Starting from SQUARE ONE: How I Would Start Over in 2026

If I had to start over in 2026 in business, this is exactly what I would do, how I would go from level 0, nothing, I don't have a business, to getting my business off the ground, level 1, to then scaling and getting all the way up. I am currently on level 5 where I run, we've done about $45 million in revenue. We have $300 million of aggregate portfolio AUM between our companies and how we are trying to scale to level 6. Which is running a multi-billion dollar company. And we'll share all the in-betweens of level 3, 2, and 1, at least how I design it and how we've gotten to where we're at right now. So let's zoom in down to level 0, which is what I call get my base. I met with a kid that lives nearby me right now and he wants to get into business, but he currently has about $1,500 to his name. He's working a job about 40 hours a week. And is trying to get a business going. I said, dude, you got to get a base beneath you, which I define as 3 to 4 months of money saved up for rent, food, basic expenses. And by the way, you can cut expenses as well. So cut your expenses and try to increase your revenue. What I told him, I said, right now, if you just got a second job, he works about 35 hours a week. I'm like, you could work 70 hours a week. You're 20 years old. You really want to do this? You're hungry? He's like, yeah, I'm hungry. I said, okay. Let's get a second job. You could literally double your income. He makes about $3,000 a month right now on one job. I said, if you got a second job, that would jump to $6,000 a month. And I said, it's not forever. This is just for a few months to get your base beneath you so that we can move up to level 1. Now, big caveat, I'm speaking to someone who is young, starting in business. I know people have other crazy circumstances and maybe can't do that, but either way, I would try to get my base Beneath me if you can. There's a chance you can't, and maybe you just need to skip to level 1, which we'll talk about right now. Now, level 1, this is where things start to get fun. This is what I call fail fast and fail cheap. Many people, including myself, think up business ideas and we sit on them for so long and we think about them and we don't know quite what to do. There's a great book that talks about this called The Lean Startup that says fail fast and fail cheap. We're going to write down anywhere between 30 and 50 business ideas. And maybe you can even do this in section 1 where you're getting your base. And yes, that many business ideas. You need to have that many ideas to get enough where you can whittle it down to 1 to 3 ideas that you think are excellent. What we're then gonna do is fail fast and fail cheap. What does that mean? We're going to see and test out these ideas very quickly. We don't need to sit on or think about an idea for 6 months. There's no rationale for this. I had a great mentor in college tell me this, like, Bridger, you can test out any idea you have in about 3 weeks or less with about $500 of spend. So you got your base down, put a budget, $500, and a timeline of 3 weeks or less. So this kid I was mentoring yesterday, we were on a phone call. I said, yo, he's got this idea. He wants to do pressure washing for semi-trucks and go clean their trucks. He's like, I think I can make decent money doing this. I said, awesome. I said, what are you doing about it? He goes, well, I was gonna think about it, maybe go buy a pressure washer, maybe I'll try to get some clients. And I said, stop, stop. Don't buy a pressure washer. Like literally today, right now, not later. Go to the truck stop, make some phone calls, see if people would be interested in even buying this thing. Say, hey, I plan on being here Saturday morning all day. I'm gonna clean some trucks. Can I put you in the queue? I'd love to have them clean your truck on Saturday morning. And they might give you some who's and some how's and tell you if there's competitors or other places. And maybe you go, wow, there's a lot of people who do this. I'm gonna scratch this idea off my list. Or they're gonna say, yeah, Saturday sounds okay. How much do you charge? You go, well, how much have you paid the other guys? Well, we're typically $150 a truck. You say, awesome, I'll do it for $110. And start queuing up orders for Saturday morning for you to go and clean trucks. And now today's Monday. Between Monday and Saturday, if you get 6 to 10 trucks lined up for Saturday at $100 a pop, that's $1,000 that you're gonna make on Saturday. So take some of your base, Go and spend $400 to $500 on a good pressure washer, good materials, etc., and show up Saturday and go do that first group of truck drivers and then ask for referrals. You could validate this whole business idea within 4 days with less than $500 to see if it's a good idea. Now again, we're here to fail fast and fail cheap. If it doesn't work, let's just say people don't like what you're selling, you can't— for whatever reason, you can't figure it out— cross it off the list of 30 to 50 business ideas. Cross it off and then go on to business number two and start again Monday morning and say, "All right, business number two. We're going to do window washing and we're going to go down the line and I'm going to test out if I can get clients on Monday and Tuesday that I'm going to come back and fulfill on Thursday and Friday." And you're going to see if that's a viable business, and if not, you're going to cross it off the list. You were going to fail fast and fail cheap all in level one. Now I default to service-based businesses here because service-based businesses are easy to get going. You don't have to get some product out of China. You can just start today. A few examples. Like I already mentioned, cleaning, detailing trucks, window washing, going to rich neighborhoods and saying, hey, do you have old things in your garage you wish you could get rid of and sell? Hey, I will take those. I'll take pictures of them. We'll sell them on the classifieds and whatever we make, we'll split the profits 50/50. You got some old skis or some boots in there that you need to sell? Great. I will sell them for you. Cleaning out dryer vents. Great business. Door-to-door. Hey, $50, your washer and dryer, you probably got some clogged up dryer vents. I'll bring my Shop-Vac. We'll clean it all out. Landscaping, great entry-level job. College parties. If you're in college, start pre-announcing a college party. Go and see if you can get places to rent out for a few hundred bucks for a night. Get a DJ that'll come do it for free because they're trying to get the up and up. And bam, college events and parties is how a lot of entrepreneurs started with their first few businesses. Again, service-based businesses I think can do very well in phase 1. Now, this kid that I was mentoring yesterday, he says, well, Bridger, I don't want to do that forever. Like in 5 years, I don't want to be washing trucks or cleaning windows. And I said, who said anything about 5 years? And I responded with, you're asking the wrong question. Again, this is fail fast and fail cheap level 1. He was getting all worried about step— we do this all the time— step 97. He's like, well, in 5 years on step 97, how will I scale this and how will I help people do this? And I said, dude, who cares about step 97? We're on step 1, 2, and 3 right now. The whole goal of level 1 is for you to go make about $10,000 to $50,000 that you can set aside in your bank account to further increase your base. No, this is probably not a forever job, but what it does is teaches you the ropes of business. It teaches you how to sell, how to just get things started and going. It teaches you all the great lessons of fail fast, fail cheap. I did this with my first 6 businesses my first 2 years of college. I did Chinese tutoring and a bunch of other businesses that helped me understand the levels of business. This teaches you the ropes of how businesses operate on a very basic level, and I think are very necessary to go ahead and get better at 2, 3, 4, and 5. The whole goal of level 1 is to learn the ropes of business and also get you a larger base to then move up to level 2, 3, 4, and 5. All right, now on to level 2. This is where things start to split, and the split happens here. Number 1 is you just start to scale what was happening in business 1. There's a chance you just hit something really well. You start to hire more people, start to build a company around that. Great. As you're in business, you'll start to see new opportunities or new business ideas that you had no clue even existed before you got to level 2. It's like walking through the fog and things start to reveal themselves to you as you progress. Now, this is where you start exploring new verticals with extreme amount of growth. And this is how I approach new verticals that I want to play much bigger in. Number one, what are the macro trends around these businesses? Are there huge waves pushing in a direction? Back in the early 2020s, we saw online info marketing was a huge wave at the time that people were doing very well in. Other things right now like robotics, AI, blockchain are huge waves hitting. Can you position a business in front of those waves? Secondly, how much margin are in those business models? So I'm taking a broad bird's eye view and coming down to, okay, macro trends. Now, how much margin are in those businesses? Are they high margin businesses that have a lot of growth potential? I don't want to play small anymore. I want to start playing bigger because I'm moving on to level 3 in business. Number 3, where are customers being underserved? Again, as you walk through the fog, you'll start to notice maybe as you're power washing semi-trucks, you'll realize other problems that truck drivers have that are underserved markets that you can then serve them at a higher level. And then number 4, I make sure these businesses have one of the 4 pieces of leverage in the business. And there's only 4 types of leverage in every business. They are number 1, media. When you make one piece of content, it can go out to millions of people. Media is a huge piece of leverage in business. Number 2, money or finances. Having lots of money allows you to have leverage or do more in business than you could have done before. Number 3 is labor. Having lots of people or foot soldiers allows you to do a lot more in business than you could have had before, have leverage in business. And finally, the And then the last one is what they call code or tech. You can write one piece of software that is then printed millions of times over, and it gives you lots of leverage in business. I make sure every business I have, to summarize, is following a macro trend, has high degrees of margin, has customers who are underserved, and deploys one, if not all 4 types of leverage in this business to the nth degree. Degree. This is where you start to scale a business and potentially split and find a new vertical. And again, further with this, on the scale side, you're adding marketing, sales, and other infrastructure in your business. This is level 3. This is where you're starting to go from, you know, if level 2 was $50K to $1 million, level 3 takes you from $1 million to about $10 million in revenue. Now, this is where I have been at with Funnel Launch for the last few years, was level 3. We were doing a lot of these things. We were adding margin. We were scaling, marketing, sales, and other things in our business, which in the last about 18 months led us to get into level 4, which is where you start building infrastructure in your business. Infrastructure meaning you are building out a second tier of management. You're having managers who lead other people, even third tiers of management. It's starting to separate from you. You're building out large-scale softwares and other processes within the business that makes the business Repeatable across an organization. No longer can you affect every sale and every transaction. You're starting to build lots of infrastructure here, which again can scale you to $1 to $10 million. This is what we did at Fund Launch for the last few years, which is a lot of work here and really not that fun. Building infrastructure is not fun. I had to evolve as a business owner to really nail level 3, which has led us now to level 4. Now, 2 paths again on level 4. You can— if you have a great product market fit, you can just keep scaling. In our example, we found we could not scale really past level 3 without making drastic changes in our business. There's a great saying that I love, which we are employing a lot right now on level 4 to get to level 5. And again, level 4 is going from about $10 million a year to $100 or even $250 million a year. The quote is, millionaires focus on marketing and billionaires focus on product. What we have found on level 4 is we had to completely Reinvent our product to hopefully scale to level 5, hence why we're building Funnel Launch AI and a lot other different systems within Funnel Launch. We employ all the great things that we've learned earlier, making sure we have large amounts of leverage, hence code and tech. We are coding a lot of cool stuff right now. Our other fund has just raised $30 million of capital. We do some YouTube content, which gives us media. And to be frank, we haven't got that good at labor. Maybe we'll employ that here at the end of level 5. 4. Furthermore, we use the things of fail fast and fail cheap. We are going to build products with our customers and test them rapidly before deployment. Level 4 is where you start taking big shots at things that could really grow and take your company to a billion-dollar realm. At level 4, you have to recruit great talent. One of the big focuses of mine right now is recruiting who is coming into our business. I am trying to find The smartest individuals that I know of. And I'm trying to entice them to leave their comfy jobs at their businesses to come work for us because of the potential of what we could grow into as a business. At this point, I am meeting with venture capitalists, maybe for their money. In our case, we're bootstrapped. We have some money, but I want to get their feedback. I'm meeting with large-scale mentors to see if the products and the ideas we have match. What these people above me on level five or level six have done before, and if it matches what we're doing today. Now maybe we'll make this video in a year or two, and I'll let you know how level five and level six and hopefully level ten that we get to in the next few years goes. But this is how I would start over in 2026, specifically down getting off of level zero to level one is massive, and moving out beyond there in the levels of business. If you like this video, send this to someone you know that you're scaling your business with. Please like and comment down below. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next video. Bye bye.