How to Make $40k in 2 Months with Christmas Decorations

Welcome to the Kerner office. I wanted to do something different today, so I have this video go pseudo viral of this interesting Christmas decoration tower that this Instagram influencer put on her front porch. And I thought, any good craft idea is a good business idea. We'll talk boring logistics in the beginning, but at the end, I'm going to show you what you really want to know and that's how to find customers. So if I were going to launch this business today, here's exactly all the tools I would use to launch it. So what you're getting is 15 years of entrepreneurship experience. 75 launch businesses in hopefully just a few minutes. Number one, we're going to go to Home Depot and we're going to buy resin urn planters. Get a few different types because you want to test different shapes and sizes. While you're at Home Depot, you're also going to buy some play sand. You don't want to mess with concrete because it's way too heavy. It's never going to come out of that planter. And play sand will have the same result, which is to hold the dowel in place and to prevent the urn from falling over, you can reuse that every year. You can move it around in five gallon buckets, super easy. Then you're going to go to Uline. Depending on where you live, you might have a Uline location near you, so you don't have to pay for shipping. But usually even if you do have to pay for shipping, you're going to save a ton of money on boxes. Don't buy boxes at Home Depot or Lowe's or anywhere else for that matter. Buy them from Uline. You can see how cheap they are from 24 cents a box, depending on size, up to a couple dollars a box. And these are huge boxes here. I mean 6 by 6 by 36 inches. Much bigger than you'll ever need. A lot of these you can buy in quantities of 10, 15 or 25, sometimes 50. You're also going to buy some wooden dowel rods at Lowe's or Home Depot or wherever you go to get everything else. But this is the easy stuff. You could figure this out on your own. The hard part about any business is getting your first customers. If you can get your first one customer, then getting your next 10 is so much easier. If you can get 10 customers, then getting your next 100 and next a thousand and is even easier than that because you need reviews, you need referrals, you need proof of concept, you need traction, you need sales you need motivation. All of those are solved by getting your first few customers. So I'm going to focus on that at the end. Now, I don't know if you ever saw my porch pumpkin interview with Heather Torres, but if you go to my YouTube channel at the Kerner office right here, it's the featured video on my channel. Because Heather is a rock star. And in four years she built a porch pumpkin decoration business for from crazy idea that no one thought was good to a million dollar business with 40% net profit margins. Yes, in four months of work, she can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in net profit, but she doesn't decorate porches for Christmas. She wants to spend time with her family. So that's up to you. So I would watch this whole interview and listen to exactly what she did to find her first few customers that first season. Okay, now you need to make some samples and you need some before and after pictures and some videos. But can you. You don't want to spend a lot of money. So go to thumbtack right here. Thumbtack, you can look for a photographer that is competing with other photographers in your area for the lowest price. So find a photographer that has four plus star reviews, that has a good bit of traction, but it's not the most popular on thumbtack. Tell them exactly what you want as you describe your project and ask for a flat quote to get some simple videos and before and after pictures. Now get to work. You got to build these things, build a few different types, put them on your front porch. If you're not proud of your front porch, then go to a friend or family member's house, put them on their front porch, get a bunch of media. I don't care if you have a following. You don't need a following. You're going to take that media and go to all the local Facebook mom groups and buy sell groups. Every area has a local Facebook mom group. You're going to post these pictures in the mom group just as if you're bragging like, hey, what do you guys think? Is this cute? Do you like this? Start to get some feedback and I promise you, inevitably people will be commenting asking, how'd you do that? How'd you do that? It's like, well, I used X, Y and Z to do it, but I'm actually offering this as a service and then strive to get them on the phone because it's much easier to close them in person or on the phone than it is over DM or text. What do you charge? Feel it out. You're going to start by charging a little so you can get those first few customers. Get that traction, get the testimonials, make sure you're profitable from the first order on. But you're not going to price yourself in the beginning where you'll price yourself at the end. You're going to work towards that, especially as you get busier. So call it 1, 2, 300 bucks. And that's the price for them to keep all the materials at the end of the season. But if they let you take it back, then give them a 10 or 15% discount. But also feel it out a little bit because you might learn that either A, people don't want to give it back even with a discount, or B, everyone's expecting to give it back anyway. So let the feedback drive your decision making here because a lot of what I'm saying about this particular niche is based on theory. I've never launched this business and I'm very open about that. I've launched 75 other businesses, many of them in the home services niche. But you're going to be paving new ground here. So let the feedback dictate what your strategy is. Okay, now back to acquiring your first customers. You're also going to post on Facebook Marketplace the pictures sell themselves here. Make sure that your first piece of media is a video because Facebook Marketplace will prioritize those in the algorithm. But you want both pictures and videos. Just make sure the first one is a video. And be careful with how you word it because Facebook Marketplace does not like people to list services on Facebook Marketplace like this, this. They only want people to list products, so be sure to name it like Christmas decorations or something. But then like in the image, maybe use Canva to put words over your images. That really sells the product. And then in the text description, be more vague about what you're offering because if Facebook thinks you're just selling decorations, you're good to go. But if they think you're selling interior design services, they might delete your listing. They're not going to ban your account or anything like that. They would just delete your listing. Now go to Instagram, your personal Instagram account. Whether you have 50, 500 or 5 million followers, just start posting what you're doing. Every year that goes by, Facebook and Instagram become more and more algorithmically driven, which means it doesn't matter how many followers you have. If what you're posting is interesting or eye catching or unique, the algorithm will push it out to people that are near you. But don't know you personally. So don't sweat about follower count. Start emulating what you see in your feed from other people, using trending audio in the background or trending filters, and post the before and after pictures. You're not going to be outright salesy, posting prices and all that. Just talk about this business that you're starting and how excited you are about it, how you just got your first customer. Build it in public. People will want to support you. Once you get your first five customers, ask them for a review and ask them for referrals. You have to ask for referrals. They're not just going to come naturally. Now if you really want to get creative on finding customers, you're going to go to useoutscraper.com and you're going to start scraping ancillary industries to do what I call the piggyback method. You want to go find tree trimmers, landscapers, pressure washers, house painters, house cleaners, window washers, car detailers, anyone. Christmas light installers. A lot of the landscape guys are also Christmas light guys. A lot of the pressure washing guys are Christmas light guys. I promise you the Christmas light guys are not going to be doing this service. But you can approach them, you could text them or call them and say, hey, this is what I do. Here's a picture. If you mention me to one of your customers, I will give you $100 from every customer I get. You keep your customer, keep all your money from hanging Christmas lights, but just say, hey, I noticed that you clearly care about decorating your house for Christmas. Look at these pictures. Would you like this done too? And you can do one of two things. You can white label the service or you can just have them refer you. If you were to white label it, then the person you partner with would quote the job for you based on what you tell them to do. So they'd say, all right, let me look at your porch. Yeah, it's going to be about $400. We can get it done in about a week. And then they're going to pay you $300 and you're just going to come do it. And you're just an employee or a subcontractor as far as the homeowner is concerned. That happens all the time. That's white labeling or just referral. You say, hey, here's so and so. Here's her business card. Give her a call, tell them I sent you, and then they will interface with you directly. And you could just pay them 100 of the 400 that you charge. Either one works, but this is a win win for both parties because these Christmas light guys or the pressure washer are not about to start offering this service. So piggyback. Anyway, you're going to go to Outscraper, you're going to log in. I already have an account, super easy to use. I'm not affiliated with these guys. You're going to go up here to services by brand. You're going to go to Google, Google Maps, Scraper, you're going to type in. Okay, there's no category for Christmas lights, so type in Landscaper or whatever. Type in your zip code. I'm just picking a random zip code here. Or type in your city, or type in your state, your county, whatever you want. You can limit the results and you can get really granular on how much info you want. But generally the default settings work just fine. And then you click get data. And then these are my past scrapes that I've done. You see all these companies, I've scraped thousands and tens of thousands of these leads. And it's going to give you a spreadsheet that you can put in Google sheets or you can leave it in Excel. You're going to have cell phone numbers, email, first name, last name, address, business name, website, everything you need to reach out to these guys. And you will have more customers than you know what to do with. So give it a shot. Get 20, 30, 40, 50 customers, 100. Set it up, learn, fail, screw up, stress out. It's okay, you're learning. This is your first season. Take the stuff back, get a 10 by 10 storage unit. It's about 100 bucks a month. Store it or put it in your garage. And then next August or September, get ahead of it early and try to double the amount of customers you had the year before. I don't charge anything for this, so please like subscribe. Share it with someone that could use this. There's lots of room to go around. Every city of 50,000 could have 10 to 15 of these businesses in it. Law of abundance, people. Thanks for watching.