Q&A: Investing newsletter, short term rentals + fly fishing, video production growth, Alaska car biz & video creation software! Ep. #010. Small Business Ideas and Entrepreneurship

Welcome. Welcome to the Kerner office. Or what was formerly known as Kerner's Corner. We changed the name because frankly, the Kerner office is a better name. So if you want to call the corner office and mispronounce my name, I don't care. Just keep listening or watching and you can tell me whatever you want. Just don't call me late for dinner. Anyway, today was a great day. Some really diverse questions were asked in this order. Here's what we're looking at. Number one was a guy in Phoenix with a newsletter idea. Does he want to do a local events newsletter or does he want to do a newsletter geared to investors to raise money for his investing or his real estate project projects? Second one was a guy that owns short term rentals in Georgia and Tennessee that wants to launch a fly fishing business around it. Or maybe use fly fishing as a way to get more occupancy. The third guy owns a video production company and his growth has stalled. So I gave him some ideas on fixing that. Fourth guy wants to raise money for a local shipping store. He needs 60 grand to buy a shipping store. And I gave him some hard advice and I felt bad about it. But I think you'll. I think you'll agree with it. And if you don't, whatever. The next guy has a video creation software business and he wants to sell this video software to small mom and pop businesses. And I gave him a viral growth hack that I think you'll find interesting. And then the last guy was my favorite. Saving the best for last. He has a bunch of businesses in Alaska and he wants to know which one should I abandon? Which one should I lean into? Should I start something different entirely? He also has a W2. Three businesses plus W2 something sounded familiar. So I gave him some advice that I really loved. And I think you're gonna love it as well. Which is why I saved the best for last. So enjoy episode seven of the Kerner Office and we'll see you next week.

My question is. So I'm trying to decide between these two, these two different ideas. One is I've got a real estate investing newsletter. I write like a personal story. I try to make it funny, which is what happened to me during the week. Then I paste in three popular real estate tweets and add commentary under each one. The ultimate goal of the newsletter is to raise money to buy real estate down the line. This idea, though, the con, I think is the value add isn't super clear. And I'm no like real. Like I've got seven doors, so I'm no real estate guru. Idea number two would be to. I'm basing this off the joy list, which I'm not sure if you know what that is, but they, they're based in New York City. They, it's all about making friends in New York City and they send a weekly newsletter that has fun events to do in New York City where you meet people. I would do one for my city and this is the value add on this one is much more clear. There's a pain point that me and my friends have. I soured on this a little bit though because I looked at their website yesterday and they've got, they're bigger.

They've.

The one I'm basing it off of has got 7, 500 subscribers. But I looked at their website and they're charging like 100 bucks for an ad. So I think, okay, maybe there's not a lot of money there actually. So if it doesn't make money, it wouldn't probably make a ton of sense. But it seems like a more interesting idea and the value add is very clear. Whereas with the real estate, the value add, at least for what I'm doing, if you don't know me, you might not, you're probably not going to be interested in like my personal story and what I'm doing that week. So I was just interested in hearing your guys thoughts on which idea I should be going with.

Yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna repeat that a little bit because either I cut out or you cut out at some point. So I'll just rehash it and then it'll also help me help if I understand the question. So you're tossing around two different newsletter ideas. One is they're both low. Are they both local or is the investor one not?

Well, the investor one's not. It's more just about me and what I'm doing. So not really.

Okay, so your investor newsletter idea is to kind of send out a few popular real estate tweets of the week or month and then add some funny commentary around it. Right. Just add to the tweet a little bit with some humor.

Yeah, that's what I've been doing. But as I've been doing this for the last several weeks, I'm okay. There's maybe no value add really to this.

Okay. Do you follow Sean Puri's like five tweets of the week newsletter?

I do. That's actually what where I got the idea from. It's the similar. I was doing Five, too, but then I switched to three. But yeah, it's like the same. It's like the same thing. I just add a personal story.

Yeah. Okay. I love. I assumed you got that idea from there. I love that he's doing that because it probably takes 10 minutes. You're on Twitter all week anyway. And it's just like a way to stay relevant for a very low amount of time. And honestly, I'm kind of mad that I didn't do that because my newsletter takes hours, but. So that's your first idea. Take some popular real estate tweets of the week, email them out to newsletters, and with the ultimate monetization goal of raising money from LPs. Okay. And then the other one is basically like a joy list for Phoenix where you are. But you're not so sure on that one because it probably hard to monetize as much as you would like it to be monetized. Right?

Exactly. Yeah.

Okay. So to me, this is assuming. Do you have a passion around the joy list idea, or are you kind of ambivalent about either one?

I'm kind of ambivalent. Like the. With the joy list, it seems like it'd be entertaining, and I like making new friends, so I like the idea. And it's a pain point of mine, so it's interesting in that way. But, yeah, it's not like I get super jacked up about it or anything.

Okay.

I just thought it could kill two.

Yeah. To me, it's very. Sorry. Yeah, totally. To me, it's very clear. And I've had. I've never had this investor idea for a newsletter that you do, but I've had the idea to start a local newsletter because I think that's sexy and interesting and I like the thought of being like a local expert. But to me, it's. I'm kind of. I'm already kind of doing the investor thing with my newsletter and with Twitter and because I don't really directly monetize anything, I don't have ads, I don't sell sponsorships, and I don't really launch things. But I do post about RV parks we're buying, and it brings investor interest in. And over these last two weeks particularly, I've just been thinking, holy cow. Like, particularly related to Twitter. I can't think of a higher and better use of a Twitter account than doing real estate. Invest like real estate raising money from real estate investors because you're building trust at scale, they see you talk about real estate, they see and assume you're not an idiot. And so they read your stuff for weeks, months, years on end, and then they have an opportunity to invest in that. Whereas with a. What's your value per subscriber going to be on a local newsletter? $0.50 a month, $2 a month. Whereas with a real estate investor, it's. Or a real estate investing newsletter, it could be a hundred to a thousand times that. And if you're passionate about both, and I honestly, the investor one will probably take less time too. The one thing I would add is if you make it humorous, don't make it too humorous. Just because I've witnessed guys on Twitter that they lean into that so hard that they're just kind of like a joke, they're kind of a comedian. And it's no like, oh, then they tweet something serious and it's nah, are they trolling? And it's just, it's really good for clicks and views, but it's a lot harder to monetize. So if I were you, I would show humor just enough to show your personality, but not lean into it so hard. And I don't think you said you would do that, but that's just kind of an anecdote. But I would also add that at the end of every email or at the beginning, you just, you put in some sort of smart commentary that shows your readers that you know about real estate too. Like that you have value to add just as much, if not more than these tweets you're including.

That makes sense. Cause that's actually what I wanted to do. But my thing was too that, Yeah, I have seven units, so that's maybe impressive if you're like 20. But it's hard, I think, to show you're an expert and raise money. Maybe I don't want to come over and say I'm an expert or something because I just see all these big accounts. These people own like tons of apartments and whatever. And that's not really the angle I can go. Obviously, that's been my kind of thing. I don't want to look like cheesy or whatever. Like, thanks about real estate. I'm not like some legend.

Yeah, I totally get it. I think the way around that is to instead of positioning yourself as the owner of X amount of units, position yourself as the guy who looks at real estate investing a really interesting way or that has received, that has experienced really outsized returns or done a unique strategy with your real estate as opposed to like trying to be. Trying to compete with Grant Cardone on pomp and fluff.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

But I like that idea, man. I want to hear back and see how it goes. Yeah, thanks, Carter. Thanks for calling in. Welcome everyone listening or watching? And especially. Welcome, Jimmy. You've got a question for me about your short term rentals in Georgia. So let's hear it.

Yeah, man. So I've actually got. Yeah, I've got one cabin in Blue Ridge and I've got two actually in Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg area. And they're both the one in. They're both kind of like just standard cabins, but they're very. The one in Blue Ridge is walking distance to the Toccoa. You can see the Toccoa river on the back porch. The Pigeon Forge one is. So I. My question to you is just like how can I differentiate my cabins and start doing more like marketing and getting more direct bookings? I just need to increase revenue and I'm wide. I would obviously like to not spend a lot to get that. But yeah, I need to increase revenue for both cabins. So I was thinking go like a. Some kind of fly fishing angle. But I'd love for you to take the ball and run with it and get your advice.

Yeah. Okay. So two cabins total or more?

Three total. Two in Pigeon Forge, one in Blue.

Ridge, one in Blue Ridge. Okay. And I would guess that they were doing a lot better kind of post Covid. And then it's. You're a little oversaturated now. Trying to differentiate.

Yeah, 100%.

I had a nightmare the other night. You know what it was? It was that there were ads on this podcast. But I would never do that to you. You know what I would do? I would shamelessly ask you to like and subscribe to this and to share it with only 1300 of your friends.

Yeah, 100%. It's just like revenues down and it's not like anything like Armageddon like what you see on social media, but it's.

It's just.

I'm just trying to make it better, more profitable. Just trying to get revenue back up.

Yeah. Okay. Now if you were to say, if you were to look at all the other cabins in those areas, where does your stand as far as amenities are concerned between like a ten being like five grand a night and it's on water slide and a one being like a freaking tent in the woods?

Sure, sure.

I'll.

A solid five.

Right.

Like it. They all have hot tubs, but they're. They all have pool tables and stuff, but it's just kind of like standard stuff. So maybe that's like a six or something, but.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay. And what is your occupancy looking like lately that you would like. And you'd like to get it to like 80, 90%, I assume.

Yeah, it was. It was probably like for Blue Ridge, like 50, 60. And then in Pigeon Forge, like 70 to 80. And that's. That's just a number. But those are like really messy numbers because like January and February, both markets, it's like zero, but then in December it's like 100. So that's.

Yeah.

Okay, cool. Which one? If you could wave a magic wand, which one do you care about most? Which one did you.

Blue Ridge, by far. We love as a family. We love Blue Ridge, Georgia. And it's out. I know you've been to Pigeon Forge and stuff, so you know that scene, but Blue Ridge is like very outdoor centric. There is no franchises or there's no name go kart tracks or anything there. It's just all outdoor stuff.

Yeah. Okay, tell me what you were thinking with fly fishing specifically. I know you mentioned that.

Yeah, my big idea. And I like your approach of like actual steps. But my big idea was to like get a direct booking website, but. But really market and stuff with promote. Even on Instagram, like promoting the fly fishing aspect and like getting the local guides, like getting them involved. Promote them and then they in turn promote my cabin and get bookings and like that way.

And. And then.

But eventually I'd have my own client list. So eventually I can build up something. A fly fishing cat. Because I love a place out west, like Idaho or something as well. So I can eventually sell this as a portfolio to like Orvis or Sims or whoever in the adventure outdoor space. Somebody looking to building. Building a fly fishing brand.

Okay. So you not only want to increase the occupancy, but you might want to actually scale this. If you can figure out how to fix this occupancy issue, then you want to lean into this site, this business more. Because I know you've got a zillion businesses.

Yeah, yeah. Right now I'm just trying to increase revenue and stuff, but it doesn't all that what I just described. That's very manageable and actual. Like I can get that done next month. But I just wanted to be smart about like where I invest my incremental capital. I'm wanting to get the highest returns on invested capital possible for this. So I just wanted your opinion on what to do.

Okay, so what? I think you could do one thing is lean into the fly fishing side. That's your idea. And do some keyword research. Look for some like kind of low traffic but high intent, long tail, two to six word keywords related to fly fishing or fishing in Bluebridge. And then I would put up a completely separate website and you can do one of two things. So one, you can just advertise your own. Do you currently have a website where you advertise these yourself or only on the big plug? Okay, so one is you could do that and you could just start with your own website and get direct bookings and you're going to get nothing for a while and. But I would start on the back end generating some content and you can even use AI to make this content. What? Stephen Ullman and his partner Sam Thompson, they're starting a business that's really interesting where they use a bunch of automations to generate articles like keyword rich articles on a daily or weekly or however often basis that's fully automated on the back end and just publishes to your website. And they're having insane results, bruh.

What are they called?

Yeah, it's called unlimited content. Unlimited content.

Unlimited content, yeah.

Yep, that's what it is.

Hard done.

And I. Their value prop is like basically 80, 90% of the benefit of SEO for 80 to 90% less, right?

Yeah.

Because it's automated and they're making no bones about it. It's AI. But I kind of like that from a business angle because it's. You can't really, you can't. Tech advancement won't put them out of business. They're leaning into tech advancement.

Right? Yeah.

Anyway, I have no affiliation with them, but it's a conversation I had this last week that just came to mind. Anyway, I. So I would start by doing that no matter what. Step one, create a direct booking website. You follow Isaac French at all?

Hell yeah.

Yeah. Have you thought about taking his master class? Because. Yeah, this is exactly what he talks about.

For sure, for sure. He. Yeah, it's. I thought. I'm sure you thought Richard Furtig as well, like his stomp capital. Yeah, like he, he was the one that. He actually had this idea of fly fisher. I don't know if you've met any like die hard fly fishing people.

They're.

They will spend unlimited money, unlimited time on it as kind of. So he's what, the one that actually got me to think about this and of course like I haven't done anything with it, but yeah, that's. Yeah, both of them. Yeah, that's exactly what I was going for.

Yeah. So that would be step one, direct bookings. And it's kind of like a farce in a way because you've got the direct bookings available right on the front homepage. People aren't necessarily going to find you unless you push paid ads to it. But on the back end you're going to be running all types of keyword rich content that will take weeks and months and years to play out. But I think you're patient and you're, and you're willing to wait. So I would do that. And it shouldn't take too long and you can kind of do that passively. And then step two is to, and I'm only suggesting this to you because I know you like starting new businesses. Think about starting like a, like a local marketplace for fly fishermen. And so on one side you get all the local fly fishing shops or guides in the within a two hour radius listed. You can use outscraper to find them. And then on the front end you can push paid ads to it and find fly fishermen. And at first there's no mention of your short term rentals. It just looks like it's a fly fishing, a local fly fishing marketplace. And then you can use something like Share Tribe there, that's like a marketplace software that I used eight years ago. I'm sure they have a bunch of competitors by now. It's the only one. And then as you make these relationships with the fly fishing shops, you can start it out for free, just, hey, my name's Jimmy, I'm gonna send traffic your way. What's the cost? I don't know yet. But for now just enjoy these free leads. We'll figure it out. And then when, slash, if it works, then you can start talking about either charging them on a per lead basis or taking a percentage of revenue they get or being creative and saying, you know what, where are your guys staying? I don't know, I don't care. I just, I'm a guy. What if you, what if instead of you paying me for these leads, I give you leads and I pay you and if you send me people to stay in my cabins, I'll give you 10% of the booking, which that could be 200 bucks, it could be 50 bucks, something like that. And that way they're like incentive, like they love you, you're over delivering, you're giving them free leads and you're paying them just to recommend your cabins. What do you think?

I love it. I love it. The big thing I Don't know how deep you've dumped into, like, Richard Fertig's post. But what's interesting is over 50% of his revenue isn't bookings, it's the ancillary services that he does. And his Outer Banks project with the wind surf, it's the same thing he's done for windsurfers and the Outer Banks. Like, I was thinking fly fishermen, so I was trying to just figure that out, but obviously with like, limited resources. So that's. I love all that.

Okay. Anything else that should be. That should be enough to get you going.

That's great, man. I love the show, love the feedback. Thanks so much.

All right, thanks, man.

All right, thanks.

Yep. See ya.

Well, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Absolutely. So all I know about you is video production.

That's right. Yeah. I'll give you a little bit of background for context. So I started my video production company about seven years ago, but over the past couple years, the revenues flattened out and I've really struggled with growing it in any sort of, like, consistent or predictable way. I have tried cold email, cold LinkedIn outreach, Facebook, and Google Ads, but I haven't found anything that that works really well. Really just love to hear any advice or ideas you might have on how to kind of predictably and reliably grow the video business. I do have a few ideas I could pitch, but I just kind of curious to hear your thoughts and I'm happy to answer any questions you might have for that.

Okay. Where are you located? Where's your business?

I'm in San Antonio, Texas.

Okay. And is everything you're doing local or do you travel for stuff or do anything remotely?

We do travel and we do a decent amount of projects remotely. Now. I've started doing some work on upwork just to kind of get typically lower value projects. But all my editors are remote, so we can do kind of like animated motion graphics and explainer videos and that kind of stuff all remotely without having to be in person. But we do travel if the client, if the budget works for the client.

Okay. And when you're on upwork, are you doing like explainer videos and stuff like that? Is that your average job?

Yeah, primarily on upwork. There is some, like, shoots and stuff that come from that. I'm actually going up to Dallas next week for a shoot with McKesson that came through Upwork of all things, but most of it's editing projects, social media videos, animated explainers, that kind of stuff.

And are you on thumbtack at all or Angie's List.

I have been. Yeah, I'm actually thinking about getting back on it. I was having a similar issue where the, you know, a lot of those platforms are kind of raced to the bottom, so it was hard to charge my, like, normal rate. But. But yeah, I've. Because I've since hired someone full time who's just doing upwork proposals all day, every day. That's just started the past couple weeks. So I'm thinking about having them do, like, tech proposals while they're at it.

Yeah, I asked that because I found my video guy on thumbtack and I paid him many thousands of dollars and I found him like seven years ago and I still call him for stuff.

Yeah.

Sample size of 1. But does Angie do that as well? Does Angie have. I don't think I haven't listing.

I haven't looked at Angie. I think they're primarily home service, but I haven't checked to see if they have. But I definitely can look into that as well.

Have you heard of the site like Spare Foot?

I don't think so.

I think it's like. Let me pull it up. It's like an Airbnb for renting out space in like, random spaces for photo shoots and stuff like that. No, it's not Spare Foot. That's Self storage.

Peerspace, maybe.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, yes. Have you heard of them?

Yes, I've heard of them. I've thought about that too. I don't actually currently have a physical space. We typically travel to the client's address. But one of my ideas was getting a space that's. I'm definitely open to that possibility, but typically I haven't needed one because we just go on location. And now with. Since COVID there's been a lot more of the remote stuff as well.

Yeah. And I was asking because I was wondering out loud if there's a way you could potentially leverage that platform in a different way, because a lot of people that are your potential customers are going to Peerspace. Now, you could easily say these are my competitors going to Peerspace, but I bet you'd be surprised that there are influencers and other types of businesses that are looking at Peerspace that still need a videographer for projects. I'm wondering if there is. If they have a. Like a public directory or a listing or anything or any sort of partner program where you could weasel your way in there or even. Do you do weddings very often or is that just not your jam?

No, typically we haven't. We've done a Couple many years ago. But it's not our bread and butter, for sure.

Are you not interested in doing weddings?

I think it's possible. It's kind of like a completely different animal in a way. So I know a lot of, like, my staff that are doing the shoots now. Like, I would probably have to find more people to do it, different people to film that those. And I think the editors could potentially do it. But it's almost, in my mind, it's almost like a different business, which is fine. I'm happy to kind of pivot where the. Where it is, but that's just not something that I've really pursued that.

Yeah, it's almost like if you take on weddings and you might as well just chase your shiny objects. Cinderman. Start something else entirely that could be more profitable.

Exactly.

What is your average ticket size and what does your average job look like? Like, what type of job? Is it a McKesson type job or smaller businesses?

Yeah, traditionally, it's kind of like the corporate thing. We show up on site. Historically, this is what we've done a lot of show up on site, do some interviews. Maybe it's scripted, or maybe there's just some questions, maybe like customer testimonials, that kind of stuff. And those projects can run anywhere from 1500 to 2000 upwards to 10 to 15,000 is kind of the range that we play. There's people that'll do it for 50 or 100, and there's people that'll do it for 500 bucks. And then with the remote stuff, like on Upwork, the average project size is like 500 bucks.

Okay. Okay. What if you could pick, like, a niche or an industry that you've worked with in the past in this business, what is. What have been your favorites?

Yeah, so I've worked a lot with technology companies because I actually used to work at Rackspace back in the day. So that's where a lot of my network was. I've done a lot of cybersecurity tech companies. I like those. And also done. My biggest client is like a healthcare. A large healthcare client with like hundreds or thousands of clinics. And. But that's more. So it's not so much the healthcare part, it's just the fact that they're a larger company and they're not cheap. They understand the value of what I do. So it's not like having to kind of argue with them over the value of the service, that. That sort of thing. So that's what I like about them. And then the only other thing recently is since I've hired the motion graph graphic designers on the team, I've liked doing these animated explainers because there is good margin there, but it's a lot of people. There's a lot of demand for that kind of project as well. Another thing like. I. Sorry, go ahead.

Is that something you think you want to. You keep leaning into the animated stuff?

Yeah, I think so. I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Okay, and what were you saying?

I was just going to say that the other side of it that I haven't really done a lot of is the more recent like TikTok shorts, YouTube, all that kind of stuff. The creators types videos, which it's in the same space, but it's almost like the weddings in that it's not where there's a lot of demand. And you've got like the clipped and all those guys that do the monthly recurring service, which I like the idea of that, of having people. It's almost just like the pure labor arbitrage model, but it's also not the types of stuff we've done traditionally. So I don't know if it makes sense to kind of pivot that direction when it's not the background of what we've been doing.

Yeah. When it comes to thumbtack, what percentage of the jobs, the total potential jobs out there would you say that you're bidding on today?

On thumbtack or on network? Yeah, we. So I got a couple filters on there. We kind of ignore like the lower dollar amount projects and we focus on primarily the U.S. only jobs. But we were basically every job that's something that we would do. Right now we're bidding on all of them. It's about maybe 10 proposals a day for that. And again, we're ignoring like the $30 an hour and under projects or like the $250 projects, that kind of stuff. So there's more out there, especially if you take the US filter off. But yeah.

Any idea of how many. What percentage of those jobs you're getting?

We're starting to track that now. I don't have the perfect numbers, but I'd say It's probably about one out of every 10 right now. Maybe one out of every 15 proposals. So we're trying to tweak our proposals to get higher response rates and things like that.

But are you doing personalized video proposals?

I've done a little bit of that in the past. I'm not currently doing it though.

Here's. If I were you, I would do exactly what you're doing on upwork, I would ignore the smaller jobs. Not worth your time. But I would aim to get two or three out of every 10 jobs that you apply for. And just by being super unique and creative. What would you say is the average ticket size of an upwork job?

Typically about $500 is like, the average is about 10 hours of editing. Right now we're pretty low at 50 or $60 an hour just to kind of build up the profile. Although there are like one out of every so many clients is going to be something where, oh, we want to do 20 videos over the next year. So it kind of ends up being a bigger lifetime value of the client. But the project sizes are relatively small most of the time.

Okay. Can you foresee any of them turning into recurring engagements?

Yeah, we're working on. We've actually gotten a couple clients in the past few weeks that are recurring clients. So that's. That's why I kind of doubled down on upwork. The only issue I kind of see with this model is like, to get to any sort of like, reasonable or like, sizable revenue of like, I'd love to be in the 1 to $2 million revenue range. It's like you're doing the math, and it's okay. That means I'm gonna have a team of like 20 editors doing, you know, 800 hours a week of edit or whatever the math works out to be at this kind of rate. I mean, there are some larger rate stuff on upwork, but it's few and far between. So typically it's in that $40 to $60 range. So I want to scale, and it seems like it'd be easier to do that with more going direct to the corporate route. But that's also where I've struggled to get any traction with the acquisition side.

Yeah, it's really tough doing cold outbound to those corporate accounts. That's why I'm just racking my brain.

It's.

You've put yourself in this niche of corporate stuff, but that stuff is just so hard to find. So you said you've tried pay per click stuff, Google Ads?

Yep, Yep, I've tried Google Ads. And I think there. I know. So the issue is with all of these methods, like, I know there are people who are making it work. So it's. I don't know if it's me. Maybe I'm not sticking with it long enough. Maybe I'm not bidding on the right things. But it wasn't. I wasn't able to get it profitable When I tried it, this was about a year or two ago.

All right. I. I would. There's some software out there, AI software where you can upload a video and then you can have it, like, swap out a key sentence or a keyword. So I would do video proposals for everything on upwork, front and center, personalized. You already have someone. Like, you've hired someone to do this job for you, which is great. I would have that person. I'm sure they're already applying as fast as they can. I would have them start including in the application as much personal info about that job poster as they can. And that might involve them clicking through to the profile, looking at the company going in. Oh, okay. Finding, like, a random article or story about that company from years ago, using the web archive. Web archive to find something on their website that they don't offer anymore. Like, it sounds like a lot of research, but some of this stuff, once you're well versed at it, will take five to 10 minutes. So really just dive deep and have them say, hey, first name. Hey, why aren't you offering X or Y or z anymore? I really like not just commenting on the job post, but commenting on the company stuff that you have to find outside of upwork, yet applying inside of upwork. Because I have been posting to upwork since it was called odest, probably over a thousand job posts. And so I have gotten so many applications, and a lot of these guys circumvent upwork and they'll cold email me, they'll see me, they'll see my name, and they'll do this kind of research I'm talking about. And it pisses me off. Like, I. I could be an exception, but I hate it. Like, I hate people going outside of upwork. Like, I'm using upwork because I want to stay on upwork. I could be an exception, right? And so if I'm an exception, then go do that. Because they're probably doing it over and over because it works. If I'm not an exception, it's worth testing for sure. Then do all that outside research. And it's no different than a job applicant that you're hiring for coming in and saying, hi, I love that your company does this and you used to do this, but you pivoted. You're just like, wow, you're flattered and your ego takes over and you're like, nah, I like this guy. Or, he could be a terrible employee, but he did his research. So you have all this positive confirmation bias going into this interview. That is probably going to make you want to hire him. So I would treat upwork like a job interview and do all that research. If there's only 10 a day, as you say, like that's just a part time job for a va. And then make a personalized video and see how it goes. First with using AI to swap out like that first sentence because you want to plug in the name of their company or their first name right in the beginning because most people won't watch past five seconds and then after that it's the same video for everyone. Right. You're just copying, pasting it.

Right.

And then see if you can get that acceptance rate from 10 to 20 or 30%. Now I. Do you think that would be a meaningful difference to your business if you were to double or triple your upwork side of the business? Or is it still kind of. I got to do more than that?

Yeah, I think it is meaningful. We just really started upwork seriously a few months ago. It is just, it's, it feels, I think it's meaningful and it's worth doing and I, I definitely will do that. But it's kind of like a lot of all this effort and then it might equal one of one of my larger corporate clients to get like a bunch of these smaller ones which is, that might just be the game that I need to play. But it's, it's hard to.

Yeah.

Wow. There's these 10 Upwork clients are paying me like half of what my one large corporate client is paying me every month and with a lot more back and forth and stuff. But, but it's competitive and it is a fairly commoditized skill at this point. So it's hard to figure out where that angle is necessarily.

Yeah, I like the idea of being able to sell explainer videos to companies all over the world, but we both know that's something that AI is just going to crush. Right. Whereas doing stuff like your market is plenty big enough for you to have a 10 million plus dollar business. So leaning into using this upwork hack that I'm talking about to kind of boost your enthusiasm and your ego and get you excited about the business again so you don't keep looking around at other ideas. But, but then I would also start at the same time just starting a drip campaign scraping like a targeted list of emails in your area. And I know it's hard, but there's something about Michael Scott says always be closing. Right. I say always be sending cold emails a much longer acronym. But like when you always Have a campaign going of 50 to 200 emails a day to complete strangers. You're just always in the game, right?

Yeah.

It's like you're right now, you're sitting on the bench at the baseball game and you're not getting called. You're never going to hit a home run because you're never even going up to bat. But if you're just putting your name in inboxes all day, every day, something's going to hit and then one of those things that hit will be recurring. So even if you're like this, the potential promise of this and your outbound response rate is much lower than a traditional business. It's worth doing. And then I would also explore putting your stuff out there using TikTok and an Instagram to your advantage from like behind the scenes, behind the curtains, like the life of video. You've seen those videos? I've seen them. Where it's like a picture of the camera showing how you make certain shots. I think that could go a long way, but I would put that as like opportunity number three of these three, whereas the other two would be higher and better use of your time.

Yeah, no, I like that. I appreciate that. That makes a lot of sense. Can I just pitch one brief idea around this video business just to hear your feedback? So I'll make it really quick. One idea I had was leasing a space in like a large office building and building like a small podcast slash video studio and using that as like a lead gen within the hopefully it's a building that's big, that has hundreds of tenants and even potentially partnering with the landlord, either making it like an amenity, like a fitness center, except it's a podcast studio and having the landlord pay me some like discounted rate and using that as a lead gen almost. Okay, I'll do this like low cost podcast or whatever with the idea that, oh, I can pitch the podcast editing services or other videos. Yeah. So I don't know if that you think would be worth pursuing or should focus on this other stuff first.

Honestly. You could do like a we work or a we work knockoff where it's just a month to month and you're like, I just need this office. It's exclusive, it's not a shared office. And that way if it doesn't work out, you just pull the plug and then throw up a website. Start reaching out to people. Like certain, like local entrepreneurship groups would be perfect because these are guys that if they don't already have a podcast, they're about to have a podcast and they'll want a podcast. And they probably live at home with crying kids and it's just a place for them to escape to it. You could structure it a zillion different ways. You could rent it out by the hour as needed. Flat monthly rate, unlimited usage, additional costs for editing or the editing is lumped in. You could do any number of things. And then you could even use it as your own office when it's not being rented out. That's a great idea. And maybe it doesn't even need to be a lead gen source. Maybe it could just be a self sustaining business in and of itself and a lead gen source. That's a great idea. Yeah. It sounds like you've got a great thing going. I want you to follow up with me, tell me how everything's going. Absolutely.

Have a good day.

Yep, you too. Raw.

Hey guys. What's going on?

How are you?

I'm doing great.

You're looking to raise capital for a local like shipping store, right? Correct.

Exactly. Basically I have been looking to acquire business and instead of going on buy, biz, sell and all these different sites, I figured why don't I just go in my local area and just go talk to business owners. So this shipping store is two minutes down the road from our house and talked to the owner for a few hours a couple of weeks ago and they, they do mailing and shipping of packages, they do passport photos, things like that. And he is open to selling. He's at that age where he wants to retire and do something else. And he's looking for $60,000 cash. He's not open to seller financing because apparently he's been burned before in a previous sale of a business. So he's against that. And he did provide me the financials so I kind of wanted to get like deal analysis, but also maybe ideas on getting capital as well.

And do you think you need capital to for all of this or a portion of it?

All of it. Ideally yeah. I have some cash saved but like I'd rather, I'd rather just finance the entire deal.

And what makes you interested in the shipping store of all other types of businesses?

I like this business in particular because it's pretty dead simple on how it works. And in addition to that, I like how there are so many opportunities to improve this business as it is. Right now he has 90 mailboxes that are about 80% occupancy. I would immediately add more mailboxes. The other thing is his pricing for everything is not in line. With like, the averages of competitors. So I would increase prices there as well. So I see opportunity in like, increasing the business, like right off the jump. And then on top of that, it's not that much capital up front. So it's 60,000 bucks versus a lot of businesses on the websites like biz by sell are 3, 4, 500,000, if not more.

How many shipping stores are in your area aside from this one?

So there's one that's in the area maybe like a mile or two away, but it has one and a half star rating on Google, and it's like probably 25 reviews. So it's like, really not a place that people like going to. His store has about 25 reviews, four and a half stars. And then we do have a UPS store and a USPS as well. But he is an authorized shipper for UPS, USPS, DHL, and FedEx. And the other nice thing is, like the shopping center that he's in. And there's a Kroger and there's like.

A bunch of other.

There's like a planet Fitness. So there's tons of, like, foot traffic and like, tons of parking. So really high visibility area as well.

Would you say that his location is better than the one with the one and a half stars? Correct. What are you doing right now? Do you have a W2 and how many hours per week are you actually working?

I don't have a W2. I do contract sales work. So I eat what I kill and I work as much as I want or don't want.

You enjoy doing that?

I like selling. I do like selling, but I don't want to go back into the W2 because what I've noticed is when I work my W2, it's. I get into this phase of, okay, learning, doing well, and then I just either get bored or I get tired of just like, working for the man, I guess you could say.

So.

This seems to be like a great way to just get my foot into the door of like, entrepreneurship and starting a business and then eventually hiring an operator and then flipping it and doing something or and doing something else eventually.

What would you say that the max potential for this one location is if you were to fully optimize it realistically, not if you're 100 occupied with twice as many mailboxes, but, like, conservatively, what would be the net profit in your pocket?

Net profit in my pocket right now. He gave me the last three years of his P L and he's averaging around 142,000 in top line revenue. And so I'm thinking that I could double the revenue. And he's running at like 25% profit margins or net profit. So guess what does that put?

35 grand?

Yeah.

Okay, so he's selling it for two times profits. Basically, yeah. And how many people live in your area if you were to buy a different business based on how far you'd be willing to drive to operate that business, about how many people live there? So I don't know.

I know that like our neighborhood in particular, there are 2,000 homes in our neighborhood, but outside of that neighborhood there are more residential homes and there's lots of like low income apartments. So we live in an area that is probably like 70% or 60% low income, Hispanic. Lots of check cashing services, lots of laundromats, lots of dry cleaners, things like that are in the area.

Okay, so your question mostly revolves around how, if I'm understanding quickly how to raise the money to buy this business. Right, Exactly.

And the thing is, I looked into SBA loan, but my concern with SBA is that he has a couple buyers that reached out to him already and basically they're just like, hey, I need a little more time. Like six months, like three to six months. And I know that the SBA process can take a good chunk of time, so. And of course, I just don't know if it's worth it for $60,000. But that's really the only avenue I've explored.

If you were to raise money from friends or family, do you have a track record that you could point to?

I don't have a business track record, no. I just have, again, just the W2 and like corporate reputation. So yeah, that's. I don't have a business ownership background though.

Okay. So here's what I think. I honestly, I think you will regret if you end up buying this business. I know this industry fairly well. I've. I used to drop off packages at stores like this for my E commerce business a decade ago. I just think that for the amount of effort it's going to take to really take out a 10 out of 10 execution on this, you could put the same or less amount of effort into a different opportunity and make two to 20 times more. I don't know if you listen to my first million, but on a recent episode they said the phrase like 10 out of 10 execution and 1 out of 10 idea or opportunity. I look at that like this. I think if you're able to convince someone without, and I think you could be able To. I think there's a lot of money out there, especially for people without a big track, or not especially, but including for people without a huge track record or a big business background. I still think you could be able to raise money for this, but I don't think that you should. I just think that your ceiling is way too capped for all of the stress it's going to take to run and own and buy and operate a business like this. And I used to have retail businesses, my iPhone repair shops. And it was. I hated it, man. It sucked. It was just picking pennies up in front of a steamroller. It was meeting people and they get angry about whatnot and it's. They're right there in your face. And it's just, man, I could be making money on the Internet. And I'm not saying you need to go buy an Internet business necessarily, but I think you should be patient and lean into your skills as a salesperson, which are very hard to find. Like, it's hard to acquire those skills, especially if you tell me that you like selling. Like, why sell a $10 a month widget or a $30 a month widget when you can sell a 3:30, $300,000 widget? Right? Like, look into life insurance. Salesmen can make millions of dollars a year. It's a grind. It takes. You got to eat crap for a while. But I would just suggest entirely that you lean into your salesmanship and don't even necessarily focus on starting a business, but focus on buying undervalued cars on Facebook marketplace and flipping them. Or just start by flipping stuff because you can sell. So selling the hard part. Beep, beep, boop boop. I'm a robot. I'm AI. You're watching artificial intelligence asking you to like and subscribe. You're cringing, but I'm cringing more. I'm dead inside. So selling is a hard part. The easier part is buying. And honestly, a lot of those skills are the same. It's just people skills, soft skills, working with people, and you know what I'm saying? So I would just. If you want extra income, I would start by doing onesie twosie things that get your juices flowing, get your gears turning, get some money in your pocket, building a track record. And then when you do go to raise money for something, make sure that thing is sales focused. So the track record you lean on can be based on sales and not based on business ownership.

Yeah, that makes sense.

What do you think?

Yeah, I think you're onto something. It's just I could definitely see it being a low ceiling. And then obviously like retail, it's a place that opens that's open Monday through Saturday and somebody has to be there. And if it's not open, you're not making any money. So it's definitely a challenge there.

Yeah, you can go to Home Depot and buy a $200 pressure washer and go knock some doors, make a thousand bucks. Like, you can't have pride. Like, no matter what you do, you can't have pride or it's just not going to work. And so just take these valuable skills that you have. And I know you, you feel like this sunk cost fallacy or committed to this deal. You've already talked to this guy and you're like kind of romantic about it and you've probably made spreadsheets. But don't let that get in the way of an opportunity that you, I think you will most likely regret in the future.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah. I was just gonna say there are even bigger opportunities than that where you don't need to raise any money. Like a home service business. Right. Like I would seriously start looking into that. So sorry to disappoint you, but that's just my opinion.

No, you're good.

I appreciate it, Chris.

All right, Merle, have a good day.

All right, you too.

See ya. See ya.

Yeah.

Can you hear and see me okay?

Perfectly.

All right. So the company is Deep Cognition, which I had mentioned, that's Dallas based company and they started out with something called Deep Learning Studio, which is a development platform for AI. And more importantly, the thing was the flexibility. So we talked about generating videos potentially from different images or from video to customize the video and make like a composite video out of images or our image video combination. And not only that, we're down the line, we are thinking we can make it where you can customize it.

Sar, do you want to sell videos to these mom and pop businesses or the video making software to them?

The video making software.

What would be the, like the revenue size of a traditional business that you think you would sell these to?

So these are.

Right now we're doing, we're targeting like mom and pops, I don't know, a couple million a year.

Any industry or are there any industry thinking of?

Currently we're thinking about restaurants and motels operators and as I said, we can customize it so if it's. Or build on, build more features as time goes and depending on how much traction we get. So for example, if it's a restaurant and they have. You can integrate all sorts of functionalities, either even their webpage or their specials or everything. They want to build a video, make a video and then post it on Instagram or reels or whatever they need. Whatever medium they use, we can build on that. So each business will be different.

So yeah, it's. Do you think you could be able to build like a bot that could go to their Google my business profiles, aggregate their pictures and. Or reviews, make a video out of that for them and, and then send it to them?

Yeah.

As a way to market. Do you think that'd be possible?

I think so, yes. Actually we've kind of. We are thinking ahead of those kinds of things. I think it's possible.

Okay.

Yeah. So here's. Yeah, that's what I would do. I would find someone. Maybe it's someone on your team or maybe it's an offseason virtual assistant that could build some sort of a bot or a scraper that would go to a geographical market or forget geography. Maybe just go to hotels and restaurants like you're planning. Find the ones that have a good amount of reviews and pictures. Have it. Make them a video of the reviews and pictures. But I would do it very strategically in that you plant Easter eggs near the beginning of this video. Such as, let's say you only include their 1 star reviews in the video.

Okay.

And it's. It's kind of like you're sending them a promotional video for their own business to promote your software, but you're putting in things that will make them want to respond to you. So it's kind of like a, it's kind of like the psychology of a viral tweet or video or anything. You've got to put stuff in there that make people want to comment. Or if you just make them this perfectly edited, gorgeous video, they're not likely to respond even to say thank you. But if you put something in there that stirs an emotion in them, like they're going to know, they're going to remember that one star review. Right, Right.

Yeah.

And it's going to make them feel some things and. Okay, yep. Thank you. But like, why would I want to promote this one star review? I think your software is buggy and so. No, it's. We wanted to get your attention. Now you have a conversation. Right. And just be transparent about that. Like we. Yeah. And then maybe you can even have a backup video queued up to where when they respond you can automatically respond with the real thing. Here's more what the final product Looks like. And then if you can build a bot to do that at scale. Holy cow. You could even text them a link to the video with this bot to the number in the Google. My business profile. Only if it's a cell phone number. Yeah, that's what I would do if I were you. And then play around with the pricing. Play around with all that. But I think that could be a super scalable like growth hack to help you grow.

Correct.

Makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, man. Let me know if you try it and how it goes.

Sure, sure, I will.

Yeah.

Okay. Thanks, Jay. Thank you. It was good talking. Yep. See ya. See ya. Clint, that looks like a man who lives in Alaska.

Okay, good. Glad you can hear me this time.

All right.

Hey Clint, thanks for taking my call.

Absolutely. So where in Alaska are you?

Anchorage.

Oh, man. What? Okay, what part are you like in Anchorage proper or in one of like Palmer area?

Oh, you're Alaska. I'm in Anchorage. Palmer or Anchorage proper.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, we went there 20 minutes from downtown.

Okay. Yeah, I love Alaska. I'm a total fanboy of the state.

Yeah, me too.

It sounds like you're doing all kinds of cool Alaskan small business stuff. So why don't you tell us like a brief background of what you're doing and then of what your question is.

Yeah. So I work full time here for credit union and my wife and I we also do a few side businesses. We do Airbnb, we live in a duplex, so we do Airbnb, we do Turo. And my wife also does an E commerce business, a skincare business with Shopify. And we have decided that neither of those are it. We don't really like them.

We.

So we're looking for kind of a business idea to go all in on to scale to the point where I can quit my full time job. And so that's kind of where we're at. And the question is we love. So we're trying to find a business idea. We love Alaska and it's largely underserved. We know that we want to do a business around Alaska, but at the same time we know that it's not our forever home. So that kind of creates a dilemma. And so I have a few ideas of business is that we could do here. So hoping to get your idea or your thoughts on those as well as any ideas that you just have naturally thinking of Alaska and what could be successful.

Okay, so if you were to rank all of your current businesses, where would you rank them from? Most loved to least Turo would be.

Most loved, then Shopify would be medium, and then Airbnb would be the lowest. And I think Airbnb, because it's house hacking and we don't like sharing our property with others.

Yeah. And Turo is nice because I assume the demand's good. You drop off the car, there's very little hassles most of the time, and you just. You make good money.

Yeah.

Do you have one car on Turo?

We do, yeah.

And what is. How occupied does it stay?

The. During the summer, it's nearly like 80%, 90%. And then during the winter we actually pull it because it's too much of a liability getting parked on the street with snow, and there's a lot of like, windshield damage during the spring and fall seasons. So that's another reason why we're like.

What type of car is it?

So we had a Chevy Traverse and we sold that last year and we're looking to buy a Kia Telluride for this year.

Okay. What were you in the middle of saying? That's another reason why you're trying to.

Oh, another reason is it's. It is lucrative, but it's very much a. It's like only three months or. Because we only do it during the summer.

I. I assume if you scale this up, let's say you could wave a magic wand and have 10 of these and they stayed 80% occupied. You'd have. Probably have to store them somewhere in the off season.

Yeah.

For that.

Yeah.

Okay. Do you have any idea of how popular the Traverse is on Turo in your local area compared to other makes, models, or just types of vehicles, cars, trucks, vans, etc.

I don't, I haven't looked into that.

Okay.

But it is a vehicle and that's kind of our thought of why we sold it. And we're going to look into. To buy a newer vehicle because newer is more desired.

Yeah. And what do you. What did the Traverse rent for? And what are you planning on renting the Telluride for on average, per day?

Last year, the Traverse sold or rented for roughly 150 to $180 a day during peak season. And then the Telluride where anticipated, probably closer to 230 to 250 a day.

And what percentage does Turo take?

Right now we have it set for 10% because we don't pay for as much of their insurance.

Okay, so let's say the Telluride. And what is the Telluride going to cost?

35,000.

Okay, so is it is the season three months? Is that safe to say? Or could it be even longer?

Yeah, it's usually May through August are the peak seasons, so I think that's four.

Okay, so let's say. Let's be more conservative and say that your telluride rents for 220. And then let's knock off 10% and call it 200. And then let's call it four months. That's 120 days at 80% occupancy. So let's see, that's going to be 19,000 a season. So that's pretty crazy. Obviously, you're going to have some cost, but they're filling up the gas. You got to pay for insurance. And then I would just kind of work in the storage, even though you don't have to store this one. So 19 grand a season, theoretically, on paper, for this telluride, that costs 35 grand. So your payoff is two years, right?

Yeah.

And then. Okay, here's what I would do. I used to do this with Airbnb. I would spend two or three hours in Turo in Anchorage in Alaska, running searches. Open a Google sheet, and I did this with RVs once. And I'll share you my format with you. After this, open a Google sheet and start running searches in Anchorage at different dates, like try and always do. I assume weekends are busier, so I would do like a weekend in early May and then a weekend in early June and then a weekend in early July and then August and then even September. Just see and run searches for everything. No filters set. And then just put in your sheet how many results, what types of results, make it as granular or as broad as you want. And then I would start writing some filters, like maybe SUV only, maybe three years or newer only, or a certain amount of miles only, or four wheel drive only, whatever you kind of want to lean into. And then start running those same searches on a date much sooner. Right. So compare like a weekend in August versus a weekend in early May at the start of the season or next weekend. And what you can do with this, you. You can do this on RV Share or Airbnb. This will tell you how popular certain models are. Or not, how much demand there is. Or not. Oh, and also put down the price of the average rental price for these filters. It's going to take. It's going to take a little bit, but I would recommend you do it yourself and not outsource it because it'll be worth your time. And I'm only recommending all this because you told me that of everything you're doing, you like Turo the best. And then I would seriously look into scaling. It's late March. If you were to get two or three vehicles, now's the time to do it and look into like, there are people that make millions of dollars a year on Turo. And I think you're in a market that, like, when we went to Alaska, we used Turo, right? The cars were insane. And it was. We went to Hawaii, we used Turo. And I don't know what the competitive landscape is, but my gut is if you had a fairly easy time renting out your traverse 80 to 90% of the time and that was a little older, then a better vehicle will do even better.

Right?

And I would start pricing out some storage facilities and just baking that into your projections and then make a different Google sheet that just says, okay, let's say I have two cars or three or four or five, or just one, and put them in a Google sheet and then have a master number that says, what if I'm at 10% occupancy, worst case, what do I do? But I'm at 40, 50, 80, 90, 100%. And then just kind of come up with a framework based on hard data. Isn't guessing. This isn't just like wishful thinking based on a spreadsheet that you're. This is a spreadsheet forecasting based on hard data in Ontario that probably no one in Anchorage is doing right now. No one else.

Yeah.

And then you can learn. Wow. This is exactly what I did. So I'm recommending something that I literally did myself. I did this on RV Share. I wanted to buy an RV for my family, but I also wanted to rent it out on the side. And it was clear as day to me that Class C RVs in Northeast Dallas Fort Worth were a super hot commodity. And it got to the point where I even got on the phone with one of the co founders or VPs and. And I showed him my spreadsheet and he was super curious and interested that some nerd did all this research. And I'm like, hey, can I ask you and. And it was in his best interest to talk to me because I said, I think I just learned something about my local market that really makes me want to buy a ton of RVs and put them on RV share, but I'd like to talk to you first. So we got on the phone, I shared it with him, and he's holy cow, if you're in my, like the back End of our database. This is exactly right. Yeah. Because I wish I could shout it from the rooftops. People need to buy Class C RVs. Not just DFW, but they were hot in a lot of different places. And especially there's more nuances. Like you don't want that. You don't want one that's too long because then people will be intimidated. But if it's too short, then it's too small for your families. And I was able to figure that out even like the length of the rv. And so once I figured that out, it was like, wow, yeah, I'm off to the races. So I bought an RV and. And it was like a 2008. It was. I don't know. I've bought several. I bought several RVs, so I don't remember which one this was, but the payback period on this thing was like three months, which is similar to what you're looking at. Yeah. And I did a tweet on this because it was like, hey, I'm shouting this from the rooftops. You could start a really scalable business on RV share and outdoorsy. And there's three other platforms now. The problem is you're in, like, you have one Turo. And so the fact that this is your favorite initiative right now is really saying something because that's hard. Like I've always said, if you're gonna have one rental house, you might as well have a hundred. If you're. And if you will have one Turo, you might as well have a hundred because you're in that. It's just. It's hard. That's a hard business when you only have one car. So I would do that research and figure out is, can my market support 5 more cars or 10 more cars? And where do I put them in the off season? How much is that going to cost? And then just work that off season storage and insurance cost into your calculations.

Okay. So you wouldn't even think about doing something different?

I would do this research before making that decision.

Okay.

And maybe you could even do this research and then come back and talk in a week or two and tell me what you think and then we can talk about another business. Because I know better than anyone that other businesses are hard and other businesses are always sexier. The grass is always greener. But if you already have this, it's already profitable, you already like it, then find out if it's scale enough, scalable enough there before making the decision about something totally different.

That makes sense.

So, yeah, good luck, man. I want to hear how it goes.

Okay? Sounds good. Thanks, Chris.

Yep, no problem. See ya.

Bye.

Cool. I guess. That concludes episode seven, I think. This is of the Kerner office. Thank you for listening or watching, and we'll see you next week.