Robot lawnmowers, Christmas tree business & monetizing email lists⏐Holdco Bros Discuss! Ep. #110

I have some legal docs out. I'm going to see how it plays out.

Why would a Christmas tree concierge business not work? I want you to tell me.

I saw this LinkedIn post. Every month I write my boss a $1000 check and if I don't make a thousand cold calls that month, then he can cash the check. I've never once broken it. If a business model depends on spamming someone with flyers in the parking lot of your main competitor, I am 1000% all for it. If you're not in that Christmas tree subscription game, then where you at? Do you remember that episode we had a couple months ago about the. The idea to take the random viral, like Tik tok shop type ideas and put them in a store? Remember that?

Yeah. Pop up.

Yeah. Well, someone's doing that on the Promenade in Santa Monica. There's a literal, like a tiktop shop. It's not TikTok shop. It's this company called Outlandish and it's a physical retail location where you can sell stuff on TikTok Shop Live. You can watch people selling live, you can test products, you can buy products in person, you can take classes on how to sell on TikTok Shop, you can take classes on how to sell on livestream. And it's all right there. Exactly like we talked about.

Did they acknowledge that they got it from us?

I have some legal docs out. I'm going to see how it plays out. No. Apparently this company's been around for a few years, but they've never done like a physical retail store until like last week they opened it.

I had heard that the Promenade was actually having a hard time. It's 3rd Street Promenade, you said, right? Yeah. I heard that they were having a hard time with leasing space. Like they were getting a lot of tenants leaving. I guess there's a really big homeless problem there in particular. So, I mean, it would make sense if they just have some free space to throw up that idea.

It's pretty crazy.

The company who's doing it, they're a legit company. Like, have you heard of them before?

No, but they're legit. Yeah. I never heard of them.

Come to Dallas Next. All right, Chris, let me ask you a question. Are we the startup bros or the Holdco bros?

Both.

We're the whole co Bros. Thank you. You're right.

Yeah, that's what I said.

We don't just talk about startups. You like how I just, like, bulldozed through it. You're like, both Absolutely. You're right, Chris. We are only the hold co bros. So I went, I bought a Christmas tree. And we were buying, it was $100 and like $20 tree. Typically, we will buy Christmas trees and we spend like 10 or $15. We get a permit and we go to BLM, Bureau of Land Management land.

Black lives do matter. I agree. Thank you.

Black lives matter. Land. And we cut down a tree and it's 10 or 15 bucks and it's a cool experience. We didn't do that this year because the people we usually go with and anyways, whatever, it's a whole long story. And so instead we went to the place that was selling a Christmas tree near our house at the. At the grocery store. It was $120 to get this tree. So it got me thinking. Two ideas. One's a dumb idea, one's a good idea. The first one, the dumb idea is I haven't looked at any of the regulations. I don't know if it's legal or not legal. I can't imagine it's like, marketed as legal. But what if there was a concierge Christmas tree business where I go, I buy 20 permits a year, so I cut down 20 trees and I take it and I deliver that to people's homes. Now, you could get like as crazy with it as you wanted, right? Like, you could take pictures of it and they could choose it virtually, and the kids could look at it and they could name the tree for a couple. Maybe they named the tree three years ago and they've been watching it for three years and it's finally ready to cut down. That's kind of too short of a period of time. But you get, you get what I'm saying. For significantly cheaper than the $120. I mean, maybe 60 bucks, you go up, you cut down 10 trees, costs you a hundred dollars because you wouldn't bought the permits. And then you go and deliver the trees to each person for 60 bucks and you just made, you know, $600. Obviously your labor is included in there. Why would a Christmas tree concierge business not work?

Is this the good idea or the bad idea?

This is the bad idea.

Okay, that's good. No, no. Okay. Any idea could work with the right distribution and execution. Okay, I will say that, right? If. If you got Elon Musk to tweet about this idea, it would work, okay, Just by the law of large numbers. But aren't people paying for the experience of trekking up there in the mountains and cutting it down?

No, this Is what I'm. This is what I'm saying. It costs me 10 to $15 to buy a permit to cut down a tree. Or I go to Albertsons and buy a tree in the parking lot that's pre cut and it cost me $120.

Right?

So what I'm saying is a hybrid. If I was. If I was a young person and I'm just like, I'm going to have a side hustle this Christmas, I'm going to make two grand, whatever, why wouldn't I just buy permits, go cut down trees, and then deliver these to families and then on the back end, charge them another $50 to come pick up the tree after Christmas is done? It's like your pizza business that we talked about last week, right? Like, it's not necessarily. It's like, I'm gonna go scale it, but it's just.

No, no, no, no. I don't shoot. There's no idea. That's too small for me. Okay? No judgment here on that.

My wife says that all the time. There's no such thing as too small, Nick.

First of all, Cindy, I'm sorry you had to hear that. That's my mom who listens to this. Okay, so you're.

And to. And to my mom, you're welcome because I'm sure she had a hearty laugh.

So this is an alternative to the. To the Albertsons buyers, You're saying it's a cheaper alternative?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not to the people who are going to go cut down the tree themselves. Like, I'm not marketing to them.

Okay, that's what my question was, assuming.

Yeah. No.

Okay, so I like this because positive cash flow conversion cycle. Collect the money up front. Venmo me 60 bucks or Venmo me a hundred bucks if you'd like it delivered. You get paid up front, right? And you could say, hey, 15 of the 60 goes straight to the BLM. That's the permit. The rest goes to me. 40 extra dollars if you want it delivered. Or you could pick it up in the parking lot Saturday morning between 9 and 11am So I like that it's cheaper. You're cutting out the middleman. You're cutting out the multi billion dollar company that's selling it in the parking lot. Why wouldn't that work?

I don't know. Why wouldn't it work? It seems like the side hustlers paradise. Like, oh, of course I'll go cut down some trees. I'll deliver them. And not only will I deliver them, but I'll pay you to pick them. Like, I'll handle everything end to end.

What's the distribution strategy if you're not on a busy corner? Like, Albertsons is two things that I.

Thought of to start with. Old school. I know I'd probably put flyers up at Albertsons. People are there, like, they're seeing the tree farm anyways, but then all of a sudden, they see this flyer that's like, I'll go cut you down the tree. Cool.

You're dirty.

Dirty. And they're done. They're cheap. That would be one way I would do it. The. The other way I would do it again. This is if I was local, I would join some of the local Facebook groups and just say, like, hey, I'm doing this this year. Anybody who's interested, let me know, because there are tons of Facebook groups in Eagle, Idaho. I would just go join 20 of them since I live here, offer that as a service, and see. See who bites.

I like it. Absolutely. I mean, if. If a business model depends on spamming someone with flyers in the parking lot of your main competitor, I am 1000% all for it.

I mean, I'm in. All right, so here was my second idea with this. I got curious, and I started chatting it up with the guy who was there. He was not the owner of the tree. Tree lot, but he's worked with the company for a long time. And I'm like, hey, how long you guys been here? We've been doing this for 30 years. He sounds nothing like this, but it just works for this part.

This is. Yeah.

Oh, we've been doing this for 30 years. How do you do it? Oh, we just. We have to get in contact with Albert since. And they award us a contract every few years, and we just come and set up the trees.

Like, really?

You've had it for 30 years? He's like, yes, sir, we have. What's the name of your company? Tells me the name of his company. It's a landscaping company. A landscaping company owns this tree lot, right? He's like, yes, sir. How long you been around? We've been around two generations at this point. So it got me thinking. I'm like, dude, this could be the perfect business to go out and, like, try to buy. So what do we do? We started doing some research. I find the name. This is the meme of Vince McMahon when he's sitting in the ring, and it gets, like, progressively more excited.

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I was thinking Vince Vaughn. For some reason, I'm like, no, no.

No, so, like, the first thing, I was just like, first I was like, you've had this for 30 years. Okay, tell me more. Then he tells me, oh, you're owned by a landscaping company.

Oh, okay.

You had my attention, sir, but now you have my focus.

My grandson calls me the Boomer Silver Tsunami. Go on.

So then he tells me the name of the company. I go to the website. Guess what I found on the website, Chris.

Please don't tell me it was just plain HTML.

There was no website, Chris. They were on Beautiful. They were on Google Maps because people had been giving them reviews. I click on the website, Chris, first of all, it's been ransomware.

Can you tell me the business so I can look at this up? Is it the same Google business profile listing for the tree business and the lawn care business?

No, it's just the lawn care business. There is no Google listing for the tree. The tree business. The first one that comes up is like, your connection is not private. It's like, I can't. I can't go to it. And then the second one I tried to get to, I get this, like, ransomware. Your website is under construction. If you're the owner of this domain and need assistance, please contact web support at web support. So I'm like, dude, first of all, these guys don't care about their website because they've allowed it to just sit there as a problem. Second, they're a known entity. People are leaving them Google reviews, but they're still not optimizing it. So you know when you reach out to a mobile home park and it's like Gary Johnson, AOL.com or Lauren Michaels at comcast.netsbcglobal.org the second I see that.

I buy a boat. Why?

Why do you buy a boat?

Because I know I'm going to be able to afford it with all the money I'm about to make. What's up?

Oh, my gosh. So. So good is the time. It was anyways, so it got me thinking. There have got to be many similar ancillary businesses that are owned by unsexy companies that are operating. And there's one of two options. Option number one, you try to buy the. The Christmas tree lot from them. I think that would be hard. I don't think they want to carve that out. They're probably, like, super high margins. Option number two would be going to try to buy this business because I already know a couple things. Number one, they've been around for 30 years, so they've. They've Got a really long track record. That's awesome. They've got people know who they are. They've got a crew, they've got. They're delivering good service, et cetera. They're probably making a ton of money from the tree farm, and they're probably making so much money, they don't care about their freaking website. That's how much business they have coming in. So they're probably close to retirement age. They're in the ballpark of like, hey, man, I'd love to talk to you about buying your business. I'm not saying it would work, but there's a chance that you can buy this business. So I know you do the same thing as well. I think there are so many opportunities like this to go out and cold contact these people in your local markets, these local businesses that could potentially be for sale because they are going to sell in the next 10 years. We know 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every single day, and a thousand of them are business owners. So as you're out and about, look for little clues like that, could this be a company that's coming for sale? Because you might just find a gem.

I mean, the homepage of their website says, click to print coupon. Like, what? That's a thing.

I know, I know. And it, like, not even necessarily I want to get into landscaping, but if I did, like, dude, this would be a perfect opportunity. This is the type of business that I'm looking for is like, an owner who's making so much money, they don't even care about their branding or their website. And they're probably close to retirement. I want to reach out to them.

I have, like, four sub business ideas based off of this one. First of all, Andrew Wilkinson was on a podcast, and he talked about an idea that I thought was really interesting. You know, they have, like, the roombas. The roombas for lawn mowing. Now, have you seen those? I mean, makes sense.

But no, I didn't know.

It's like a fully autonomous robot lawnmower. And of course, what do the haters say? Oh, insurance oil. Cut your feet off. Oh, like, like, as if they don't have sensors. It's the future, right? We're moving that direction, but guess what we got. We've had roombas in the house for over a decade. Still selling brooms, still sweeping, Right? There's room for everyone here. Now, this was said from a tech guy who's probably never mowed a lawn in his life, but his idea was buy a landscaping business and take a Subsegment of the customer base and say, hey, we're beta testing this. These robot lawnmowers, we're going to drop them off and then we'll come back and pick them up in a couple hours. And you just buy a fleet of these roombas for the lawn. You drop them off, you train it to the yard once you program it, and you just drop them off on your route. Instead of having a whole crew of guys, it's just one guy dropping them off, pick them up, charge on the drive, drop them off at another set of houses. What do you think?

I just had the mental image that 10 years from now we don't see Hector driving around doing lawn care. We see freaking Kevin the nerd driving around doing lawn care. He's like, can't just kind of pick up these robots. Oh, oh, this one's malfunctioning. I'm just gonna go back to the car.

The white skin looks like a vampire. Never been outside in his life. Making 40 grand a week.

Servicing all the machines. Yeah, it looks like we gotta reboot this thing. Have we tried unplugging it and plugging it back in? That's so good. I don't hate the idea, but that just seems like super capital intensive. You got to buy the landscaping company and then you got to buy all the machines.

You don't have to buy a landscaping business. I mean, it's less capital intensive than having a whole crew of landscapers and lawnmowers and equipment and oil and moving parts.

Oh, these are cheaper than traditional lawn equipment.

They're pretty comparable because they're a lot smaller.

Oh, so they're all electric?

Yeah, they're all electric and they're small because you don't need someone to sit on them. Right. They're literally like the size of a Roomba. And a riding, like a commercial riding mower is easily 8 to 15 grand. And these do not cost that much. The downside is they take longer, but there's no one riding them, so it doesn't matter. So I think for like cookie cutter neighborhoods like you see in the suburbs, 5,000 square foot lawns, these are perfect. You train them to the lawn, it remembers that, you drop it off, you pick them up. So that's one idea.

That's a cool idea.

Interesting. Right? Second idea, this is like far out there in the future. But obviously figure Tesla, they're all making these robots and they're going to go in the house. You can't tell me there's not going to be a Business that literally just drops off a $10,000 robot at someone's house, cleans it, and then someone comes and picks it up. Like, the counterargument to that is, like, why wouldn't they just buy their own robot? Okay, well, I just did an episode about a guy that rents out appliances for $60 a month. Appliances cost $300, and some people rent them for years at a time.

They would rent the robot as a cleaner.

I'm talking about a cleaning business that owns a bunch of, like, Tesla robots that drops it off.

Optimus.

They clean the house. Yeah. And then they just come and pick them back up.

The way you're thinking about it reminds me of the way we used to talk about Tesla probably, I don't know, five years ago. Because they've been promising FSD for years. And, like, you and I would talk about, dude, just for. Could buy a fleet of Teslas, wait, and then rent them out. They'll be their own taxi. Like, it's very similar to these robots.

Yeah, well, you saw a Tesla release that, right? Like, the design for it? Yeah.

This is rad.

He promised to be ready by 2020. We're a little late, Elon.

Musk over promising. No, not our king Elon.

All right, so that's. That's one thing. Okay. We're gonna go in that direction. That's where. That's where things are headed. Does it mean that cleaners are out of business? Not at all. Okay.

No.

And you drop off robots and do laundry for you. Right. We still have invented. We still haven't invented a good machine that does laundry for you. Have you ever seen those machines? They're like hydraulic machines with these huge hooks, and they roll up to a tree, like a fully mature tree, and they dig these hooks in the ground, pull the tree out, and then you go dig a hole in the ground that's the exact same size and just, boop. Transplant that tree into that hole.

Yeah.

Isn't that insane?

Insane or. Or the same. I mean, it's the same concept, but those machines that go and pick apples in large orchards, like, they're driving, and then they just grab the tree and shake it.

Yeah.

It's insane.

So cool. Okay, so two ideas here. Christmas tree. What's stopping someone from going to a Christmas tree farm? Scooping that sucker out of the ground, putting it in a pot, Right. With extra soil, delivering it to the house. Oh, we have a nice, real Christmas tree. You're watering it every week, and then you just take it back, put it back on the farm. Do it again next year when it's a little bit bigger.

Did you just invent a recurring revenue model from Christmas trees?

If you're not in that Christmas tree subscription game, then where you at?

What was the original version of that where you at? Yeah, anyways.

Me. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah.

Why could you not do it?

I think you could. It's, it's. It's the same concept of transplanting trees, which I've done. You're transplanting it into a pot that is transportable. You're putting it in your living room and you're putting like a nice wreath or a garland or something around the pot, something Christmassy. And then you're taking it back at the end of December and you're putting it back on the farm to keep growing.

Yeah, like you just charge someone a rental fee.

It's eco friendly, baby.

If it dies and it breaks, then you charge them the full price of the tree. That's a really interesting idea.

Well, those trees can go a long time without water. I'm betting that you could get away with not even watering it that much.

There's probably a farmer listening to this right now. Is like these idiots. What they don't understand is so dumb. Birch trees can't survive for that long outside of mother Nature.

Someone slept through agronomy class. Tell me you're not an arborist without telling me you're not an arborist.

I'd say these guys are hoarda uncultured, if you know what I'm saying. We're so stupid.

All right. That's one idea. Okay, okay. Here's the other idea that I've had for a while. Tell me why this wouldn't work. Tell me why it wouldn't work. If you want to build a house or build anything, you buy raw land and it's probably going to have some trees on it. Okay, what do you have to do? You got to clear the land. Land clearing is a thing. It is a well established industry. Okay? You can do it with chainsaws, you can do it with heavy equipment, skid steers, you push the trees over, you cut them over, you pull out stumps, you burn the stumps. You can clear land any number of ways. So there's a market there that exists. And then you've got a market of homeowners or businesses that want to plant mature trees because it's the one thing you can't just like snap your fingers and have exist. They either have to wait decades for them to grow or you have to Spend a lot of money to buy a transplantable tree. The bigger a tree, the more expensive they are. Tree farms are insanely expensive, like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars to buy these trees that are 5, 10, 15 years old. And it makes sense, right? Why can't you buy one of those hydraulic machines and somehow find a way? Maybe you're pulling city permits, maybe you're pulling real estate records when a piece of raw land sells and reaching out to the buyer right after it sells and playing middleman between the guys that are about to chop down or burn all these trees and the guys that want to buy mature trees and moving them.

If I were the nursery or the tree farm, that would be something I would explore as a distribution channel. I would reach out to, like you said, tree trimming businesses or land clearing businesses, or getting records of homes that have sold in the area and use that as acquiring cogs, essentially. Because in that way you don't have to reinvent the wheel. You're already selling these trees to people. You're selling them at a much different maturity level, but you're already selling these trees. Yeah, I don't hate it. Those are four good ideas off of that.

We're pretty tight. All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it. Because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform. Or you can go to tkopod.com also my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads, it's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there. All right.

Do you remember when we were talking a couple weeks ago about dogs with leaky gut?

Yes.

Well, when I was talking to him and gave me this idea and I was going to bring it up last time, but we didn't have enough time. If you remember, he's selling supplements to pet owners to fix their dog's leaky gut. And he charges a subscription for that and it's effectively a two month treatment course. And then people pay after those two months, after the leaky gut is fixed for the supplements. But he has pretty high churn. So he's got three or 400 current customers, but he's had over 5,000 customers. And when I was talking to him on my podcast. I'm asking. I'm asking him the question. I'm like, what are you doing with those 5,000? He's like, nothing. I'm like, what are you doing to nurture them? Do you sell to them?

No.

Do you sell any other products besides these supplements? No, not yet. And it got me thinking. I'm like, how many other companies are like this? How many other Shopify or small businesses. Shopify stores or small businesses? E commerce businesses just have massive email lists that they're not utilizing. And we've talked about going and buying email lists, which I still think is a really cool thing, or buying Facebook groups. But the idea that I had would be to spin up an agency showing small businesses how to better monetize their customer lists. So, for example, these are some things that you can do with a customer list. You can send surveys, you can do special giveaways, you can do announce product launches. You could just start a newsletter to give generalized updates. But your customer list is very similar to LinkedIn. Many people only use LinkedIn when they're looking for a job. Many people are only using their customer lists when they're trying to sell to them actively. So the question is, there's like three main questions. What's your process for capturing consumer emails, customer emails, what's your strategy for nurturing those relationships? And how do you track and determine success? I don't think most small businesses know how to answer those questions. They may know on the front end when they're trying to. When they've launched like a sales campaign and they're. And they've. And they've set up their funnels so that they can actually sell on a specific product. But once they're in the door, they're not doing a really good job of maintaining the relationship with their customers. So I think if you launched an agency around helping small businesses monetize their email lists, whether that's through a campaign, whether it's just nurturing them, whether it's starting a newsletter, whatever it is, and then selling that locally would be a really cool business. What do you think?

Yeah, I like it. So not an email marketing agency that would basically manage someone's email, but it kind of like a consultancy a little bit.

Yeah. And I would only start with existing customers because there's going to be a natural tendency to be like, oh, well, I'll set up all of your funnels. What does your landing page look like? How do you capture emails? Once the email comes in and you've got a Lead, where does it go? How are you responding to it? Within what period of time are you sending them information? I wouldn't do that. You're going to like there's going to be a natural inclination to do that. I would just focus on existing customers because eventually then if you do a good job, the business owner is going to be like, well, can you help me on the front end as well? They've got a leaky bucket, they're losing customers that they've already brought on. So help them patch the hole in their leaky bucket and then you can help them upstream figure out a better way to set up their funnels. But I just don't think that they're capturing information nearly as well as they could.

So you help them with their, their lead magnet, their email capturing system and then you help them better monetize their emails?

Well, no, no, I would, you could do that. I would start with just their existing emails and just say, talk to the business owner.

Cool.

What are your goals? How does a customer typically purchase? What is the life cycle of a customer? How do you stay in contact with them and then help them craft a customer nurturing campaign or just strategy? So that keeps those leads more. That's the first thing. And then I would help them set up other funnels within their business to help with sales.

What do you think you would charge for something like this? And I'll second question, what does an ideal customer look like? What size business? What industry?

I would start by charging one time project based. I know it's really sexy to be like I charge a monthly fee or I just think if you charge a monthly fee you're going to continually get blown up by these businesses. Like set it up one time for them and let them run with it and then if they have problems they can come and come and contact you. I would charge probably five grand and I would say, look, this is my ROI guarantee. If you don't get X number of sales within the next Y days, I'll give you half of your money back. You know this with email lists of people who've purchased from you before. If you, if you're a good company, those are the warmest leads that you have because there's a relationship with you already. So I would charge just straight up five grand. Then I would work into a monthly subscription to help them on the front end. That's the thing that's going to be changing a lot more is like here's a new campaign you can run. Change the wording of this. This is what the copy should like. It's going to morph into a more traditional marketing and sales agency. An ideal business size, I think is going to be a sub 1 million business that has a history and a track record. Maybe they've been around for 15, 20 years. Like it's that landscaping company that we described earlier. A little bit newer because that's kind of a little too old, a little too boomerish. But they've got a history. People know who they are, they've got customers, they've got something to work with that you can then show them the real value. If they don't have a big customer list already, then the offering doesn't work.

Let me tweak it. So I think sub 1 million is probably too small for someone that's going to spend $5,000 on something like this. I could be wrong. But what about the model of so fast tree care? Right. Our tree training business. We have a sizable email list and a phone number list that we've never once used. Right. Total hypocrites. Here we are talking about all this. Yeah, we've never used it. It's like it's human nature. Like, hey, don't eat carbs. You do. You should take a brisk walk after you eat dessert. We don't. And we know that we should. Right, okay. So we're all hypocrites. But I just went through this a couple of weeks ago because I'm like, all right, let's, let's send a mass email for fast tree care to drum up some jobs. And I would bet, I would bet 90, over 90% of home service businesses that are sophisticated enough to collect emails are not regularly emailing their list. If they are, they're probably paying an agency, like a full service marketing agency, way too much money to do it for them. Which means it's not personalized. It's cookie cutter copy paste. Not very effective. So that means 90% of the home services business out there, I would put at the ones between 500 grand and $5 million in top line revenue. You know, go in there and say, hey, what CRM do you use? Jobber. Okay, cool. We know Jobber. We love Jobber. Here's what we're going to do. For $0, we're going to go into your jobber account. We're going to segment your list. We're going to find people that you gave a quote to but never purchased. We're going to find people that purchased but never purchase you again. We're going to find people that Just opted in for whatever reason and they've never bought from you. And we're going to start generating jobs for you from your existing customer list. Oh, I could send an email anytime I want. Yeah, but, you know, you don't. You don't know what you're doing. And even if you did, like, you just need someone to click the button. You need someone to hold you accountable. We'll just do it for you. Well, what do you charge? Well, nothing. We're going to charge 15% of every job that we bring you, or we're going to charge you $50 for every quote that we generate for you, every lead that we generate. And that's it. We're just. It's an alignment of interest of incentives.

I like the pricing model. I would go the lead route is. It's hard to say. Like, it's hard, just hard to track. Like, did that job close? Did they pay? What was the actual, actual price?

It's not hard if they are, like, diligent using Jobber, because then it would. It would just be in Jobber and we're already in Jobber. But if they're not, that's if they give you access. Right, but we would need access to do this anyway. But they might, like, have Jobber on paper and pay for it every month, but not like, be actually putting out jobs in there. And in that sense. So maybe it would just be a gut call when you log in a Jobber and it's like, oh, clearly you're doing everything in here. I'm going to charge a percentage of revenue generated. Or clearly you're paying for Jobber. You're just collecting emails. But I don't know, like, Jobber shows your revenue is zero. I see nine wrapped trucks in your parking lot. That's clearly not true. I'm just going to charge per lead generated.

I love that.

I think that could be a really good business. It's just hard. Like, philosophically, it's hard for a business owner to shell out thousands per month or one time for some service and just hope and pray that it works. It returns a positive roi.

Yeah, I mean, we, we've dealt with that a ton. You think you have a really good idea and you're like, oh, this is amazing. I could generate a hundred thousand dollars a month for this person. Makes all the sense in the world. But there's still that step of faith, like, okay, I'll pay you five grand for this. What's my guarantee that I'm actually going to get it? So you better Have a really, really good, really well dialed in offering.

All right, quick question for you. Do you think that there's a business here? I had a caller reach out my Q and A episode and he wants to start a business that's like a business owner accountability platform. There's a business out there that does this for health and fitness. You pay him 600, $700 a month. They check in with you every day via text. They don't eat this, don't eat that. What'd you eat today? I think there's a lot of automations involved, but there is an actual real person on the other end of the phone. The company's doing well. Seemingly they're growing. He wants to do this for business owners, both people starting a business and people running a business. An accountability partner. Okay, I'll tell you what my answer was to him actually. I want to hear what you think. Is this a viable business model? Why or why not do I think.

It'S a viable business model? It depends to me that you're just describing a Mastermind, whether it's EO, YPO, Vistage, Tiger21 Hampton.

Well, this is one to one though. This is like an, it's like a business partner with no equity. It's an accountability partner. Hey, do you do those cold emails today as opposed to a mastermind is like, I'm going to meet with these eight people. We have group chat. This is like very one to one, personalized.

Yeah, I know. I'm giving you my justification. You're asking me do I think it's a viable business? Yes, because it's, it's similar to those companies and businesses that already exist and a function of those masterminds is accountability. So. Yeah. Do I think it could, it could work? Yes. Does he talk about pricing?

No, I'm just assuming he's, he's in the same ballpark. Hundreds of dollars per month.

Here's why I like the idea. I like the idea because it's really easy to not hold yourself accountable. I'll do it tomorrow. This came up and I wasn't able to get it done. And having somebody check in with you every day, even though, even if it's an annoyance, you're going to get better results. There's a reason why. What does Sam Par always talk about? My body tutor, I think is one of those, that they work right because there, there's an accountability, there's a feedback loop built in to the process. So I think that it's a good idea from that standpoint. I think the difficulty of this is going to be the intimate nature of it. Like in order for me to have an accountability partner, I'm gonna have to open myself up and I'm gonna have to tell them about my life, my business, things that are important to me, et cetera. I think there's a bigger trust factor there that you'd have to overcome. You'd have to really get them to understand that you're not going to disclose things or that you actually have insights or you're going to be consistent. So I think that might be one of the biggest hurdles is getting people to trust.

Yeah, I agree. I think if you trust the person that's your accountability partner, then you're more likely to keep paying and stay accountable and do the thing you. But I think getting there is. Has. Takes so much time that it needs to be a more expensive product.

Right, I think so too. I also think it's like you can't be a nice accountability partner. It can't be like, oh, what happened? Oh, tell me about why you weren't. I kind of think you need to kick in the pants a bit of like, what the freak, man? What are you waiting for? You said you're going to do it.

If it's just some stranger in an sms, it's like, who the freak is this guy? I don't care if I'm going to do this or not, you know?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I saw this LinkedIn post where this guy, he had a picture of a $1,000 check and he's like a real estate broker and he said every month I write my boss a $1,000 check to his name and if I don't make a thousand cold calls that month, then he can cash the check, keep my thousand dollars. And I've never, I've never once broken it and it's kept me accountable. And I think that would be interesting, right? I think it should be. It's like the barbell, right? This needs to be like 2,000amonth and like someone legit, someone you, which is just a coach, it's just a business coach, which is a well established industry. It needs to be that or it needs to be like a free app where you deposit money and that money is kept. Kind of like the idea we talked about a couple weeks ago, that money is kept if you don't do the thing and you doing the thing has to be provable somehow. It can't just be on your honor.

I like that idea. I like that idea because then there's real skin in the game, maybe you.

Start super niche, where it's like an accountability partner for. For cold outbound, and you have to link through an API to your. Your open phone or to your. Whatever it is so it knows for sure that you're doing that thing. And if you are, then you'll get your money back. Maybe less a 5% processing fee. And if you're not, the money's gone.

Yeah. It has to be things that are easily measurable. Like my. My mind goes to. Let's say somebody wants to grow a social media platform or a social media presence and that we're knee deep in that world right now. That's very easily measurable. Did you post three times today? I don't care about the quality. Just, did you post? Did you write what you said you were going to write? Cool. Now I know whether or not I can keep the money or whether or not you get refunded. Yeah. Picking a niche I think would probably be the way to go. Hey, I'm gonna help entrepreneurs who have a hard time losing weight. That might be a niche. Or, like, I'm gonna help entrepreneurs who have wanted to learn Spanish but never have. It's like, all right, sign up for Duolingo and I know exactly whether or not you've done the courses and so you get your money back. Yeah, I like focusing on the vertical or niche. So, yeah, I think it could be cool. I think I got that same question from him. I feel like we've gotten that a few times from him.

Maybe he blasted me up like four different ways.

What I would say to him, I can't remember his name. I know I could find it because I read the same thing. What I would say to you, you know, dragonslayer 69420, is if you, like, you've asked us this question several times. Go freaking test it. Like, at this point, if it's on your mind and you've been like, you can't stop thinking about it and you're trying to get external validation from somebody else, just go do it. Just go see if it works or not. That's going to be the real validation, whether or not you can get somebody to pay for it.

You've heard it here first. Bias direction, Trump's all, start it before you have it.

All right, this is a good one.

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