Tariffs: Here's How to Make Money While Everyone Panics | Ep. # 154

The United States is in Trump tariff turmoil today. And there's more than just alliteration in that sentence. There's opportunity. Now, I will be the first person to tell you that I am not qualified nor interested on speaking about macroeconomic events or politics or any of that. It doesn't interest me at all. But I am an expert in business ideas. It's all I think about, it's all I talk about. And with great turmoil comes great opportunity. So I'm going to spend just a couple minutes touching on what's happening in the economy right now, just to set some context. And then I'm going to talk about what kinds of businesses you could start and or how you might be able to capitalize on this opportunity. Okay? So, as we know, April 2, 2025, is now branded as Liberation Day, where Trump announced sweeping new tariffs for most US trade partners. And in doing so, the US tariff rate jumped from 2.6% to 22%, which is the highest in over 100 years. The S&P 500 lost over $5 trillion in value. Everyone's freaking out, and JP Morgan says we have a 60% chance of a US recession this year. Also, by way of a quick side note, December 2023, everyone was convinced we would have a recession in 2024. So I bought a paid account@newspapers.com and I searched for the word recession in newspapers across the last 100 years. And you know what I found? We're pretty terrible at predicting the future. Of all the headlines I read, only about 30% of them ended up being accurate in retrospect. Now, does that mean I'm saying we won't have a recession this year? No. I don't know what I'm freaking talking about, but I do know that predicting the future isn't so easy. Now, I don't know if you saw this, but Trump bought a full page ad in the New York times back in 1987, my birth year, that criticized U.S. foreign policy. The title of the ad said, there's nothing wrong with America's foreign defense policy that a little backbone couldn't cure. So it's clear he's had strong opinions about this stuff for about as long as I've been alive. Now, over the last few months, we've seen Trump leverage America's economic strength by instituting tariffs with smaller countries like Colombia. But this is meant to be a permanent solution, not just a negotiation tool. And so whether you agree with these tariffs or not, they're most likely here to stay in some form or fashion. So let's figure out some ways we can take advantage. Number one, let's look at smaller Asian countries such as Vietnam and Cambodia. These countries have also been hit by tariffs, but they don't have much negotiating power with the United States. And so they're not going to be able to cut favorable trade deals like China is trying to do. We're already seeing a lot of manufacturing move to these smaller Southeast Asian countries, but that's about to accelerate. One of my favorite tools to reverse engineer where any company, large or small, sources their products from, is Import Yeti. This is not an ad, it's just an awesome tool for finding out where any company gets their stuff from. And so it's going to be really interesting to watch where companies large and small start to move their sourcing to. You can literally find the exact factory that companies use to manufacture their products. So if you have a couple hours of data spare, I would pick a niche, let's say baby goods or kitchenware, and then use a tool like Jungle Scout to see what products in these niches are selling like gangbusters on Amazon. In case you don't know, Jungle Scout will give you approximate sales volume numbers for any product you could ever search for on Amazon. So spend a couple hours one night finding random niche products that are selling like crazy. Products that seem to have a lot more demand than supply. You can even see recent sales volume trends to see if they're trending up or down. Then you can take your newfound knowledge, go over to Import Yeti and see if you can find the same or similar manufacturers or sourcing agents for these same products. And honestly, this opportunity has been strong for years. It's not reliant on new tariffs. This is just a cool way to find cool products. Pull up a list of all the countries that are not as affected by these tariffs and use Import Yeti to see if, if you can find manufacturers of the same types of products. And then once you have that information, what can you do with it? Can you sell it in a PDF to companies here in the US that are already selling those products? Eh, maybe. Can you order some samples and see how the quality is and then order some samples from the company you're competing against and see how the quality compares? Absolutely. Another thing you can do is approach these American companies that are currently importing exclusively from tariff impacted countries like China, and you can act as a sourcing agent for them and make a percentage of everything they import as a broker's fee or a finder's fee. You could start a reverse engineering newsletter based around these tariff changes. Call it Tariff Tuesday. Just get an Import Yeti account and every time a big brand changes a manufacturer or supplier email it out to your newsletter. This is the type of newsletter that is incredibly valuable even if you have 100 to 10,000 subscribers because the people on this list list are likely to be executives or sourcing agents at companies. Therefore, the amount you can charge for ad space on this newsletter could be literally 5 to 10x what a normal newsletter might be able to charge. Another thing about Import Yeti is you can have a one to three month lead time on new products because it can often take that long for those products to arrive here in the States. Or you can go to builtwith.com, export a list of every Shopify plus store with the contact information of all the owners or executives. Or you could go to Upwork and do the same thing for 20 to 50 bucks. Just have a virtual assistant send you a list of all the Shopify stores scraped from Built with and then you could start emailing these stores and say here's my offer. I'll find you better factories within 24 hours. Tell me three products of yours that you'd like a better manufacturer for and I'll find you alternatives. And I'll only charge you if I find someone that you end up using. Or I'll do you one better. If you don't want to put the ball in their court to send you three winning products, you can just do this. So video is cool, but you know what's better? Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter tkopod.com go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. Three episodes a week. Stuff like this. You're gonna love it. All free. No sleazy sales pitch tkopod.com if you go to any Shopify store, let's say you go to mine texasnacks.com and then after the dot com you're going to put slash question mark Sortby equals best selling. I'll put that suffix in the show notes. If you add that URL suffix to any Shopify store's URL and hit enter, the Shopify store will automatically list all of their products from best to worst selling. This is the best life hack ever. So when you reach out cold to these Shopify stores, just tell them that you know what their three best selling products are listed out in the email. Say hey, you don't need to do or say anything. I'm going to go find three alternative manufacturers for these products and I'll let you know what I find. But then you don't get to work until they respond to you because 95 plus percent of people will never respond no matter how good your offer or email is. Once they respond to you, then you get to work because you have a fish on the line. Oh, I really like this idea. Another idea seems very crowded right now. Yes, but when and or if the US dollar weakens that means it's going to stretch even further when hiring and or managing remote teams abroad. So you go to upwork, you find some Rockstar virtual assistants and you place them at companies for a one time placement fee, 500 to $5,000. You can do a flat fee or you can do 10 to 30% of their first year salary. Yes, a lot of people have this business. Yes, this seems very crowded. But I think in the long run when we look back on this industry 20 years from now we we're going to see that 2025 was still very early when it came to offshore recruiting or staffing agencies. There's two models of this game that you can play. Number one, a staffing agency. You mark up their seven or eight dollars an hour by 50 to 100%. You manage them, you deal with the headaches of hiring, firing and you take a 50% margin right off the top. Number two, placement agency where you charge a flat fee or a percentage of the first year's salary in exchange for finding and placing a competent overseas employee. Pick your poison. Staffing agency is generally more recurring, more profitable, but a lot more hand holding, more headache. Placement agency could be good cash flow but it's not really recurring. You're only as good as your last deal. That's the trade off you got to make. The third idea that I love. Anything software code isn't affected by these tariffs. Digital products, communities, info businesses, SaaS products. There's never been a better time to launch any of these things. I mean first of all we can have AI do it for us. Repl it. Cursor, bolt, lovable, Windsurf. Go play around with them, get to know them. Gumloop. Surely you heard my episode from two days ago with the co founder. Build an agency on top of these things. Build a last mile agency. I'm really liking that idea. Right now all these people are playing in replit. They can't finish what they started, myself included. They go to the replit bounty program, they're underwhelmed, they're disappointed it is not a great replit product unlike their core feature. And so there needs to be an agency that takes all these 80%, 50% finished projects and finishes them out. Go start that. Number four, Become a tariff or a supply chain consultant. Become an expert on these things. Get up to speed with deep research. ChatGPT, Google. Start talking about what you learn on Twitter or social media. Hit record on your camera. Hit publish. See what happens. Maybe nothing, but not one person listening to this can honestly tell me that they think there's more supply than demand for this service. Right now. People are scrambling. They have no idea what to do with these tariffs. Reading for a few hours would put you in the top 5% of experts. Number five, buy the dip. I don't mean as an investor. I mean as a business buyer or as an opportunist. I guarantee you there are millions of business owners in the United States freaking out right now because they don't know how the ripple effects of these tariffs will affect them. Even if they won't affect them. Blue collar businesses, sweaty startups, home services, laundromats, RV parks, pet crematoriums. If you're more bullish on the future of America over the next couple years than the potential seller is and you're right, then you win. If you're wrong, then you likely lose. But if you have an asymmetric amount of information. In other words, if you spend some time learning about these things and the impacts of them and cover your downside, work in some seller financing some creative deals where the seller can get the business and or piece of real estate back. If you default on it, then you can win. Idea number six. You just keep doing what you're doing. Like what are we doing? Don't freak out. Remember what I did at the beginning of COVID Sold all my stocks like an idiot. Guess how much of a temptation I had to do that this week? Zero. No temptation. It's not happening. I'm never selling. I'm buying. I'm doubling down on my biggest holdings. Panicking isn't a strategy. You want to hear the names of some companies that were founded in the wake of huge tariffs and or recessions. General motors, founded in 1908 a year before was the panic of 1907 that decimated banks. You think you don't need a bank to start a car company? Starbucks expanded aggressively during the 1980s recession. Where would Starbucks be today if it didn't have that foundation it built in the 80s? McDonald's exploded during the post World War II inflation era right after the Korean War tariffs were enacted. Ray Kroc was greedy when everyone else was fearful. Microsoft 1975 the US was in stagflation. An oil crisis and a brutal recession. Everyone was cutting back, but Bill Gates and Paul Allen just kept grinding. Apple 1976 same story. Johnson and Johnson thrived during the Great Recession. Why? Because people were still buying shampoo, diapers, medicine and hygiene products. LinkedIn started in 02 right after the dot com crash. Airbnb 08 we know what happened in 08. It was the year I got married. It was all that I knew. It's funny because I remember talking to my Boss back in 08 and I was so ignorant. I was 21 years old. I didn't know what was going on and I was just like, oh man, I don't know if it's ever going to get better. Are we ever going to come out of this recession? And he just laughed and laughed. It'll get better. What I would not be doing right now is starting an E commerce business. Unless it's an E commerce business that only relies on goods manufactured domestically. That's probably the best type of E commerce business you could start right now. Something handmade. Made in America. Still affordable, High quality. Made in America hasn't really had any teeth to it until now. I don't know if you've noticed, but Americans are only really willing to buy Made in America products if they're affordable enough. Maybe now's the time that they will be. So lean on it. Even if it's obvious that your product is made in America. Kind of like corn chips that say gluten free. Yeah, there's no gluten in corn. They're naturally gluten free. But who cares? If it gets 5% or more people to buy your chips, then brand the heck out of it. All in all, anytime you log into your portfolio and you see red everywhere, that's opportunity. So go grab it. Share with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.