How to Sell Products That Cost You Less Than $0. HoldCo Bros Are Back! Ep #056

And so I think there is a world where you could. This is an even much easier sale than the stump grinding. You call up all the tree trimmers and say, hey, today's your lucky day. I'm going to come get all your wood for free. You let me know where you'll be. I got it. You don't even have to pay me. Welcome to the Kerner office, the only podcast where we discuss more business ideas than your crazy uncle at your family reunion. I've started over 75 businesses. When I first started this podcast, it was over 70, but we've started at least five since then. And this is the place where I discuss all of them and how to start more of them and how to grow them all. So welcome. If you're new to us, then we're glad you're here. Today we're going to talk about four or five different business ideas. Nick and I hold Cobro, he is my partner. We're going to talk about. We're going to go back to the stump grinding business, but add an interesting aspect to it. A way to get your foot in the door with these B2B customers integrating barbecue, wood, firewood. You're going to like it, I promise. That's why we put it first. Next one, we're talking about self storage and how to chase your fat pitch. And then the one after that, we're talking about the Shelf Dude, a follow up from the Shelf dude episode that you just heard. How you can kind of use that idea to scale it in your own market with any number of different services. And then the last thing we're talking about is licensing different boot camps and masterclasses in your local area as well. A lot of cool ideas. I hope you enjoy it. Please, please, please share with a friend and like and subscribe and we'll see you next time. All right, I'm excited about this one. You ready?

Yes, sir.

Okay, so our stump Grinding episode is now. It's a hit. It's a quote. Viral hit. Viral for me. Sheesh. Yep. And people loved it. Improved by Taylor Tanner. I'm sorry I forgot his name, but the guy who started a business based on our episode of Hold Cobros, he started the stump grinding business. He made nine grand his first 15 days doing exactly what I said in my tweet, which just like this, just feels so good. Let me just pause for a second. Just. I'm just going to be a little cocky for a minute because people in the comments, the haters, and there's not a lot of Them, we're going to say 5%. I was like, you're, you're grossly oversimplifying this. You're making this sound way too easy. What about insurance? What? And it's like, I am oversimplifying it. Yeah, I am making it sound easy.

Because that's how you get clicks.

No, no. I mean, luckily there is an overlap there, but because you can attest to this, I'm a toxic optimist. Everything I do is going to be the next billion dollar thing. And that's why I do things, that's why I launched, that's why I have a bias for action. Because I'm so optimistic that it will work. Because I don't do too much research. That is a mistake. You do too much research and you talk yourself out of it. But we've all seen the, you know, the trough of disillusionment, the graph where it's like, this is so easy. I'm going to be so rich. Like, oh, wow, this is hard. This is much harder than I thought. And then you slowly start coming out of it. And then three years later, right, Like I think of like Texas snacks. It took us three and a half years. Mining syndicate, we're almost four in now. We're still learning it. Like three to six years later, you're like, this is now somewhat manageable and easy and profitable. I'm glad I did that. Right. And it's not every business, but people overthink it and it's like a coping mechanism to never have to launch. And so if I oversimplify, A, I actually look at the idea that way. I'm conveying what I actually believe. B, if I add too much nuance and context, then you, AKA the reader or listener or watcher will never do anything and I want you to do something about it. So this guy, he rented a trailer, he rented a stump grinder, he started texting tree trimming owners the exact pitch that I told him to. He started texting all of them every week. Just staying top of mind. Do you have anything for me today? Do you have anything for me today? Nine grand in 15 days. His first 15 days in a seasonal market, right? Yeah. So, okay, so I say all that to bring my next idea.

Let me just say it really quickly, please. Nobody is more surprised that this idea worked than me because we just lie all the time.

You know, let me take your joke and let me add some truth to it. Okay? We did all this. We did the research. I had Kamal hire a virtual assistant. He called a Thousand tree trimming and landscaping companies in Houston. Only one in five answered their phone, which there's an opportunity in and of itself. And the data showed us about 10% of these guys are willing to outsource. Stump grinding. To us now, it could have been higher if we called, if we sold it, a little better, if we finessed it. He was international. He probably didn't know that nuances and culture could have been better. But I wanted to see more than that, right, because that's like, to me, that's like the TAM. The total addressable market is 10%. Basically 10% of all the tree trimmers and landscapers could be a potential customer of ours. I wanted to see 20 to 50%. And so we never launched, and I don't regret that.

The other thing with your posts is you are very much the type of person who likes the launch and the, oh, my gosh, we're going to be billionaires phase of it. You don't like the trough of disillusionment or whatever. Like, whatever the stages are. You don't like it when it gets hard. That's what she said. And you have to work through it and build the stuff around it. So when you post stuff, it's very much, hey, this could work because, like, you can go and validate that idea. But in order for the idea to be successful, it does have to have that other half. Either you stay consistent, you persevere, you build out the systems, like, whatever it is. But, like, what you're saying, what you're saying in all of these tweets that you do is like, hey, this is a really cool idea. This is how I would start it. You like helping people just get started. And I think that's admirable because it removes the stigma of, like, oh, it's gonna be so hard. I don't even know where to start. How do I even get this done? But you're showing people how to generate the first dollar. The first dollar is the hardest. And, like, once they see that first dollar, then they go in and are willing to go through all the crappy stuff because they've seen it validated. So, yes, I get it. People look at it and they're like, oh, you're oversimplifying it. But you're also, like, demystifying this first phase of launching a business. And I think it's awesome.

Funny part, slash maddening part, is when something goes viral, right? Something goes viral. And I wish we could predict when something will go viral. We can't. And let's say I get something in my numbers wrong. Like, I did a pickleball tweet where I said, I bet this place does half a million a year, right? And it turned out that this place has an fdd, A franchise disclosure document. And you can actually find out not what that location does, but what that chain of locations does. And it was like 150. It. I was off by, like 3x. Okay? And then that tweet went viral, which I did not know it would go viral. I was covered in sweat as I typed it. I had literally just played pickleball at that location. And then people hop in the comments and they're like, this is irresponsible. This is irresponsible of you to get that math wrong. Because look at all these people that are going to go spend $850,000 on this franchise now because of your tweet. I'm like, dude, dude, I did not know that was going to freaking go viral. If we were at a dinner party, just talking, and I was like, I bet that place does half a million a year, and I was off by 3x, would that be irresponsible of me for having wrong back of the napkin math?

I mean, yes. No. I had a post the other day that did really well, and it was like, the six things I wish I knew about the SBA and somebody else who's like, he's like an SBA expert. He's like, oh, look at all the things that are wrong in this post. I'm like, okay, what's wrong? You know what? One of the, like, the first thing he named to me was, well, you said the max amortization for a loan is 27 and a half years. It's actually 25 years.

Oh, my gosh.

That's the first thing, like, you're going to point to is I missed. Like, I missed it by two and a half years. Like, the point I was making is if you buy real estate with a business, you can amortize it over a longer period of time. But, like, I just don't understand this compunction that people have of, like, actually, this is irresponsible because, like, what are you talking about? That wasn't the thrust of what I was trying to post about. I'm trying to post so I can get people motivated to act. And yes, you may have been off by 3x, but that's because you're doing back of the envelope math. And if people want to go and correct it, sure. Help me understand where I missed. Come and Correct it. But, like, we're not trying to post this stuff to mislead people or.

Anyways, Yeah, I think that the difference here is, like, are we selling a course? Are we selling a pickleball franchise? And we misrepresent something.

Yes.

That's a whole. That's a whole.

Another dot com founders, Nick, for 10%.

Off, that's a whole. Another ball game. Or if you're selling a course and you're like, you can make $10,000 a month guaranteed. It's like, whoa, bro, you're oversimplifying. Like, this is a lot harder. Like, we're not doing that. We're not doing. We're not selling it anyway. So we're on, like, our third tangent here. Our tangents are growing tangents. So back to stump. Same industry, same concept, which is like B2B Home Services. Different idea. Okay, you ready? You're going to like this. You go round up all the tree trimmers there. There are at least two ways where you could make money here. So we own a tree trimming business. Therefore, we know a little bit about this. Tree trimmers have to get their branches to the dump. They got to get them, or they got to chip them up and haul them off. That's half of the job, right? One half the job, cut the thing down, the other half, get it out of there. Okay. We're taking branches to the dump every day at the same time, Nick. At the same time, there is a critical shortage of barbecue smoking wood. Same type of trees, too. Oak.

Until the last word, I had no idea where you were going with that.

I.

We're talking about trees. And then you're like, there is a shortage of barbecue smoking hickory wood. I was like, oh, okay, there it is. There's the through line.

There is. So I can't speak for every state. I'm speaking to Texas right now, but wood is sold by the cord, and prices are significantly 4x higher than they were a few years ago.

What are you doing by.

Okay, what?

There's a shortage of it.

It's significantly more expensive than it was a few years ago. Okay.

Okay.

So we're throwing all these oak branches away when we could be selling it to barbecue restaurants. Right. Or to a distributor that sells wood to barbecue restaurants. Okay, now granted, there's some caveats. There's some asterisks. In order to smoke barbecue wood, you. It needs to be seasoned, AKA dried.

AKA I was just going to ask that.

Yeah, it needs to sit outside for months. But there's a way to Speed that process up. And that is in a kiln, right? And so there is a company now that sells a portable kiln. It's probably the size of like an air conditioning unit, like a large air conditioning unit. And it attaches to the end of a 20 foot shipping container. That's it. And it like pumps hot air in there. And it's a seasoning process that like has existed for a long time. And if you, if I go bar, buy barbecue wood from my favorite supplier in Fort Worth, they season theirs to speed up the process because time is money, but it's very expensive and it's physical and it's on site and it not a lot of people can do it. And so I think there is a world where you could. This is an even much easier sale than the stump grinding. You call up all the tree trimmers and say, hey, today's your lucky day. I'm going to come get all your wood for free. You let me know where you'll be. I got it. You don't even have to pay me. And eventually you can charge for it. And this is a beautiful business, Nick, because this is what I call a negative cogs business. A negative cost of goods sold business, much like Eco Scraps, the company out of Utah that got paid by grocery stores to take their old produce that they were throwing away. So they didn't get it for free, they got paid to take it. And then they took it to a warehouse off I15 and they stacked it up and they bought a bunch of sawdust, mix it in, churned it around and they made organic, high quality compost that they sold to grocery stores all over the country. And then they sold to a major multi conglomerate.

Okay, here's my question.

What's up?

So I get it, I get the negative cogs for that business, the eco friendly business, because composting is just inherently faster than drying out this wood. But there is a significant outlay of costs in the form of labor to go and pick up this wood. Maybe you have to cut it, you can have to bring it back somewhere. You're gonna have to stack it. And then there's a, there's a long period of time. I don't know how long it is in between gathering the wood and the wood being cured. I don't know, what do they call it when it's like ready to be smoked?

There's not a very long period of time if you have one of these portable kilns.

How long is the kiln? Like how long?

I mean, it's like a. It's like a day or two that's. Oh, that short? Yeah.

How much do they cost?

20 grand. This is significantly faster than the composting idea, because you can't speed that up. That takes months.

Agreed. I hear that. Do you put the wood in and then you take the wood out two days later, or does it have to sit in there until you sell it? Does that make sense what I'm asking?

Let's say you get this raw branch, right? You got to cut it up into log sizes, and then you got to split it, and they have hydraulic splitters. Pump it through there. You have, like, you know, chunks of wood, and then you take that finished product, and it's way too wet to smoke, and you put it in that form in the kiln, dry it out, pull it out, and it's ready to sell to a barbecue restaurant.

So to launch a business like this, you'd have to do two things. The first thing you'd have to do is contact tree trimmers and say, like, hey, can I come and pick up your tree trimmings? The second thing you'd have to do is. So let that be, like, your supplier. And then the second thing you'd have to do is find a business that would buy from you.

Mm.

Right. Is it any wood? Is it any wood?

Are like, no, it's not any wood, but I have a. I have an answer for that. Okay, let's say it's a pine tree. Okay. So I know you're not an outdoorsy guy, but I kind of am. There's two types of wood out there.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm sorry. You're an outdoorsy guy, are you?

Try me. I've been outdoors today twice.

Two types of wood. Hardwood, softwood. Okay, hardwood. Oak tree. Softwood, Pine tree.

Balsa.

Sure. Birch. Sure.

Mahogany. I get it.

Sure. And so you're only smoking hardwoods, by the way. Hickory and pecan. Same thing. By the way, it's the same thing. Bet you didn't know that.

I didn't know that.

Let's say you cut down a pine tree, you put that in the mulcher, and you chip it up. You could sell it as mulch, or there's actually a massive aftermarket for selling, like, stumps and larger pieces of wood to woodworkers that they can use with the lathe to make bowls.

Or let me ask. Like, you saying this idea makes me excited to do it, because I'm like, why would we not do that? That sounds like an amazing idea. But then the inevitable question that we always ask is like, okay, well then why is nobody doing it at scale at this point?

People are doing this. So we have a big tree trimming competitor in Richardson that sells a ton of firewood. We haven't even talked about that. A ton of firewood in Dallas, Texas, of all places. I don't even think they sell, like, barbecue, smoking wood. But they're vertically integrated, both on site. They have tree trimming business, firewood business right there. The difference is this new technology, right? This enabling technology opens up a whole new industry for. For more people to do this without having a bunch of acreage, a bunch of equipment, a bunch more capex.

Before this airs, we need to get in touch with the company who. Who has that, because.

Agreed.

This could be a perfumatic situation.

I'm one step ahead of you, my friend.

You always are, my boy.

So it's not an easy business. It's sweaty. You're driving around, you're. It's hot. Like, it's not passive. It's not easy. But I love, love, love, like, I have, like, this bucket list of business ideas that I love, right? That I want. Like, you know, I'm gonna own a barbecue restaurant one day. I don't care that it's a bad idea. I don't care. It's probably gonna fail. I'm gonna do it, okay? You're not gonna stop me.

I know.

I love the idea of. I don't even know if negative cogs is the right way to say it. It's a. Yeah, it is. Negative cogs. That's exactly what it is. It's a negative cogs because you're getting paid to take it. I want to own a business like that where you get paid to take something and then you sell it.

I also think, and I don't know if you've thought about this, but you could have a business that is just calling into individual markets. All right, I'm going to do Oklahoma City, and I'm going to find three people who could become, you know, what would you call this business? Quickie wood, Quickie smokey.

All right.

Hey, do you want to be the quickie smoky guy for Oklahoma City? And they say yes. And it's like, okay, here's the business in a box. Buy this shipping container, and then I will show you how to go out and get all the business that you want from all these treatment companies. And, like, you could contact a tree trimming business and then give them the business in a box that shows them how to generate the leads in order to convert them so that they can have the quickie smoker. But I think that there would be a cool component to that as well with the education piece and selling these units.

Yeah. You know what it reminds me of is LCD cycle. I did not enjoy negative cogs with LCD cycle, but LCD cycle was me. When I say me, I mean three virtual assistants in the Philippines. Me calling up iPhone repair shops saying, hey, you have a box of broken iPhone screens. Can I have them?

Right.

And it could not have been a negative cogs business because I had competitors and there was a market for these. If I was the only guy in town, then theoretically I could have said, hey, this is e waste recycling. Would you like to pay me to properly dispose of it so I can get it back into the. Into the circulation? Right. So. But that's. That's why we grew so fast, is because it's a foot in the door business. We got our foot in the door by giving them a no brainer, stupid, easy offer, which is, let me pay you to take your trash. I pay you to take your trash. Who would say no to that? Okay. Okay, cool. Now we have a relationship. We have trust. We've exchanged money. Then you call them up again and say, hey, why don't you buy parts for me as well? It's just a great model. And so here we go, Nick. Here we go. I just thought of something. You get your fitd. You get your foot in the door by saying, don't pay dump fees anymore. You know what? Sell your chipper. Sell your trucks. I would never tell a true trimming business to do that. But this. You know, we're trying to make good content here, right? It doesn't need to be. I mean, come on.

It doesn't need to be true or verifiable or.

I've got to oversimplify this for more clicks. No, but it's like, don't pay the dump anymore. We'll take your stuff for free. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to be at 1:23 Maple tomorrow. Come pick it up. We'll be done by 2pm Cool. You get their trust, you get the relationship. And then, Nick, it's right in front of us. Look, you looking at me? I need your eye contact. You looking at me?

Yes.

Hey, who's grinding your stumps? Mm. Did we just come full circle? Who says no to that offer once we already have a working vendor relationship.

Oh, my gosh.

Who's gonna say no?

I don't know. Sociopath? Nobody It's a good offer.

Richard Dahmer, maybe. Seriously, it's the. Say it could be the same business.

Yeah, it's a great offer. I love it.

Everyone's. Everyone's talking about home services. No one's talking about B2B home services, but I'm in on it.

I call it Homeboy services. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Call up your homeboy, get some services.

Just.

Muhammad, please edit that. I got it. I got that one, Chris. Don't worry about it.

Okay. What you got, dude?

So I had a conversation with Baird today. He goes on Twitter, on Twitter as the Sultan of storage. I don't even know how to say his last name. Let me look it up.

No, nobody does Baird.

Klein Smith.

Oh, yeah, that. Oh, Klein Smith. That's his good.

No, yeah, that's a super good. And like, his story was incredible to me. So he started. He lives in Durango, Colorado. So it's beautiful mountains, skiing, mountain biking, all that stuff. And he's like, I went to college and the only thing I optimized for was being outdoors. So, like, I got a business management degree, but really I just spent all of my time outdoors. Hiking, biking, skiing, all that stuff. He graduates from college and he needs a job. He's like, I had a degree in business management, and there just happened to be this company in town that was hiring. He had a bad opinion of them because he's like, they always had ads. So I was like, what's their deal? Why do they have so much turnover? But I needed a job, so I applied. Turns out that was like the only tech company in Durango, Colorado. He gets hired on there. That tech company ends up becoming more than a billion dollar company selling upstream to. I don't even remember who they sold to. But he ends up getting a ton of experience over the years. He ends up being there from like 2005 to 2016 and was a part of. Works his way up, does exceptionally well, was a part of the team that negotiated the sale, had equity, has an exit, and then he's sitting on like $3 million of capital. He decides, okay, well, I got to put this to work. I'm not done working. So he does all of his research and he falls in love with self storage. And over the last four years, he's put 1.8, I think million dollars of his own money to work, and that 1.8 has purchased $21 million of real estate. Now, obviously there's debt on top of that, right?

But he's probably after appreciation yes.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was the. That was like the purchase of real estate. Amount. Yeah, yeah. His basis. So he bought really, really well. It's obviously appreciated since then. And he's cash flowing, I don't know, three to $400,000 a year to himself after debt servicing. And now he's kind of looking out side of that because he's like, I have all of these passive losses and so I want to get passive income so that I can offset it. So that's why he started this latam virtual agency and all this other stuff. But anyways, he was talking to me and he told me the story about how he bought this facility for a 2.8 cap. $12 million. 2.8 cap. And I was like, dude, that's fascinating. Tell me about it. He's like, well, it was here in Durango. I knew the rents were undervalued. I knew that it was under occupied. And it was like a. It's an institutional type of investment. I don't know what that means, but it must be like big and nice. He's like. So I just. I knew I could turn it around. Like, oh, really? He's like, yeah. So I thought it could get to a place where he was doing like $1.8 million a year in Noi. And if I just made some tweaks, I could kind of get it there. But it was the biggest deal he'd ever done. He sold another property in order to buy it. Kind of like leveraged everything. So he buys it for 12 million. It's a 2.8 cap. And within like the last year, this last month, it did $130,000 in NOI. So it's already now at like 1.6, $1.7 million a year in Noi. There's still a lot of room left to run on it. He thinks that he's going to get it to like 2 million in NOI. And he's like, I think it's conservatively valued at like $17 million right now. That story just got me thinking about this concept that I really like, which is like the fat pitch. And Warren Buffett talks about it. He's like, okay, when you get the pitch, you gotta take a swing. And Warren Buffett historically does 10 investments a year, whereas a lot of fund managers will do hundreds of investments a year. But his investments are very concentrated and he puts a lot of money behind them because he's waiting for his fat pitch. He's like, I stay in my buy box. I know exactly what I'm trying to do. But when I get that opportunity, I go big in it. And Baird, to me, was like, this living example of someone who was like, okay, my fat pitch came. He had generated all this experience in the tech world. He's sitting on mountain of cash. He gets some experience by buying these facilities, and then a facility crosses his desk that is in his backyard. So he knows the market. He finally has some operational chops, so he understands what he needs to do to turn it around, and he has the capital in order to take it down. So, to anybody else, like, you. And I was like, dude, you paid a 2.8 cap for a $12 million facility. It's like, dude, that is so risky. But for him, he's looking at this. He's like, no, man, this is my pitch. I've been waiting for this pitch. He goes all in on it. He's nervous, he's scared. And it is, so far, at least worked out really, really well for him. And I just continue to be obsessed with this idea of when the right opportunity comes that only you can take advantage of, you should swing really hard. Anyways, so that was the story with Baird.

That's a great story. It reminds me of our Waco Park. Different outcome, same entry. Right. Because we bought that park at a 1 cap, knowing exactly what the playbook is going to be after we bought it. We bought it, we executed the playbook, and it worked, period.

Also reminds me of, like, perfumatic or the perfumevending.com where you have a lot of experience with marketing, and then we also have experience with relationships with suppliers in China and the operational understanding of what it's like to ship products from China and then distribute that in the United States. And then, like, there was. There aren't many people in this space who would be able to do the things that we've done with perfumevending.com with, you know, to post drive the interest and then have the expertise to fulfill on the back end. That's an example of it as well. I just think it's. I think more of us should be waiting for the fat pitches as opposed to, like, ooh, shiny object. Oh, shiny object. Like, if you can stay disciplined, that is such a better strategy for growth.

Yeah. I think the difference there is, like, what is our fat pitch? I don't know. Like. Like, I think there's a difference between a fat pitch and a white whale. Like, a white whale doesn't have to be a fat pitch, but sometimes it is. I'm trying to think of a time when like I just pushed all the chips in.

To me like launching Mining Syndicate was a fat pitch. Because it was also very similar in the sense that, okay, you had to get Chinese supplier relationships. I don't know that we've necessarily though had a true fat pitch yet. It feels to me like the perf. Perfumevending.com is, is one of those fat pitches where it's like, we got to make that work. It's like, let's go hard on it and let's go all in. And we have, we've been investing in it, we have a team around it, we're building an infrastructure, we're negotiating with the manufacturer. Like it, we're doing it. And six months from now we may be able to look back and say that was a fat pitch. I'm glad we took advantage of it.

And update. August, we're up to 58 grand in revenue, 45% gross margins, pretty solid net margins. So.

And we're not pushing.

Yeah, we're just hopping on calls.

We're slow playing it right now because we're still trying to tread lightly with this stuff. So I can't wait for that update in six months. It's going to be a fun one.

I love it. Yeah, I love fat pitches. I love white whales. It's funny because you don't. When you are chasing shiny objects like I've been doing, you're better able to see opportunities because of that cross referencing. Right?

Totally. So Warren Buffett got the fat pitch analogy from Ted Williams. Ted Williams was the greatest baseball hitter of all time. And he developed it because he knew exactly where in the strike zone he had the highest probability of hitting the ball. And so he was like, oh, that's my fat pitch. I'm waiting for my fat pitch. How did Ted Williams learn that hundreds of thousands of reps, like hundreds of thousands of swings and hits that over time. He iterates to and he's like, okay, this is my zone of genius. I know that when the pitch comes in this area, like, I'm going to go hard on it. So for you and I, yes, lots of shiny object. And we can sit here and be like, oh man, these guys are so distracted. But there is a muscle that you build up in kind of semi pursuing a lot of these endeavors that allows you then to see like, oh, I've done this 17 times. I know for a fact this one's gonna hit.

So.

So like you have to get the reps in in order to recognize the fat pitch. It's not just about sitting on your hands.

Dude, I want to get a T shirt made that just says compounding doesn't care. Right. If you're all in on one thing that's awesome, you're gonna crush it. If you're having shiny object syndrome, that's awesome. You're gonna crush it. It doesn't matter. Compounding doesn't care. It's like gravity. Gravity doesn't care. If you drop a brick or a feather, it's is going to fall. Your experiences will keep compounding. You just have to stay in the game. Like, if you stay in the game, it doesn't really matter what you do. Maybe outcome A, you make more money or outcome B, but the truth is, you'll never know. You will never know. You can't a B test your life?

No.

Right. So just do what is fun and what pays the bills.

I love that. I also want to get a shirt made that says, I love fat pitches. And just like a picture of a woman on there, that's a little.

Edit this out.

Is that not where you were going with that?

We're going to power through it. It's funny because the fat pitch, there's two types. There's like a financial fat pitch, and then there's like a time fat pitch, and then you could do both. Right. And it feels like we're doing a time commitment fat pitch with content because it's all encompassing. Like, content is a business that could launch any business. We're building a foundation, and it feels very much like a time commitment fat pitch. It is costly. We're a net negative on our content. We have people helping us edit and post and all that. It's a fat pitch nonetheless.

Yeah, that's what's been. This will be the last thing I say on it is like doing our podcasts. How many episodes have you done and released now?

40 something. 50 something? Yeah.

We're in the 50s. So, like, each of us have done, we've had a hundred conversations with people. Like, we're just getting so much exposure to what is out there and what is possible and seeing all these different pieces that could work in different places and building out a network that when the fat pitch does come, because we've laid all this groundwork, people are going to look at it and be like, dude, that must be nice freaking overnight. But all the hours, all the time spent researching, building up that muscle so that you could then take advantage of the opportunity. That's what I think a lot of people miss is they discount the amount of reps that people put in and then they overemphasize the short nature of their success when it's neither one of those that they truly are understanding.

Yeah, agreed. So with that in mind, I want you to help me brainstorm something. So my last podcast, well, by the time this airs, it won't be my last, but my podcast with the Shelf Dude. What the Shelf dude did, if you didn't hear this episode, is he saw a Facebook ad for garage shelves. He thought, I need those in my garage, Let me build them myself. He did. And he thought, huh, I could sell these just like someone sold them to me. And he posted it to Facebook. It went well. He made five grand a month working 16 hour days. He had a 95, quit his job, went all in. Now he's making 15 grand a month doing something that doesn't scale. Okay. Cause these things cannot be shipped. He sells plans for 10, 20 bucks on his website. He has an Instagram account with 55,000 followers. But mostly, you know, 80% of his revenue is coming from building and delivering custom shelving benches and all that. It's like mostly garage shelves, right? Okay. Yeah, Cool. So I love this because it's hyper local and it, quote, doesn't scale. Okay. So I love the idea of finding opportunities like this. Opportunities that many, if not most people look down on because it's not something you want to talk about at a dinner party. It's not sexy. Like no one wants to be delivering a couch 30 miles away for a $200 profit. Right. Like no one wants to do that. It doesn't scale. It's big, it's bulky. I love the concept of doing this, making decent money in it, documenting it on social media, and then like being very free and open. And this is exactly what Alex did from the Shelf dude. So I'm just like copying what, what he's already done. Being very free and open with everything that you're doing, hey, come compete against me. And that, that's kind of your hook, right? Right. That's your whole brand is like, compete against me. Come compete against me. Come compete. Because like, no one's going to want a shelf delivered from Orem to Los Angeles. So just finding that thing, making good money at doing that thing, documenting that thing, and then having people fly to you in person and charging them a pretty penny to show them exactly how to do that thing where they are.

So what you're saying is find something hyperlocal, non scalable, and then document your journey on social media. That gets awareness out there, builds trust with people, and then essentially turn it into a course. Is that like what you're like?

Yeah, like something in person though? Yeah, I mean, specifically in person.

I know we recoil at the course word, but right.

A training. A lot of this stuff is like not new or innovative. Right? Courses are not new. Doing things that don't scale is not new. Documenting your journey on social media, that's. I'm not inventing any of this, but putting all these pieces together look really interesting because what Alex can do now is he can be a lead gen source for all of these people around the country or world that want these shelves. And so someone from Miami reaches out. He could build a programmatic SEO site like garage shelving.com or something. Someone in Miami says, hey, I want those. Says, okay, yeah, we'll give you a call. He sells that lead for 50 bucks to the guy in Miami that already paid him five grand to learn how to build those shelves. And so he's profiting up front and then he's profiting over time as he sells those leads to the same people that he taught in person. Rinse and repeat with any industry. Basically, there's a guy that does this with epoxy flooring. He started with an epoxy flooring store, literally selling epoxy flooring materials. And then he got active on social media. Now he hosts these in person trainings of how to start your own epoxy flooring business. And so he makes really good money from that. And then he's makes even more money over time as he sells them the epoxy flooring. They don't have to buy from him. They do.

But here's my question. When I hear the way you're explaining it, it sound like. It just sounds to me like kind of what we make fun of people doing on Twitter where, hey, I started a cleaning company. I got it to $20,000 a month in revenue. And then you use that credibility to then sell a course. Like the be the business becomes selling the business information as opposed to the cleaning business. Am I misreading what you're saying? Is that the idea of what.

Yeah, pretty much a lot of those, like, remote cleaning things, the whole angle there is like, like the sex appeal of selling something remotely. Right. Like own a remote cleaning business without having to do anything. Whereas this is like very much unsexy, like flipping couches, repairing appliances. Epoxy flooring, it's something where you are the operator.

Okay. Yeah. So you're not selling the dream or the allure of passive income. You're like literally teaching people almost like a trade. Like, hey, this is how you gather. This is how you buy back electronics door to door and then sell it on ebay or any other of those ideas that you could possibly do locally.

It's just interesting what like the Internet has enabled. You know, we're 30 plus years into this and like, teaching has always been the lowest paid profession, one of the lowest paid professions, and it sucks because it's such an important thing. But with the Internet, that's like flipped on its head, right? With just look at YouTubers alone. They're just teaching, right? Like Mr. Beast is teaching people how to survive on an island by themselves for seven days. And it's. There's entertainment involved. There's a lot of entertainment. But now today, like teachers that have found out how to scale their skills are making more than 99 of the population.

Can I flip your idea a little bit on its head? Because it dovetails into one of my ideas that I wanted to talk about today.

Yeah, I'm done with that one.

Do you, you know who Chandler Reed is?

Huh? Yep.

SMB boot camp.

Yep.

Yeah. Okay. So for those who don't know SMB boot camp, basically they put on these boot camps several times a year, and I think Tampa Bay, Florida, and then when people come in, it's a live workshop boot camp, and they have speakers come in who are industry experts. They'll probably have somebody who knows the. Who's a lawyer that can help them with their purchase agreement, somebody who knows the due diligence, who can do the quality of earnings, somebody who knows financing, who's a banker, somebody who knows operations that can actually help with the transition. Right? So they come in, they speak, and they educate a lot of these people. But as I was talking to them a couple weeks ago, I had them on my podcast and I was like, why don't you do boot camps in like, Salt Lake or Southern California or Minnesota? Like, Florida's kind of out of the way. I live in Boise. It would probably take me 10 hours of travel to get to Tampa Bay. Part of that's because Boise has a terrible airport, and part of that is because Florida is just really far from Boise. So I started having this idea, and it kind of dovetails on. What you're saying is, could there be a business where in local markets you take live courses like the SMB bootcamp and say, hey, I want to license that from you. I'm going to hold a boot camp here in Boise. I will find the speakers. Like, I have your curriculum. So I'll find the finance person, the Q of E person, the. The operations person, and the lawyer. I will organize and host the event. I'll cut you a percentage because you've already created the material. But I have the network here. And then you market it and you get people from the west coast, you to essentially come in and attend that SMB bootcamp, and then you pay them a percentage. You keep the rest. And that's the business.

I love it. I mean, the hard part is having the expertise, right? Like, the hard part is having a life worth teaching about. Okay. Most people just don't fit that mold, period. And then the second hardest part is having to grind out all of that content. Once you've done that, it becomes fairly easy, right? Easy in quotations. And so if you can find someone like Chandler who's lived that life, he has the expertise and he's done all the hard work of assembling the content, then you can leverage his expertise and his content and give him 20%. And for him, it's just a bonus because these are. This is stuff that he wouldn't have captured anyway.

Yeah. I mean, and you can think of a version of this being done with the true trimming bootcamp or cleaning company boot camp or a coding bootcamp. Like any bootcamp that you can think of that has a live, in person component to it, which I think that many boot camps, even though there are virtual options, many people prefer the live and in person. If you could figure out a way to build that network locally and then reach out to somebody who has a successful bootcamp to then license it, that would be really cool. Again, hyperlocal education based content business.

I love it. Okay, what'd you think of those ideas? Please share it with a friend if they come to mind as you listen to it and leave me a review, I would really appreciate that because I don't really ask for it and I don't have a lot on the app store, so it'd be good to get some more. Have a great day.