The Simplest Business in a Box Anyone Can Start

It was a 2-day event and it was $8,000 net.

$8,000 net profit in 2 days?

Yeah, yeah, same product. He spent $150,000, these guys spent $1,000. A small event with 80 people, you know, you make $400.

How many hours is an average day?

4 to 8 hours.

You're making between $100 an hour in profit and $200, $300, $400 an hour in profit?

Basically, yeah, yeah.

Wow, that's incredible.

The cost for being wrong is gas money and $150 that I might have paid for that location. The coffee doesn't spoil. You know, you have a freezer for your ice, okay? Your cups, you just put them back in your storage. Once I made the first cart, I said, you know, wow, I wish I could figure out a way to make this usable by an at-risk population, maybe a divorced mom or a disabled veteran. You know, that was my idea of a business in my box for anybody.

Good for you. So check out this freaking guy named Mark. What did Mark do? He went to a festival in the middle of a desert, and a guy rolls up next to him in a $150,000 pizza truck. Now, what was Mark selling? Iced coffee out of a Home Depot tool cart that he gutted in his garage for under $1,000. But here's the kicker: by Sunday, the end of this festival, Mark had cleared $8,000 in pure profit. It's a 2-day festival. Which was more than the $150,000 pizza truck right next to him. He calls this a business in a box. Every cup of iced coffee he makes costs less than $3 to make. He sells it for $8 and he pours it in 30 seconds flat, whereas all the other coffee guys out there are using a $30,000 espresso machine and taking 5 full minutes to pour that same cup of coffee. He doesn't need that espresso machine. When I said under $1,000, I meant everything, all the equipment, materials, cart, everything. He's already set up the same system for divorced moms, military spouses, and immigrants here on visas. And at the end, we dive deep on home run locations that nobody else is tapping into. Now, whether you love coffee or have never even tasted it like me, as long as you love business, you are going to love this episode. Please enjoy. Before you get into your awesome business, yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about your background and what makes you so entrepreneurial? Like where does that mindset come from of instead of giving my kid 5 grand, I'm gonna help him build a business.

I'm a lawyer by training, but I grew up with, my mother was a war refugee from Europe. My father went through the depressions. We lived very, you know, we didn't make big expenses and war refugees are, they, the mindset is what you have today might disappear tomorrow and you've got to always learn how to make do. And so that was kind of just, you know, for, for 8, first 18 years of my life, that was the dinner talk about everything that was lost and everything that was regained. After the war. And that just shaped me. I went to law school knowing that I didn't want to practice law. I just wanted to use it for my advantage. When I was a teenager, we used to have a little business that we put people's beach chairs out on the beach. You know, every $35 for the summer, you know, 20 or 30 people paid us $700, $800. You know, back in the '70s, early '70s, that was a fortune for us. And, you know, that's where I kind of got bit by that. And I was always looking at businesses and I was way more interested when I lived in New York in the little guy who built his business from zero to, to really good. You know, Wall Street didn't interest me. The giant corporations around New York didn't interest me. It was the guy, the hot dog cart. So the hot dog vendor that I saw every day, but summer, winter, you know, he started with a little, he was a Greek guy, started with a little cart. And over the years it grew and grew into a cart where he actually stood in. So he was no longer. Subject to the, to the winds and everything. And then his— then later on, you know, I lived long enough in the neighborhood that his son moved into that business. And so those kind of businesses always excited me, what people—

same. Yeah.

Resource. And so, you know, so that, that's what got me hooked on it.

It's funny you mentioned the hot dog cart because when my wife and I were first married, our first year, my grandma's friend had just like retired from having a hot dog cart in New York and he used his retirement to buy a beautiful home in Greece. In this little city called Karystos. And we went and stayed with him for a week. And I'm like, holy crap, like you bought this home, second home in Greece from a hot dog cart. And he did. He had a great life.

And in New York City, the hot dog vendors in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue, they pay the city $100,000 or more for the right for that license to sell. So, so it tells you that, I mean, you know, there's the winter, there's the summer, But it's something that almost anybody can do and creates wealth so that you can go back, you live the American dream kind of in a suburb, and then you go back to your country. That's my gospel.

Yeah. Now, what type of law were you practicing? Were you working with business owners?

When I was in New York, I did bankruptcy law for a couple of years. Corporate bankruptcy law. And that was very sobering because that was just filled with stories of people who were going down the tubes and they knew it 3 or 4 years ago. They didn't pull the plug. They didn't do what was necessary. They kept the Cadillac and they kept the big beach houses and they didn't, you know, and that was really formative for me about this stuff happens. And then I came to California, kind of give that up. And about 10 years ago, I started working with immigration lawyers. And there's a couple of visas out there where if you invest in a business in America, you get to come live here. So if you have $100,000, if you're a foreigner in certain countries and you have $100,000, you can come live here. But the lawyers who were handling the paperwork said, I have this guy from Spain or this guy from Pakistan wants to come to America, doesn't know what business to do. And so this was like right at home for me about looking at reviewing businesses, business in a box, carpet cleaning versus a pizza shop, pizza shop on a main strip or in a little strip mall. So, you know, I really learned again, I was just, just neck deep in people who were coming to America and building pool cleaning services, carpet cleaning services, and they're willing to bet their whole life and their whole past and their whole future on coming here. And so, again, that makes me always looking for business in a box. And your bit, your, your whole TKO has just opened a whole world of other businesses in a box for my clients. Yeah.

So it sounds like you grew up with immigrant parents that were hustlers, they were scrappers, and they just talked about their life at the dinner table. That impacted you. Then you started slinging beach chairs and umbrellas in the '70s. That impacted you. Then you saw all these bankruptcies and you learned what not to do, even if at a corporate level and not a small business level, the principles are the same, right?

Yep.

And then you start helping immigrants come to America, you know, through a visa that enables them to buy a business. So you have this a lot of breadth to yourself.

Yes.

So that's the background that enables you to go to your son or daughter and say, let's start a business together.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm not just coming out of nowhere. It's, it's, yeah, I've tested it on a lot of other people, including myself. I wouldn't ask anybody to do a business that I wouldn't be ready to do myself.

Yeah.

So let me put my words into practice. So when COVID came and so much was falling apart, The outdoor event business was exploding, and I met these guys in San Diego, two young guys. And I love meeting young people because they don't always get it right the first time, so you can cut a much better deal with them when they're just, you know, when they have something and you know what you can do with it, any money you give them is enough, but they're just giving away territories for, you know, for free, basically. So there was one guy that loved beer, one guy that loved trucks, and so they created these trucks that serve beer at events. And that was what I picked up during COVID for one of my daughters and her husband. My daughter was incapacitated. Her husband needed to work on the weekends. So, I would book the events. I'm the outdoor per— I'm the outside person. I connected into the events. I did a tap truck. I did this thing, the tap truck. And it did well. It was weekend. We could make anywhere from— weddings would book us for $3,000 to $5,000. We could do a concert. We would go to a concert venue out in the desert. Make $5,000 or $10,000 selling beer.

Wow.

It was fun at that time. You know, I had big dreams when I first got into it, a fleet of 10 trucks and whatnot, beautiful trucks like this. But the logistics kind of got in the way. I really wasn't— I'm not a logistics person, and I didn't really have 100 employees. So one of the things that I switched to, when I said, you know, every time I want to make a new, a new way to serve beer, I have to spend $30,000 on a truck. $20,000 on a pickup to drag it around in a trailer. So I gotta spend $50,000 just to sell a $5 beer. So, you know, I said, okay, what can I do? So I started buying these armoires on Facebook Marketplace. People would get rid of them. I enjoyed the chase. I drive 50 miles to meet a fun couple who had some piece of furniture that they needed to get out of there. So I, for $10 or for free, or sometimes they paid me, and I just put taps on them and then I would rent them. It was a conversation piece that I could rent for $300, $400, $500, go and maybe put some college kid as a bartender. And so that lowered my costs of cloning myself. It was, again, a logistic issue that had I been 30 years younger and had I not had a law degree, this is something that I would've jumped in with with both feet.

Now, did you invent this concept?

I think I did. You know, taking, taking, you know, pieces of furniture and just putting taps on them. Because here's the deal.

Oh yeah.

I'll tell you why. A lot of women were not excited by having my truck at their wedding. Okay. The husband loved it. And some of the more cowboy gals liked it, but women, it just didn't, you know, it just didn't float their boat. So I said, you know, what can we do? And I said, you know, an armoire that's painted softly, we can, we can do that. I could do wine if I wanted to. I could do Prosecco or beer, all of those easy to interchange. There's a way to serve all of that. So I wanted something that I could, you know, something that I could also drop off at a frat house. I didn't want to leave a $30,000 truck at a frat house. I live in a college town. So, you know, we would carry these things over there and set them up in their basement or in their backyard.

Okay.

Have somebody serving the beer. So, so that was, so that was what I did.

You're going to have to enlighten me a little bit from coming from someone that's never even tasted alcohol. What is the business model? If someone is like renting a keg, instead of you just bringing a boring old keg like everyone else does, you bring the barmois and drop it off.

Exactly.

And you make even more and have somebody who runs the tap. Okay.

$100 college student who is run— Setting up the tap, switching out the beers, and serving it.

And what do the unit economics look like on that? What's like an average day of revenue and profit?

You know, you buy beer in the, in the big barrels and you're— we're talking about 80 cents, 80 cents a dollar a glass, and you're selling it for $6 or $7. You know, wow. So, you know, the, the economics are—

you just buy it from a distributor, just a local distributor.

You have to have a liquor license or you have to work with a nonprofit, but that, you know, I— we had access to a liquor license that allowed us to go off-premise and serve it.

Hey, YouTube's fine, but what about when you're driving around? What about when you're mowing the lawn? You need my audio podcast, The Koerner Office. Just look up TKO Pod in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so I'm imagining with that business, even if you paid someone to go serve it, you can make a few hundred bucks profit an hour.

Absolutely. And again, you know, I was doing this to see I like figuring out the process, simplifying it, putting it in a box, and then saying to somebody, here's $1,000, let me help you go do that. That was my idea. One other thing is, after you've done— you can understand this possibly— after you've done 100 of these weddings and things and people getting drunk, as a lawyer, I'm like thinking, okay, how am I going to enforce the drinking rules? How am I going to get some 25-year-old bartender to not serve somebody Who's too drunk? So I started getting tired of the liability questions. Okay. And I started looking, okay, what else?

Sorry. I think it's funny that the way you said that, because that's like one of the things that people comment on my stuff the most. Like, what about liability? What? And I'm tired of it. Like, I don't get tired of the liability. I get tired of the liability questions. And that's exactly what you said. You get sick of people asking about it, even though I'm assuming the liability was never itself was never actually an issue in this business.

But being a lawyer, I know what could happen. But I also know, I also know that innkeeper liability, you really have to leave a trail of smoking guns or crumbs so that they can— so that that person who crashed that car, you have to have video evidence and 7 nuns willing to say that you're the one that served the beer and you're the cause. So the— although the innkeeper liability is real, it's very, very, very remote. But it does make it, you know, every year there's a, there's an underage party at a house where parents know there was alcohol. That goes wrong and it's a million or $5 million verdict, you know, but I just didn't like that.

Well, also, like, you're like me, you're always looking at other opportunities.

Yeah.

So if this is like the, your big idea of your life, then you're gonna figure out a way to get over the liability or to fix it or to set up cameras. But if you're looking at this from an opportunity cost standpoint, you, you're already, you already have wandering eyes of these other opportunities. You're like, you know what, let me just chase that one because the liability annoys me here.

And again, I don't know if you've ever spoken to it on any of your events, but on any of your shows, but the event business in America is embarrassingly large. I mean, what people spend on weddings, engagement parties, christenings, quinceañeras in the Hispanic community, on corporate events, Christmas parties, summer parties. If you can tap into that, and become a trusted resource, the money, the markup is phenomenal if you have the right product. I was always amazed. I went to a lot of parties in Hollywood. There's always the cotton candy lady there, some cute young woman. All she had was just a little cotton candy maker and she charged $500, $600 for 3 hours to make cotton candy for the Hollywood, for the LA Moms and kids, you know, and I, you know, and I always laugh because the caterers, the French food caterers, they show up at 6 AM and they put up a tent and they're chopping. And I probably made as much money net, net, net at that big wedding. Not more. Who with, with 15, with 15, you know, employees. So I, you know, I was looking around and so one day I went to an event. There's this guy, this was his display at this event. He has a company near me in California. He brews coffee, grinds coffee, brews coffee, puts it in kegs so that you can then tap into that keg. And he talked to me, and I looked at it, and I couldn't understand the value proposition of this mess. I kept going back to his store, and I kept looking at those machines, and I said, You know, there's, there's a business in there somewhere, but he's executing wrong. And so the idea was that this is what he makes. He makes coffee in a keg. And if you've ever been, if you've ever gone to a coffee cart, a coffee truck, they all have a $30,000 coffee maker in there. Those espresso makers are $30,000. The frosted, the milk, you know, the, the whipped milk is, you know, the $5,000, the grinders. And they're sitting there measuring the ground coffee by the gram. The interesting truth about coffee is after 9:00 AM, 95% of what people are drinking has sugar syrups in it. Everybody buys coffee, hot coffee at 9:00 in the morning until 9:00. After that, you go sit—

Interesting.

You go sit in a Starbucks, in any coffee place that's that's a sophisticated coffee. And they make their money on iced coffees, on now all of the dirty sodas, the iced drinks.

The Dutch Bros, Swig, and—

Yeah. And the second you put that cream and that syrup in there, the quality of the underlying coffee doesn't matter. And no matter if you measured the milligrams, one guy here does this by the beach. He's a British guy on one of these visas. I love him. I learned a lot from him. But he sits there brewing coffee, you know, 5 minutes every time to serve the coffee. And I go see him and I buy a coffee and I talk and I want to see what his pain points are. And 90% of what he sells on a warmer day is a big tall coffee, mostly ice with his espresso poured into it.

Yeah, yeah.

And then a syrup, a caramel. And I'm saying, okay, you don't need all of that $30,000 espresso. Stuff, you know. And so what went off in my head when I saw these kegs, you know, basically what, what popped into my head was this: I want to serve great coffee, or coffee like Starbucks, but without having a $20,000 a month rent. I just want to take this to events because with my tap truck, I had figured out between LA and San Diego and Palm Springs, the air shows, all the places that I could be and not everybody wants alcohol. There's a lot of family events, school events, public parks where I could come in with a coffee cart, but alcohol, they didn't want me there. So it solved a lot of my problems.

So this guy on the beach that you're talking about, it's like he's using a Toyota Corolla engine and putting it in a Porsche, right? Yeah, exactly. 'Cause he has this beautiful product that he's just after 9:00 AM is just diluting with ice and sugar and cream. And so he could put in like Folgers, Maxwell House, whatever, and it would taste about the same to most people.

That was my point. And the owner of this company that brews the coffee, he kept talking to me about all of the, the aromas and everything. And to me, his greatest point was that, and he was right, is that his coffee is shelf stable. So in that keg, it can stay there even if it's open for 3 to 6 months. And the other part was that you could put nitro. The new fashion is putting in nitro, nitro coffee. If you go to Starbucks, there's nitro brew. And it's these little micro bubbles. Instead of you using CO2 to pump the liquid out, you use nitrogen, which is a smaller bubble that lasts longer. And it makes the product fizzier. It makes it mix differently. There's a whole look to it when you calibrate it right. There's a whole art to it. But this guy was pitching me— the man who was brewing the coffee, he was trying to displace coffee in restaurants. He was saying, oh, the average restaurant throws out 50% of the coffee it makes because it gets It gets stale after a while. And he was going after restaurants. And again, like the tap truck people, he was a guy who had a great idea, but I just felt that he wasn't tapping into the right market. I just felt that because I had traveled so much out in the world and saw what people were doing, that I thought there has to be a better use for this.

I'm looking at a Google Trends chart for Nitro Coffee and it's up and to the right.

Yep.

For the last 13 years, it's just been trending like crazy.

Yeah, coffee just keeps on exploding and now it's gone cold and now it's gone at every street corner. So again, my European refuge, all the big department stores in New York and all the big stores in America were started by German or Jewish immigrants who started with a cart selling their stuff. So why have a restaurant? Why have a coffee shop, $20,000 a month? Why even have a coffee truck for $30,000 or $40,000? What I went out and made was this, you know, was this little cart. And inside it, this is just some, let me show you. That's what I use. I go to Home Depot, I buy a Husky cart. I get a guy with a metal saw to pull out all of the guts. It has a nice top. It's good looking. It's got good wheels.

Sturdy.

It's my— it's sturdy because this thing is going to be loaded up and down in a truck, up and down sidewalks, you know, that's the product. So, you know, so what happened was I made this for, for myself, you know, and this woman, she said, you know, she lives outside of LA and said, you know, I want to go to schools. I want to go to my area. And I built her this thing and kind of put her in business. Okay.

That looks awesome.

And then I had another client. You know, this was an E-2. This is one of my visa people. Got him approved for, you know, make bringing coffee to, you know, this was indoor in a gym at a, at a convention.

For these first two people so far, you're monetizing this by building the cart and selling them the cart?

No, I was helping them to get at this point. I have my own cart that I take out to events.

Yeah. But which we'll get to, but for these two people, how are you, how are you monetizing it?

I was interested to see. I was just testing my theory.

You're helping them. You're getting data, learning, helping them.

And also, I had to understand the human factors. To me, the weakest point in so many business is the human factors that, you know, I had to simplify. For example, those, those metal cylinders, they're heavy. Okay, that rules out, you know, a small frame woman running this business and having 3 or 4 of these. So, again, I got online, I started asking my suppliers, and I found that you could put this coffee, instead of putting it in a 5-gallon, 40-pound keg, you could have it processed and put into what's called bag-in-box, BIB. It's what the syrup in a restaurant comes in. And, there's a pump that pumps it out that's activated by gas. So, so I found, and I'll show you later, I found this company that made this system that would, that would draw the gas, draw the, the liquid out. My coffee supplier, he agreed with me that these, these heavy metal cylinders or the recyclable 5-gallon cylinders look like an absolute environmental nightmare. You know, that's shipping it in these 10-liter cardboard boxes with a bag, heavy-duty bag inside, made a lot of sense.

Is there any difference in taste between that and the keg?

No, no. And again, I mean, not after you— not after you put the syrup and the cream in it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to your point, the liquid itself weighs 8.5 pounds a gallon, right? So if the keg weighs so much empty and it doesn't add to the flavor, then what are you doing? What's the point in having it at all?

Listen, when I lived in New York and I, you know, even into the late '80s, in the middle of the winter when there's ice and I would see the people delivering the beer kegs to restaurants and sliding down the stairs, going down the— like, beer is great, but what it takes to get it from the brewery to the store, it is— you're moving water around. In these 100-pound containers. That creates risk of fall, that creates massive back injuries, and the technology really hasn't kept up. Nobody's made a keg handler robot.

Yeah.

So, again, I'm all about these human factors because, again, once I made the first cart, I said, wow, I wish I could figure out a way to make this usable by an at-risk population, maybe a divorced mom. I would, you know, if there was a mom that was willing to go sit at a gas station, you know, while the kids were in school and could park the cart at the gas station, I'd build her the cart for, you know, for whatever. And I'd go get the product delivered to her and we'd split the profits, you know? And whether it's that or a disabled veteran, you know, that was my idea of a, business in the box for anybody.

Good for you. It's literally in a box in this case.

Eventually became in a box.

The bag in a box, that is a concentrate then? You have to mix it with water?

No, this one is the brew. It's not a—

okay.

It's not a concentrate. This one is brewed. But yeah, so this one is brewed. And again, it's a waste, a little bit of a waste, but I didn't want to invest in a machine that mixes the concentrate with the water. Then I have to bring water to the place.

Now, are you personally able to taste a difference between the bag and a box and the keg?

No, no.

So, okay, wow. And I'm assuming you have more of a discerning palate being in the business.

Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I go around tasting coffees and I go around tasting bag. And I mean, I was looking for price competition. Again, I'm always, I'm always looking for the downside. So in case my guy down the road who brews his own coffee dropped dead, there was an earthquake and he was shut down. I had to see, are there other people that put brewed coffee into a bag?

Yeah. I, I wanna point out the fact that I'm, I just keep going back to your friend on the beach that's like the aroma and this and that, and he's all romantic about it. And as business owners, that's why we get into business because we're romantic about an idea. But usually we are not romantic about the same things that our customers are romantic about. And that disconnect is very expensive. So if he's obsessing over the aroma and how many milligrams per cup and this and that and the $30,000 machine, and if he were to go actually survey his customers and say, what do you want? They're going to be like, uh, iced coffee. But yeah, but like, what about the aroma? Like the mixture, the ratio between— I just want iced coffee, you know?

So sadly, and I, again, I didn't have the nerve. The man who, wonderful man who brews this stuff, who has a whole business, of brewing coffee and putting it in kegs for all sorts of food service industries. He's a coffee aficionado. He tastes coffee from Guatemala, from Kenya, and he's always talking to me about aromas and bouquets and roasting temperatures and roasting—

The nitrogen in the soil.

And I've always been very— maybe I'm jealous of people who have a passion like that and pursue the passion to make the absolute world's best coffee. But living in New York, seeing hot dog vendors, it was that same hot dog that spent 12 hours in hot water, you know, and you bought it for the same $5 whether it was fresh out of the bag or 12 hours later. And it's a little bit cynical, but it's bottom line. I have never gotten into businesses. It's just not me. I don't have it in me to make a luxury product. I want to get it out the door and cross the desk and Somebody pay me. That's what I'm looking for. I'm even the beer and the beer people would ask me if I brewed my own and if this was this and you know what the calibration was and like really the people, my customers just want to drink lots of beer and at a giant $10,000 company picnic, you know, and, and so, you know, there are too many people who make money selling a plain vanilla product and I know the internet has changed that you have to make yourself different. But to make yourself different was get rid of that $30,000 coffee machine that breaks down and costs $5,000 to fix every time.

Yeah. You're passionate about the profit, right? And about the product.

About the ease, because I'm totally ADD and I'm totally spinning 50 plates at one time. The last thing I need is to worry about the coil, the hot coil in my $30,000 espresso machine. And when you go on And when you go on the coffee maker, coffee shop owner, coffee truck owner things on Facebook, that's what they're sitting, this, oh, my coil, how do I replace a coil on this machine? And I've learned in 40 years of business to be redundant, but I can be redundant without having to buy two $30,000 coffee machines. I can be redundant for $1,000 and know that when I go to an event that's 100 miles away from civilization, that I'm not—

you have to be redundant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The part of the things we talked about was this is what I would bring. This is what I bring to a, the simple little thing I bring to a Tractor Supply Company, you know, weekend in their parking lot, something like that.

And are you having to pay anything to be there?

No, for them, no. Again, maybe they'll charge one day, but, uh, other events, there are, there are things in California and other places that are called night markets. What happens usually in You know, the way the economy is going, you know, especially because of COVID people have discovered the power of outdoor events. And in California, we were blessed, Southern California, where we're blessed with great weather. Entrepreneurs, mostly Hispanic and even Chinese, they go, they rent out a parking lot, they rent out a, you know, at a college on a Friday night till Sunday, and they sell tickets. They sell booths for anywhere from $150 to $500 depending on what on what they, what you're selling. And they sell admission tickets and they get 5 or 10, 20,000 people that come through this. And, you know, when your only alternative for fun for your kids is, is $1,000 day at Disneyland or at some water park, you know, taking your family out at 6 PM to one of these events where there's all sorts of food, there's music, there are tables, your community is there. So you meet people and talk night markets. Have become a really big thing here. I don't know if you have them yet in Texas or, or what.

Not that I know of. They're big in China, aren't they?

Yeah.

Let me ask you something. How many leads have you lost because nobody picked up the phone? An 8:00 PM call comes in, you're at dinner and you let it go to voicemail. And by the time you call back the next morning, they've already hired someone else. And that's reality. Leads come in after hours when emergencies strike. And when you miss the call, you miss the job. And it's not about quality, it's about speed. HighLevel built an AI employee to fix just this. It answers real phone calls, talks to leads, qualifies them, and books appointments directly on your calendar 24/7. Also, it'll handle texts, DMs, and web chats so you can stop missing revenue just because you couldn't grab the phone. Oh, and you can also white label the entire thing and resell it to your clients as your software. Charge them monthly, and that is recurring revenue that you didn't have yesterday. So check out gohighlevel.com/tkopod, and they will give you a 30-day free trial to see what I mean.

So some places charge fees and other places— again, part of my final recommendations later, I'll have a list of recommendations, but not everybody charges fees because sometimes you add value. Sometimes So you bring people, have some, some event or a baseball game or something. And, you know, you're just there at the baseball field selling, you know, selling liquid, like, you know, unlike anybody else.

Before you get into the Tractor Supply, tell me monetarily how it went for these two first two people that you helped, the gentleman and the woman.

They both were happy making $400 to $800 net for the day.

You know, I would think so.

You know, it's, it's, it's totally doable. Nobody that I've— that I'm doing this with has based their ability to put their kids through medical school on this. Everybody's just looking for a plan B, for something to do on weekends, in, you know, in between jobs, as a filler in, you know, a lot of gig economy, you know, not everybody— we don't have a lot of people don't have a full 40-hour-a-week job. And a lot of people are in financial situations where they need 3 jobs.

So yeah, but man, compared to the gig economy, this seems so much better. You stay in one place, you don't break your car.

It's fun for me. I mean, I love to be outside. I love to meet people. I love to find new venues. But to some people, that's hard. You know, introverts who just want to sit at a desk all day and some do something at the desk, an accountant. What I do is, is, is, you know, they can't think of anything worse. I just get so energized by what I see people selling. I mean, The lemonade stands make even more because they've got even less go. But I just wanted to have a twist on the lemonade stand with coffee being one of the biggest group continually. They were just constantly— it used to be a morning thing. Now it's an all-day thing. And then they've added on these sugary drinks, these fruit juices, these dragon fruit things, these matcha teas. And, you know, anybody who wants to can do that with my system. It's just that the beauty about my system is that when you, when you are set up on a hot day where the sun is beating down and people are having fun, whether it's a car show, a boat show, an air show, a baseball game, people don't want 10 or 15 choices. Like, if I just have like here, a latte and a coffee, and that's it. Coffee with cream or coffee black, latte with a certain type of cream and a syrup. I have yet to have somebody say, don't you have this? Can you put a little of that? Don't you have any Baileys or so? Nobody, you know, I mean, if I was set up as a store, people would quickly complain that I didn't have 50 different variations on the theme. I see people who have these kinds of trucks with 15 different flavors, and that takes time. You know, the 5-minute coffee brew, the 3-minute coffee brew for my friend who does it by the beach, I serve it up in 30 seconds. So I could sell— I've served 1,000 people in a day with 3 people working the station.

30 seconds a pop.

Bingo.

How much does each cost on average, and what are your margins like?

So I go to car— you know, Cars and Coffee is big in California. So on weekend mornings, I bring my converted tool chest and the men, people want to order these. I don't want to go to the trouble of making them end user friendly, but people appreciate at a Cars and Coffee where there's half a million dollar cars and there's all sorts of what, it's just a, again, it's to get people talking and seeing. I'm just hoping that somebody say, you know what? Well, somebody did do something and I'll tell you that later about something that came out of this. Let me just show you the costs. Okay, so you buy a tool cart for $600, you buy a tap system for $200. This is the machine that mixes and calibrates how much the gas and the coffee mix. That's the most expensive part. You have to have a nitro tank that— to buy it once for a couple hundred bucks, and then you fill it for like $30. And you fill it every 2 months. I mean, it does a huge, huge amount. And then there's these that you either buy the bag in the box or you buy the keg. So, you know, to build the cart, you know, you're talking about, you know, $2,500, maybe another $500 to get somebody to build it for you. But this— these are your costs into the cart.

Okay, put that on a credit card.

Yep, bingo. And so, you know, What I do, you know, I do 24-ounce cups, big cups, give them their money's worth. At the fairgrounds, a big cup of like a 20 or 24 cup of beer is sold for like $18. Okay, so, so, you know, it's high for a cup of coffee, but it's mostly ice. And sometimes I drop my price and make a smaller cup for $6.50. The coffee itself is about $1.50. There's really no way to get that down when you start I could make up, yes, I could lower my price by mixing up instant coffee in a container and serving that. You have the cup, the lid, the straw, about 30 cents, ice. Again, there are places that pay, there's certain gas stations that just to get you to come in will give you a 25-pound, if you buy 10 bags, You know, it's like $33 for a 25-pound bag of ice. It's— then you pay sales, you know, you collect sales tax or you pay sales tax later. So it comes out to about $3 a glass and, you know, you sell it for $8.50. So you're making $5. I will sit there and make $5. You know, my setup is so easy. The maintenance is so easy that, you know, it's not the biggest profit margin in the world. But it's something that everybody wants. And I've got it, you know, I can, I can make it for the, you know, the manly drink, you know, it's, uh, men want it, you know, straight up and, you know, women want syrups and creams in it. And so I can service, you know, I can service what they want to, you know, make $5 at a good event. And, and that, that's where, you know, my big thing about his location, I'll get to that, but, you know, a small event, with 80 people who buy it, you know, you make $400. I mean, that, you know, that's all you need.

What would a small event be? Would that be like a Tractor Supply parking lot? Exactly.

Exactly. A large event is a local, something like the, in Santa Barbara, we have the Avocado Festival, the Lemon Festival, the German Festival, the Israeli Festival, something that draws 2,000 or 3,000 people locally, 5,000, you know, you can make $800 to clear. This is net, net, net, you know, clear $800 to $1,200. You know, one of the real games to play is, is, you know, the, the festivals and the fairs. And, you know, they charge fees to get in, but there's a lot of latitude because I made friends with a guy a long time ago with my beer trucks when he was just starting out, and he did one little fair, and I became very good friends with him, and I supported him, and I did everything I needed to to help him when he would call me. Oh, can I borrow your truck? Oh, Mark, you know, this guy just backed out. Can I do this? Can you do this? Can you get me a trailer? And, you know, now I am on his good side and he lets me into these events. And, you know, it's a $2,000 day for, you know, for selling coffee. And I mean, I pay for the thing. He charged me like $300 or $400. So it would still be $1,500.

How many— how many hours is an average day?

4 to 8 hours.

Wow.

People don't drink coffee after 6 o'clock. People are starting to, oh no, no. And like sometimes I switch over to decaf or to other kinds of drinks, but 10 o'clock till 4 or 5 o'clock, people are grabbing the drinks. And if, and like then some of the market, night markets I do, I do decaf. People are very conscious. Oh, I can't drink that. It's gonna keep me up.

So depending on the event and the size of the event, you're making between $100 an hour in profit and $200, $300, $400 an hour in profit.

Basically. Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. That's incredible. Have you ever, have you, you or one of your people ever had an event that just bombed for whatever reason?

I mean, and that's my, that's going to be like my, one of my closing points. Okay. First of all, the cost for being wrong is gas money and $150 that you might've paid for that location. The coffee doesn't spoil. The ice, you know, you have a freezer for your ice. Okay. Your cups, you just put them back in your storage. So the cost of being wrong. Yeah, I've done Tractor Supplies where I sold $100 in coffee. But again, when I went back and understood the location, the date was wrong, the season was wrong. You have to go back and calibrate just like in real estate. You know, it's location, location, location. Every geographic area will be different, but I mean, the granddaddies are the fairs and festivals. They're not as often. There may be a line. You may not be the first in line for coffee, but although very few people do iced coffee, so they're willing to bring you in for that. Farmers markets are every week, and sometimes you have to commit to be there. And then farmers market, almost everybody will tell you the first few times at the market, The people don't know you. They don't trust you, whatever it is. But eventually, they warm up to you and they make you part of their regular routine.

Now, you say location and I think two different types. One is the event that you're at and two is this very specific location at the event.

Absolutely.

How much does that location matter?

Okay. Yeah, I totally agree. And I'm always, you know, and I drive the small event people crazy. The big events I have, I can't. I can't, I can't do anything about, but I get there early, you know. I get there early.

Jockey, you're like throwing elbows here, right?

Yeah. The, the, the, the, you know, the metaphysics, you know, the, the theoretical, I get there early so that I can look and see how they're setting up, see where the traffic is coming in, you know, see, see where they're bunching up the wrong thing. You know, these shows will have a food area. And they will have a merchandise area. And I never know whether you should be the only food in the merchandise area or you should use the food court idea that one food, having 10 food will motivate people to buy food who maybe didn't want to buy food. So it's a constant, you know, modifying, you know, my umbrella, you know, do I need a dancing flag? You know, My big surprise is I've had to make bigger and bigger signs because people don't know what I'm selling. It says Nitro Coffee. It says coffee. It says latte. They will walk past. So maybe I need a giant coffee cup. Maybe I need a giant steaming coffee cup. That's been the really the funniest part, that I'm a very observant people person and I know what everybody's doing. Most people don't know what I'm serving. And my setup is so different, maybe that's the problem. They have no idea what I'm serving.

What if you had a sign that just said iced coffee?

Yes, because lattes, you know, people didn't know what's nitro, what's nitro latte. I now go back to just iced coffee. That's it. Now we have teas, you know, and other stuff, but that's where I've gone to with this. I mean, I have, my garage is full of signs printed at, you know, one of the most amazing finds in all of this. Is those signs that I make in the front of my carts. FedEx offices will print that on a giant piece of PVC that's very durable for like $100. So I just make up art on my computer, send it to my local FedEx, you know, 3 days later it shows up. You know, $100 for a sign. I can make mistakes all day long and until I figure out what the right thing to say on my, on my coffee cart is.

Let's say you get to a fair and you've got flexibility on where you post up. You've got two options. Let's say each of these options get the same amount of traffic exactly. One option is you're, you're just by some booths. There's not really food or beverages over there, but there's just as many people as option B where you've got a lemonade guy, a smoothie guy, and then you. Would you rather be where there's like products so people are in that mindset, or would you rather be on an island with not competing with any other beverages?

What I believe, and again, not as scientific as I would like it to be, I believe that I'm better off in the food area. That when the people are in the merchandise area, ooh, ah, look at the sweaters, look at the tablecloths, look at— and they're just not thinking food. They get there. And what's interesting, at a lot of these places, they put the food at the beginning, right by the front door. That's where they— set up the food. And so I've done it both ways. I thought that there would be an advantage to being the only vendor in the non-food area, but I've been very wrong most of the time on that.

Yeah, I've noticed the same thing. Yeah.

I don't like being with a lot— my sense of uniqueness, my vanity, my hubris.

Ego.

Ego wants me to have everybody come, oh, you're so unique. Ooh, ah. But you know what, in my, in my, you know, 60 years of life, you know, you can't deny the auto, the auto dealerships that are all lined up. You can't deny the success of, of food courts.

There's a street near me that has all in a row, side by side, Panda Express, Raising Cane's, Chick-fil-A right next to it, McDonald's. Then you've got like 2 or 3 others that I can't remember. And all of them stay packed. Yeah, right. That's why people go to that street is for the fast food. I've got a buddy that opened a healthy restaurant in a shopping mall, an indoor mall, because he said there's no other healthy restaurants here. I'm the, I'm the best option. And he failed because people didn't go there to eat at a healthy restaurant. They wanted crappy Panda Express.

I run into that a lot. And, you know, and, and again, this whole, this whole, you know, malls and food courts is something from the '70s and '80s. And marketers were just shocked that the best play was to be part of a 20 different food place food court or be part of an auto mall. You know, it used to be you made your, you know, you had your car dealership in the '50s on your corner and that was you. Well, the auto malls that the big real estate developers loved just blew the doors off of that and said, don't be afraid. You've got all these people coming here to buy cars. They've got cash in their pockets. Just let the market work for you. And yeah, totally counterintuitive.

I'd like to be the only guy selling anything, but right, guys, TKowners.com, that's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about 1,000 people in there building, starting, growing businesses. Check out TKO, as in the Koerner office, TKowners.com. If someone wanted to do this like full-time, make it a daily thing, How realistic is it to find a willing gas station owner to let you just post up every day?

So now you've, you know, I don't know whether I had let the cat out of the bag or you just came out of this yourself.

We have the same brain.

Okay. We have in California, and I don't know if the rest of the world does this, you know, we have these car dealership, the car washes. There's the automatic ones where you sit in your car, but there are other ones where you get out of your car, The car goes down a line, the guys finish washing them and detailing them.

Yeah, we have those here.

And there's 15, 20 people. It's like kind of a hand car wash. And those do— I've tested those. Those do amazing.

What's amazing?

In an afternoon, 11:00 to 4:00, prime washing, $500, $600 net just for showing up.

$100 an hour.

I was, so I was at a location and a guy came up. Turns out this guy owns 25 car washes in LA, and every Saturday and Sunday he washes between 500 to 1,000 cars. Okay.

I mean, that's per location or total at every location, car washes.

I mean, they're, they're $5 million businesses. Okay. With between the land and the, but yeah, it's absolutely shocking what the throughput— and again, I don't know, you know, if it's because California is always sunny or what, but the throughput of car washes is just absolutely remarkable.

I'm crunching the numbers. You get 1,000 cars, you just get 10% of them to buy a coffee. You're making $500.

Bingo. That's my point. Again, there was an article. I mean, I've been telling this and, you know, somebody— I'm going through some business magazines And some of the best coffee is served at gas stations and from a gas station, from a coffee cart, not inside the gas station.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a quarter million gas stations in America.

So again, I haven't tested the gas station because I just try to find places that have real crowds all the time. You know, gas station. I mean, yeah, it would kill it at your— I'm sorry, the brand that you love in Texas.

Buc-ee's. But he's— yeah, well, I mean, imagine just a Tesla Supercharger, like a busy Supercharging station.

Oh man, exactly. But you see, my problem is at 66, I'm not who I was when I was 35 years old. And so I'm leaving a lot of stuff on the table. Now I'll gladly build— you know, I'm looking for people starting in my area who will say, Mark, I want to do this. I'll front everything for them. I'll find them the location.

Oh, you're going to get some emails. You're going to get some emails.

Because it's just so unbeatable. Now, there are permits. I mean, you know, when I started it, I was cowboying it, not worrying about the permits. And different locations have different permits. A lot of gas stations or car washes have an inside waiting room where everybody passes through. And so that wouldn't, that wouldn't be considered street vending. If you just set up a cart in there. A lot of times, you know, a catering license where you're going to an event and either selling or give, you know, the— that's a different thing. The most difficult thing is to set up shop on a public thoroughfare where everybody can see you, where, you know, that's when the government wants to see everything up front. And I'm moving in that direction with, with this, you know, my goal is to, these are very expensive, but I want to make this as my, as one of the aspects, probably $10,000, but you go to one concert and you sell $10,000 profit for the weekend. But this is something that would pass inspection, you know, and I'm not here to sell anybody anything. But, but, right, it's that if, you know, if you don't, if you don't want to cowboy it, you don't want to gorilla it, and you really want to go out in the open to every last event, you put a nice wrap on this, pink, something bright that sticks out, and you do this. And now, you know, it's at the other end of the spectrum for me, but it's not the $40,000, $50,000, $150,000 pizza trucks I've seen. You know, I, I was at an event and a guy pulls up one morning He gets there, you know, I get there very early and he pulls up next to me. He's got this giant truck with a container on it that has a wall that's been taken out. And he's got a, he's got a mobile pizza maker, but he spent $150,000 on it. And it's funny because I helped two kids in town here get into business by buying these little $400 pizza makers that you see at hardware stores where you just, you know, you could just make pizzas on gas. Pizzas on a tabletop, you know, same product. He spent $150,000. These guys spent $1,000.

Now, what's your pitch to the venue or the gas station owner or the car wash owner? How do you convince them to say yes?

So what I'd love to be able to say is, I mean, again, I'd love to be able to say, you know, I've got this woman, you know, divorced mom of 3 who wants to set up a business at your place. You know, she really needs the money. It would really fit in great. She comes in between 10 AM and 3 PM when her kids are in school. Can you help me out? I'm not scamming them. I'm being honest. I'm looking for a way. I hate knocking on front doors. I want to meet a gas station owner or a car wash owner online on LinkedIn. I want to meet him at a conference and have him say to me, yeah, I'd really like to see you guys at my location, rather than me saying, hey, how much are you going to charge me to be at your location? That's not the conversation. I've just done this side door stuff all my life. I don't believe in going in the front door because of the gatekeeper.

Same.

It's how can I— what itch do you have that I can scratch? And maybe same thing with veterans. I've been trying to get a meeting with somebody in LA for the veterans to get this in front of them and their benefactors. And there are people who come out. We have a military base, a couple of military bases where we have the Seabees, people who come out of the military or even military wives. One of the big challenges of military wives or spouses, which I have to be a little bit more contemporary, mil spouses, they need a set, the husband, the one spouse gets the government money and benefits, but the other spouse, they may need extra money for their kids. So there's a whole cottage industry of people who recruit military spouses to sell magazines door-to-door or whatever, you know. And so I built these machines because I wanted to see how easy it was. I wanted to understand the entanglement of the regulations. You know, I have income from other places, so that's not my number one, but I wanted to see if I could build a business in a box that was multifaceted, that, that was, and that could benefit my kids and benefit anybody looking to just have a side gig or a full gig. There are food courts where you could take this. Okay. There are, again, when I was growing up, you know, the statistics within the '70s and '80s, people went to a mall 12, 13 times a year. Now they only go 3 times a year. So I don't know what it's like in Texas, but most of the malls in California are just dead all the time.

Yeah.

They're trying to bring in food courts, but somewhere out there, there's a food court where this this— where they'll be happy to have you. Somewhere out there, there's a semi-pro football league, semi-pro baseball that has crowds every weekend, you know, that would want you.

So when you're working with someone, an operator, what does your deal look like with them? You front all the costs, you show them how to do it, you provide the business in a box, and then they give you a cut of ongoing revenue?

Exactly. Yeah, that's how much is the cut? It's 30 to 30% of it, you know, just—

yeah.

And again, it depends on who brings the truck, who brings, you know, who does what. Yeah.

Yeah. How do you track cash, or do you?

So the good part, you know, I do the honor system, but the great part is, is it's, it's remarkable how many people don't have cash anymore. And it's remarkable when you go into the affluent, the upper scale, how many people just have an Apple Watch. Even the kids, the kids, everybody. I mean, I'd never seen it before, but till about 3 or 4 years ago, I now go to events where 80% of the buyers are using some kind of an app, an Apple Watch product or a phone-based product with completely, you know, out of the whole card business.

Yeah. Logistically, do you have like a piece of software or CRM that you're, you're tracking their sales or is it, it's literally just on your honor?

They use my Stripe account, a Stripe account or a Square account. You know, I set them up and it comes down into my account and then we split, split from there.

So last question before I let you go, what's the best event you ever did profit-wise?

It was a 2-day event. It was very hot, 100 degrees, and it was probably $8,000 net.

$8,000 net profit in 2 days?

Yep. Yep. Just, I knew it was going to be big and I knew it was going to be hot. And so we, you know, we scrambled for product for constantly getting ice and yeah.

Yeah.

If you're out in the middle of nowhere and there's no alternative, there's no McDonald's or no Chick-fil-A, you know, you're the man that, that puts more money in your pocket, but you have to get there. If you do a street fair where the streets are lined with, with other options, there's, you know, you, you get lower percentage. So again, yeah, that's why I'm back to location, location, location. You have to, you know, these air, air shows, you know, they're all over California. I don't know if you have them in Texas. There's, you know, there's all these, these, these plane enthusiasts and that line up with the military and they get the Blue Angels and they get all these Confederate Air Force, they get all these events going and you're out on an airfield, you know, with lots of parking But there's, thank God, there's no competing food venues.

Yeah.

People are there from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM watching the military planes and all the demonstrations and the parachutes. So that's an all-day fun event. They don't happen every day. So you have to make a decision about, am I going to be an event guy or am I going to be a, you know, a 5-day-a-week guy?

Yeah. Well, Mark, as someone who's never tasted beer or coffee, if I can get fired up about this, then anyone can. I'll tell you what, because I get fired up over business, entrepreneurship, profit, helping people have their own business. This is— you're speaking my love language, even though I've never tasted these things. So, but thank you for sharing this.

You've heard all of these dirty sodas or, or— oh yeah. Oh, I've got—

hey, I mean, look, this is, this is today. I've had 2 Celsius. It's late. I'm not over here claiming to be, uh, Perfect.

I can make a Celsius. No, no, I can make a Celsius. There is a way for me there. There's something called a corny keg, which has a top that comes over, that comes off. You pour your liquid, your juices, your fruit juices and water plus fruit juice, and you carbonate it and you're Celsius. That's what all of Starbucks money is being made now on, is on those fruit drinks that are mostly out of and 5 cents of, of fruit, fruit syrup.

Right.

The profit margins on those, other than the real estate, it costs to maintain the $30,000 a month lease you have to pay to have a Starbucks.

Yeah. Well, let's do a follow-up later because I want to find out what those home run locations are. But for now, I've got, I've got another interview to do, but I had a blast, Mark. This was an incredible conversation. Where can people find you if they want to learn more? That's right. There it is. sunburstenitrocoffee.com. Well, I assume that coffee is spelled the normal way.

Oh yeah.

It looks like—

Oh my God. How did I do that?

It's all right. We know how to spell coffee.

No, no. I'm sorry. That is— Oh my gosh. That is embarrassing. I'm sorry.

That's okay. You're good. We'll link to your presentation on the video. Okay.

Let me, let me get you that presentation back. I'm so sorry. Oh my God.

No, you're good. You're good.

Nah, no, that's embarrassing. A lawyer or whatever. 60-year-old man.

You're ADHD like I am.

All right, well, thank you, Mark. Which is exactly why I don't practice.

There you go. There you found your phone.

Thank you. Watching your stuff is, you know, and again, my world, you know, just want to tell you, AI is fun, but for some reason I am so drawn to these physical businesses. It's because they can help so many people, so many people. Who are in a rut, having medical bills, or have— we— there's something. You're, you're line painter, you're, you know, just, just all these things that just can really change the, the trajectory of a person's life. With a car, a trunk full of tools, and you're in business. And what they need is guidance, and that's what I'm looking to do for people. Okay.

Yep. All right. Thank you, Mark.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly, M-O-L-L-Y, at co-founders.com. That's one word, co-founders.com. Molly at co-founders.com. Tell her your story and we'll give you $100 if we end up interviewing them. Please share with a friend, hit a like or a comment below, and we'll see you next time on The Koerner Office.