The 6 Most Profitable Businesses To Start In 2026 (That No-One Is Talking About)
In this episode of the $100 MBA show, Omar Zenhom argues that conventional lists of profitable businesses are outdated because they highlight ideas that are already saturated. He introduces a forward‑looking framework for spotting under‑served, high‑margin opportunities that can be launched with under $10,000 and reach $100k in revenue within a year. The framework consists of four filters: ≥60% profit margins, solving a paid problem, low startup cost, and rapid revenue potential. Using this filter, Omar outlines six specific business concepts for 2026: (1) a done‑for‑you AI installation agency that implements turnkey AI systems (e.g., AI phone answering) for small businesses; (2) an affordable, niche‑focused customer‑service software that undercuts expensive incumbents like Intercom; (3) an AI productivity consulting service that audits and automates internal repetitive tasks to return hours to staff; (4) an AI‑powered personal assessment platform that delivers customized, data‑driven personality or performance reports at a fraction of traditional assessment costs; (5) “boring” repeatable service businesses (moving, cleaning, pest control, lawn care, car‑wash) enhanced with a digital layer—online booking, automated reminders, AI follow‑ups, dynamic pricing, and review generation; and (6) a course‑to‑coaching transformation consultancy that helps existing course creators shift to outcome‑based, recurring coaching programs. For each idea Omar provides concrete examples, pricing models, and scaling considerations, emphasizing the early‑mover advantage and the need to act now before the market catches up. The episode ends with a call to action to test these ideas on the side and links to related content.
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It seems like every day somebody publishes some BS list on the most profitable businesses to start. And every year the list is exactly the same. Digital marketing agency, dropshipping, bookkeeping services, pet care, online courses. We heard it over and over. And look, those are not bad businesses, but they're not what this episode is about. Because here's the problem with every list you've ever read on this topic. It tells you what is already working, not what is about to work. Like Wayne Gretzky says, Skate where the puck is gonna be, not where it's been. By the time some of these businesses make it to the trending business list, the early window of that opportunity is already closed. The people who've made real money got there before the article was even written. Today, I wanna give you 6 businesses that are not on those lists. 6 opportunities that are sitting in plain sight right now, underserved, underbuilt, and waiting for the person who sees them before everyone else does. So let's get into them. As I get started, you might be asking yourself, Omar, how did you build this list in the first place? Good question. Not every business idea is worth your time. So I have a filter that I've built to make sure that these 6 qualify for a potential successful business. First, the business has to have high margins. At least 60% of what comes in stays in your pocket. Okay. Next, it has to solve a problem people are already paying to solve. Right? They are badly looking for solutions, but the current solutions suck. Next, number 3, it has to be startable with under $10,000. Lastly, this business has to be able to hit $100,000 in revenue within a year if you're focused and you execute well. Every business on this list passes all 4 tests, okay? And none of them are on the standard lists. Business number 1, done-for-you AI installation agency. Done-for-you AI installation agency. There's a lot of hype around AI and it's actually a big problem. The problem is that there's hundreds of thousands of small businesses right now scrambling 'cause they feel like they're behind because AI's moving very fast, faster than most businesses can really keep up with. They know that AI could help them, but they just don't know how. They've heard it several times. They've heard that it's gonna reduce their costs, it's gonna generate leads, it's gonna handle customers, but they don't have the time or the technical knowledge to figure out what to do and what to install in their business. They need the time and the know-how to configure it all and make sure it actually works for their specific business. And for most businesses who are very busy, this problem goes in the too hard bucket. This is just too hard for me to deal with right now. So they do nothing and they just keep losing money and time as a result. They keep feeling that they're behind and they slowly feel guilty the fact that they're not utilizing AI. So that gap between what AI can do and what most small businesses are actually using is the business, is you coming in and saving them the headaches. And this only works if it's a done-for-you system because this is something that they just don't wanna deal with, but they just want the solution. They want the results. So what does this look like? Well, we're gonna call this an AI installation agency. So it just looks like you're installing something. It's understood as something that, that they just have and they don't have to learn. So let me walk you through and paint you the picture. You go into a small business, let's say a dental practice, a law firm, a real estate agent, a restaurant, a gym, and you install a complete AI system that runs before you leave the building. You want to offer something concrete, something that's high value for them, right? So for example, most of these businesses are not open 24/7, so no one's answering the phone when they're closed. Which means they're losing business. So an AI phone answering system would be an amazing solution for them. Think about it, okay? A plumber misses a call at 9:00 PM because their office is closed or, you know, they're in bed. So what happens in that situation in real life? Somebody calls a plumber, doesn't get an answer, they just go to the next person they find on Google and the plumber loses the job before they even knew it. But with an AI phone system, that call gets answered and the AI handles the common questions. It captures the caller's details. It sends an automatic text message to keep the conversation going. It books an appointment for the customer, and it lets the plumber know to follow up with the lead in the morning. Now the plumber wakes up, they don't wake up to a missed call and a missed customer. They wake up to a warm lead waiting to pay them money. The installation could just take a few hours to install into that plumber's business, but it's going to generate hundreds or even thousands of dollars in revenue every single month. You can charge them a setup fee and a monthly retainer to maintain and update the system. And guess what? Are they gonna cancel? No, because even just one deal, one secured customer from the system is gonna be worth your business. Now I gotta reiterate this. The reason why this is an opportunity is because it's a done-for-you end-to-end. The solution you're offering is you don't need to deal with this. I know the AI stuff. I'm the expert. I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna install it for you. And all you gotta do is just answer the text messages, when you get them to follow up with customers, something that they already know how to do. This is not a consultation, this is not a course, this is not a workshop. You come in, you set it up, you train the team, you leave it running, okay? The client shows up to something that works and is running for them and making them money. That is the product. Tools like this cost around $100 a month. You can easily charge $100 a month plus the setup fee, which could be $2,000. So you're making recurring revenue plus the one-off. And it's all software. So your overhead is not much other than your installation time. And of course, you can scale that in time. But in the beginning, you can do this in a few hours. You could probably do 2, 3 businesses a day. The margins on this business is extraordinary because the value is extraordinary for the business. And it's early days, and most of the local businesses around you have no idea where to get started. So you're going to come and save the day and dominate your market. Business number 2, affordable customer service software. I want to tell you, Huh, about a problem I experienced personally. Intercom, Intercom is a customer service platform that tens of thousands of businesses use for live chat, for support tickets, for email, for customer communications, for knowledge base, all that kind of stuff. It's a great tool. The only problem is it's outrageously expensive, okay? We're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per month for a growing business. I know this firsthand because we used Intercom when we were growing Webinar Ninja. It's a good tool, but it's ridonkulous how expensive it is. And here's what makes it worse. The value per dollar has declined significantly as the product has become more complex. It's more bloated. It's more focused on more enterprise customers. It just does too much. And therefore I'm paying for things I don't need. But here's the thing about customer support software. Switching is painful. The entire support history lives there. All your customers, all the chats, All the transactions, all the refunds, everything that's documented in that software. The team is trained on it. Your website integration points to it. It's a lot of, you know, commitment to move off a system like that. So what happens? You stay, right? You just stay with the software and you continue to pay outrageous amount of money because the switching cost is too expensive. This is a classic trap in many businesses that use very sticky software. And when I say sticky, I mean it's very hard to leave. A product that's overpriced, underdelivering on value, and sticky for the wrong reasons. Okay? That combination is a neon sign like that one. Okay? For disruption. You can come in and disrupt this market easily. There's an opportunity here that you can build, or in 2026, AI tools can build for you. And we have a couple episodes on showing you how to do that. You can create a clean, modern, affordable customer service platform targeting small and medium businesses that don't need all these fancy tools that enterprise companies need. And you could target these small to medium businesses that are already using Intercom, okay? 'Cause they have a lot of frustration. Here's the good news. You don't need to out-feature Intercom. In fact, less features is better for that small to medium business. Only have the features that matter to your niche audience, to your niche customer. You need to serve one specific customer, say a SaaS business under $1 million in revenue. For this type of business, they don't need Intercom, but they need something that is as good looking and functions and doesn't have all the bells and whistles and that they can afford. They need a simple interface. They need fast setup, clean mobile experience. They need AI-powered first responses, which is going to be very easy now these days. And it needs to be priced reasonably, like at $49, $99 a month. Yeah. Instead of $500, $1,000, $2,000 a month. I'm telling you, this market is enormous. Okay? And you, by taking a slice of it, still means you're going to be making tremendous amount of money. To give you an understanding of what I mean by this, a good friend of mine, Nathan Barry, runs a software company called Kit. Kit.com used to be called ConvertKit. It's an email marketing software. He has a niche product. It's for bloggers and creators. Okay. To us in our world, Kit seems like a huge brand. But in the email marketing space, they take about 1% of the pie. And yet that business is well over a 9-figure business in revenue. If you're not a technical person, you can get a technical founder to team up with, or you can get a fractional technical founder who can help you get started building the software so that you can have an MVP, a minimal viable product, start selling it, make some money, and hire some technical people on your team. Business number 3. AI productivity consultant. This is different from the AI installation agency. The installation agency focuses on customer-facing systems, phone answering, lead capture, follow-up, that type of thing. Money that's left on the table, okay? The AI productivity consultant focuses on internal operations, the hours that your team is losing every week on tasks that AI could just do for you. And when you save time in your business, you make money because you have more time to make money. Here's the pitch. I will find 10 to 20 hours per week inside your business that are currently being consumed by repetitive, manual, low-skill tasks. I'm gonna install some AI systems that'll handle those tasks, and your team gets those hours back. You're basically selling time. You're giving people their time back so that they can focus on higher-value things in your business. This is really a huge revenue generator for any business owner. If you talk to any business owner, you say, hey, I'm gonna give you 10 to 20 hours back in your team, because they're wasting time on these menial tasks. Like, yeah, they shouldn't be doing this. They should be doing things like talking to customers or helping build a better product. And guess what? Most businesses, they have no idea how bad the situation is. They don't know how many hours they are losing to tasks they already could be automated, whether it's email sorting or drafting or meeting notes or action items or social media scheduling and repurposing or data entry and reporting, customer service, FAQs. There's so many of us, right? Invoice processing. The list goes on and on and on. The list is different for every business, but it's always long. And your job is to audit, to identify, and install and train the team so that they can get their time back. The audit alone, a 2 to 3 hour process, is going to sell your product or your service automatically because it's going to map out all the repetitive tasks and the time that's being wasted in this business. Once the company and the boss sees, hey, my team is wasting a total of 40 hours amongst all these team members, every single week on tasks that they shouldn't be doing. Wow. How much is this? Where do I sign? The installation will be the paid engagement. The ongoing maintenance and optimization is a monthly retainer. This business requires no technical degree. It requires fluency in just some AI tools that already exist, like Claude and Zapier and Make and a handful of others that you can map out some automation that will help the business save time. You can literally take the transcript of this episode, whether you're listening on a podcast or on YouTube, and tell AI, hey, in this episode Omar talks about XYZ. Can you map out an offering for me that will work for local businesses? Selling this type of product is so easy because you can give them the average hourly rate of their team, their team members that they pay every single, you know, month and multiply it by the hours that you're going to save them. So say for example, you go into a business, you do the audit, and this team of 30 people could save 100 hours a week on the repetitive tasks they're doing. And the average salary of each team member in this company is $50 an hour. That means the value you're adding to this business is worth $5,000 a week. So minimum $20,000 a month. So if you charge a retainer of $500, that is a drop in the bucket. Business number 4, AI-powered personal assessment business. This one requires some context. For decades, businesses, many big businesses and individuals have paid a lot of money for personality and behavioral assessments. The DiSC assessment, COBE, StrengthsFinder, you name it. These tools used to be for hiring, for team building, for leadership development, for coaching, for self-awareness. All the big gurus used to tell you, you should take these tests so you understand who you are and who you're dealing with. The market is enormous for this. Corporate training budgets alone spend billions on this category every year. And here's the problem. Most of these assessments are completely outdated. They're generic, they're expensive, and the product outputs that feeling of being a horoscope, right? It's vague enough to apply to almost anybody. So there's an opportunity here with AI, okay? Where you can create a conversational AI that can now ask you, lots of nuanced, contextual, personalized questions. AI will understand your specific situation, your specific tendencies, your specific role, your risk appetite, your specific environment, and produce an assessment that is more accurate, more specific, more actionable than any DiSC assessment or whatever that can be produced at a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost. And here is the business model for you. You build a branded AI assessment experience, whether using existing AI tools or using like OpenAI's model, and you target a specific niche— executive coaches, HR department, sales teams, entrepreneurs— and you charge for the assessment. Now, you might be asking, Omar, who would buy this if they could just ask ChatGPT? Well, ChatGPT is not going to create the assessment. You are going to train the model on the questions they need to ask to gather the information they need to come up with the answers that they're looking for. Now my opinion is you can easily do this as an MVP, minimal viable product, by creating a custom GPT in ChatGPT. If you don't know how to do this, ask ChatGPT, it'll tell you how to create one and it'll walk you through the steps. It'll create a product for you within a GPT, but you could sell that GPT to the customers that you're looking to go after. The company that buys it, they have this GPT that they can use within the company. It's already built out. That's one way of doing it as an MVP. But then you can also just build your own AI tool with its own website that the company will be able to have access to for a yearly subscription. Now, I know this sounds really technical, but you can literally take the transcription from today's episode, put it into ChatGPT, say, hey, Chat, can you please tell me what are the steps in building business number 4 that is mentioned in this episode? And it'll walk you through step by step. Now, if this episode's already showing you opportunities you haven't seen before, I want you to subscribe to the show because we've got a spicy episode coming up. I don't I don't want you to miss. All right. I don't want you to miss it. It's all about how to fire good people who are bad employees. Okay. How do you do this right? Because it's not easy. I'm going to walk you through step by step how to have that conversation. Working on that episode right now. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. 2 more businesses to go. Let's go. Business number 5, the boring repeatable service business. I am passionate about boring businesses because these businesses are not mentioned on-trend reports. They never are featured on the startup blog. They'll never be the subject of an inspiring podcast episode except for ours because we love boring businesses. And no one talks about the millionaires that run these types of businesses. Again, except us. We had David Royce on who is in the pest control business and his business sold for half a billion dollars. Bugs. Okay. There is a lot of money in boring businesses, and I'll tell you why. I'm talking about moving companies. I'm talking about cleaning services, pest control, lawn care, in driveway car washing. These are not glamorous. Right? They're not exciting. They're not the kind of business that you would describe at a dinner party as getting an interesting reaction, right? It's not something that people are going to be like, "Oh, wow, that's interesting." But let me tell you what they are. They're recession-resistant. They're recurring. They're high demand. They're low barrier to entry. They're all amazing things that I love about a business. And almost universally, I've seen these businesses badly run. Anytime you see a business that's badly run, it's probably because it's an easy business to run. Meaning that it's easy, anybody can do it, and therefore even when it's badly run, it makes money. So here's an opportunity specifically for 2026. Every one of these businesses can now be supercharged with a digital layer that the average operator in the space has yet to build. Start one of these boring businesses, but add an online booking system that takes 30 seconds instead of a phone call, an automated appointment reminder that cuts the no-shows down so you can keep more money. An AI-powered customer follow-up that turns one job into a recurring client. Hey, time for your next car wash? How about you book the next 6 car washes and get a discount? Automatic Google review generation that compounds your Google rating month over month. Dynamic pricing that adjusts for demand, higher on Saturdays, lower on Tuesday mornings. There are so many options to make your business the best one in town. You have to remember your business is not just the physical service, it's the experience that the customer goes through. It's not like your car wash is better than somebody else's car wash, or the pest control that you do is going to be better than somebody else's pest control. The difference that you can make in the actual service may be very small. You can't really differentiate yourself in that area, but you can differentiate yourself in the total experience they have with you. That digital layer that makes it easy for you to be a customer of yours is what makes you different, what makes you the choice in the market. Just think about Uber Eats. Why do you do Uber Eats? Why do you use this app? Okay? Why don't you just call the restaurant directly? Because you have the convenience of Uber Eats. It knows all your preferences. It knows your address. It knows your credit card. Everything is saved. You don't have to talk to anybody. You click some buttons. It's easy. It has nothing to do with the food. But you and I keep using Uber Eats because of the total experience. The moving company, the cleaning service, the lawn care operation, they are the vehicle. The differentiation is the system you build around them. If you're willing to do the work that most entrepreneurs consider beneath them to build a real operation around it, this is one of the most reliable paths to genuine profit, genuine growth. And it's sitting right in plain sight here in 2026. Business number 6, course to coaching transformation consultant. I did an entire episode recently on the state of online courses and the whole industry. Here's the summary. The old model: record a course, set up a funnel, collect passive income. It's all dead. Okay. Courses are struggling. They're dying a slow death. And there are tens of thousands of course creators that have been building businesses for the last decade that are seeing their business take a nosedive. They are desperate. They have an audience, they have an expertise, they have content, they know their stuff. What they don't have is the right delivery model for 2026. There's an opportunity here to be the person who transforms your business, taking their business from a course business to a coaching business. You're going to show them how to take their existing course and rebuild it around implementation, about accountability, about real outcomes. Specifically, you can help them make those 3 moves, right? Again, how to take their course and turn it into implementation, accountability, and outcomes. First, you're gonna help them reposition the offer from an information delivery to outcome delivery. Stop selling a course, start selling a result, okay? Second, add the coaching layer. Are you gonna do group coaching? What does that look like? How often? If you decide on a weekly group call, that turns that passive course into an active program. Completion rates are going to go up. Most courses have abysmal completion rates. We're talking about 3%. The best I've ever seen is 15%. Coaching, on the other hand, have 85 to 90% because of that accountability, showing up for the coach. Testimonials get dramatically better. Revenue per customer increases. And then thirdly, you're going to restructure the pricing, move from a one-time purchase to a monthly and annual membership, a recurring revenue. This is gold. This is gold. Okay, predictable income, a business that grows every time a customer stays rather than every time a new one comes in. So it's just compounding. The market for this is enormous. Hundreds of thousands of course creators are waiting for you to help them, okay? And clients are pre-motivated 'cause they see their business starting to slowly die. There's already a real pain and they already know something has to change. So you're that person who's gonna come in and help them make that change. You're going to show them the vision and show them what their new business is going to look like. And that alone will sell the product. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I gave you 6 businesses. They're all underserved. They're all high margin. They're all startable for under $10,000. They're all able to build you a 6-figure business within the next 12 months, 18 max. If you are focused, pick one that fits your skills, pick one that fits your market, pick one that you could start a conversation about tomorrow without needing to learn everything first. Okay. And start that conversation. Start working on it because that is what gets you going. You have to start and you better start now before everyone else sees what you're seeing. If this episode showed you opportunities you haven't seen before, great. That was the point of the episode. Okay. But if you want to continue learning, I have another episode that you might want to check out. Just, it's an episode we published just recently called 5 Lazy Ways to Start a Business on the Side This Weekend. Because every business on today's list can be tested before it becomes a full commitment. You can just try it out. So I'll show you how to just trial this business on the weekend while you're just, you know, in your job right now, not full-time entrepreneurship. Go ahead and check it out. Thanks for being part of the $100 MBA show. Thanks for making it to the end of the episode. You're my kind of person. You're a completionist, you're a doer, and I'm looking out for you. Let us know how you're doing. Put in the comments. As you implement what you learned today so that we can understand your progress and we can root for you, we can cheer for you as you go on. See you on the next one. Mm-hmm.
