23 Beginner Friendly Businesses You Should Start In 2026⏐Ep. #255

Welcome to the Kerner Office Podcast. This is Kris Kerner and this is episode 255. Today is December 8th. You're probably listening to this on or after December 9th. And today was a big day for me. I appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast with Stephen Bartlett and it is the second biggest podcast in the world and the first biggest business podcast in the world. And so I assume I have a lot of new listeners today. So I wanted to do something a little different and I wanted to make an episode that would be great for both my existing my OGs, my current fans that have known and followed me for a little while, and an episode that was great for all of my new fans coming over from dire of a CEO. So whether you're new to me or old to me, you're going to love this episode and it will apply to all of you. What I'm going to do in this episode is take all 254 episodes of this podcast and distill down the best ideas, the best learnings, takeaways, guests, everything, so you don't have to go back and listen to all of them yourself. You going to get the best of the best right here. And if you heard all or some of those episodes already, it's going to be a great refresh on some of the best episodes. And I'm going to add kind of my take to these ideas, why I like them, what I don't like about them. And some of these episodes didn't do super well for whatever reason. Maybe they had a title that didn't describe it well enough or something. But the common theme between all of these ideas is that they are approachable for almost anyone to start. Whether you're in the US or abroad, you have a lot of money or a little. So let me intro myself real quickly and then I'll get into the ideas and I'm going to rank them based on how much I like them. So there are 23 of these episodes slash ideas and I'm going to rank them from 23 to 1, one being my all time favorite. Okay, but who am I? I'm Chris Kerner. I live in the suburbs of Dallas, Fort Worth. I have been married for almost 18 years. I got married at 21. We had all four of our kids in our 20s. My wife, her name is Jessie. We were high school sweethearts. She is an amazing person. She's incredibly loyal, incredibly patient with this wild entrepreneurship ride that we've been on and I couldn't do it without her. My four kids are between the ages of nine and 15. I have three boys and a girl. We are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We used to go by Mormons. You probably see missionaries walking around with white shirt and ties. That's us. That was me from 06 to 08. I served my mission in Hungary and it was the most transformative, most amazing two years of my life. Hands down. Our faith is a big part of what we do and we're a pretty tight family. We live on a few acres. We've had animals in the past. We've been in the same house for about nine years. We don't plan on moving anytime soon. I'm a huge foodie. I used to do endurance events running ultramarathons between 30 and 140 miles. I'm basically an all or nothing person. I'm either going to be fat and just sit around and watch TV all day or I'm going to be up and about doing way too much all day every day. I've learned that about myself. And so I try to stay on the right side of the spectrum because I did spend about 10 years of my life obese. All of my 20s I was still building businesses, starting a lot of businesses I talk about in this content. But I just didn't take good care of my health. And at age 31 I fixed that. I lost all the weight. I started running these endurance events and I've kept the weight off ever since. I was born in Utah. As you've probably heard, my first business was selling used golf balls. And it's funny because a lot of the comments on my interview were like, oh, you grew up poor but you lived across the street from a golf course. Yeah, I did. Both of those things are true. Look up park avenue in Logan, Utah. We sold our home for $40,000 in 1998, which was today's equivalent of about $80,000. It's a 70 year old thousand square foot home that was across the street from a golf course, Logan River Golf Course. My dad worked in a greenhouse, a nursery at Utah State University. He ended up getting a job at the Kennedy Space center in Florida. So When I was 11, we moved to Florida. I started going to the beach, making friends, wrestling, dating girls. That's when I met my now wife. I worked a bunch of odd jobs in middle school and high school. I bused tables, I waited tables, I delivered pizzas for Pizza Hut, I sprayed pest control every summer, I mowed lawns, just whatever it took to have some income. My parents got divorced about five, four years after we moved to Florida. I was 15. I lived with my mom. My dad lived across town. My mom now lives in Utah. My dad is still in Florida, living in the house that I lived in in Florida as I was growing up. My parents are awesome people. I have three siblings, an older sister, a younger brother and a younger sister. They live all over the country and I love them very much. My mom waited tables as she raised us at the same Mexican restaurant where I bus tables. It's still there. Ellie and SITO Right on U.S. 1 in Titusville. And my parents taught me the value of being charitable, being kind, being honest, and working really hard. And I'm grateful for them again. I served a mission for my church at age 19. I got home when I was 21. I was a very average student in high school. I was kind of the class clown, but also introverted. If you knew me really well, I was extroverted. But to everyone else on the planet, I'm very introverted. I got home in March of 2008 from my mission. I proposed to my now wife one month later to the day. We had never dated before. We just kind of had a crush on each other from ages 13 to 14. And then three and a half months after that we got married on 080808. I spent hours and hours and hours that summer of 2008 reading books, business books and real estate books at Barnes and Noble in Melbourne, Florida. And I basically took all of that brand new business knowledge and paired it with all of my rejection experience and sales experience and grit experience that I gained on my mission in Hungary. I put them together. My wife was a student at the University of Alabama. I moved to Alabama right after we got married so she could finish her school and I could start school. And I took all that knowledge from those books and I just hit the ground running. We bought a single family home to live in about seven months after getting married. Then we bought another single family home with $8,000 tax credit that Obama gave first time home buyers. We were waiting table at a Thai restaurant together and taking classes. I did my first two years at Shelton State Community College. I got my associate's degree and then I transferred to the University of Alabama. In addition to waiting tables, I worked at the Tuscaloosa county jail as a guard. It was the worst job ever. I also worked for a company called Game Day Tents. I worked for Jimmy John's delivering sandwiches, whatever it took to make ends meet. I started my first real business in Tuscaloosa called Phone Restore. That business has since been sold two times over, but that first retail location is still there a whole 15 years later, which is crazy. And to summarize the last 17 years since that point, I finished college at the University of Alabama. I got an mba, a Master's in Business Administration from TCU Texas Christian University here in the Dallas Fort Worth area. I did that in 2019. And from 2008 to 2025 I've started about 80 different businesses and I've actually documented every single one of those businesses that I've started on this podcast. If you go back to episode 14, episode 21, episode 88, and then there's one more in there somewhere I can't remember, I've spoken about every single one of those businesses. Entrepreneurship is my absolute passion. Content creation is something fairly new to me. I've been tweeting about business and real estate for the last four or five years, but I just started like other forms of content not even two years ago. I started this podcast in February of 2024. I've released 255 episodes at this point. Oh, I forgot to say this. I love emo music from the early 2000s. Brand new taking Back Sunday Manchester Orchestra. I love Tim Robinson the show I Think youk Should Leave and I love working out in the yard. Also you can tell I have ADHD because I'm all over the place. I got diagnosed at 35 I think and it was life changing the diagnosis. I really really really wish I would have been diagnosed earlier, but my life has been immeasurably better since the whole theme of this podcast. I try to keep it tactical, right? I've had a few episodes where we kind of go high level and talk about frameworks and stuff and I love some of those episodes cause I learn a lot from them. But 95 plus percent of these episodes are very specific, very tactical. Use this tool, use this wording on your subject lines. Start this business. Here's how you do it, here's a seven step plan, et cetera. That's how I like for this podcast to be. And it's kind of a double sword because the more tactical a podcast is, the less broad it is, right? So the chance of me becoming as big as a diary CEO is almost zero because it's so specific and tactical and it just doesn't apply to the general population. But it is in my experience the most effective way at encouraging people to start or grow their business. They need real specific steps, real tools so we don't hold anything back. And every time I interview a business owner about their business, I go into it telling them people will want to copy exactly what you're doing. So if you're not okay with that, you're probably not a fit for this podcast. And for that reason, a lot of people don't come on the podcast because if I start interviewing them and I'm like, how much revenue do you make? How much profit do you make? Where do you find your customers? They're like, oh, I'd prefer not to. It's like, okay, nevermind. You know, some episodes we'll talk about five to ten different ideas, hypothetically, not ones that we're doing, but just ones that we think are interesting. Some episodes I'll talk about stuff that I'm actively doing because I do launch a lot of these ideas that I talk about. And then some episodes I'm diving deep on one idea with one business owner. And I only do this when I survey my newsletter. You can join my newsletter for free@tkopod.com and I ask them, hey, here's 40 businesses, niches, ideas, whatever. Vote on five to 10 of them that you want to learn more about. And then I will specifically reach out to owners of those ideas that you guys, my listeners, watchers, followers, whatever, really, really want to learn about. That way I don't hit publish on an idea that just isn't interesting to people. It took me a while to learn how to do that, but that's been working really, really well. I don't do much prep at all for my podcast because I want to go in blind. I'm not a good actor. I can't really fake surprise if I'm asking a question that I already know the answer to. So usually when I go into an episode with a business owner, I know like a couple things. Their business makes X amount of dollars. It only took them Y amount of months or years to make that money. It cost them so much to start it. And the industry is what it is. That's about what I know. So without further ado, Here are my 23 favorite episodes, Ideas, guests that I love the most or my listeners viewers love the most. So if you like any of these ideas and you want to learn more about them, I will say the episode number in the idea. Episode one is my oldest episode. 255. This one is my newest. So you can just scroll down on Spotify, Apple or wherever and we will also, for your convenience, link to all of them in the show Notes So you can go binge them later. Okay. Idea number 23 was episode 55, how to start a six figure side hustle exclusively on Facebook Marketplace. I came across this guy named Alex on Instagram who was making $15,000 of profit every month making simple garage shelves from his garage and delivering them locally. He found all of his customers on Facebook Marketplace. I found this incredibly fascinating because that's a lot of money. He quit his full time job to run this. So that's episode 55. And I actually did a follow up with him just last month. That was episode 250 where he told us how it's been going over the last couple of years. I love this business because anyone with $100 saw and some two by fours can start it. You just posted a Facebook Marketplace and you find customers. It's more competitive than it used to be for sure. But he's doing other unique things like building beds that have storage underneath them and building other things and more custom things and doing garage cleanouts. And business is going great for him and it's going great for all of the people that started a business based on hearing that episode. So that's number 23. Number 22 is starting a drone business. This was episode 229, and my best friend slash mission companion Nick was on this episode with me. And we both independently dove really deep on the drone roof inspection business. And then we came back to this podcast, reported on our findings, talked about what we loved and what we hated about the idea. This was one of the ideas that my newsletter said, I want to learn more about drone roof inspections. I never would have guessed that you guys would find that interesting, but you did. And sure enough, it became one of my top performing episodes. This is a great business because there's a crazy stat in there that I can't quite remember, but like 50 or 60% of like insurance adjusters are baby boomers and will be retiring soon. Also, it's a huge liability. It's dangerous to get on a roof and inspect it. So drones are replacing that. But there's not enough supply of drone roof inspection operators to meet all the demand that there is for these jobs. You can make hundreds of dollars per job. You can get long term contracts with roofing companies, with insurance companies, with commercial property managers. There's just a lot to love about this business and you can start this business for like a thousand bucks. All right, now, my 21st favorite idea from this podcast is going to be episode 226. This is about domain name investing. I Have a friend that I met on Twitter. His name's Peter Askew, and he makes really good money buying interesting domain names and then building businesses around them. So instead of saying, ooh, I have a business idea. Let me go find a domain name to fit that idea. No. He wakes up every morning, he drinks his coffee, and he starts shopping for expiring premium domain names. Vidalia. Onions.com onions.com duderanch.com he'll buy a domain name and then he'll build a business around it. And because of the fact that he does it in the reverse, he has immediate traffic on day one because people are typing in these EMD's exact match domain names and giving him business from day one. He's an incredibly interesting guy. He's eclectic. He does a lot of really cool things. We had a double episode, but I believe the first one was episode 226. And my 20th favorite episode is about laundromats, episode 239 with Tyler Purcell. This guy builds really, really, really nice laundromats in areas that already have a ton of laundromats, because those areas usually have a ton of crappy laundromats. And so he thinks that the more competition there is, the better, because that's a signal that his market already has a ton of people that frequent the laundromat. So all he needs is a better one. Not a different one, but a nicer one, a cleaner one. And yes, it is more expensive. But he is transforming these communities with a laundromat, and they are extremely profitable, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in net profit, each with very, very few employees. Now, this one is kind of an exception because it's not nearly as approachable as most of these businesses. It costs more money to get started. But this episode crushed it regardless, and it's an awesome idea. All right. My 19th favorite episode was about Etsy Print on demand. How to start reverse engineer research and build these print on demand businesses where you sell stuff on Etsy like printables, like sticker designs or picture designs or mugs with custom design on it. I had my friend Cody Schneider on. He's doing this. He talked about using AI tools to create design hundreds and thousands of listings on Etsy and see which ones are winners. Then once you post like a thousand designs to Etsy, 10 to 30 of them start doing well, then you triple down on those 10 to 30 of them. Very approachable, very affordable. You can use a few AI tools to start. This is a banger of an episode, episode 210. All right, I'm going to combine my 18th favorite episode because they're kind of similar. Ish. And also I thought of a new episode, but I've already said 23 ideas, so I'm gonna keep this 23 and not 24, but I'm gonna combine two of them. So my 18th with an asterisk. Favorite episode slash ideas are porch pumpkins and mailbox repair. Okay. Both of these are happening in the front of the house, so, hey, it's my podcast. I can combine these. Porch Pumpkins is owned by Heather Torres. I saw her on Instagram a year and a half ago, and she decorates porches with pumpkins for the fall. That's it. And she makes over a million dollars a year, and she's absolutely crushing it. And this can be done in any market. She finds her customers from organic videos on Instagram, no paid ads and referrals. It's very profitable. It can be done in the Christmas time. It can be done with seasonal flowers. I interviewed another guy that does that in Long island with flowers. The porch decoration business is booming. That is episode 73. And then the mailbox repair episode part B of this one. That was episode 186. And this is another one that my newsletter really wanted to learn about. If you look at Google trends, everyone is searching for mailbox repair, and no one is thinking to start a business repairing mailboxes. I've since spoken to a few different guys that have started this business based on this episode, and they're doing well. Chicago, Nashville, Austin. You put up Google Ads and you fix mailboxes and you make hundreds of dollars an hour. You can sell mailboxes, you can maintain them, you can get referrals from the mailman. There's a lot of ways you can grow this business, and you will not have very many competitors. So that is episode 186. All right, my 17th favorite idea here is episode 196, forestry mulching. I interviewed a guy named Alex who is up in Ohio, and he was a digital marketer by trade. He knew nothing about home service businesses until he needed to get some land cleared. He bought some acreage, and he had about five acres that he need cleared. And guess what? He. He could not find anyone to do it. No one. And he was in Cincinnati. This isn't like the middle of nowhere here. And so he started doing a bunch of research on keywords and traffic and Google trends and SEO and all this type of stuff that would show him how promising this Idea is or not in Cincinnati. And he learned. Wow. Yeah, there's a gap in the market here. And so he started a forestry mulching business. And this business is crushing. These machines are expensive, but you can rent them. To start, he uses YouTube ads and Facebook ads to get all of his leads. His average job size is I think $3,400. And he's spending like a hundred dollars to find these customers. Okay, so he's turning a hundred dollars into $3400 with ads on Facebook and Instagram. It's, I think my third or fourth most popular YouTube video of all time. And it's way up there on my audio podcast as well. So that's 196. And my 16th favorite idea is episode 162, Lessons Learned from Starting 75 Plus Businesses. This was a little more high level, not as tactical. But I really spent hours to think and take notes and ponder and reflect on what I've learned from all these businesses. And despite the fact that it wasn't as tactical as my usual episode, it performed really well and the feedback was awesome. And my 15th favorite idea slash podcast is number 170, how to get a yes from everyone. I interviewed this guy named Stu Heinecke. He wrote a book, a bestseller, called how to Get a Meeting with Anyone. And it is incredible. Very, very tactical on how to find a white whale of a customer or of a business partner or of a vendor. How to get Mark Cuban to answer your emails. How to get really important awesome people to pay attention to you. This was an incredible episode. And my 14th favorite episode is episode 175. This was with my good friend Sam. He's been on the podcast like 15 times. He's so entertaining. He's always growth hacking and building these awesome businesses. And in this episode, episode 175, he talked about how he launched a hummingbird food e commerce brand in like a few hours. Because someone on the Internet said, if it's so easy, why doesn't anyone do it? And that made him so mad and so fired up that he went out and did it. And now he's making thousands of dollars selling sugar water to people that want to feed the hummingbirds in their backyard. I had no idea this episode would do so well because it was just like Sam at his best. Maybe I just take him for granted, but this is a banger of an episode, especially if you're interested in e commerce. All right, now, my 13th favorite episode is similar to number 15, how to get a yes from Everyone, this one's called how to Get Everything youg Want out of Life. It's episode 144 with my friend Jordan. And this is called Permissionless Marketing. It's a lot like how to get a yes from anyone. It's basically how to stand Out. Jordan has always done very interesting things to get the attention of NBA players, of business moguls. And he built a framework around this. How to stand out, how to get attention, how to sell anything. And it is incredibly inspiring. Number 12. This was a solo episode where I just talk about which AI should you use to make money? Which is best at making money? It's episode number 207 and I think this is the one where I put a bunch of the AIs against each other. Grok, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT perplexity. And I had them invest in stocks for me and I actually invested in those stocks. I put my real money into it based on their suggestions and I wanted to see which one was more accurate. I had a ton of fun doing this. I actually made money doing this, believe it or not. And I learned a lot about options trading, which. Caveat disclaimer. For all the lawyers out there, this is not investing advice. Okay, I'm an idiot. But this is really great info on like what AI to use. And my 11th favorite episode is episode 233, Beginner Friendly Ways of Making 10 Grand. On this one I had my friend Brandon on. He's been on about a half a dozen times. And we just rift on cool business ideas that will help you make ten grand in like a very, very short amount of time. Yeah, I think we talked about ideas to make 10 grand in a day, a week, a month, or a year. And this one just jam packed with business ideas. And my 10th favorite episode was episode 228. $3 million a year from tiny AI tools. Here's how you can too. I chatted with this guy named John Rush we met on Twitter. He makes over $3 million a year in recurring revenue from these little AI tools that he built. An SEO tool, a scraping tool. A lot of these can be vibe coded if you don't have any coding experience, which most of my audience doesn't, neither do I. And he just shared his screen and he showed how he's doing it and it was really good. But my ninth favorite episode was episode 203, how to Make a Million Dollars in Six Months. We discussed different ideas. This was me and my best friend Nick. Again, I think by download count, this might be my most popular or third or fourth most popular. It's really, really tactical. And we did what Brandon and I kind of did with the $10,000 idea. We just talked about specific ideas of making a million dollars in 10 months. We got really excited. The energy was high and you're gonna love it. And my eighth favorite episode of all time was episode 230, how to copy businesses and white label them with gohighlevel. So gohighlevel. Com is a website where you can sell software without having to know how to build software or build a website even. And so what I do in this episode is I just go reverse engineer companies that are already white labeling everything they do on high level because it's listed online. And then I go to the web archive and I look at how they got to where they are, how did they grow, how did they find customers, what are they selling, what are they doing differently, if anything at all. And my seventh favorite episode is episode 205, Overlooked Business. The most overlooked business idea you've ever heard of. My friend Kyler, he lives in Utah. He rents out washers and dryers on Facebook Marketplace. He makes $10,000 a month in net profit. It's actually more. That was like six months ago when he told me that. And he's been growing ever since. So he makes over $10,000 a month of net profit just renting out washers and dryers for 60 to 80 bucks a pop on Facebook Marketplace. You can start this with $200 and a trailer. You can rent a trailer from Home Depot if you don't have one. This is probably my most viral episode ever. But it's not number one. Cause it's not my number one. But it's very approachable. And of all the ideas that I've talked about that people have reached out to me and said, hey, I started that. This is by far the most popular because it is so approachable. And Kyler, props to him. He basically invented this industry, right? Washer dryer rentals have been a thing from like Rent a Center and big companies, but it has not been a thing for individuals or for being done on Facebook Marketplace. And my sixth favorite episode is again with my friend Nick. Episode 248, Eight Ideas for your to Start this Weekend. And we just talk about eight awesome business ideas. That's it. And they're awesome. My fifth favorite episode of all time, episode 169. 25 tips, tools, tricks, hacks to use ChatGPT to get the most out of ChatGPT. This is a solo episode. I basically just share my screen and show everyone how I'm using ChatGPT to get everything I want, how to prompt it, how to massage it, how to upload references, what model to use for what purpose. I had no idea this one would do so well, but it is a banger. 169 and my fourth favorite episode of all time. I talk all about VO3, which is Google's video generation software. This is episode 161. How to start an ad agency with AI video generation, how to generate videos with AI, how to use VO3. Why VO3 will slash is changing the world. Why AI video is changing the world. How can you make money from this? Who cares if it's changing the world if we can't start a business from it? So I share my screen and I show exactly how I would do that and how to prompt VO3 to make beautiful videos. And my third favorite episode of all time is all about reselling liquidation items with my friend Shannon. Shannon has been on this podcast about 12 times. I think this was our best performing episode. But if you go on YouTube to my playlist, you'll see all of my episodes with Shannon are on YouTube. Unfortunately, Spotify nor Apple has a playlist feature, so it's kind of harder to sort those all out. But what Shannon does is he goes to websites like bstock.com, which sells overstock, Costco supplies, Costco returns, and govdeals.com, which sells stuff that the government is liquidating. And he will buy pallets of items for pennies on the dollar, like or penny on the dollar, 90 to 99% off. He'll get it shipped to his garage, his house. He'll listen on Facebook Marketplace on ebay. He'll sell it. He'll make a few phone calls and he'll sell it. And this is such an approachable business. Anyone with a few hundred bucks could start it. Anyone with an iPhone with Facebook marketplace access can start this business. So check out episode 156 for that. My second favorite episode of all time is my directories episode episode164. I had a guy named Frey Chu and he builds directories. And I talked about this on the Diary of a CEO podcast. What is a directory? It's an ugly looking website that lists out a bunch of stuff, a bunch of locations. All the dog parks in the area, all the fencing repair companies in the area, all the Thai food restaurants in the area. Thanks to AI, directories are needed more than ever. People think the AI is competing with directories. That is absolutely not true. AI is referencing these directories because people have questions, they need answers and directories are a great way of getting that done. So Frey makes six figures a year building directories. And this is incredibly passive. I don't say the P word a lot on this podcast. Passive. I don't do it because most things aren't. This is like it takes activity to get it started, to get it launched, but then once it's launched, it's incredibly passive. And my first, my number one, my favorite episode slash best idea ever covered on this podcast is episode 204, which is called I started an online business in 56 minutes. Okay. This was posted on August 4th. It's better to watch on YouTube or on Spotify video because it is kind of visual. But this episode got me so hyped up to film. What did I do in this video? I couldn't sleep. I was so excited about AI and starting businesses that I sat down at my desk at like 4:30 in the morning on a Saturday and I started a business from scratch, from absolute zero, sharing my screen the whole time. And at the end of 56 minutes, I had a customer. That's it. A customer that didn't know me. I didn't use my audience. I didn't use any cheats. I used tools that anyone on the planet can use. And I had a customer. Now what was I selling? I was selling an AI voice agent to him as a service. I don't know how to build an AI voice agent, but I know how to use GoHighLevel. So with about six clicks within GoHighLevel, I had created an AI voice agent for a garage door repair business. And the guy's like, I'm in. Sign me up. I was so excited when I got him as a customer because I honestly didn't think that would happen. It wasn't like a faked video filmed over days or weeks. It all happened over the course of this video. And that's why my number one favorite idea right now is implementing AI into small businesses. Period, end of story. AI and or automation. And a lot of my excitement for this idea stemmed from this video from when I took this video. And I fell in love with that idea so much that I actually started a community called Playmakers where there's about 150 people in there doing exactly that. They're starting an AI implementation and or automation business, AI consulting business. You can learn more about it@playmakersai.com it's also linked below and people are finding customers. We have three to seven live calls per week. There's tons of hours of content. There's templates. You can go from a brand new beginner to an expert, all within the confines of this community. So check out playmakersai. Com and if you don't really like that idea but you want to do something with one of these ideas or any of these ideas that I talk about, you should check out my other community called tkowners tk o w n e r s.com where there's about 700 people in there starting their first or their second or their third business or growing their business. It's very broad. We're not going all in on one idea. We're discussing all kinds of ideas. We also have weekly calls with me, I do ask me anythings in both communities every single week. Other experts are in there. We have a Slack group. We have tons of exclusive content. So check out tkowners.com as well. If you've been with me for a while, thank you. I appreciate you. If you're just now finding me from the Diary CEO podcast, welcome. I appreciate you as well. Please hit subscribe Share with a friend if you found this helpful. And if you want to binge one or any of these episodes that I've talked about today, they are all linked in the show notes. We'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.