#90 Side Hustle King: 3 Easy Businesses Anyone Can Start

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Me an hour of your time and finally he says chris if god himself appeared to me and told me that this worked i wouldn't even believe god.

Today'S guest chris kerner has made a career after finding these overlooked hidden super profitable small businesses that just about anybody.

Can start you can't have no money and pride that doesn't work i added up how many times i got rejected it's like twenty four thousand times find a business find the things that they hate doing unbundle that what do you.

Think are the three best most underrated.

Side hustles okay.

Welcome back to the big deal podcast i'm cody sanchez and i found out something fascinating the other day which is that eighty seven percent of you guys people who watch our episodes are not subscribed to this channel so i have an ask for you all if you could subscribe to the channel this is the way that we grow we can have bigger guests we can hire the right team members and it's only really through you guys doing this one simple thing so if you haven't already subscribed to the channel can i ask you a favor this week can you hit that subscribe button thank you truly we can't do this without you you've built sleeper businesses basically as a career it feels like you know crazy side hustles then grew them into actual companies these are cash flow producing non venture backed companies almost anybody could start if they were willing to take the risk and do the hard thing of actually working them is there one that you're like currently obsessed with now or is there like a business that you're obsessed with at the moment man.

It'S like asking which kid is my favorite i just love business so what okay so i was in cameron missouri last week population eight thousand people i pull into this hardware store and i see this cute couple thirties kids out by the road selling pizzas right i have like an outdoor kitchen with an authentic pizza oven i geek out over it so i had to talk to these guys they've got like a seven hundred dollars pizza oven a one hundred dollars like a pop up canopy and they're just slanging these authentic pizzas and so i'm like how much money are you making here and seven hundred dollars a day their kids make the pizzas they wave signs and i said well what do you pay they're in the parking lot of a hardware store what do you pay to be here well nothing like they just hope that we can bring them customers and they bring us customers this is like middle of nowhere middle america right like and they're making seven hundred dollars a day eighty percent margins selling pizzas from an oven that they bought at home depot right like i just love stuff like that because who couldn't do that like who who couldn't do that business if they really had to make some money is.

That wild and if you just like for people who aren't you know who are public school math kids like me i mean if you take let's round it to a thousand times thirty days in a month we're talking about some that's a that's a thirty thousand dollars a month business if you have eighty percent margins we're talking about you're taking home a top one percent level salary you know two hundred plus thousand dollars.

But how many people in cameron missouri are saying oh there's just no opportunities.

Here i know you know what else kills me that i think you prove a lot and is like one of the missions of this company it's like you're shirt you can just do things and in fact i think you'll be shocked by how often people don't charge you like we did this whole experiment with vending machines where we put vending machines in a bunch of different locations and then we did videos about shared the numbers and everybody was like you left out the rent i'm like i didn't pay rent yeah you know i know that you can theoretically and you might have to sometimes like i just didn't in this case and so i love that story you know i was curious for you is there one business that you've seen like ever that you're just like this business is such a sleeper and almost anybody could start it.

So a year ago i was we own a tree trimming business right and tree trimming businesses are great it's i call it a binary outcome right the customer needs a tree gone you show up the tree's gone five star review invoice paid right whereas other businesses it's just like custom homebuilding it's not it's there's so much that could go wrong but stump grinding is kind of a pain in tree trimming because you know if you're a tree trimmer you just you've got a truck with a chainsaw and if you got to grind the stump it's like i got to go to the rental place put it on my trailer gas it up pay three hundred bucks to rent it charge three hundred bucks to grind it it's just a pain so i was talking with my business partner about this and we thought i bet there's a world where you could be a business to business stump grinding business and that wasn't really a thing right so we were just riffing on this on my podcast and as an experiment because i'm curious and i have to get my questions answered right so i scraped every tree trimming business in houston and i'm in dallas and and so i wanted like a sister city that was comparable and i hired a virtual assistant to call up every tree trimming business and say hey who grinds your stumps do you own a stump grinder do you rent them theoretically if you could ever outsource that entirely to a stump grinding business that only served tree trimming businesses would you do it if so what would you pay and the results were incredible like twenty percent of these tree trimmers would love to outsource it and so we were just talking about this and people went out and started business to business dump grinding businesses based on this theory and research and this one guy made three hundred thousand dollars his first year and he rented the thing and he rented the trailer and he like he didn't he wasn't wealthy but he's making like sixty seventy percent margins grinding stumps for these tree trimming businesses i love.

It well you know boring businesses are that's my love language but what i think is interesting is two things one it doesn't take that much to get the research right you literally just cold called or in this case cause you haven't assisted had somebody else cold call a bunch of people and ask him three or four questions and the other case of the pizza company you just were willing to do the thing most people won't which is how much revenue do you make a day how often do people not give you the answer to that question i'd be curious rarely.

Honestly right you just have to ask.

I would say it's like ninety five percent of the time they tell you and why because they're proud of it if you've ever ran a business and you know what it feels like to actually get somebody to pay you for your service how hard it is yeah you want to tell people yeah you know i was yesterday i was i am old now and so my back has been hurting just so on par and so i go to this pt and he was telling me a story about his background and i'm like that's incredible and i started telling him the number like percentage of numbers that actually percentage of businesses that actually hit one hundred thousand then a million then ten million a year it's kind of rare actually and so he was like can i tell you my revenue number and i was like yeah totally what is it it's like three hundred ten thousand and i'm like that's amazing because you don't have any employees either right so he's got an eighty percent margin business amazing right yeah now with your tree trim trimming business when did you start that two years ago and how much cash did you have to start it.

With i had cash to start it with but i like i grew up poor right and so i always like to say constraints equal creativity and i've never been vc funded i've tried to raise money it's a lot harder than people think and so i've been forced to be creative right and that's never left me now to this day like i can afford to do certain things but i'm so cheap and or willing to be creative that i don't have to so with the tree trimming business i had a truck i found a young hungry entrepreneur that had just graduated from college and i knew how to start it because i had helped a friend do it as a favor a couple years prior and so we really we didn't own a chainsaw we still don't own a chainsaw we just found subcontractors and subbed it all out to them and so can you explain what.

That is subcontractors that people don't know.

Yeah so we just found tree trimming businesses that did the work themselves and we just said hey we're going to quote sixteen hundred for this what would you call eight hundred okay cool we're just going to mark up all of your quotes to us one hundred percent and we'll take that margin we'll bring you jobs we'll keep you busy cool.

Yeah that's wild and now how big is that business do you share the.

Revenue numbers yeah i mean we're doing half a million a year that's amazing.

Yeah and this is you and a kid who was in college yeah he's.

The operating partner and how old is he now he's twenty three wow yeah he had no experience in the industry.

Interesting and do you think like what's the formula so let's say somebody right now has no money or they've lost all their money and they want to go out and start a business what is the formula that you need to be able to have a cash flowing.

Business that you start yeah well you you can't have no money and pride that just that doesn't work right so you have to be able to work and you have to be humble enough to go like ask people for things or to go sell if you have pride and you're broke at the same time i don't know what to do for you right so the formula is to be curious about the world and to answer those questions you have about these potential opportunities immediately right you're familiar with habit stacking right if we want to do twenty push ups every morning we should probably do it right after we brush our teeth because pairing those two habits together makes us more likely to do it so i'm only kind of connecting the dots looking back i didn't do this intentionally but as i look back on why i've started so many things it's because i genuinely love commerce business entrepreneurship and so i'll go to a restaurant and wonder man how much are these guys doing and then i'll i'll answer that question immediately i pair the habit of getting the question with the habit of answering it and then that kind of trains me to act to have a bias for action and then if you stack that up over years you end yourself having started seventy five businesses and it can get a little stressful but it's very fun.

That'S okay you could kill some babies right or sell them that's my preferred method that's right god i've started and bought so many businesses it's all it's why we stopped saying how many businesses we own because i'm like if i say thirty today i know that two of those businesses i'm probably going to sell i might close another one and it started to feel like not very authentic yeah and then also it's not always a good thing to own twenty six businesses it's probably better to own one or three that are way bigger yeah i agree than twenty six so i was like people think it's cool i'm like man something's always going wrong so it's not just start with one you know just one so if in that instance i'm i'm sort of curious like you you started this business with this guy how did the guy like show that he was competent enough to be your operator so if like somebody young is watching this and they're like man i want to go pitch chris or cody or whatever rich person i know on a business to start what do i have to present in order for you to say i'm going to give you fifty percent of this company.

Yeah i kind of regret what i'm about to say but it's but it's the truth so i've noticed a direct correlation you probably have too between the people that have just gone all out to get my attention and then their performance after i hire them or partner with them right whereas some reach out kind of half heartedly and it's like sometimes i've hired them in the past and it just they kind of did a half hearted job but the people that are like just blowing me up everywhere like i will do this i will do this like i promise i'll be your hardest worker i don't know anything i'm humble but i'm willing to do all the work that was james he had never had a home service business he had like flipped iphones on facebook marketplace but he was just hungry and so i like to look for humility gratitude someone who's like i'm just so grateful for this opportunity and some sort of an entrepreneurial gene right because i don't want to make them entrepreneurial they have to have that if they have those three things then it's almost one hundred percent certain they'll be successful.

Yeah i always loved the munger quote where he says if you're going to have a mistress pick an old one because she'd be grateful for it and i think that it's true of business partners too he used to you know describe buffett as the best thing that we have in our partnership is we're both grateful for it i think that's true in marriage it's true in business absolutely and so if you could optimize for intelligence history sophistication or hunger and gratitude go left not right love that okay so let's say that there's somebody listening who has zero time on their hands maybe they actually have money but they don't have time what business would you tell them to do or what would you tell them to start that's.

A good question i would say that they should start liquidating things buying things from like costco overstock there's a half a dozen websites out there that sell pallets of returned items defective items or items that might be perfect you just don't know like you could buy a pallet full of blackstone grills for one hundred bucks right so someone like that that has some money to buy stuff like that and doesn't have a lot of time they can start by selling a few things on the side learning how it all works and then partnering with someone like james my business partner in the tree business to do it for him but i think it's very important that you don't outsource things too quickly you really gotta get in the weeds so you can recognize the weeds before you get out of the weeds.

Right yeah yeah i do think it's really hard to hire well until you've done well and so first do good then hire good i think that's a really good point yeah you know and you you kind of have highlighted all these different businesses i want to go over some best in the worst we actually took one of your ideas off of twitter we didn't give you enough credit for it so we got an internet duel but and we did it here in the office yeah and we we basically the idea was can you buy things on facebook marketplace and have ai do everything for you and my too long didn't read at the end was like no like you got it there's some human still early yeah but for people who are entrepreneurs and hungry i think both you and i it was like this is wild yeah like once you start to play the game you realize just that twenty percent off your stack is so valuable yeah so if like right now you had to look at all the side hustles all the businesses that exist what do you think are the three best most underrated.

Side hustles okay all right so you say right now i'm going to take that literally so we're in august and i came across this woman last year who decorates porches with pumpkins have you seen that i saw it because of.

You yeah yeah the dallas chick wasn't.

She yeah heather we've since become friends and she's making over a million dollars a year just buying wholesale pumpkins from someone that anyone could google and find a wholesale pumpkin supplier buys them by the truckload and decorates them on porches and it's a beautiful business because it's so visual if you put your iphone on a tripod put it on time lapse post that to instagram the algorithm loves it right so there's all your customers and that's what she's done and she does an amazing job and she's an amazingly hard worker so i'm not downplaying like it's just a good idea anyone can do it it's very profitable she charges between dollar six hundred and dollar one thousand three hundred to decorate a porch with pumpkins i'm a customer my wife loves it and i love this opportunity because you could start with almost nothing an instagram account little money for pumpkins and then you can make it not seasonal she prefers for it to be seasonal she wants to be with her family during christmas but there are people that do this for christmas decorations i talked to a guy in pennsylvania that does it for flower front porch flower decorations he charges a few hundred dollars a quarter and he'll swap out flowers every month i'd pay for that yeah and he's in long island like this stuff would work anywhere and it's very visual it goes viral very naturally that's one because it's high margin it's unique and you don't need a lot of money to do it you.

Know what the other thing about that one is when you don't have a lot of money you don't realize how much money other people have and that they want like think about rich people they want to spend their money yep and so i remember when i was broke and poor the idea of some mom putting thirteen hundred bucks to put pumpkins on their front yard in dallas would be crazy and then you drive in highland park and you're like these they spend a lot more than thirteen hundred bucks right yeah like dallas decorations are another another brand but every state has city centers like that yep so that's really smart okay so first we're going front porch decoration all right so.

I met this guy in utah that this is a business you could literally start with no money and i mean that genuinely as long as you have a friend with a truck or a trailer and you have some humility like we talked about he goes on facebook marketplace and he buys washers and dryers or he'll get them for free because people give them away all the time they're moving their lease ends tomorrow they gotta get it out right and then he goes back to facebook marketplace and rents them out for one to two hundred dollars a month to people that live in apartments that have hookups that don't want to buy it because they're afraid it's gonna break he rents them out and he's making six figures a year working five hours a week he has another company he has an rv park he's doing all kinds of stuff this is a just one of his businesses but what's more approachable than that like you're gonna have to carry a washer upstairs it's gonna be hot it's gonna suck you're gonna have some that get stolen from you but find me a business that doesn't have problems yeah right i'm still waiting for that one.

Find me a job that doesn't have problems you know let's go low level okay i like it what do we think about the third one i like also that there's one that like women are gonna do you're probably not decorating pumpkins on a porch your wife might though yeah and then your wife is probably not schlepping big machines yep but you might yep okay what's our third.

All right so h vac companies they you know they have these service contracts either commercial or residential where they check in every six months make sure everything is working part of that contract is they have to clean the coils on the outside of the units as just like a preventative maintenance but that's a pain for them because you gotta have water you gotta hook up water you gotta have chemicals and it just doesn't go into their normal workflow so this guy that i met he started he owned a pressure washing company he started doing that for h vac companies and saying i'll just do all your coil cleaning and then he got a grocery store customer just by walking into the grocery store can i talk to the manager who does your coil cleaning these guys but they forget sometimes they hate doing it it's the worst part of their job but that's another good framework right find a business that does something find the things that they hate doing and just kind of unbundle that right so now this guy his whole business is washing the coils outside of these grocery store h vac units and he says that he never loses a customer it pays him i think it's like five six hundred thousand a year in this random rural area that you would never think this opportunity exists and he's like this is my secret weapon and he's owned a bunch of businesses he's like this is the best business i've.

Ever had that's so interesting you know what else is true also you go up the ladder of entrepreneurship and so when somebody's like that's a terrible business which i hear sometimes i'm like maybe for you you know if you're making a million bucks a year and you're a software engineer probably not a great business for you but like one of my favorite businesses back in the day was a podcast production studio i bought part of it it was great it was a service business actually the podcast production was all remote so it was just like you ship in the you know video edits and they would edit for you thumbnail title et cetera so i owned part of that business and and then i sold it back to the the owner at some point people are like why if you're making a coup dollars a year in a business why it was just too small at that stage and so but for jonathan the guy who took it over he still runs that business he loves that business and he's really happy at the level he actually doesn't want it to grow he's like five hundred k a year business perfect like i don't want anything else and so i think people underestimate how there's like not everybody has a size ten shoe you're probably twelve and a half what you're tall that's big yeah it'd be kind of weird if you had a size six you know yeah i can't let the internet know that if that was the case it would roast you okay let's talk about worse businesses so if you like had no money again or were just starting out but we're gonna get save people decades of mistakes and hours what are the businesses that you would never touch with a ten foot pole i'm.

Gonna talk about binary outcomes again okay so oh man i had a third party logistics business once and basically e commerce brands would come to us and we would store their products in a warehouse pick pack and ship them out for them right we were doing four hundred thousand a month and not making any money it was a miserable business because it did not have binary outcomes so the business owner our customer was like so emotionally invested in his inventory hey i did that big sale why haven't they shipped yet hey these went to the wrong address hey my inventory went stale because maybe it was food aren't you keeping track of these expiration dates there were hundreds of things that could go wrong and literally if you click the wrong thing you could ship three thousand packages to three thousand wrong homes ask me how i learned that right and those aren't our packages which makes it even worse right so we were making all this money top line with no profit losing money right it was not a binary outcome it's not a simple business we were competing with like amazon who's going to do that so anything like i've started seventy five eighty businesses the common thread between all of them are just non binary outcomes too complex not simple yeah okay so.

Worst is three pl what's your second.

And third oh man house cleaning interesting yeah why house cleaning it was just a lot of ways to screw up it was i guess same thing yeah like there's a hair you left a hair on the floor or you scuffed the baseboard no we didn't that was there first like offer dollar one hundred fifty you know like there are businesses where that stuff is worth it right where like those headaches are worth it but if it's low ticket and complex stay stay away yeah right i agree with that what's the third custom home building did you ever do that yeah well my i had a business partner that was a custom home builder and he branched off and we started we started starting one together and that was like headache to the extreme right on one hand you have a homeowner that's putting their life savings in something that they're going to live in forever these were nice homes and on our side we had permit issues weather issues subcontractor issues insurance issues so many things that could go wrong and i've built a custom home for myself i've been on both sides of it stay away like high ticket but even at like a million dollar home it's just not worth.

It what price point home do you think it starts becoming worth it mm.

Multiple millions yeah yeah i think that's.

Almost the secret in every business is that if you're not it's not if you're not good but like you have to have enough margin in the business to be able to deal with all of the headache from mistakes yes and like more margin more you can handle mistakes like you're like all right you pay me enough for that right yeah and so i think i have a couple friends that are custom home builders but they're at the ten to twelve million dollars mark and in that that amount you're making millions of dollars on every home you're like sure nancy the tile is wrong ship it back to.

Italy no problem right margin affords it.

Right but if you're doing it on a million dollar home which to young cody i'd be like that's that's so much money yep not in home building it's not so you actually can't get compensated enough for that and that's the real magic of entrepreneurship is getting enough reps where you can kind of just look at a business and go oh that's not going to work that way yep and the only way to do that is just to get in the.

Game right yeah you gotta and stay.

In the game yeah and keep playing it.

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Probably true.

About texas snacks and the.

Buc ee's heist yeah oh heist that's a good word i like that so for those that aren't familiar with buc ee's it's a chain of gas stations they do billions of dollars a year from fifty locations right it's just an amazing business privately held and it's a it's an amazing brand it's like a disney right they have a great brand and so i went there six years ago and i walked in and with my cousin who's also a business nerd and we were like he said i think he's like do you know disney sells like i'm making this up i don't remember the number but like fifteen billion a year of shirts i was like i didn't know that that's crazy i wonder how much these guys sell online of their shirts so we go to their website and i distinctly remember there's no shop button it's like where do you buy these shirts and these gas stations are in these far flung rural areas and so you you can't get to it unless you're going down to the beach right and so that was just like a light bulb moment and it was at this time that i was running that fulfillment business and so we thought wow we need to get them as a customer and instead of just like fulfilling their products we're going to bring them online and fulfill their products this could be a white whale for us right so i started reaching out to the executive team no response no response so we're like what if we just try to get their attention by launching the business for them and then just cold emailing reporters and saying buc ee's won't answer us so we're gonna launch this business for them yeah and his first question is like chris we're gonna get sued and i was like that's gonna be a good story though right if we get sued then we can just say okay okay leave me alone i'm done i'm done but i was like but what if we don't get sued it could be a big business it could be a big partnership it could be tens of millions of dollars who knows and so my business partner and i we bought one of everything from the store near my house cost about three thousand dollars i hired a photographer for two hundred bucks we took pictures of everything in their store put it on a website cold emailed reporters and said we want to get bucky's attention so we're selling everything that they own online for them and they said that's a great story we had a dozen news outlets write about us and we went viral and did two hundred thousand dollars of sales in our first month and we do millions of dollars a year now five.

Years later you're still doing it today.

Yeah it's a great business i bet.

So you're the one responsible for all the buc ee's merch i now see.

All over country that's right we don't have like an official partnership with them but we have an understanding and they support us they help us buy it in bulk but we just resell it we go to one of their stores we load up a box truck full of pallets bring it back to our warehouse and sell it online ship it.

All over the world so you're not even actually their like licensed provider nope that's so texas i love that they're like yeah fuck it you're gonna buy it at a full price go ahead man yep oh my god that's so.

Good i like doing things where like worst case is a good story yeah because most people don't have good stories.

Right such a good way to think about it yeah because that is the game of entrepreneurship do it for the.

Story someone put that on a t shirt do it for the story yeah.

I think the kids say do it for the plot i think that's what the gen zers say today that's what my non gen zers in this room say but they i think you're right you know a lot of times i'm sure you get asked this question too well i want to create content and be on the internet so what do i talk about i'm like like if you want to be interesting you got to do interesting yeah so before you get online and like try to talk about a bunch of stuff you haven't done go do the thing because you're not suffering from stories right why because you're doing wild things all the time yeah i'm trying really hard trying really hard to get one of our portfolio companies pinks and they're a window cleaning company they have incredible brand and i'm trying to get them i'm like all the dudes are good looking right they're like good looking young wholesome guys i'm like we need a sudsy calendar like i think it would kill it you know what i should do do their photos without their permission and put it on you should i would just say chris made me do it but i laughed with them because you know we're moving into commercial so they do a lot more commercial work now but they do some they do a lot of residential and that usually goes through the the lady of the house yeah and there's this like idea of a cute pool boy that's already been created in the zeitgeist right you don't exactly go god my window cleaner was a real looker yesterday that's not like a thing but with this company you kind of do so we've played into it slightly with and it's just it's funny and it's cute and most of these guys are like christian married super wholesome but they do it for the plot they like don't take themselves that serious yeah and so the two founders you know you have like i don't know one hundred seventy locations or something now and their one business does three mil a year just like their austin based business but they're doing kick flips and you know putting ridiculous thing in their instagram because they don't have a lot of ego about it yeah they're not too precious and they do it for the plot do it for the story all right somebody make a shirt for chris do it yeah we'll wear it on the podcast all right did you get into go tell me no i was.

With the pink skies i have an idea so i got to get out tell me yeah so you should make those calendars yeah because that would be viralable wouldn't it right it would be so good and then you should take your whole customer database and find commonalities by the zip code of like what type of they probably already know this but like our average customer has a seven hundred thirty two thousand dollars home we charge three hundred fifty a quarter that's fourteen hundred a year and they for five years right so seven thousand dollars lifetime value right okay what would we pay to acquire that customer let's say five hundred dollars what does it cost to print and ship a calendar let's say twenty dollars okay worst case they should scrape all of the homes that fit that criteria the demographic of the owner the race the gender everything and permissionlessly ship them that calendar for free such a good and they're going to hang it and they're going to look at that pink's logo every time they see it and they're going to.

Put it on instagram and you're put.

On instagram and that twenty dollars could return twenty thousand right why wouldn't you.

Do that one hundred percent well that is the thing you know i think about it a lot here at this company so i'm in finance so you know i bought companies i sold companies i never really thought about marketing in finance you don't do ads yeah you don't market you can't really you can't there's all these regulations about them and if you do you have to keep them for seven years it's kind of a crazy thing and so now that we've come here i've started to really appreciate that most marketing is so boring yeah it's so boring and i get why because it's embarrassing when you put your face on youtube and you're making a stupid face and you're like actually slightly more sophisticated fingers crossed than you are portrayed on the internet you can have ego about that or you can be like do i want to look rich or do i want to be.

Rich yeah oh that's good you got.

To make a choice right yeah i.

Mean cody i'm like an extreme introvert i don't like going out yeah oh yeah i'm posting these videos in the comfort of my own home but going outside is like not for me and so like the thought of short form videos was just like so foreign to me interesting but there's a whole world on the other side of cringe cringing at yourself right because at the end of the day like no one even cares like the guy at church or your neighbor who sees that video of you talking about he doesn't care he's not thinking about you so just do.

It yeah one of my best mentors ever told me there's somebody who is dumber than you are has worse products than you are isn't as good as you are and they're making more money than you do because they're willing to sell yeah and i was like all right thanks bob but he was right you know yeah okay i want to talk about you just have so many stories i want to run through a bunch of these companies and hopefully for you know if you're listening online i think the thought is like take these as these little moments of inspiration just like you did you're like oof what about this so it might not be that somebody's going to go pitch but buc ee's and create a whole t shirt empire but it might be like right off of it like slightly asymmetric you know yeah so i want to talk about pet cremation because that's the obvious next thing uplifting topic yeah that's awful my dog's here hide the dog.

So hot right now by the way is it really cremation so hot right.

I had to is that a dad.

Joke i have four kids i love.

A dad joke okay let's talk pet.

Cremation okay what happened i had a friend that worked in private equity and he had seen the inside of some deals some pet cremation deals that looked really really good ninety two percent gross margins we have more puppies in the united states than children today as of two years ago like the line officially crossed more puppies than kids right so extract from that what you will but there's an opportunity there everyone bought puppies during COVID those puppies are five years old now and unfortunately they will die and cremation is exploding in popularity so i like to look for businesses that ride several tidal waves at once several trends right and so you've got the puppy boom you got people buying puppies you have people preferring cremation for whatever reason and then you have my friend that had an inside look into the industry and so that same friend luckily also had a friend that was a veterinarian that owned a very high volume clinic like he did as much business as six clinics right and he was able to say hey if we start a pet cremation business would you work with us instead of who you're currently working with sure so we just kind of had that relationship and so we started looking at these burners and they're like one to three hundred thousand dollars each and then we thought oh man that's i don't usually do that i don't put hundreds of thousands into businesses right i'm scrappy and so we thought okay well what if we could just play middleman and just have a refrigerated van where we just play puppy logistics if you will okay pick up the puppies puppy pickup and then deliver them to the cremation facility that's already invested half a million dollars into equipment because they want to be in the cremation business not the logistics business and that's one thing that we learned we interviewed a few of them and say what's the pain point in your business something we've already talked about and they said you know sales and logistics what if we do both of those for you my friend had another friend that had been acquiring veterinarian clinics so he had contacts in the industry so we said all right there's our sales here's our first customer that's worth six customers put the pieces together let's spend fifteen grand on a refrigerated van and we're in business and so we capture a margin between the cremation facility and the veterinarian.

God that's so smart so it's almost like you see an opportunity in an industry and you go okay what's the most direct route okay well cremation but then you say my constraints are i want to spend less than fifty thousand dollars so if i can't get into that aspect for fifty thousand dollars where can i find just part of the business so instead of taking everything from i'm going to get the the lead for the puppy to i'm going to deliver the puppy to i'm going to cremate the puppy to i'm going to like have a certificate i give the family or whatever i'm just gonna take this step yep and because i only take this step it doesn't cost me all of this to start it that's really clever it's like breaking down the business to the chunk you can afford.

Yeah and the thing about that step that's a headache to them is if it's all you do it's not a headache because all your systems are built around that one thing so it's a win win for both parties yeah and.

So you're basically doing the opposite of what most companies do which is like they might do vertical or horizontal integration where they go buy buy these things you're saying let me do the opposite let me remove a portion of somebody's business i can build an entire stack on it and then if i want to add on and compete more i can yeah but in the beginning i.

Get to just start yeah and now what we can do is we can go the vet route and go into clinics and sell them or we can go to the cremation facilities and say hey i know what your margins are because i know the business what if you give us thirty percent of that margin and we'll take care of all of your headaches right so you can you can streamline your operations you can net out ahead even though your top line revenue comes down and it'll be.

A win win yeah i love that also it's so much easier to start a business when you can sell to people who are already doing the thing that you want them to do it's really hard to create an industry so for instance we try to talk people into this idea that we should not let these businesses die that you should buy them and that you should do it creatively you shouldn't always have to go to the bank and be a millionaire to do it it's not easy it's hard there's lots of components of it but it's total with that is you are not you're like talking them into a change in lifestyle it's actually not a very good business it's like more something that i just think we should do but if instead you're going to business owner they already have the pain point they already have the cash to solve it all you're doing is removing work from them like that's a really interesting model yeah i typically don't think about businesses that way so i like that cool the funny part though about pet cremation to your point on like people don't people don't realize what people pay for like yeah what does it cost to get a pet cremated.

Oh two hundred and fifty to five.

Hundred dollars god my dad's gonna kill me for this story but i like when my favorite dog died he was obsessed with the dump truck like you know how the trash tub yeah the dogs and so he died and his name was elvis he was this amazing little cocker spaniel and so you know my dad told me and so i came by the next day i'm like well where's elvis buried you know what happened and he's like oh no i like took him to his favorite spot and i'm like what do you mean by that yeah and he just put him in a bag and gave him to the dump truck and i was like i think that's illegal i think that's he was like he would be thrilled he'd be barking happily all the way to the dump his favorite place.

Like staring into the abyss oh i.

Just was i know such a you know we're latino they like they don't understand things like cremating a dog for five hundred bucks that's like not part of the equation okay let's talk about rv parks so i think a lot of people are interested in this idea of i call them like low people businesses you know vending machines laundromats car washes rv parks all of them have like a version of the business that could be low people then they have a very high people version of it you own a bunch of rv parks and got into it how did you get into that business break down the economics of it what's most interesting about.

It yeah so and i've done both ends of that small rv parks with no employees and large rv parks with a lot of employees so i was buying single family homes back in college and then i moved to texas and i met some guys that were they owned hundreds of single family homes but they had just been introduced to mobile home and rv parks and they basically said chris you've got to look at this instead of having twelve homes across a metroplex in two hours you can have twelve homes all on the same two acres and each one of them is more profitable than those and it costs like a third as much as all of the single family homes so you have the efficiencies of them being all right there it's the lowest form of affordable housing so it's recession resistant and they're easier to manage and you don't have to maintain the unit the tenant owns the unit so you just own the land so i'm like why do people even buy single family homes like i don't understand is this like the world's best kept secret it and so we partnered up and we started buying these small rv and mobile home parks across texas and oklahoma ten to seventy pad sites no amenities mostly long term tenants where the tenants own either the rv or the mobile home and we just maintain the infrastructure and we did that for two and a half.

Three years what would each one cost.

You to buy those yeah so between one hundred thousand and one point five.

Million million wow and what kind of margins are you making on that like how much money are you getting in.

Your pocket from that it's like thirty to sixty percent cash on cash returns.

Yeah that's wild it's insane does that still exist today or has a lot.

Of that it does no it does.

Because a lot of people say those days are over you can't find x business like that y business like that is that true and if it's not true then why can you still find those why why are people not buying.

Them so the founder of one eight hundred got junk has a quote that i love and he says that as long as pianos weigh eight hundred pounds we're going to be in business right and so as long as rv parks are ugly and forgotten and hard and or at least they seem to be hard there's going to be an opportunity there i've been saying since twenty eighteen since i've been in the business like oh private equity they're coming they're coming and they're coming after the ten million dollars park but private equity doesn't care about one hundred thousand or a million or three million dollar part so there's.

Opportunity there yeah it's the same with buying businesses yeah they literally if you want to sell your three million dollars business that has thirty percent margins it's hard yeah it's super hard and now we know we own like the biggest depending on how you do it let's call it the second biggest biggest behind business by sell marketplace for small businesses and man there are so many good deals on there that nobody's buying and we're getting like ten to twelve new listings every single week and we've only been around for a year and some of these businesses it's like a business that does one hundred sixty thousand dollars in revenue a year let's call it fifty thousand dollars in profit and they want to sell it for fifty thousand dollars yep so it's all around what about actually let's do this really quick so somebody's listening and they're like i would love to own like i would love to just feel like an owner of a business and buy a mobile home park for one hundred to two hundred thousand dollars and like like get there what would be the couple things you would tell them don't buy mobile home parks unless you do this oh.

That'S easy wastewater treatment plants i don't know if most people never heard that phrase but a lot of parks treat their own wastewater on site and that is like major red flag you could get shut down by the government like stay far away a lot of the best deals you'll see have those for that reason so stay away from that you you want to think of a barbell on one end of the barbell you have no amenities i did that seven years ago it was great that means you don't have to have a manager you could manage you know one person remotely could manage a half a dozen parks as long as he's on site every quarter or so and then on the other end of the barbell you have amenity rich pool pickleball horseshoes unit water slides everything that's a great place to be that's what i'm doing today i'm a partner in a fundamental pond and those are the parks we buy hundreds of pad sites near national and state parks it's harder but bigger and you know you know bigger numbers right you don't want to be in the middle if you buy a park with a pool and that's it then your insurance is much higher you need someone to be there and they're only there for the pool you don't want a kid to drown right so you don't want to be in the messy middle like either no amenities or all.

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Bnc bank brilliantly boring since eighteen sixty five you once started a crypto project with john mcafee who is easily i think the most eccentric paranoid and wild entrepreneur maybe of all times he founded like founded and sold mcafee antivirus software investigated for murder in belize and later returned to the us where he ran for president it not once but twice i think there's a whole netflix documentary about him is that right that's correct.

Yeah so it was like seven years ago or eight i don't know but crypto was going crazy and i was getting involved because i'm you know always distracted and i kind of found this math equation that helped me predict the price of cryptocurrencies and it was very simple here's the whole secret okay i i found a way to measure how much hype cryptocurrency had how many people were talking about on twitter reddit facebook and i put that into a number from one to one hundred and then i used public websites to find out the market cap of the cryptocurrency how much it was worth and then i just divided the two numbers so if there was a cryptocurrency that was very big very popular but people weren't really talking about it my algorithm division told me it was going to go down in value at some point or if everyone was talking about something and it had a small market cap then it would go up in value so i started investing my own money in this it was working and i felt like i had just discovered like newtonian physics or something right i was like this is huge i'm going to be so rich this is amazing but i this was like years before i ever started started publishing content i had no following no audience no rich friends nothing and so i thought who's the biggest name in crypto john mcafee he had like a million twitter followers at the time and for better or worse he was the biggest name in crypto and so i thought if i could just skip the line right constraints equal creativity if i could just partner with him and get him to buy into this vision that this works then i could do something with this equation build a community or sell access to it for a monthly fee or raise a fund and invest the fund's money into it i got to get his attention problem is is that he founded a security company he's very private he lives on a compound with bodyguards so i started guessing his email address because i couldn't even find his email which is pretty easy to do i couldn't find his so i'm trying like jmacafee dot com comma john at mcafee john and it was just bounce back bounce back bounce back finally i had a notification it was opened i'm like okay i found it he didn't respond but i found it so then i just start blowing him up john i'm really onto something here some guy in texas he doesn't know who i am i'm nobody i'm on something i think finally he responds and i still have these screenshots so this was january twenty fourth twenty eighteen as long as it is a live demo as i said before i will not even look at history and will throw you out of house house if you bring it up even if you have hd video showing god coming down from heaven and exclaiming that you are legit i will still throw you out of the house i want a live demo of your product that accurately projects the future otherwise i will be seriously pissed off can you pull off a demo that predicts prices the following day forty eight hours from today and one week from today if you can do that then please come if you cannot even with the greatest excuse god could provide then do not come put it in.

The history books oh my god i want to use that david the amount of times i'm going to say to you now for things you want to pitch me even with the grace of god that's right i will never dance on the internet yeah that is so good okay what a fucking great email.

Saved too and i was like john just give me an hour of your time in person and he said okay i live in lexington tennessee be at my house on i think it was february twenty eighth at one twenty three pm and if you're there i'll give you an hour and he said i'll give you my address the morning of whoa i'm like okay so i fly to tennessee i get a rental car emailing email him that morning and say i'm coming john what's your address no response i'm just going to lexington i don't know where he lives right there's like forty thousand people there john i'm coming to lexington finally like one o' clock or like twelve o' clock he emails me his address so i pull up to this house it's like this old southern style neighborhood and there's one like spanish style home with like a hummer and like a nissan versa and it's just like if if anyone lives here it's john mcafee right all these crappy cars and i knock on the door and you know that scene in home alone when like they're about to leave to paris and it's just bustling activity and everyone's running it looked like that there was an australian film crew in there multiple bodyguards with guns on their person and then john and his wife janice and he's like who are you i'm like john like you just gave me your address he's like i don't know who you are i'm like chris i have that he's like oh janice sorry this guy thinks he can predict crypto i don't believe him i'm like this is we're off to a great start this is awesome i'm glad i flew to tennessee for this so he's like come in we're going to the liquor store store i'm like okay and i'm a member of the church of jesus christ latter day saints i've never tasted alcohol he's like the opposite of me like in every way except entrepreneurship right so he's like come in sit down so i sit down at this breakfast nook and everyone leaves as soon as i get there and i'm like what okay that's this is weird and i'm looking at this table and there's like hard drives and laptops and i'm like okay this is like the most secure person in the world there's probably one hundred million dollars worth of bitcoin on that hard drive and he doesn't know who i am he's just what what what is happening long story short i end up hearing someone there one of his bodyguards was there he's like oh nice to meet you he was very nice he's like tell me why you're here and i spend like thirty minutes explaining how this works and he's like i don't get it i don't get it and i'm just like great this is just a total failure and so then everyone comes back john sits down he's like all right chris you got an hour so i open up my macbook i start talking and he's like do you mind if this film crew films this i'm like okay sure so they start filming and i'm like halfway into my second sentence and he's like this is brilliant of course of course it works why wouldn't it work it's just all hype you're just dividing the hype by the market cap what do you want from me and i'm like wow this guy gets it and so i'm like let me give you a quarter of of whatever it is that we build and you tweet about me twice per week i'll tell you what to tweet we'll build something and we shook on it and i spent the day there eating mexican food and hanging out with him and then we started a business together and what.

Ended up happening with the business oh.

Man this was twenty eighteen right at the start of crypto crashing from twenty thousand to three thousand but we started a cryptocurrency that we gave out for free and it reached a thirty million dollars market cap and we built a community with seventy thousand people in it we planned conferences and we became friends over the course of two years until it all just kind of fizzled out.

And died wow so basically crypto crashed and that just killed the whole business.

Yeah we were just swimming upstream for two we launched like the worst possible time wow i still have his voicemails saved on my phone that's wild yeah i can't delete them i just can't.

Chris john mcafee i'd like to chat.

For a little bit it goes on and on it's like two minutes it's this idea to like start a business giving away free crypto to like strippers and mimes and he's just rambling and it's like it's funny but it's like i leave rambling voicemails like that not while on coke but it's like we have the same entrepreneurial brain and his is like plus coke you know and.

Strippers it's strippers and no morals wow that is wild it's a good story what a story though okay i think one of the there's kind of two other things i want to go with one is you've obviously met a ton of everyday business owners who have gone from nothing to a couple hundred thousand million two million dollars businesses everybody talks about the world's greatest founders but what have you noticed just in your millionaire founders that you've met what is different about them than everybody else yeah they.

Have an insane bias for action they just move fast and not like to have first movers advantage just because that's just how they operate they're impatient right which could be seen as a flaw it might be a flaw in their personal life i don't know but they're just insanely curious and impatient and they pair those two things together and sometimes it gets messy and things fail and things explode and bankruptcy like but over the long the long run they just win if they don't quit they stay in the game they just win until.

You actually get in front of people who are moving like like billionaires like most of the billionaires i've met i'm just like oh my god you do once you've made a decision it's just tidal waves of movement but i've struggled to try to get like a formula for how to explain if you are fast or not like if somebody said all right hmm let's chris create for me the algorithm of am i fast or am i not in my life what would be the inputs how could one tell if you really were a person who biased for action.

That'S a good question i've noticed like the best employees i've had work fast and that's not something you talk about with employees you talk about productivity or but they just like if i give two employees the same spreadsheet to have one of them has done ten minutes one does the same thing in three hours yeah right and so i wish i wish i had a formula of like how to train that maybe it can't be trained but like you know what maybe the commonality is you truly love what you do like i love what i do so much i'm sitting at the macbook typing away and i gotta go to the bathroom i'll run to the bathroom there's no deadline no one's around no one cares right it's just an email i'm writing or something and i'll run back back yeah just because i genuinely love it and i want to be doing more of that going pee is not fun yeah right i want to be doing that thing and so that kind of forces me to be fast if i'm researching a business or launching a business if i do it faster then i can do more of it in a compressed time period so maybe you could make an analogy to like a hobby or something that you love like if you're if you love going to the beach you might speed on the way to the beach you might spend more time there you might be really creative or efficient at finding your way to the beach because you love it so much so just take that same principle and apply it to whatever it is you're doing yeah do.

You have a way to screen employees for their speed.

The only way i found is just thirty day trials for everyone yeah and just saying on day one statistically speaking this isn't going to work out nothing against you you seem awesome or else we wouldn't be doing this i'm just looking at numbers there's you know thirty or thirty chance this works out so on day thirty let's put it on the calendar right now we're gonna have a talk no hard feelings it just probably won't work out and if it's the right person that conversation will put a chip on their shoulder right because that chip can be very heavy and some people get that some people just don't have that gene it offends them and it drives them like it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and they don't work out out some people are like oh okay we'll see i'll be in that thirty and that's the guy or girl that i want.

Yeah it's a good did somebody ever.

Do that to you oh i like everything i've done is because of some stupid comment that someone made or like it's chips on my shoulder like it's everything i'm sure you could refer to.

Everybody says like don't build angry i'm like wrong there's no greater fuel than being a little pissed off yeah oh yeah you know it's i mean i mean and if you're religious just talk about like righteous fury like that is a real thing yeah and you know you don't build the irrational thing that is a big business because you're like i kind of don't care i just feel nothing and i'm just and i like stumbled my way into this business i just don't believe that i think you have to build it through like a force of will that is unreasonable and that often comes from being really pissed that something doesn't already exist yeah and so yeah i'm not the right person to talk to about like work life balance or you know being really reasonable on everything i'm like no no we got one life and at the end of the day i want to be able to say we made it.

And if you enjoy it then right yeah like as much as i love my mom i love you mom but i didn't become successful because she believed in me so much right i'm glad that she did i believe in my kids i became successful because some stupid guy in college is like you're not going to do it you're not going to make it and that guy probably doesn't even remember that i exist you know it's so silly but if you're able to harness it then it's not.

Silly yeah yeah yeah yeah i used to keep i have like a little screen i bet i still have the screenshot from when i was in finance i was a partner at a finance company and we had grown really fast my division and one of the other division heads basically didn't like that i was starting to bring a lot of this stuff online it was pre contrarian thinking but i still thought that in the future investing a lot of it was going to be done through a version of online marketing i was like i think steak dinners as the only way of business is that's not this generation yeah and they disagreed and so i remember he sent me an email i think he was a little liquored up it was like late at night and the email said i hope you gained more followers today because you've dumbed down our business oh wow and i.

Remember being like you probably remember exactly where you were when you read that.

Email yeah i remember where i was i remember how i felt and i remember being like thanks man i needed that and so be really careful i think also with like the fuel you put into other people yeah you know because you might not realize you're you know enemies can be powerful too yeah and so you know i've learned that lesson also let's talk about that for a second like you've done seventy five businesses you have to have gotten lied to cheated defrauded like what's the worst thing that's ever happened to you in.

Entrepreneurship man we could have four hours of conversation like i call it like surface area for fraud surface area for scams trials business partnership fallouts i've had like fifteen business partners i could tell so many stories but the worst one ever was i was building a business with a couple partners and we had a fifty million dollars opportunity on the table we had a term sheet and it was significantly better than we thought we would get get and this was life changing money for all of us and the two partners that i had kind of like ganged up so to speak had a meeting without me and they said you know what like there's really not enough equity to go around i know our operating agreement kind of you know we could just rip up that operating agreement start a new company get those same investors in our new company with just us they're not gonna care they barely know chris right sucks but like honestly this just makes the most sense so they had that conversation and then i was in my head i was about to sign like the best deal in my life i was way up here right and then i get a text it's like hey meet me at starbucks and i just like i just saw the text and nothing i had no red flags like there were no signs that this was about to happen right but i saw that text and i was like i don't feel good about this why don't i feel good about this just something told me and like that feeling just came up and i'm like okay so i get in the truck and i drive across the street to starbucks i'm like why aren't we meeting at the office this was right across the street okay so i get to starbucks and i thought i was meeting with one of them and the one i was closer with i was meeting with both of them and you could just see the looks on their faces and it was a longer conversation but basically it was like this sucks this is wrong we know this is wrong we know this will ruin our friendship but you're out like you're out this is done we're doing this without you we don't need you and so i was just like chip on your shoulder right i was like okay well that came later in the moment i was just like seeing red and just like driving home like this and it was just it was one of the worst things that's ever happened to me honestly yeah but at the end of the day like you know lawyers got involved that deal blew up and my life has never been.

Better ever since yeah it's such a lesson i mean one of the things that i feel like a lot of people are scared of doing entrepreneurship because they know the big bad scary thing will happen like if you're in the game long enough you're gonna get hit it's just the name of the game but the crazy part is it doesn't kill you you yeah like it's not going to kill you like entrepreneurship by itself unless you fall off a roof it's not going to kill you it's going to suck you know you're going to have mental scars all the ptsd but you know i'm always surprised about the people who defraud you and the people who scam you like i we have this guy who like chris and i my husband chris were like really close to like met his kid and like been in his house and like knew the guy and i thought we were buddies but i was on the internet a little bit by then this is like kind of at the beginning of me being on the internet and the guy was formerly in secret agency world and so i knew like obviously those people understand manipulation like they know how to come after you but i just never would imagine being targeted you know that was like a foreign thing to me but what happens in entrepreneurship is you do get targeted actually all the time sometimes like big manipulation sometimes little and the one that stuck with me the most was not the most money it was only a couple hundred thousand dollars that he defrauded us from but it was that somebody could come after you with that intent somebody could steal from you so intensely and the whole time you think you're friends yeah and i think with business what it really starts to teach you is that partnerships should be like few and far between or really set with a lot of expectations and you've got to expect that you're gonna have a breakup yeah and and then it'll be okay and for people like that always comes back around yeah like i think it's very rare for somebody to have a ton of business success over decades and decades and continuously partners and people not know right yeah so one of the good parts is when you're when you partner with people who are of success you're like okay i know what i'm gonna get into one of the lessons that i've learned is like be very careful with the unknown commodity you know like if if you don't know them if they haven't ever had any success but they're the same age as you got to kind of be careful it's better to be the young up and comer probably or it's better to go with the established one but i do think entrepreneurship can break your heart because that was one of the few ones where i was like oh you know you're just a commodity not something else but i think thank you for sharing because nobody really wants to share those stories and everybody makes themselves out to be you know like ah it's only been great everything's only good you know it's tough and that's not the case yeah let's talk about like let's give people some tactics really quickly so we've already talked about some ways to find businesses but if you were gonna like have somebody leave here you've given them three businesses like you like you've given them three businesses you don't if they right now are listening and they want to go find their next business to start where would you look what do you.

Do where do you start so i think that you you have to put yourself in one of two buckets am i someone that already knows i love entrepreneurship i've made my first dollar for myself i've tasted it i love it or am i someone that loves the idea of entrepreneurship i like how it sounds i don't want to work who wants to work for someone right some of those people end up trying it and they don't like it right right so step one is figure out what bucket you're in right and then answer that question for yourself like go gather things around your house that are just sitting around sell them on facebook marketplace see how it feels is the hassle of going back and forth with someone or meeting someone to sell a dollar fifty dresser is it not worth it for you or does it seem not worth it until you make that dollar fifty and you're like oh that feels good i did that myself right so start there i would say yeah now.

What about for the person that like is already in a job so like they're already working they're they kind of maybe like what they do but they're they're not like young and hungry necessarily they're like in their career is there somewhere you tell people to start where they it's slightly more advanced like is there a two hundred two level to start or does everybody have to start at one hundred one facebook marketplace place.

Yeah you familiar with the ikigai principle yeah yeah so for those that aren't such a venn diagram what do you love what are you good at what does the world need and what could you charge for okay start there so if you if you work in dentistry right you know dentistry better than most people you know so maybe you should start thinking of ideas that are tangential to that maybe you have a vendor that seems to be crushing it and you could copy what what they're doing maybe you could start a maybe you manage your your dentist facebook ads account and you could start an ad agency for dentists right so start what you enjoy and what you know and what is in kind of your zone of genius and go from there where i see people going wrong is like they're a lawyer and then they go try to start a pressure washing business and they're like i don't even like this at my house what am i doing you know and that could turn them off from entrepreneurship just because they chose the wrong thing they might actually actually love the feeling of entrepreneurship right so definitely start with what you know and then test it like jeff bezos talks about the regret minimization framework right people don't regret things that they do typically right like we regret things that we didn't do like the jump that we didn't take and so that's one thing that i have i have like call it like underlying fomo if i have a business idea that should be just ruminating i've got to get it out and if it fails great because now i know because i don't want there to have been an idea from three years ago that could have been a billion dollar idea so you're just every year that you get older right the chance of you leaving those golden handcuffs just goes down and down and down and the worst feeling is just being forty fifty sixty eighty years old and looking back like i should have done that like that job kind of sucked the whole time why didn't i at least try it like people don't have to quit under almost like there's very few exceptions where you have to quit your job to start a business yeah.

So yeah you know the part that's really interesting on that too is like i think most people really overestimate what happens i'm sorry people really underestimate what happens after you start like the hard thing is the start yeah the really hard thing because most people just will never kickstart their way like again to go to my dad he was in real estate forever and never bought a property i'm talking like thirty or forty years because he's super risk averse and so he's like no i'm a deal maker i like to get the deals i'm like yeah what if you're sick you have to have something else that can pay you and so it's like just kind of get started and then you can see what happens what about i like this framework of like minimizing regret do you also like do you have you have four hundred fifty two businesses like you've done like seventy five businesses today do you think you have add adhd or something do you have a hard time sticking with one one thing for an extended period of time.

Diagnosed adhd definitely have that and it used to stress me out i used to say chris shiny object syndrome stop no no no this is working i even i went and got my mba just to like fight that right and i used to think focus is like focusing on one business and maybe for some people that is to me the the focus that's important is focusing on your superpower okay and where i went wrong was trying to do payroll and trying to do a little bit of marketing and hiring and operations i'm terr operations right i forget payroll sometimes that's really bad that's really bad when you miss payroll all right let me tell you but i'm really good at marketing and ideation and executing on ideas on ideas fast so now i just focus on that and if that's across ten different businesses or one it makes no difference because i'm going to win either.

Way i love that because these these days people all tell you well hey you should just do this one thing you know if instead you focused on one business how much richer would you be it's like i don't know maybe but maybe i'd have less fun and so do we always have to optimize for return or could we optimize for a little fun plus return so i think for anybody out there who's you know got a little add gets distracted kind of easy that doesn't mean that you can't be an entrepreneur it might just mean your path looks different yeah thanks for letting me ask that it's probably inappropriate what other medical diagnoses do you have that you'd like to discuss today anything else well you said two things that i think a lot of people feel like you can't have as an entrepreneur you're like i'm an introvert i actually don't like doing this and second you're like i'm adhd i get distracted and yet you can still be a ceo still be a content creator and still be pretty wildly successful is there any why could a person listening right now not do this what's the anti entrepreneur you will never make it.

If you have these characteristics ego pride you don't want to look stupid in front of your friends that aren't even thinking about you like it could just be like you really just don't want it that bad you just like the idea of entrepreneurship but you try like getting your hands dirty a little bit and it's like i just want a paycheck and that's awesome i would love to report to someone a lot of times me too i would love to just say tell me what to do right so so i think if you are humble and you do really want it i can't think of really any excuses why you can't do it because even working hard you don't have to have a work ethic if you genuinely enjoy it it doesn't feel like work right some people say people are inherently lazy i think people need to work i think we get fulfillment from work most people just haven't found the work that they love yet so it means you have to keep trying things until you do right like after starting seventy five businesses i know exactly what i like and what i don't like but had i just stayed in one the whole time i might not know so i just like i just follow the energy if i'm doing a task it gives me energy i just do more of that and i think it's really hard to go wrong if you do that you're familiar with product market fit right it's just like the concept that your product or service there is a big market for it and and you know it's there because you're just like staying up all night fulfilling orders like there's so much demand for this some people think you have to have that you don't usually have it i've experienced like two or three times but when i have a product or service or business that has product market fit i'm not out there getting distracted i don't have time there's a selection bias right so if i'm distracted by another shiny object that's a signal to me that there's something worth getting distracted over because this thing is expensive as far as opportunity cost is concerned concerned so if my energy is directed over here then i should pay attention to that right.

Yeah it's a it's a really good point it's a very fair point too i also think like most people it's like do you only want to do what you want to do or do you want to do what's required if you only want to do what you want to do at all times yeah then you won't make it yeah now you can only do what you want to do broad picture but like day to day you're going to have to do some yeah and if you're willing to do that i really think you can be an entrepreneur it's just like like it is that mixture of like can i become obsessed with a thing then can i do some stuff i don't want to do can i do it past a point that is reasonable for most other people and can i continue to move forward yeah and your religion do you have to do like door knocking and selling we did during.

Our mission for two years yeah so.

You kind of learned hard difficult salesy things how old were you then nineteen.

In hungary eastern europe jesus yeah do you speak hungarian a little bit i still got some left left wow what do you got yanok that sounded great thank you what did you say i just put a little deeper voice on and no one can tell the difference i just said how are you hello.

How are you wild and so do you think a lot of your entrepreneurial chops come from doing hard things like.

That really young oh one hundred percent i was like in high school you know i i i had a single mom she was a weight a waitress and i had bad grades i was not motivated i was not driven i was not valedictorian and three point zero gpa stupid stuff on the weekends but after knocking doors in eastern europe in a foreign language for two years and i added up how many times i got rejected loosely because we would knock on doors all day every day and so if you add that up like x doors per day it's like twenty four thousand times rejected to my face okay this isn't like a mean email like i don't want want what you're selling me when you do that for two years and you come home i came i just remember sitting in my room after coming home thinking like i can freaking do anything like and i will like this is america i can do whatever i want because i met a lot of really smart kind talented people over there that had no opportunity they could not get ahead if they wanted to and i was like i can do whatever i want here compared to hungary and so i've just been trying to do that ever since sense.

Do you convert anybody with twenty four.

Zero zero zero no's eleven whoa yeah.

So how's that seems like a lot like if you believe you're saving souls eleven is a lot that's more than me but that's a tough ratio that's tough so do you think like will you make your kids do the same thing or ask your kids if they want to do this we encourage them.

To yeah but it's i can't really force them to do anything you know especially once they're eighteen you just model it yeah yeah but the thing is about those eleven people is i learned after a while like it was all for me like that sounds selfish but i served that mission i thought i was serving others and that became a byproduct of what i was doing really i was served the most in serving them yeah i get that does that.

Make sense oh one hundred percent it's my favorite reason for why we host workshops here like it doesn't make a lot of sense to do like with the scale that we have have to bring one hundred people in here teach them about business but we've been doing it for the past five years like why would you do such a thing because it's actually really selfish yeah like when you meet the people at the end and in the beginning i remember one of the guys i won't say his name but he like have you ever looked at an entrepreneur you can tell they're going through it like when you were with a ceo buddy and they're having a tough time in the business i think it's often physical but you can literally see it on their face yeah and so he had sort of these like i guess it's it's shingles like a hives sort of and i was like what's going on with you man and it was because he had a what is that called where you go and check a company check a house to see what it's worth oh appraiser yeah okay so he was a home appraiser and by the end of two days we kind of figured out that he was really selling to the low end of the market he was taking everybody so he was making it was your three pillars problem no no profit too many clients lots could go wrong and they really didn't value his service very much so it was always a price negotiation right but by the end i'm like are you good at this he's like yeah we're very good at it i'm like why don't you just put like luxury home appraisal just like optimize for seo on that you're a luxury appraisal company now did it he's like oh my god i doubled my business plus i have half the number of clients and he started looking healthy now that is awesome for him i'm stoked about that but like i was so excited i'm like look at the help that i could give this dude doing it and i think people don't realize that entrepreneurship can really be that so i think it's a real service what you do because now you're talking to how many people are following you on the internet now with all the all the sauce you're given.

I mean i don't even track it but like three point six two million something like that no so i don't.

Track it and where do you like people to follow the most i like your instagram yeah and your twitter i try to stay off x as much as possible actually because it can be a cesspool but you have great x and instagram do you want to tell them where to find you yeah my.

Podcast really the kerner office spelled like.

My last name yeah spell it because they're never going to get that k.

O e r n e r there you go tkopod dot com i actually.

Thought it was corner up until this very moment well i don't do anything really so it's the kerner office because.

It looks like corner i'll accept both.

Of them okay cool well thank you for being on here thank you for all the the secrets that you share about entrepreneurs and i think this episode is going to be really useful for multiple people out there who are stuck in their own way and they might just break through so if you do give them a follow all across the interwebs and if you actually if you guys start a business or if you grow one because of this tell us we will get you something special in the comments come back we will patrol this for the next couple months and if something cool happens we'll make sure we get a away some merch to you maybe we'll even get an original buc ee something that chris did simultaneously thanks for being here thank you.