend a couple, I need to spend some time on it, is my cookbook. Um, I'm literally, I have like all the recipes. I just need to put it together in, in a, in a book form. I need to sit down and do some research on how to do that., or I could just ask AI to do it for me too and probably just do it that way, but save myself some time. But yeah, I mean, like, if you're passionate about cooking and you have a bunch of family recipes, you know, I, it's just a little, that's a whole nother lane of revenue I think that you could do along with, you know, the meal planning, um, stuff like, you know, opening a restaurant or a food truck. That's That's, I would say that would be like a next step maybe. Not everybody can afford to go and do that or has the credit to do that, so, you know.

The meal prep business is pretty big. There's a few, you know, I see a few companies, you know, advertising that and they, you know, they do different, you have to kind of like figure out like what's the, like we used to have a client and they did, trying to remember, the Zone Diet. That was their thing, was a particular type of diet, Zone Diet. And they were, you know, everything goes in cycles with all these, you know, keto, Zone Diet, whatever, no carbs, gluten-free. So they had different, you know, they had different plans, you know, and then they, and then, you know, they went around and delivered it. To your house so you got your food every day. Then there's other places that I see, like they deliver it for the week, so, or the half a week. 'Cause you know, with the price of gas, you gotta take that into consideration. You know, how are you gonna do that? You know, or are you gonna go like maybe where you have it in a warehouse, your kitchen in a warehouse somewhere, and then you set it up where, okay, you can come by between this time and this time and pick up your food. Of course, you know, people would do that too. And then you don't have to have delivery drivers. So you gotta think about how to set the business up for, and a lot of people have these, you know, set up these ghost kitchens.

I wouldn't deliver anything. I would say that's probably a bad idea considering the cost of gas right now. I would do pickup. Like, that's how you would, you know, how you would get your food if you're, if I was, if I, if that was me, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be driving to people's locations. When I, I follow a couple of meal prep people in Fort Lauderdale, um, and they all have pickup. It's not, it's pickup only. It's, they're, you know, they're trying to deliver some food. I mean, that's just insane. Um, But yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, those are good, you know, passion businesses for me anyway. And then my third one was gardening. This is something that I've been really racking my brain on and how to monetize. The first one, obviously, you know, you probably, you know, you set up your YouTube channels and all your social media handles and you just create the content around your garden. And then, you know, from there you could start selling seed packs, get into some custom soil, you know, like the soil you put your own proprietary blend of soil, you know what I mean? I like to call it Black Gold.

I think it'd be interesting, like if someone had a garden business And the garden business was like growing fruits and vegetables, and then you would— like, people could contact you and then you go to their house and you set it up.

They're already doing it. It's called permaculture gardening. It's something I had talked about a while ago. Yeah, there's a bunch of people doing that. It's really popular actually. And in— I don't know, not so much down in South Florida. It's really hard to grow in his zone. I forget, 5B or something that I'm in. So it's really only trees that you can grow down here. The vegetable season is really small and limited. You basically got like January to May there. I mean, not saying that you can't grow fruits and vegetables in South Florida. Don't come for my head. I don't have, you know, the— I do have the area for a small greenhouse. I actually bought one, but the instructions, it's just so terrible. So I haven't been able to figure out the poles, the putting the poles together. It's really, yeah, it's really actually very frustrating because it was expensive.

And yeah, like where my daughter lives in Iowa, everybody there is into like planting a vegetable garden, right? And they have a small, you know, a small window of time, you know, fall and then the summer, and then it's over. Rocky, stop that. Sorry.

So yeah, I mean, I think gardening, gardening is, it's tough, but I think there's still a lane, um, 'Cause then you could go into like creating garden beds and you can, you know, DIY people for, you know, they're trying to set up small garden beds in their backyard.

What about those like hydroponic things where I see like people like have a tower and they're growing it on a tower?

Never looked into it. I never really wanted to grow food hydroponically. I always wanted to get it dirty, get, get into the soil and that's, you know, that's just me.

No, I get it.

Yeah, listen, vertical farming is huge. I've talked about it before. There's a nonprofit in Milwaukee called Growing Power and shout out to Will Allen. He's a guy, he, I don't know if, He's definitely led the vertical gardening movement. Um, yeah, he's a great guy. Anybody listening to the podcast, do your Googles on Will Allen. Rest in peace, bro.

Um, there was a company down—

loss for Milwaukee, man. It's— well, he passed away. That shit sucked.

There was a guy down here that was trying to like take over like vacant office buildings.

Yeah.

And he wanted to put hydroponic gardens in the office buildings.

Smart.

He was raising funds for that.

Maybe the cost of food wouldn't be so high right now.

So. Well, it would be close.

That's why I'm passionate gardening. I'm trying to figure out a way to cut my grocery bill in half. 'Cause yeah, there's that. All these things are, you know, ways of making money. So I think that Out of all of them, my number one, you know, passion would probably be the gardening. And so, like I said, I've been really trying to figure out ways to monetize that. There's a few guys I follow, his name's Pete. I'm gonna mess his last name up, but it's Green Dreams, something like that. Something like that. He's from Florida. He's up north though, so he's got a lot more of a growing window. And he's, you know, he's made a living out of it. He plants the, what you're talking about, going around and setting up food forests in people's backyards.

Right. I think it's got, you know, it's really popular like in places where you can really grow a lot. It's kind of hard.

More space that they have up north too, right?

Yeah.

Down here, I mean, I have a lot of space, but the property I'm on is just— it's just the layout is just ridiculous. I, I don't know, you know, whatever. I didn't build a house.

So listen, like on my house, there's just like— I just have like one little spot of grass and then there's like one side yard in the back. There's no room. And on the side, there's not that much sun throughout the day, but I've no— and the ground is really hard too, for like where I—

Well, you can't plant anything in the soil down here. You need to bring your, you need to grow your own soils, like I like to say.

Yeah.

You have to do some mulching, you get some compost and all this other going on. Like there's a lot. To it. Um, that's why, that's why I was saying, like, I think I'm kind of on to something with the, with the, uh, soil, right? Because one, one bed of mine is just crazy, it does numbers, and then the other one is just, eh, it's not really— you can— because I use a specific like blend on this one and on this one I just kind of used what I had and I can see the difference.

Okay.

And big difference. Big difference. So, I mean, yeah. So passion into a business, you know, like I said, it's, it's, it's a tough road. I think you're on— I think just like Allen was saying, like, you know, his restaurant was only in business for 3 years. You know, his passion was cooking. Um, so, you know, you got to be prepared for the long haul, and, you know, there's a lot of ups and downs that come with business.

You got to also kind of think about like, okay, well, how am I going to grow the business? You know, how are you going to like start, and then how's it going to grow? And, you know, you know, how can you, how can you maximize the revenue that you're gonna do. And you know, today you gotta look at, I mean, back then compared to now, 30 years ago compared to now, cost of labor is through, you know, 10 times what it was. So, you know, you have every, all of that has to be figured into your equation of what you're gonna do. And I think that's what attracts a lot of people to these e-commerce sites. To figure out, like, but you know, if you look at, like, I was looking at some, an article somebody wrote about Shopify, and it was like, so out of every 10 people that sign up for Shopify, maybe only 1 or 2 make it out of there because people don't— they get frustrated building the site, or they get frustrated about how to hook up the, you know, the products or how— where they're going to get the products from. One of the most difficult things now is, uh, like a lot of people were trying to buy stuff from Temu.

Yeah.

And get it shipped here, but 6 to 8 weeks, people aren't going to wait for that. You're just going to get a gazillion chargebacks. So, you know, somebody was— we were discussing that in a in a group meeting I was having with a couple of credit card processors. And we were talking to guys in the processing business, talking about that fulfillment. You got to have— you need your fulfillment to happen in like 7 days maximum, 10 days maybe. When you're stretching, the farther you stretch it out, the— that's one of the things you got to think about in a business.

Absolutely. I mean, scaling a business is, you know, that's why, you know, when I'm describing like For instance, the health and fitness area, you know, because personal trainer, you know, that's a guaranteed income. You can set that up. But like, you know, you're building up all these other things, like you could with your video content and, and your workout programs, you know, you can all that stuff you could sell, right? You can have a subscription service. You can set up, hey, monthly, you'll get 4 different workouts. You know, as we progress, you know, you will switch it up, et cetera, et cetera. Then you got the nutrition plan. That's a whole something separate. Your merch, that's something separate. And then eventually maybe your goal is to have a gym, you know, like, well then, you know, you're building up all these other revenue streams and all these other things. Hopefully you're making some money and then you can start doing the, the research on finding the proper location, size, et cetera. I would say go small at first. You know, that's just me.

Do it on the— my brother always says, he's an accountant, whenever you're trying to do something new, do it on the cheap.

Yeah.

Like when we started the podcast, we did it on the cheap.

Right.

And as we got going, we put more into it.

Yeah.

So, you know, that you have to do the same thing in a business, you know. Like when we started, when I started this business, you know, how you start out and on a shoestring budget, you know, we took a gamble, bought a bunch of credit card machines on a credit card and hoped we'd go sell 'em and pay for it. There you go. And you know, sometimes that's what you gotta do. Right, right.

Yeah, I mean, all those, you know, these ways, You know, there's a lot of people have a lot of passion, you know, I mean, whatever it is, you know, bike riding, you know, if you like bike riding, start with how to repair your bike, you know, bicycles I'm talking about, you know, like how to repair flat tires, you know, get your YouTube channel going, start a bike group. In your neighborhood, so you're going on bike rides, you know, organized, and then, you know, you start—

Yeah, you don't hardly see a bike shop anymore.

Not down here, where I'm from, there's a bunch of them. Yeah, there's actually one like right downtown that's really cool. It used to, the mall, it used to be a mall downtown in Milwaukee called the Grand Avenue.

Right.

Malls are dead all across the country. There's not really a mall. Even down here they call it a mall, but it's just a bunch of shops outside. So that's not a mall to me. Anyway, Broward Mall, there is a mall, but, well, Sawgrass is a mall.

It's massive.

Sawgrass is a mall?

Yeah, it's inside and outside.

I guess. More like— Yeah, I don't know.

I think it's become more of an entertainment area with the amount— so surrounded by restaurants now.

Yeah, but there's, you know, I mean, whatever your passion is, there's definitely some sort of way to turn it into money, a moneymaker. There's always an angle that you can take to figure out a way to make some money out of something that you love doing.

Yeah, start small. Start a— like, I had a friend of mine, his, uh, their— his son learned how to fix like cell phones. So he learned how to fix cell phones, buy the parts like really cheap from China, right? And, uh, knew where to get it all, and he just started fixing cell phones in his apartment. And now he turned it into a whole business, has like a couple of employees, and They'll go pick up the, this is a really funny thing. Like people have their phone, but then they don't wanna, they don't have time to bring it. So they like work something out with like Uber drops off packages. So you can call Uber, they'll come pick the phone up, then they come drop it off to him.

I think that's messed up. I don't like the Uber doing the delivery. That's just, I don't know. They're just taking, they're cornering the market. They're monopolizing the market. I don't, I'm not a fan of it. I'm not a fan of it at all. Uber should stick— they should— I don't— I like the Uber business model at all. I prefer taxicabs, right? So anyway, man, that's the podcast. If you got any, you know, passionate things that you're, uh, looking to turn into a business, hit me up. I'd love to chop it up with you, give you some advice. You know, I've helped start many businesses, launched multiple businesses. Failed at a lot of stuff, you know, but hey, I got the knowledge and the wisdom to keep going. So if you would like to, please subscribe to this channel, hit the like button for us one time, and share the content to your people. Peace.

Carpe diem. Peace out.