MBA1741 The Perfect First Business

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night not working on my business but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with intuit QuickBooks QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts, so doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more.

PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do.

More faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA show your personal business boot camp every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my partner back in 2014. And in today's lesson you will learn what is the perfect first business for you to start. If you are looking to get into entrepreneurship, you're trying to figure out which business model is a good first business. Whether you want to start it as a side hustle while you're working or you're going to go all in full time. Not all businesses are created equal. Some businesses have a much higher threshold for risk, require a lot of capital to get started, require a lot of manpower. But in today's lesson, we're going to take a stroll down easy street. I'm going to describe to you a good first business to start. This is a very viable option for you. I'll be sharing from my own experiences how this type of business is easy to start, inexpensive to fund and low risk to scale. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

You've made it on time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally I can start my day. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect? The hot honey sausage egg biscuit. It finally is. Go to McDonald's and get it while you can.

Starting your first business can be scary, intimidating, nerve wracking and frankly just risky. There's so much you don't know yet because you just don't have the experience under your belt. So it's really important for you to mitigate that risk. Too many first time entrepreneurs shoot for the stars. They start like a software company that requires a lot of talent, a lot of engineers, a lot of funding. Or they get into E commerce and they want to sell physical goods and items in their e commerce store which requires inventory, storage, tons of technology and a lot of customer headaches. How do I know this? Well, I have a software company, Webinar Ninja. As I mentioned before, I had an E commerce store, I was in retail, I had my own clothing line over a decade ago. But I also had another type of business that really allowed me to build my other businesses. And that's a service based business. A service based business is any kind of business that offers a service advice expertise to customers. Let me give you an example of a service based business and we'll run with this example throughout the lesson because it's an actual real example that I did. This is actually a business I ran. I had a business called Business Republic and it was a service business, it was a consulting firm and I helped small businesses build and launch new websites and blogs. Now the great thing about a service based business is that you don't need to be the expert. But of course, if you choose a service that you are good at, let's say for example you are a web developer, then you can actually start with your own time and talent. But it's not required. I started because I knew how to create websites using WordPress and I got my first few clients using my own time and skill. But after time I needed to scale. I couldn't just do all the work myself. And I actually found out that it actually makes more business sense for me not to do the work. If I were to do this business all over again, I would do just that. I would not be doing any of the actual skilled labor. So how does this work? Well, let's say for example you are charging $2,000 for somebody create you a brand new blog, a brand new website. This is very inexpensive, but let's just say this is where you're starting. All you need to do to make a profit is to actually get it Done for less. This means you can hire on upwork, for example, people that can do this job, that can create websites in this example for you, and you just be the facilitator, you pass on the work to them. Now professionals that know what they're doing can create these things quite quickly if they're given the right information. That's where your job comes in, is gathering the information from the customer, what are their needs, what are their wants, what's their business like? Grabbing their logo, grabbing their images, getting the copy. So that way you can then give it to the developer and they can load it all up and create that website. You can easily find really talented website developers in this example for like $500 a website and you can easily charge 2000 or more. When I was outsourcing it, I was charging around $5,000 a website. I had a freelance contractor who agreed that he's going to do each website for $500 and I gave him plenty of work. And he was working on three to four websites at a time. Yes, I made a 10x profit on each project. Now what's great about having a service based business is that you can scale this thing in your own time, in your own speed. Meaning that if you don't have that many clients, that's okay. You're still making a profit because you're charging somebody else to do the work per, per client. You're making a profit on each transaction. And as you get more clients and grow, you will continue to make more profit and it becomes even more profitable. And all you have to do is be the person that markets, that sells, that takes care of the customer, the actual work, the service can be outsourced to somebody else. And guess what? You can do this with upsells and sister offerings. I used to do that with logos, with business cards. I used to get other people to design them for me. They're part of my team and I would even like kind of approve the designs before I'd give it to the actual customer. And again make a profit on each add on and each new service. This requires zero overhead from you. All you really need is a website for you to be able to bring customers into your business. You only have to pay for somebody to do the work. When you have a customer, there's no inventory to keep, there's no software to build or to maintain by developers and you're dealing with higher price points, meaning thousands of dollars per project rather than customers spending 20, 30, 40, $50 on smaller items like E commerce and dealing. With hundreds of customers that complain, that want refunds, that have other issues. You have less clients and you're making just as much money, if not more, as you're scaling. This is a really good business to start with. Why? Because it makes you learn a lot of bas basic skills you need to succeed in any other business. One, building the right team, hiring people. And you could do very low risk because these are freelancers, these are consultants that are working with you. But you learn the hard way. You learn through trial and error who's a good person to work with, who's not with very low commitment. You learn how to build a team. You learn how to manage people. You learn how to manage your own time. You learn how to brand yourself and market yourself so you can attract the right customers. Learn customer service because you're dealing with customers one on one. They're less customers, they're higher paying because their average price point is a little higher than smaller units. But you learn slowly through the conversations you have with customers, how to deal with customers and deal with them in a way they feel taken care of. You learn how to be profitable from day one that you don't spend money that you can't make, hence only hiring somebody to do the work when you have the customer. This keeps you in the black and makes sure that you are running a profitable business and you grow at your own pace. Now, in my experience, when I did my service based business, it allowed me to scale, allowed me to grow, allowed me to make more money to build my own products on the side, my own services, my own courses, my own communities. And I eventually stopped doing the service based business to focus all my attention on the $100 MBA. But I would not be here without that business. It gave me some really good Runway. It gave me the cash I needed. It kept me alive. It allowed me to survive and learn entrepreneurs in the process.

Valentine's planning starts now. Get ahead of the game with 1-800-Flowers xoxo sale and save 20% on gifts for the ones you love. For 50 years, 1-800-Flowers has made Valentine's special by delivering millions of high quality roses with unmatched reliability. Right now, save 20% on premium bouquets, all backed by their seven day freshness guarantee. This Xoxo sale ends February 5th, so don't wait. Save 20% at 1-800-flowers.com sxm. That's 1-800-flowers. Com sxm.

To wrap up today's lesson, a service based business. Whether you do the service yourself or again, as I Recommend finding freelancers to do that expertise for you. It's a great business to start with. You can easily scale. What's awesome about it is once you get your first few customers, they give you testimonials, they give you referrals. You can even give your customers that just completed a project with you some sort of gift certificate or discount for their next project if they give you a referral. This is what I did and I was able to get my next customers easily. And before you know it, about six months to a year into it, I had more customers than I could handle. No office, no full time staff, no overhead. It's actually quite a simple business model that works. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 RMBA show. If you thought today's episode was a good one, share it with your friends and family on social. Let them know the name of the episode and share the link to it on your favorite platform. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, whatever you like. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. What I love about a service based business is that it keeps things simple. There's not too many balls in the air. There's not too many things to keep track of. There's work that needs to be accomplished. Somebody does the work, you pay for the work, the customer pays you. Very, very simple. It's one of the oldest models in the book. And the reason why it's one of the oldest models is because it's been working for years. For decades, for centuries. Just walk down your neighborhood and you'll see that most of the shops around you is basically this model. Even if they're selling a physical product like a cafe, for example, most of them don't bake their own muffins. They get it from a local bakery. They don't make their own beans. They actually get those beans delivered. They grind them and then they brew them. All the soft drinks and iced teas in the fridge. They didn't create them in their home. No, they bought them from somewhere and they again, they sell for a price. Where they make a profit. You're doing the same thing, but with the service. Find a niche. A service where you can serve, whether it's your area of expertise, your experience, something where you have some insights that you can add even if you're actually not doing the work. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Freeride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care.

What do the steam engine, electricity and AI have in common? These technologies not only change how we work. They can transform entire economies. I'm Stephanie Wong, host of where the Internet Lives, a podcast from Google and Latitude Studios about the unseen world of data centers. Explore how data centers are unlocking growth in every sector of the economy. From agriculture to medicine to manufacturing, data centers are powering a new era of AI innovation. Listen to where the Internet lives. Wherever you get your podcasts.