How To Start a Business With No Money in 2026

All right, welcome back to the channel. Today we're gonna talk about how to start a business with zero, yes, zero dollars. And if you own an existing business, how to buy someone else's business or a competitor's business, again, with zero dollars. Now my name is Bridger Pennington. Welcome back to the channel. Our current company, Investment Fund Secrets, done over $10 million in sales. We primarily help people start, launch, and scale investment funds and syndications, but also just help people in general with finance and business laws and rules. So with that, let's hop down below to the whiteboard of truth and justice. Now, many of us right here think we need to just work really, really hard and grind and build from the ground up and start and sometimes take on venture capital. And then you do this little thing up that comes up here. This is called, by the way, the J-curve. This is where you take capital in, you infuse capital into a company, you work your tail off, and hopefully Here, there's this point where you start actually making money. Right here is the moment where you actually are profitable, and then you go from there and you sell for $1 billion in your company. So a lot of us entrepreneurs, we stay up late at night and we think in our brains like, what's that perfect, amazing next Mark Zuckerberg idea that's gonna be the next coolest thing that's gonna be a billion-dollar startup? Now that's great. If you have one of those, go after it, go do it. That's amazing. But there's a lot of us that don't have that next crazy Elon Musk idea. However, you can still be an entrepreneur and still make oodles and oodles of money doing simple, boring, traditional businesses that you can start again with zero money. So let's dive into it. Now there's 3 main ways to get into any business. Number one is build, like I just mentioned above. You can partner or you can buy. Most of us entrepreneurs, we think about the build side, but also you can partner. Being an early part of the team, maybe 5th, 10th, 20th employee at a company, can give you shares or equity in a company. That does very well and can still make you tens of millions of dollars upon an exit. Additionally, you can go find other people who are building a big company that need one or two skill sets that you may possess. And by the way, many of those skill sets you can develop learning from YouTube just like this. Facebook marketing, Google marketing, TikTok marketing, how to do SEO strategies, how to build a message around a product, how to build an affiliate team, how to go get partnerships. Those are all relatively easy soft skills that you can develop Learning from freaking YouTube. Okay? And you will be a valuable partner on those teams. The next one down here is you can buy. Now, most of us here think, well, I don't have the money. This is how to start a company with $0. How can I go buy a business? That's only for traditional big-time old investors. Yes, that's traditionally true, but also there are other really cool ways that you can actually buy into existing businesses without using any of your own cash. Capital. That's what I want to talk about more in depth today. So I want to share with you guys a cool example from one of the guys inside of our group. They did this with Amazon stores. Now you've probably heard online people that are building Amazons or stop buying into an Amazon store, right? Well, this is what these guys did. Instead of going out and building their own Amazon store from the ground up, they would go find and buy existing Amazon stores. So what they did is they went up and set up a fund syndication, which essentially is a pool of capital. They pooled money together from investors and they raised Let's just use an example of $250,000 they raised from investors. And by the way, if you want to learn more about funds or syndication, we've got videos linked above and below this video. You guys can learn how that works. I won't do that for this video, but it's actually not as crazy as you think. You can do this. Regular people can go out and raise this type of capital. So they raised this money, they took the capital, and they went and purchased, let's call it 5 Amazon stores at $50,000 apiece. And they bought these stores from young kids who were more than happy to sell their store. Man, they're 23 years old. I'm gonna sell my store for $50,000. That sounds amazing. They would go buy these stores. They grouped them together under one brand, which gave them economies of scale. They could actually scale this company together. Got more favorable terms with Amazon. Over the course of a year, they scaled up this business so well. By the end of 12 months, those 5 stores were worth a combined $3 million and were net free cash flowing $350,000 a year, which is actually really cool. And by the way, these guys are smart guys. I'm not going to say they're not. They're smart. They know what to do with Amazon stores. They know how to scale them. But they scaled them up to this level. They took that cash flow, paid back all of their investors plus a 25% return. Investors were ecstatic. Man, you got us a 25% return. Thank you so much. And they returned the principal. Awesome. And guess what? These 2 entrepreneurs, They now controlled 100% their own, a $3 million portfolio of Amazon stores that they purchased without using any of their own money. Let me say that again. They used investor capital to buy it and within a year had paid off these investors 100% back with a 25% return, giving them $3 million of true wealth they had made with $0 down. Another route they could have done is they could have refinanced out of this deal. They could have gone to the bank and got an SBA loan on these stores, paid back their investors, and now they have a loan that they pay back to the SBA, but usually at a really small rate. Sometimes they're 2% to maybe 4% or 5% they need to pay back on that loan. That's something they could have done as well. Kind of cool, right? And if you're like, Bridger, there's— I don't know how to buy these businesses. I don't know how to get started. Again, there's videos around here. A really cool website you can go check out is Empire Flippers. Empire Flippers is a whole place of online stores just like this. You can shop and see how much stores are selling for. Which may also give you a few ideas for up above here on how to build some stores that you could sell to somebody else on Empire Flippers. Now let's scroll down to the next example here. Let's say you have an existing business, but you want to scale. Maybe you want to buy out your competitors, buy out some other people. So I want to tell you a cool story. There's a guy in our group, he came and talked to me about this. He had a gun shop, a gun store, and they were doing about— let's just, let's just give round numbers— about $10 million. Okay, he's like, Bridger, I want to expand, I want to scale, but I don't want to give up equity in my company. Because typically you see, you know, Shark Tank where they say, I'm going to give you 5 million for 20% of your company. They don't want to do that. The traditional routes for here is you give away equity or you take out debt on your business, right? So equity would be the Shark Tank play. Debt would be more like you go to the SBA or you go to a bank and you get out a $5 to $7 million loan and then you can go buy out your competitors. Also not a bad option if you get it, but oftentimes it's hard to get. They want personal guarantees from you, the founder, which is kind of— can kind of be a little scary. So what we did with this guy is I told him to set up a fund. And again, we got other videos on how to do funds, but he set up a fund. This fund, he raised a few million dollars from. So I'm going to do green for money. Money flows into this fund. He uses that fund to go buy a competitor store. And what he did was his gun store would be the primary owner and they would split returns on this new asset they purchased. So again, he didn't give up any of his current equity. He only did a split on the new gun stores. I think what he did was a 5% management fee. So he got a fee for just managing and running the gun store paid back to him. And then him and his investors, they split the profits 80/20, 20% to him and 80% to the investors. Now, if you do this correctly over a short period of time, you could own and control all the gun stores in the entire state or even western United States. And that was his plan, what he was doing and going after, which is kind of cool. That's why you might see there's certain restaurants or gun shops that own tons and tons of the same locations that are all across the state. That's not just by happenstance. That's not by just slowly growing. It's by doing strategies like this, an aggressive M&A strategy that you go out and take out your competitors by buying them and/or partnering with them on their stores. So again, you can start or scale existing businesses with $0 of your own. You can leverage other people's money through a fund or a syndication. Again, go check out other videos on our channel of how to do that, how to build it, how to raise the capital, how to have the track record. I know, The questions in your brain, Bridger, there's no way I could do this. Just go watch the videos. I promise I break it down for you. I'm a product of this. I've launched 3 investment funds. I've raised millions and millions of dollars doing this. I'm no one special, okay? There's just usable strategy you can use over and over and again to do this model and create incredible wealth for yourself. You guys are amazing. Please comment, like, subscribe below. See you guys in the next video. Bye.