I Found a Perfect Business That Anyone Can Start

What if I told you there's a service business that enjoys 100% gross profit margins and costs almost nothing to start? I'm Chris Kerner. I've started over 75 businesses in the last 15 years, three of them being worth over $10 million today. We're going to zoom in on the firewood business and how you can sell it all year round and start it with almost zero dollars. And then we're going to zoom out on creative growth, hacking techniques, and how you can grow exclusively on Facebook Marketplace.

Without even needing a website like let's Dive in.

About six years ago, as a favorite to a friend here in Dallas, Fort Worth, I helped them start a tree trimming business. And at the time, I was starting a software business and I was like, oh, software is sexy. Recurring revenue, high multiples. All the while, my friend with this tree trimming business was making tens of thousands of dollars a month, and I'm banging my head against the wall. And so a couple years later, I went to Twitter just thinking of something to post, and I did this viral thread that was called how to make $300,000 in 2023. A tree trimming Business. And it got me so excited to write about this experience that I went and started another tree trimming business with a business partner named James. That became Fast Tree Care here in Dallas Fort Worth. And it grew really fast. And we love home services. And starting a tree trimming business got me looking at other tangential opportunities like firewood. Firewood is an amazing business. The cost on the firewood is essentially $0. Because tree trimming companies, not only do they get rid of the wood that they cut down, but they pay a dump to take it. So when you approach a tree trimming company and say, hey, you know how you're paying the dump right now to take all your oak and your pine and your ash, why don't you just give it to me for free and I'll sell it as firewood? It's a great offer. It's a win, win. And so I went to a church function a couple months ago, and I was talking to some high school kids and they're like, kris, Kris, you know all about businesses. Teach us what? How do we start a business? Then I start asking them, well, what do you want to start? What do you like? And they had no idea. They didn't know where to start. I have more ideas than I have time. So coincidentally, we were splitting logs at this church activity for an elderly gentleman. And, you know, some people take TRT to Get their testosterone. And I just like using heavy equipment and log splitters. So we were using a log splitter much like this. This beautiful thing is a 27 ton log splitter with a an 11 second.

Cycle time, which means it takes 11.

Seconds to split a log. So it's kind of funny because we're talking about business ideas, business opportunities, pressure washing, window washing, house cleaning. All the while we're splitting wood. And I own a tree trimming business and I have three acres of land. And so then it just hit me like, why don't we start a firewood business? I'm a barbecue aficionado. You can sell firewood to barbecue restaurants or barbecue smokers, or you can just sell firewood to homeowners. We started talking terms and here's what we agreed on. I'll fund everything, I'll buy the log splitter, I'll buy everything. You can use my land for free. There's no rent. I'll find the customers for you, I'll mentor you, I'll teach you about business and you do all the hard stuff. You split the logs, you cut the logs and I'll just be the guy on camera pretending like I'm doing all the work. Right. They were happy with that. I'm happy with that. So here we are. So they came to me day one, they said, chris, let's buy a log splitter. How much are they? 1600 bucks. Okay, how many customers do we have? Well, do you have any customers for us yet? No, but we got to get some wood. So I reached out to James, he owns our tree trimming business. And I said, james, what do we have in the pipeline? We're taking down two oak trees. I'll have some wood in your backyard next week. Showed up, there was some wood back here. The guys came over, Devin and Cade, and they started cutting up the wood. So then they put the ball back in my court. They're like, alright, Chris, we've got wood. Where are our customers? What are you going to do, Chris? And I said, well, I'm going to go to Facebook Marketplace because you can run an entire business on Facebook Marketplace without having to need a website. And here's another brilliant part about this business. If for some reason we can't sell one stick of firewood, we can rent out this log splitter. This rents for about 70 to $100 a day to tree trimming businesses, homeowners, land clearers, people that want to split their own firewood. So I knew that worst case scenario, if I suck at selling Firewood, we can surely find someone to rent this out. Or we could just sell it on.

Facebook Marketplace and be done with it altogether.

I love finding businesses that have such a low floor, a high ceiling, but a low floor, because a lot of people think, oh, I started a business, I've got to quit my job, I've got to go buy a skid steer or a $2,000 log splitter. But you don't. There are always creative ways to start businesses that mitigate your risk from the outset. So what you're looking at right here is about a cord of firewood. A cord is how firewood is measured. A cord equals 8 by 4 by 4ft, half a cord being 4 by 4 by 4ft. A lot of times, consumers or homeowners, they can't really conceptualize what a cord is. And so we'll just describe it to them as a half a cord being about the bed of a truck. Because if you think about a bed of a truck, it's about 2ft tall by 4ft wide by 8ft long, give or take. And so two beds of a truck would be a full cord. Pricing in North Texas is about 450 to $500 for a cord, or about $250 to $300 for a half cord. So the smaller you go on sizes, the more you can charge per stick. So what you're looking at right here is about 10ft by 3ft tall from the top of the pallet to the top of the sticks, and four feet wide. We love using pallets for a couple reasons. A pallet is 48 by 40 inches, so we know that if a cord is 4x4x8 and we stack everything on a pallet, then we can at least get that 4 foot part of the dimension accurate. And if we put three pallets side by side, then we know we can get about 8ft on the other side of the dimension. The only thing this cord is missing is about one more layer of sticks. This is about 3ft tall, whereas it needs to be 4 to be a complete cord. We'll be delivering this to a customer in McKinney just this afternoon. Now, you'll notice that we're stacking these very specifically. This is not by accident. So wood needs to be seasoned. You can't just cut down a tree like this and split it up and go deliver it. That is one of the downsides of this industry, but it's also an upside because you can plan for it. Now, working with tree trimming crews to source our wood does Bring some challenges that you need to work around. A tree trimming crew will typically cut up their logs based on how thick it is. In other words, they'll cut it up based on how likely they are to be able to carry it from place to place. We need to shift that mindset if we start working with them, because we really need our sticks to be about 16 inches long. 14 is okay, 18 is okay. Anything below or above that really doesn't work because the dimensions of the cord.

Will be thrown off entirely.

So we have to train these tree trimming crews that we work with to cut the logs in 16 inches. It doesn't matter to us if a log is this big around or this big around. We need it to be 16 inches long so we can split it accordingly. Now we stack these about three to four sticks at a time in alternating directions. This is for several different reasons. Obviously, it will rain out here. Sometimes if we stack the wood too tightly, then mold can start to form and it will slow down the seasoning process. Seasoning is just a fancy way of saying drying it out. You can buy mobile kilns to speed season wood. You can attach them to shipping containers either 20 or 40 foot. These cost about 20 to $25,000, but.

It will save you time.

We would much rather prefer to plan in advance. Cut down trees in the spring to sell in the fall or the winter, and vice versa. So you can season wood by just waiting three to 12 months, letting nature do its job. The hotter it is outside, the quicker it'll season. Or you can use a portable kiln like these shown here. Or the more expensive way, if you really want to scale this business, is to build an affixed kiln. These can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, but enables you to season wood in as little as a week. A lot of times what we see in the firewood industry is as you grow, as you scale, you go from kind of a backyard operation to a mobile kiln operation to an affixed kiln operation. Right now, we're content just doing it on my property. Now, I wanted to give you some perspective on what a quart of firewood looks like when it's still in the tree form. And now, this is an American elm tree. It doesn't make for great firewood because it burns off really smoky, not cleanly like oak does, but nonetheless, it's a good representation of what about a half quart of firewood looks like. So if we were to cut this up in 16 inch logs like we instruct our tree crews to do. You'd get about 20 sticks per log here at the base, and it would slowly taper up to about 10 sticks.

Per log up here.

You shake out to about 250 to 350 sticks for this tree. That's what we call our logs after they're already split. And 250 to 350 sticks equate to.

About half a cord of firewood.

Usually about 600 is a full cord. So you're looking at about 250 to $300 worth of wood right here. So we're a little spoiled because. Because we own a tree trimming business.

So if we need more logs, we can just get more logs from our own business.

Not everyone has that luxury, but anyone.

Can pick up the phone and call or text a tree trimming business and say, hey, let me get some of your logs. Especially oak, especially the hardwoods.

But let's say for whatever reason, you're.

In a seasonal market. It's wintertime, people are buying firewood, but people aren't cutting down trees. You've got to get creative. What we like to do is we will look up the trash schedule for any given municipality and try to see when their bulk pickup day is. Most municipalities will have one day a month or two days a month. Call it the second Tuesday of every month, where you can put your brush.

Or your logs or your big trash.

Out by the street and they'll come pick it up. So let's say we look at Plano's website and we see that the second Tuesday of every month, you can put brush out by the street for free.

So we'll go the Monday before that.

Tuesday, and just start kind of hunting, looking around for logs, particularly large oak trees. And after you've been doing it a while, people are more likely to proactively give you a call and say, hey.

You guys are looking for logs, right? Come get this one, come get that one. So right now we're just kind of.

Driving around this neighborhood in McKinney, Texas, looking for logs out by the street or branches out by the street. Now, firewood can be a little tricky because you can't just turn anything into firewood.

You really want to have at least.

10 inches in diameter here. So a lot of times people just trim their trees and they put branches out and it's really of no use to us.

But if we see some logs out.

By the road, that's usually a pretty good sign.

Now, I asked my guys to leave me some logs to split because who doesn't like watching that? But they left me this big, ugly, honking piece. Now, if I were responsible, I wouldn't split this because you're only supposed to split with the grain. And this is obviously half with half against the grain. But I've never claimed to be responsible.

So I'm going to do it. So before I start any business that might rely on Facebook Marketplace for leads, I want to do some competitive market research. I need to know, is there more demand than there is supply in both my market and benchmark markets that have similar demographics and similar population sizes? So I'm doing research for Plano, Texas, which has about 290,000 people in it. Frisco and McKinney are cities that have similar demographics and similar population sizes that just happen to be right next to plano. So McKinney has 215,000 people and Frisco has 225,000 people. They're similar with race, age, income, demographics. So it's a perfect barometer to know how many competitors am I going to have if I start X, Y or Z Business that has to rely on Facebook Marketplace for leads. So I'm going to make a very simple Google spreadsheet here to keep track of these listings in competitive markets. Then when I set a radius on Facebook Marketplace, I'm going to make it a tight radius because I don't want to account for firewood companies an hour away that might deliver to Plano, Texas. I only want to know which ones are in Plano, Texas, because that's the only way I can keep my variables constant. Facebook is going to show me some listings that have firewood in the title, some that have it in the description. So I'm going to have to use my common sense to know before clicking if this is a relevant listing to me or not. So when I search firewood, Plano, Texas, within five miles, here are the listings that I see that have Plano listed in the title. I don't want to see Richardson and then click into it and see we delivered a Plano. I'm trying to save time here and be efficient and get the 8020 of this research without spending four hours. So I'm just going to look at the title. So I'm not going to worry about prices yet because some people list it as free or as $1 just to get more clicks. I just want to see listings. So right off the bat in plano, I see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, I see 14. I don't want to keep scrolling. I don't want to go to page two because I'm just going to see listings that are less relevant to what I'm looking for. So I'm going to go back to my spreadsheet. I'm going to put 14 under number of listings, and then I'm going to do the same search in Frisco. If I go to Frisco, I see 21 listings. Very interesting, because Frisco is smaller than Plano, yet it has 50% more competition. So already, after five minutes of research and it's telling me what I need to know. 21 listings in Frisco, and then McKinney will be our last market.

28.

Okay. For some reason, these are all multiples of seven. We go to McKinney and it looks even more competitive than Frisco. Now, this is why launching a business in your home area is so critical. Because if I were not native to the Dallas Fort Worth area, I've been here for 10 years, then I might look at this and say, oh, wow, so obvious. I need to launch in Plano because there's no one doing this in Plano. But since I'm a local, I know things like, okay, McKinney has a huge surface area. There's a lot of rural areas. It's further from Dallas. So homes are cheaper. There's more vacant acreage, there's more room for someone to start and run a firewood business. Plano is right up against Dallas. It's a little more urban. The lots are much smaller. There's more infill. There's just. There's not a lot left to build in Plano. So the likelihood of someone starting a firewood business in Plano is. Is much smaller than someone starting a firewood business in Frisco or McKinney. But this is a good thing. If I'm in Plano. This means that there's an opportunity for someone in Plano to start a business. A, there are less direct competitors nearby. B, they're closer to Dallas where there's 2 or 3 million more people. So I'm going to do some quick division here and see what we're working with. Okay, so there's one firewood business for every 10,700 people in Frisco Plano, one in every 20,700 people. And in McKinney, one in every 7,600 people. So this is interesting because I've done this research for a tree trimming business already, and I know that 1 in 10,000 is a pretty good benchmark. If I launch In Allen, Texas, which has about 100,000 people, I can expect there to be about nine competitors. 100,000 divided by 10 equals 10,000. So it is kind of curious seeing that the numbers for firewood businesses are very similar. And perhaps that's because a lot of the tree trimming businesses are vertically integrated and they're selling firewood as well. So right off the bat, I know that if I'm in Plano, I'm just going to have an easier time selling this firewood. It doesn't mean I'm going to be more likely to make the business work, and it just means I'm going to have less competitors. And all else equal, I would prefer to have less competitors.

One of the most ignored marketing channels is the most obvious. It's right in front of us. This is a busy road that I happen to live on. Conveniently, we're splitting all the wood in my backyard and we live on this road that gets about 23,000 cars to drive by every day. Here's why that's important. Advertisers value your eyeballs based on a CPM basis. CPM stands for cost per mil, or cost per thousand for a billboard or some drive by advertising like this. That might be worth about $20 per thousand cars. So if 23,000 cars drive by here every day, that's 23 times 20, which is about $500 a day worth of advertising. That's a lot of advertising. But me as the vertically integrated advertiser in this case, I want to get a 3-7x ROAS, which stands for return on ad spend. So if I put $500 into marketing, I want that to return 2 to $4,000 for me. So as the owner of the business that I happen to be marketing, this drive by traffic is worth two to four thousand dollars to me. That would be like selling four cords worth of firewood. How do you advertise out on the road without getting fined by the city or by your hoa? If that happens to be the case, well, you can wrap your vehicle, but that costs about 1 to $3,000. Another more creative option is to get magnets for your vehicle. You can get multiple magnets with the same image, so you get about half of the effect of a wrap at about 80% less cost. Then you park your vehicle out by the road. No one can get mad at you for doing that. And you've got a free billboard right here in your front yard. Now, that doesn't apply to people living in neighborhoods or on cul de sacs. Or everywhere. But you can always find properties that let you park or let you put up a sign or let you lease a little bit of space out by the road. If you want to know how much traffic any road gets, you'll need to navigate to the Department of Transportation website for whatever state it is that you live in. I'm in Texas, so if I pull up the Texas Department of Transportation website, I'm going to type in the city where I live and navigate to my street. Now, this isn't the street that I live on because I don't want you to know where I live, but I picked a comparable street here in the area that gets 26,000 cars to drive by every day. When you click on that number, the Department of Transportation will show you what the history of the traffic has been on that street over the last 10 to 20 years.

Now, I'm going to talk about listing strategies not just for Facebook Marketplace, but this applies to any marketplace. Maybe you're selling on Airbnb or on ebay or all of these principles apply to any marketplace. The three most important things you can ever do when listing anything for sale or rent on Facebook Marketplace or anywhere are these number one pictures. You have to take high quality pictures. You don't need a professional photographer, but you need professional looking pictures, even if it's with your iPhone. Take note of whatever marketplace you're on. How many pictures or videos do they allow you to upload? Keep in mind that these companies are a lot smarter than us. If ebay allows US to upload 24 photos, then they know that the diminishing returns happen after 24 photos. And it also means that the most optimal amount of photos or videos to upload is about 24. So don't upload. Three, even if a lot of your photos look about the same, just the angles are slightly different, upload all of them because it does you no harm. Also, it's called multimedia for for a reason. You don't only want to upload a picture or a video or multiple pictures or multiple videos. Upload everything, pictures and videos from multiple angles, especially because the algorithms will prioritize. Specifically, Facebook Marketplace will prioritize listings that lead with a video because it will stop the scroll. All of these companies want us to stop scrolling. And if we're scrolling and we see a bunch of pictures and then a video, even if a one second loop, we're going to stop there. So a the algorithm will prioritize it. B people will prioritize it because it looks better. So If Facebook Marketplace enables us to upload 12 pictures of videos, then upload two videos and 10 pictures or six and six. Take advantage of everything that Facebook allows us to do. Number two, description. You've got to nail as many keywords as you can. So I want to put in my listing hickory oak, post oak, scrub oak, ash, American ash, elm, everything. Even if it's not firewood that I sell, I still want it in the listing so I can get more visibility on my listing. And the third most important thing is responsiveness. The quickest to respond will win. If your notifications aren't completely blowing up you up on your watch or your phone or everywhere you then you're going to miss out on not just leads but money. You have to respond to these guys quickly. The Facebook audience is more impatient and more finicky than any other audience. So take advantage of that because the people you're competing against, I guarantee you are not going to be as responsive as you. So let's go into some of these listings here and I'll critique some of my competitors. I click on one and I can already see it's a blurry photo. Like I can barely see its firewood. He only has three photos. This is taken in the dark. The lighting is terrible. His description firewood for sale in Plano 18 quart or 1/4 cord pickup or delivered. Call text Matt for pricing. Hidden information. Here's what hidden information means. It means that Matt, the guy who posted this, put his phone number in there, not knowing that you shouldn't do that. Facebook doesn't want to pull people away from Facebook. So if you put your phone number in there, even if you kind of put weird line breaks in there, they can detect it and they will suppress not just your actual phone number, but they'll suppress your listing so it doesn't appear as often for as many people. So you're doing yourself a disservice if you try to circumvent Facebook. You want to work with Facebook, not against them. Remember, they're a one trillion dollar company. So what I want to do is encourage people to DM me on Facebook and then have all my notifications set up because the algorithm will also know that I'm trying to keep people on the Facebook platform and they're going to prioritize my listings as a result. I also know I want to list all of my prices. Okay, this means you're going to get less clicks, but you're going to get higher intent clicks. There's always a push pull happening between friction and the intent of a potential lead or a customer. If I put hardly any info in here, it will lead to more leads, but those leads will be much more weak. They're going to be less intent, they're not going to want to spend money with me, and I'm going to spin my wheels and waste my time. So put enough relevant information in there to trigger all the keywords that people are searching for and to incentivize someone to reach out to you to close the sale. But don't put too much in there to where there's nothing left up to the imagination. Now I'm going to show you what I did with my listing so and kind of walk you through what I was thinking as I did it. So you'll notice that a lot of the other listings just said firewood in the title. That is wasted real estate. That's like owning a block of Manhattan and grazing cows on it. It makes no sense. You want to put a skyscraper there, take advantage of it. I want to use every character I can in the title because those characters are ten times more valuable than your description. They don't have to click to read it. So I put cheap firewood. Free delivery. Help us save for college. That's the name of the business. College fund. Firewood. I broke every rule in my naming criteria when I named it that I usually like to have short, easy to remember, easy to spell three syllable or less names. But this I wanted to sell the story in the name. What is the story? The fact that I'm helping two high school kids save money for college. The whole story is told same simply in the three word name of the business. So if you look at the description, I say exactly what I'm doing. I'm helping two boys at church, Devin and Cade. I put the first names in there for a reason. These are real people. I'm not making them up. You can meet them, start a firewood and barbecue wood business. Now, I'm not just describing what I'm doing here. These are just keywords. I'm looking for more search traffic so they can learn about business and save for college. They split and stack firewood in my backyard and I help them learn about business. I also help them sell it, which is why I'm posting it here. Now if I were an orthodontist, I don't want to tell people that I'm doing it out of my backyard or out of my house or that I just got my degree. That's a completely different strategy. But this is A home service business. People are good. They want to help other people. I want to play on that. I want them to know that they are helping a real person to save for a real education instead of just another businessman that I'm competing against. And then I say what the pricing is. And I said, you can buy wood from anyone, but don't you want to support young, aspiring American entrepreneurs? Free delivery within 30 miles. Please let me know if you have any question. We can deliver only oak or pecan if you only need it for barbecue. Smoking wood. And then the picture I put in here, a picture of the actual wood. It's not pulled from Google images. This tells people that we're actually doing this. And you can see I put a picture in here of the young men that I'm helping, Devin and Kade. So they can see these are real people. And when they come to drop off the firewood, they're going to see these two guys. One of the most untapped marketing channels is also on Facebook, but it's not marketplace, it's Facebook groups. Most people have no idea how many different niche Facebook groups there are on a geographic per market basis. If you take Plano, Texas, for example, all I did was search Plano, Texas under groups and I see dozens of groups. Plano foodies, Buy, sell, trade. A Spanish Plano group, Plano, Texas job hunting. These groups are critical because it is people that live in Plano. There's a high likelihood that these people are your future customers. The quality of these groups will depend on how strict the moderating is. The best thing you can do is join these groups and start at it. Start asking engagement bait questions such as, hey, I own a tree trimming business and I want to take my guys out for tacos. What are the best tacos in Plano? You'll get a ton of responses because food is very opinionated and polarizing. Or you can go in there and say, hey, what are the best neighborhoods in Plano to raise a family? Where are the best neighborhoods for school districts in Plano? What happens when you ask these questions is that the Facebook algorithm will eventually. It usually only takes about a week. Tag your account as a top contributor and give you a badge. Which means after you earn that badge of trust from Facebook, you can start posting more deliberate salesy questions such as, hey, I've been in here for a little while. Thanks for answering all my questions. I own a firewood business. Trying to support my family. I'm a school teacher. I'm saving for college. Whatever your actual story is tell it and people want to support you and the algorithm will support you because you've already been adding value to the group without asking anything in return for the first week or two.

I'm cade, I'm a senior, I'm gonna go on a mission for my church and also I've got college. So just kind of both things of, you know, funding my current hobbies as well as what I'm gonna do in the future, money wise. The idea of creating a business like you hear all the time, people you know, you know, starting a business or you know, created this thing and now I'm making a bunch of money and it's like it always seems like such a foreign thing. How is that? How do you even do that? And then Chris came along and I didn't even know, I knew Chris, that he was an entrepreneur, but I didn't really know a whole lot about what he did. I didn't know that he had a podcast and created all this content about starting businesses. So we were up at a camp out, a young men's camp out, me and my partner Devin and we were sitting around doing this service project and he started talking man like, man like you could, I bet you could start, you know, live streaming this or even selling firewood or whatever and we should start a business. So then he was like, alright, I'll buy a splitter and you guys start running this business and we'll kind of go from there. So, you know, ever since, you know, kept talking about it and eventually rented a log splitter and got some wood. And another big thing is he has a tree trimming service as well. So you know, basically we've got all the free resources and all we got to do is the manual labor and then go deliver it and find customers. And he said, you guys do all the work, I'll find customers, I'll get you all squared away there. And then, you know, we worked out a deal and yeah, now we're making our first delivery and it's pretty exciting.

Wheelbarrow or a dolly is the most efficient way to transport this wood. But it really depends on the setting, right? The setting we're at here we have to stack the wood up on a.

Pre existing firewood rack which means the.

Most efficient way to do things is just to stack up all the wood you can and then you can just.

Drop it in one movement. So I used to own a company.

Called Sendeats, that was a third party.

Logistics company where we would pick, pack and ship orders on behalf of other brands.

And the name of the game in that industry is eliminate as many movements as you can. So if we stack these all up in a wheelbarrow or in a tote.

Or on a dolly, we've got to.

Unload, stack it, move it, bring it to the rack, unload it. Whereas when you just take a third.

Of the amount and you put it in your arms, you only have to do that once. So it's a little.

It's a little more trips, but it's.

Less time per trip and you net out ahead.

So we'll do both.

Just so we don't use the same muscles for everything. But sometimes the harder way is the better way.

Sam.