A Business Anyone Can Start Today With Just $100 ⏐ Ep. #186

Guys, I may have just discovered the most overlooked business opportunity hiding on every street in America and around the world. This is a business where one guy made over $9,000 in a single week just by walking around his neighborhood with some paint and a shovel. Another entrepreneur turned a side hustle selling dog shaped mailboxes on Facebook into a full fledged profitable business. And this is a business that you could literally start with a hundred bucks and almost no skills. So. So let's break down exactly how three different individuals started and grew mailbox install and repair businesses. We're going to talk about their specific pricing strategies that generates 90 plus percent gross profit margins, and a simple marketing hack that's landing HOA contracts worth tens of thousands of dollars. And if you ever walked by a leaning rusty old mailbox and thought, hey, someone needs to fix that, I'm going to show you how to turn that thought into money. And yes, right now I'm sitting in the bed of an Airbnb in Park City. I don't have all my fancy recording equipment, but the show must go on. And my goal with this piece of content today is to hold your attention whether or not you're ever interested in starting a mailbox install or repair business. Because we're going to talk about some marketing principles that you could apply to anything. I don't know what I find so interesting about this industry, but I have been on the Google keyword tool, multiple different subreddits, random articles about dolphin mailboxes during COVID and I just think there's really an untapped opportunity here. This business is one of those things where once you start seeing the world that way, you see broken mailboxes everywhere. I went on a walk through a neighborhood just the other week and I counted 14 mailboxes that needed fixing. 14. Now if I were to knock all 14 of those doors, what do you think the chance is that I could close a handful of those jobs super high? Because I know for a fact that they need that work done. It's a lot like the guy Cinco that I interviewed who has the line striping business. He has an insanely high close rate because every door he knocks is the owner of a business that has a parking lot with faded lines that need to be painted sometime or another. I like to call this fishing, where you know, the fish are and neighborhoods like these are all over America. This is a multi hundred million dollar industry that's growing 10% per year and most people have no idea it exists. And here's the thing, there's 160 million delivery points in America. And over time all of these delivery points, AKA mailboxes break. They get rusted, they get ran over, and homeowners either don't know how to fix them because how often do you need to fix one? Or they don't have the proper tools. I love to start tidal wave businesses, AKA businesses that benefit from having a massive tidal wave or a tailwind behind them that just makes it easier to start in the first place. Here are the tidal waves in this industry. Number one Mail Theft. It's happening everywhere and if you look at these stats, it's only getting worse. Porch pirates are a real thing and people want their mail to be more secured than ever. Second tailwind HOAs HOAs are going crazy with uniform requirements. New developments want mailboxes to all look exactly the same and one contract could be worth tens of thousands of dollars. And the third tidal wave? Curb appeal thanks to HGTV and everyone trying to compete with the Joneses. We all want a better looking front yard, better landscaping, better ma. A beautiful custom mailbox is almost like jewelry for your house. It's the first thing people see when they drive by. E commerce is exploding. We're spending more online than we ever have, so our mailboxes are getting used more than they ever have. So there's real opportunity here. If you look at the Google Trends data for mailbox install up and to the right. And if you look at the Google Keyword Planner for the terms mailbox install and mailbox repair, you see that mailbox install has high competition, which isn't great, but mailbox repair has low competition and the exact same amount of search volume as mailbox install. So it seems that all the businesses operating in this space would rather install new mailboxes than repair them. That's where your opportunity comes in. Also, I really like the top of page bids for these terms. They're only like 90 cents to a dollar, but for something this high ticket, that's a pretty good price. I love going to Reddit to find gold on weird random niches like these. So this post is from the Handyman subreddit from over two years ago and the original poster said Getting started slash mailbox. In my area, there seems to be a lot of mailboxes in bad shape. I feel like mailbox repair could be a nice little side gig. How would y' all go about getting started? So what I love about Reddit is a lot of times the original post isn't great, but the gold is always in the comments Or I should say, if there's gold, it's going to be in the comments. Top comment says, I got three mailbox jobs by redoing my own and taking pics. Genius. I talk about doing this all the time. Do it for yourself first, just to document the process and to be your own case study. And then he said, I just posted in my own neighborhood Facebook group. Second comment says, dude, I did about seven or eight last summer and I told my wife it's such easy money. I thought about printing a bunch of mailers and stuffing them in people's mailboxes around the neighborhood whose mailboxes looked rough. She shot me down, but I feel like that could actually work. And then the last comment, which was deleted, but we can still see it for some reason. He says, I did an entire neighborhood last year. I fixed, straightened and painted a total of 23 mailbox stands. I charged 9k. I had it done in about a week. I had to replace two stands completely that held six mailboxes too. You can make really good money. And the crazy thing is about those 23 mailboxes for nine grand. That all came from one Facebook post someone posted. He commented, then the HOA president called him and he had a $9,000 job. All right, now look at this freaking guy right here. His name is David, he's up in Pennsylvania. During COVID he got bored and he built a dog shaped mailbox for himself. He posted about it in one Facebook group and he got millions of views. That one post launched his whole business. Now he makes and ships these dog shaped mailboxes all over the world. And the cool thing about these mailboxes is that David's not limited to geography. So based on that and based on what I saw in the Google keyword tool, I feel like you're going to have a much harder time being successful this business if you only narrow yourself down to new installs in your own local area. I think if you're going to do new installs, you have to sell something unique or catchy and be able to ship it to anyone in the world. Otherwise, if you're going to go the local route, it seems that repairs are the way to go. And while we're talking about custom weird mailboxes, I found this woman in Arizona that makes these unique contemporary style mailboxes and she sells them for 300 to $2,300 and ships them all over the world. All right, let's talk about the margins in this business. You go to Home Depot, buy some concrete, a post And a mailbox, some screws, you're going to be in it for about 100 bucks. But from what I'm seeing, using deep research, looking at thumbtack and all these other hire a contractor websites, you can charge between 350 and $550 to install the thing. And it's going to take about one to two hours of your time. So after subtracting the materials, you're looking at between one and $200 per hour. And this is a very standardized service, which is one thing that I love about it. If you're just doing standard mailboxes, you can knock out five or six of those in a day. And what's stopping you from leaving a bandit sign right in front of the mailbox that says something like this brand new mailbox was brought to you by John's mailbox services or what have you? I kid you not. I have a friend that owns a tree trimming business and they get 100% of their jobs from bandit signs. The more visual and outdoor home service, the more effective bandit signs are. Now, for a brick and stone or a masonry mailbox, people are expecting to pay between 800 and $1,600. Of course it's going to take longer. You have to have more skills. But it's a more premium option. And some neighborhoods demand that homeowners have a brick mailbox. And honestly, if you were to get one of those augers with a motor on it, you could roll up to a job site and be out of there in 45 minutes. So now let's talk about a few different ways you can approach this business. I know I talk about this example a lot, but my friend Daniel has a pressure washing business and he gets almost all of his customers with the rock in the flyer in the back approach. He, he gets a rock, he gets a flyer, advertising and services, he puts it in a bag, he assembles them all in his basement with high schoolers, and he drives around to targeted neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods that he knows will want his service. And throws the rock on the driveway. I talk about it all the time, but I just love it so much. He has a double digit conversion rate with these. Why not do that only to homes that have a mailbox that needs repaired? How far would 100 flyers go? The first approach to this business is the handyman approach. This is dirty, it's sweaty, it's not easy, you're hands on, you're doing it yourself. But it's a great way to get your foot in the door. You're going to target aging neighborhoods. You can look up the age of each neighborhood in your area on Zillow. You're going to find neighborhoods that don't have any mailboxes that need repairs. And then you're going to find neighborhoods that seemingly every mailbox needs repairs. You're going to become known as the guy that fixes mailboxes. Start with a post hole digger, couple tools, you're in business for 1 to 500 bucks. Customer acquisition, knocking on doors, rocks and flyers, door hangers, Facebook marketplace, Facebook groups. Guys, I know this isn't sexy, right? But neither is pressure washing. Neither is window washing, gutter cleaning, whatever. But everyone's talking about gutter cleaning and pressure washing and window washing and roof cleaning. Those are all over TikTok. No one's talking about this. The reason I'm talking about it is because all of my indicators are going wild that there is way more demand than supply in this industry. So I'm trying to clue you in early. And remember, business is more about momentum than anything. It's about getting your first dollar. It's not about starting a sexy new app that you can brag about at Thanksgiving. You gotta put your pride aside for a minute. What's more miserable, installing a mailbox for two hours? What's more miserable installing a mailbox in two hours and getting 500 bucks or working in a job you hate for the rest of your life? And knowing that every single year that goes by without you quitting is makes it significantly harder to finally quit. All right, approach number two. This is going to be like your custom artist route. This is going to be lower volume but higher profit. This would be great for the creative type, someone that wants to make more unique mailboxes. I grew up in Florida and I remember there was a manatee mailbox right on North Carpenter and that thing stood out. That's going to be you. You're going to be the guy that creates buys, imports from China. Whatever. You don't have to be creative enough to make all these designs from scratch. You can buy them from a third party vendor, but you're going to be the gu known for the weird wacky mailboxes. And hoas are going to hate you. But that's awesome. Sports themes, holiday design, family name engravings, whatever your wild brain can come up with. These are going to be people that probably live in nicer neighborhoods. They shop at Pottery Barn, they're watching hgtv. They want to be a little different. Instead of charging two to 400 bucks, you're going to charge six to 900 bucks. Not as many customers, but higher profit per job. That's the trade off that you'll be making here. But you don't have to be limited to geography. This could easily morph into an E commerce business. It's funny how a lot of service businesses accidentally turn into e commerce businesses. If you find an amazing supplier on AliExpress, Alibaba, Dhgate, Temu, wherever that sells these really random Funky mailboxes for $150 shipping is $50 in bulk. And you're selling them for 6, 8, $900 just for the mailbox itself. Put those up on a Shopify site and start pushing Facebook ads to them. What do you think the cost is to point Dallas Cowboys branded mailbox ads to people that live in the DFW area? Extremely low because your competition is going to be basically zero. No one else is pushing Facebook ads to that market, selling that product. And that's the beauty of Facebook ads is finding, testing, exploring all these random little niches and seeing which one has the lowest CPA cost per acquisition. What I like about this approach, the second approach is that these mailboxes are worthy of pictures. Instagram worthy. Your standard generic mailboxes aren't. These are going to get shared. Oh my gosh, that's so cute. Where did you get it? John's mailbox guy, right? You can even use AI image generation tools to show the homeowners what these mailboxes would look like in front of their homes. Your startup cost might be higher for this business because if you're making them custom, you're going to need more materials. Or if you're importing them, you're going to have to buy them up front. But hopefully this increased upfront cost would be more than offset by the increased profit. All right, the third approach to this business would be the HOA contractor. You're going to be the guy that only goes through HOAs. You can go online, you can buy databases of HOA presidents. You can get their cell phone number, their address, their email. You could do outbound like crazy to them. Sell to one to sell to many. Yes, there are trade offs. This is a longer sales cycle. They're going to be a pain to work with. But let's say your average homeowner mailbox job is $500 and your average HOA mailbox job is $5,000. Okay, 10 times more. Is it 10 times harder to acquire an HOA customer? Maybe it's 12 times harder and it's not worth it. Maybe it's only five times harder. Well, if so, then it's worth your while, right? This is a lot more relationship based business. You're going to be networking with property managers, showing up at HOA meetings, working your way in to the right people in the right communities. But once you have those relationships, you're golden. And with the HOA model, this could be a recurring revenue stream. You could be maintaining these mailboxes or swapping out broken units every year. You're not going to get that from a homeowner. But the thing is, of these three options, none of them will work if nobody knows you exist. So let's talk about marketing strategies. Most people overcomplicate marketing and entrepreneurs waste a lot of time and money figuring this stuff out. But the great thing about the mailbox business is that your customers are everywhere. Every human being is a potential customer of yours. Now that's true in a lot of businesses. If you sell a food product, every human being is a customer. But guess what? There's a lot of food brands out there. You have a lot of competition. When was the last time you went to a dinner party and asked the guy next to you, what do you do? And he said, oh, I fix mailboxes. Never. That's never happened to anyone. But it's going to happen to you. All right. Hands down, the highest ROI marketing method that you can employ with this business is neighborhood Facebook groups and nextdoor. Com. Period. End of story. It's not even close. There's even third party tools out there. There's one called Devi that will monitor Facebook groups for you and notify you anytime something is posted that matches a keyword that you pre submit. Now, Nextdoor and Facebook hate these tools, but who cares? Before and after pictures sell, sell, sell like crazy. And this is a perfect opportunity to use them. Remember that Reddit handyman that got the $9,000 job? That came from one Facebook reply, not his original post, just a reply to another post that he saw. When we talk about posting in Facebook groups, we're not talking about you just overtly shilling and selling to everyone in the group. We're talking about you kind of lurking in the shadows waiting for someone else to post so you can jump on it as soon as possible. Almost every neighborhood has at least one Facebook group, often multiple. You need to be living in there. Always lead with value. If you do want to post your services, spend one to three weeks posting just about yourself and your business and generating conversation. Get the top contributor badge. After posting four to six times on Facebook. That way the Facebook algorithm favors you and trusts you. And then only after you've provided value as a poster do you come in with the salesy stuff. Post your own work, pictures of what you've done, stuff you're proud of. That's not an overt sales tool, but you're still selling. Here's a pro tip for you. You can run next door ads to specific neighborhoods. So find those neighborhoods with the older homes that you know have broken mailboxes and run next door ads only to those neighborhoods. That way you're not wasting money on the new neighborhoods. You can do the same thing on Facebook. You're going to spend like 20 to 30 bucks to reach like 2 to 4,000 homeowners in those neighborhoods. I guarantee you if you test like 10 to 20 marketing angles, you're going to find one or two that command all of your time because they work so well. But you're not going to find those unless you test everything except drugs. And when we're talking about any home service or any local business, Google business profile is a non negotiable. It is low lift. You'll have your whole profile set up and optimized in 30 minutes. Put pictures on there videos, FAQs, fill out all your hours and those will give you free leads for years to come. And here's another genius tip for you. Direct mail timing. Not just direct mail, but direct mail during the perfect moment. After a big snowstorm, after a big windstorm and really it's the only two things I could think of. But your direct mail is going to cost the same whether it's after a big snowstorm or not. You can do eddm every door direct mail directly through the US Postal Service. There's a zillion direct mail providers for postcards. You can expect to pay between 30 and 50 cents for letters over 50 cents. When you send the direct mail after these storms, your dollar goes so much further. And especially use before and after pictures in your direct mail in your postcards. That's a great opportunity to use them. Take pictures of every single job, build a portfolio, put them in Google Drive. And of course, do not neglect the realtors. Here's the thing about realtors. They're used to getting sold to. Also they need good handyman. When does someone need a mailbox fixed or freshened up or repaired or replaced? Right before they go to sell their home. And realtors are touching multiple homes on any given basis. Sell to one to sell to many. For the first year of our tree trimming business. We were almost exclusively getting all of our jobs from realtors. Flyers work, door hangers work. But remember, do not put flyers in the mailboxes. I know for this business it sounds perfect, but that's actually illegal. You can tape them on the outside of mailboxes, on the trash cans, rocks and flyers, door hangers, but not in the mailboxes. All right, now let's talk about how you could start this thing this week. We're going to call this the opportunity audit. You're going to go on a walk or a drive around a bunch of mailboxes and take notes, have a spreadsheet and try to get a good feel for what percentage of the homes in that neighborhood need repairs. This is you just learning the industry. What types of repairs do you see over and over and over? Are they just leaning? Are they rusted, Are they faded? Take note of all that stuff. Try to find at least 20 opportunities within a 15 minute drive from you. And please, please write down exact addresses because these are going to be your first customers. You're not just doing research, you're going to sell to these people. And you know what, if you really want to have a bias for action, go ahead and just knock on the door right then. Like, what are you waiting for? Why come back? You're never going to be more hyped on this idea than right then in that moment. So just go knock on the door. I wouldn't even buy a tool until I had my first job. When you start quoting these jobs, know that the first jobs you quote, quote less than what you feel comfortable quoting. I know that kind of flies in the face of a lot of other advice you hear out there, like don't undersell yourself. You're not charging enough. Like, listen, you just want to get some case studies, you want to get some five star reviews, you want to get some traction. Traction and momentum are more important than anything at this stage, really, at any stage. So if your costs are 100 bucks, you want to eventually charge 400 bucks on average, charge 200. Right. You're still going to make 50 bucks an hour. Then you can get some pictures, take some professional videos and pictures and use that in all of your promotional materials. Don't worry about getting your llc, your domain name, yada, yada, all that. No, just start driving around neighborhoods and learning and selling and talking to people. You might learn by the end of the afternoon that after talking to 10 people, all 10 people are more than happy doing the job themselves and wouldn't even pay you A hundred dollars to do it. If that's the case, I would abandon ship. Honestly, I would move on to the next thing. I would go to my next video or podcast and say, let's experiment with this one. Now you can get a bigger sample size, talk to 20 or 30 people, but if I talk to 10 people, that should be customers. Like direct customers. Like you're talking. It's the equivalent of having a restaurant and 10 starving people walk in and they look at your menu and say, eh, not for me that's a problem because those people are starving. These homeowners are starving in that you know that they need a new mailbox or a repaired mailbox. But if for whatever reason in that area, the people just want to do it themselves or already have a handyman, then either talk to more people or pivot to a different idea entirely. The name of the game here is to get your first real customer that you didn't already know beforehand. You not a friend or family member. That's always the name of the game and that is the best feeling in the world. All right, now, how do you scale Once this business starts working, you want to reinvest in better tools. Start with a post hole digger. Upgrade to an auger. That's going to enable you to make more money per job. Another thing you can do early on is start thinking of how you can upsell your customers. Maybe they have a standard post mailbox, but you upsell them to a brick mailbox. Maybe you find out that they also need pressure washing and you add that as a new service. Now there's a caveat there. I would only advise you to do that if you can't find enough mailbox repairs or installs in your area to make a good living out of this. If you only want this to be a side hustle and stay a side hustle, that's fine. Cool. But if you want this to be a six or seven figure business and you've done the numbers, you've crunched the numbers and it doesn't seem like there are enough homeowners with bad mailboxes in your area to make a six or seven figure business, then you're going to have to add additional service lines and pick stuff that seems to go in line with the homes that you're already working at. Maybe it's painting. Maybe you're only working at old homes and a lot of these homes also need painting. Exterior painting. Add that as a service line. That's another tip that I'll tell you about, naming your Business. Don't pigeonhole your business with the name John's Mailbox Services. No, John Services. Yes. That way you can always allow yourself the flexibility of adding new products and services. But you can still start in a niche. Like maybe you call yourself John Services forever and you become an eight figure business and you only do mailboxes the whole time. Fine, awesome. But you want to have optionality. I started a business called Phone Restore. We fixed phones pretty quickly. IPads became a really big business for us. But some people were not coming to us with their iPads because they thought we only fix phones. That's where I first learned that lesson. Another way to scale this is by geographic expansion, adding second and third crews going to cities a few miles away instead of only your home city. Look for partnership opportunities. Go find a bunch of handyman and say, hey, do you ever do mailbox installs? Yes. Do you like doing them? Eh, okay, how about you refer them out to me and I'll pay you for every referral. Or go to landscapers that are hitting 20 to 30 homes a day and say, hey, every time you see a home that needs a mailbox, send them to me and I'll give you a referral fee. I call this piggybacking. Guys, here's the thing. You can totally do this. Standard mailboxes need to be repaired or replaced about every 10 years. There's 160 million mailboxes in America. That means every year 16 million mailboxes need to be replaced. Now that's about 5% of the population of America. Call it 320 million. So take the population of your local service area. Let's say you live in a city with a hundred thousand people. What's 5% of that? 5,000 people. 5,000 mailboxes. That's your tam, your total addressable market of all the mailboxes that you could potentially fix in your local area. If for some reason you're able to fix all of them, which will not be the case. Okay, let's say you're only able to capture 5% of that market every year. What's 5% of 5,250 mailboxes per year? Let's say you charge 500 bucks each. That's $125,000. Okay, so with quick back of the napkin math, if you're only able to get 5% of your local market, which I guarantee you, it could be a lot more. Because you know who your market is, you have a very rare opportunity to know exactly who your potential customers are. Whereas if you drive by a house that has long grass, they probably are just about to mow. Or they already have a long mowing guy. It doesn't mean that they need a new lawn mowing guy. But because of the nature of this business, if they have a broken mailbox, they need a new mailbox. No one has a mailbox guy until you come along. And so let's say we're toxic optimists, right? You get 20% of your local market every year. 20% of 5,000 homes in that 100,000 person area is 1,000 mailboxes times 500 each. That's $500,000. Take out your materials, which is about 20%, $400,000 net profit. Now, granted, you're going to be doing about two mailboxes per working day. That's not a big living, but that's not a bad living. But of course, everyone can look at a spreadsheet, crunch a few numbers, and things look really, really sexy. In reality, things are hard. Business is hard. Things are going to break. You got to have insurance, you're going to have customers to get mad at you. You're going to have to redo jobs for free. But that's just the name of the game. You have problems in any business, just pick your problems. The fact of the matter is exploding topics. Google trends, Google keyword tools, and me using outscraper to scrape, how many companies in Texas specialize in mailbox repair and a few more indicators that I'd rather not talk about are all screaming at me that there is an opportunity to start this business. So go start it. Share this episode with someone that might want to start it. And thanks for listening or watching the Kerner office.