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

24:09And the only way to do that is just to get in the game, right? Yeah, you got to stay in the game. Yeah, and keep playing it. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

24:46This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. The richest people in the world didn't just build a box. They didn't come from riches. They used other people's money and a ridiculous amount of sweat.

25:19People will tell you you can't. Yet didn't you know there isn't a multi-billion dollar business out there that didn't do some type of acquisition? Amazon, 110 companies bought. Facebook, 96. The Sage of Omaha himself started buying a gumball route. They didn't listen to those who said they couldn't. They found aging owners, made connections, took risks, repeated. Today, the hardest thing to do isn't buy a company. It's start and keep a profitable business. Around here, we don't hope and pray for profits. We buy them. Real businesses, 56 ,000 of them, real profits, custom deal box so you can swipe left and right at your pleasure maps find businesses close to you off-market deals or no one else is even looking this is how you become an owner let's talk about a dude i heard a ridiculous story of yours that you're like which one it's probably true um about texas snacks and the bucky's heist yeah oh heist that's a good word I like that.

26:23So for those that aren't familiar with Bucky's, it's a chain of gas stations. They do billions of dollars a year from 50 locations, right? It's just an amazing business, privately held. And 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 15 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.

26:56So 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 start reaching out to the executive team.

27:29No 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 going to launch this business for them. Yeah. Yeah. And his first question is like, Chris, we're going to get sued. And I was like, that's going to be a good story though. Right. If we get sued, then we can just say, 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. They could be tens of millions of dollars.

28:01Who knows? And so my business partner and I, we bought one of everything from the store near my house. It costs about$3 ,000. I hired a photographer for 200 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$200 ,000 of sales in our first month. And we do millions of dollars a year now, five years later. You're still doing it today. It's a great business.

28:36I bet. So you're the one responsible for all the Bucky's merch I now see all over the 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. That is insane. 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 yeah oh my god it'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 it's 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 uh I think you're right you know a lot of times I'm sure you get asked this question too.

29:35Well, I want to create content to be on the internet. So what do I talk about? I'm like, if you want to be interesting, you got to do interesting shit. So before you get online and like try to talk about as a bunch of stuff you haven't done, go do the thing because you're not suffering from stories. Why? Because you're doing wild things all the time. Yeah. I'm trying, I'm 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.

30:07I'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 the internet. I'm going to say Chris made me do it. But I laughed with them because, um, 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. 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.

30:41So we've played into it slightly with the marketing 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. And so the two founders, you know, you have like, I don't know, 170 locations or something now and their one business does three mil a year just like their austin-based business but they're doing kickflips 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 yeah we'll wear it on the podcast all right did you get into go tell me no i was with the pinks guys i have an idea so i got to get out.

31:24Tell me. Yeah. So you should make those calendars. Yeah. Cause that would be viralable, 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 cut they probably already know this, but like our average customer has a$732 ,000 home. We charge three 50 a quarter that's 1400 a year and they stay for five years. Right. So$7 ,000 lifetime value. Right. Okay. What would we pay to acquire that customer? Let's say$500. What does it cost to print and ship a calendar? Let's say$20. 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.

32:07And they're going to hang it and they're going to look at that pinks logo every time they see it. And they're going to put it on Instagram. And they're going to put it on Instagram and that $20 could return 20 ,000, right? Why wouldn't you do that? A 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 and finance. You don't do ads. 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.

32:36It'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? I mean, I'm like an extreme introvert. I don't like going out. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

33:07Wow. 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. Nobody 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.

33:39isn't as good as you are. And they're making more money than you do because they're willing to sell. And I was like, all right, thanks, Bob. But he was right. You know? 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 is going to go pitch Buc-ee's and create a whole t-shirt empire, but it might be like right off of it, like slightly asymmetric, you know?

34:08So I want to talk about pet cremation because that's the obvious next thing you go to. That's awful. My dog's here. Hide the dog. It's so hot right now, by the way. Is it really? Cremation, so hot. I had to. Is that a dad joke? I have four kids. 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. 92 % 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?

34:45So 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.

35:21Like 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$300 ,000 each. And then we thought, man, that's, I don't, I don't usually do that. I don't put hundreds of thousands into businesses, right? I 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.

36:00Okay. 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? Um, my friend had another friend that, um, had been acquiring veterinarian clinics. So he had contacts in the industry. So we said, all right, there's our sales.

36:34Here's our first customer that's worth six customers, put the pieces together, let's spend 15 grand on a refrigerated van and we're in business. And so we captured 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 copy to i'm going to like have a certificate i give the family or whatever i'm just going to 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.

37:27It'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 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.

37:54But 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 30 % of that margin and we'll take care of all of your headaches, right? So 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.

38:26It'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 totally possible. The problem with that is 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 a business owner, they already have the pain point.

38:54They already have the cash to solve it. All you're doing is removing work from them. Like that's a really interesting model. 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 realize what people pay for. Like what does it cost to get a pet cremated? Oh,$250 to$500. dollars. God, my dad's going to kill me for this story. But I like when my favorite dog died, he was obsessed with the dump truck. Like, you know, the trash time, the dogs. And so he died and his name was Elvis. He was this amazing little Cocker Spaniel.

39:29And 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 right. He was like, he would be thrilled. He'd be barking happily all the way to the dump. His favorite place. You're just like staring into the abyss. Oh, I just was. I know. It's such a, you know, we're Latino. They're like, they don't understand things like cremating a dog for 500 bucks.

39:57That's like not part of the equation. Okay. Let's talk about, um, RV parks. So I think a lot of people are interested in this idea of, um, 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, a lot of employees.

40:34So 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 12 homes across a Metroplex in two hours, you can have 12 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.

41:07So 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? And so we partnered up and we started buying these small RV and mobile home parks across Texas and Oklahoma, 10 to 70 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?

41:49Yeah, so between$100 ,000 and$1.5 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 30 % to 60 % cash on cash returns. Yeah, that's wild. Does that still exist today? or has a lot of that? It does. No, it does. Yeah. 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 are people not buying them up? So the founder of 1-800-GOT-JUNK has a quote that I love. And he says that as long as pianos weigh 800 pounds, we're going to be in business, right?

42:28And so as long as RV parks are ugly and forgotten and hard, or at least they seem to be hard, There's going to be an opportunity there. I've been saying since 2018, since I've been in the business, like, oh, private equity, they're coming. They're coming. And they're coming after the$10 million parks. But private equity doesn't care about$100 ,000 or a million or a$3 million park. So there's an opportunity there. Yeah, it's the same with buying businesses. If you want to sell your$3 million business that has 30 % margins, it's hard. It's super hard. And now we know. We own the biggest, depending on how you do it.

43:04let's call it the second 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 10 to 12 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$160 ,000 in revenue a year. Let's call it$50 ,000 in profit. And they want to sell it for$50 ,000. So it's all around. What about, actually, let's do this really quick. So somebody is 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 a hundred to$200 ,000 and like get there.

43:45What would be the couple of things you'd tell them don't buy mobile home parks unless you do this? Oh, that's easy. Um, wastewater treatment plants. I don't know if most people never heard that phrase, but a lot of parks treat their own wastewater onsite. 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 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.

44:19You 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 fund 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?

44:58So you don't want to be in the messy middle, like either no amenities or all the amenities.

45:26more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus.

45:59You once started a crypto project with John McAfee, who was 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 U.S. where he ran for president 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 always distracted. And I kind of found this math equation that helped me predict the price of cryptocurrencies.

46:39And it was very simple. Here's the whole secret. Okay. I found a way to measure how much hype cryptocurrency had, how many people were talking about it on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook. And I put that into a number from one to a 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.

47:18So 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 publishing content. I had no following, no audience, no rich friends, nothing. And so I thought, who's the biggest name in crypto? John McAvee. 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.

47:53If 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 funds 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 jm at McAfee.com, John at McAfee, John. And it was just bounce back, bounce back, bounce back.

48:27Finally, 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 24th, 2018. 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 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.

49:04I 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, 48 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, I will never dance on the internet. Yeah, that is so good. Okay. What a fucking great email save too.

49:44And 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 28th at 1 23 PM. And if you're there, I'll give you an hour. And he said, I'll give you my address the morning of, 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 40 ,000 people there. John, I'm coming to Lexington. Finally, like one o 'clock or like 12 o 'clock, he emails me his address.

50:20So 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 anyone lives here, it's John McAfee, right all these crappy cars and um 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.

51:05I 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. I'm like, okay. And I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of 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, 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.

51:42There's probably a 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's very nice. He's like, tell me why you're here. And I spend like 30 minutes explaining how this works. And he's like, 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 Mac book. I start talking and he's like, do you mind if this film crew films this?

52:13I'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 whatever it is that we build. And you tweet about me twice per week. I'll tell you what to tweet. We'll build some. And we shook on it. And I spent the day there eating Mexican food and hanging out with him. And we started a business together. And what ended up happening with the business?

52:49Oh, man. This was 2018, right at the start of crypto crashing from 20 ,000 to 3 ,000. Oh, yeah. But we started a cryptocurrency that we gave out for free. And it reached a$30 million market cap. And we built a community with 70 ,000 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. 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.

53:29I just can't. Chris John. MacAfee. I'd like to chat for a little output. It goes on and on. It's like two minutes. It's this idea to start a business giving away free crypto to strippers and mimes. Oh, my God. And he's just rambling. And 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. His is just like plus Coke. 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 other, 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,$2 million businesses.

54:22Everybody 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.

54:56But over 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 billionaires. Most of the billionaires I've met, I'm just like, oh my God, once you've made a decision, it's just tidal waves of movement. But I've struggled to try to get a formula for how to explain if you are fast or not? Like if somebody said, all right, 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.

55:38I'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 task, one of them has done 10 minutes, one does the same thing in three hours. And so I wish I had a formula of how to train that. Maybe it can't be trained, but you know what? Maybe the commonality is you truly love what you do. I love what I do so much. I'm sitting at the MacBook typing away, and I got to go to the bathroom. I'll run to the bathroom. There's no deadline. No one's around.

56:15No one cares, right? It's just an email I'm writing or something and I'll run back just because I genuinely love it. And I want to be doing more of that. Going pee is not fun. 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 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 um the only way i've found is just 30 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, you know, 30 % or 30 % chance this works out.

57:16Um, so on day 30, let's put it on the calendar right now. We're going to have a talk, no hard feelings. It's just probably won't work out. And if it's the right person, that conversation will put a chip on their shoulder. Right. Cause that chip can be very heavy. Uh, 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. Some people are like, oh, okay, we'll see. I'll be in that 30%. 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.

57:56Like it's everything. I'm sure you could - I'm the same way. You could refer to conversations. Yeah, 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, 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.

58:32And that often comes from being really pissed that something doesn't already exist. and so yeah I'm not the right person to talk to about like work-life balance or um you know uh being really reasonable on everything I'm like no we got one life and at the end of the day I want to be able to say we made an impact 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 remember that I exist.

59:06It's so silly, but if you're able to harness it, then it's not silly. 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 the stuff online. It was pretty 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.

59:40And 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, and the email said, um, 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. Yeah. I remember where I was. I I remember how I felt. And I remember being like, thanks, man. I needed that. Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's like, 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.

1:00:13Yeah. And so, you know, I've learned that lesson also. Let's talk about that for a second. Like you've done 75 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 15 business partners. I could tell so many stories, but the worst one ever was I was building a business with a couple of partners and we had a$50 million opportunity on the table.

1:00:53We had a term sheet and it was significantly better than we thought we would get. and this was life-changing money for all of us and um 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 it 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 of my life i was way up here right and then i get a text it's like hey uh meet me at starbucks and um 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 shoulder right I was like okay well that came later in the moment I was just like seeing red yeah 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.

1:02:49But at the end of the day, like, you know, law 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 going to get hit. It's just the name of the game. But the crazy part is it doesn't kill you. 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're going to have mental scars, all the PTSD.

1:03:20But 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, we're like really close to, like met his kid and like been in his house and, and like knew the guy. And, and I thought we were buddies, but I was on the internet a little bit by then. There's like kind of at the beginning of being on the internet. And, um, 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.

1:03:59You know, that was like a, 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. 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.

1:04:36And you've got to expect that you're going to have a breakup. And then it'll be okay. And for people like that, it always comes back around. Like, I think it's very rare for somebody to have a ton of business success over decades and decades and continuously fuck partners and people not know, right? So one of the good parts is when you partner with people who are kind of successful, you're like, okay, I know what I'm going to get into. One of the lessons that I've learned is like, be very careful with the unknown commodity. You know, like 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.

1:05:10It'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. Cause 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. Cause nobody really wants to share those stories and everybody makes themselves out to be, um, you know, like, ah, it's only been great. Everything's only good. And that's not the case. Let's talk about like, Let's give people some tactics really quickly. So we've already talked about some ways to find businesses.

1:05:43But if you were going to have somebody leave here, you've given them three businesses 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 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?

1:06:15Some of those people end up trying it and they don't like it, 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$50 dresser, is it not worth it for you? Or does it seem not worth it until you make that$50 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?

1:06:52So like they're already working. They kind of maybe like what they do, but 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 202 level to start or does everybody have to start at 101 Facebook marketplace? Yeah. You familiar with the Ikigai principle? Yeah. Yeah. So for those that aren't, it's just 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.

1:07:33So 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 they're doing. Maybe you could start them. Maybe you manage your, your dentist, uh, 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, uh, and go from there. Where I see people going wrong is like they're a lawyer and then they go, um, try to start a pressure washing business. And they're like, I don't even like this at my house. What am I doing?

1:08:03And that could turn them off from entrepreneurship just because they chose the wrong thing. They might actually love the feeling of entrepreneurship. So definitely start with what you know and then test it. Like Jeff Bezos talks about the regret minimization framework. People don't regret things that they do typically. 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's 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.

1:08:44So 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 40, 50, 60, 80 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, the part that's really interesting on that too, is like, I think most people really overestimate what happens. I'm sorry.

1:09:20People really underestimate what happens after you start. Like the hard thing is the start. 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 mean, I'm talking like 30 or 40 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.

1:09:50Do you also like, do you have, you have 452 businesses, like you've done like 75 businesses today. Do you think you have ADD, ADHD or something? Do you have a hard time sticking with one thing for an extended period of time? I am diagnosed ADHD. Definitely have that. And it used to stress me out. I used to say, heart, Chris, shiny objects. And stop. Nope, nope, nope. 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 focus that's important is focusing on your superpower.

1:10:27And where I went wrong was trying to do payroll and trying to do a little bit of marketing and hiring and operations. I'm terrible at operations. I forget payroll sometimes. That's really bad. That's really bad when you miss payroll. Let me tell you. But I'm really good at marketing and ideation and executing on ideas fast. So now I just focus on that. And if that's across 10 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?

1:11:02It'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 can 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, I mean, you've, you said two things that I think a lot of people feel like you can't have as an entrepreneur.

1:11:31You'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.

1:12:02It 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. I would love to just say, tell me what to do. Right. So I think if you are humble and you do really want it, like, I can't think of really any excuses why you can't do it. Cause like even working hard, you don't have to have a work ethic. If you genuinely enjoy it, It doesn't feel like work, right? Like some people say people are inherently lazy.

1:12:41I 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 75 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 you know it's there because you're just like staying up all night, fulfilling orders.

1:13:19Like 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. So if my energy is directed over here, then I should pay attention to that, right? Yeah, it's a really good point.

1:13:52It'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, then you won't make it. 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 bullshit. And if you're willing to do that, I really think you can be an entrepreneur. It's just 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?

1:14:20And can I continue to move forward? In 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? 19 in Hungary, Eastern Europe. Jesus. Yeah. Do you speak Hungarian? A little bit. I still got some left. Wow. What do you got? Jóna Podkívanok. That sounded great. Thank you. What'd you say? I just put a little deeper voice on it. 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?

1:14:54Oh, 100%. I was like in high school, you know, I had a single mom. She was a waitress and I had bad grades. I was not motivated. I was not driven. I was not valedictorian, 3.0 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 24 ,000 times rejected to my face okay this isn't like a mean email like I don't want what you're selling me when you do that for two years and you come home I can 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.

1:15:53They could not get ahead if they wanted to. And I was like, I can do whatever I want here compared to hungry. And so I've just been trying to do that ever since. Do you convert anybody with 24 ,000 no's? 11. Whoa. Yeah. So how's that conversion rate? Which also seems like a lot. Like if you believe you're saving souls, 11 is a lot. That's more than me. But that's a tough ratio. It'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 the same thing? We encourage them to. But it's, I can't really force them to do anything, you know, especially once they're 18.

1:16:26You just model it. Yeah. But the thing is about those 11 people is I learned after a while, like it was all for me. Like it sounds selfish, but I served that mission. I thought I was serving others and that became a by-product of what I was doing. Really, I was served the most in serving them. Yeah, I get that. That makes sense? Oh, a 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 to bring a 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?

1:16:59Because it's actually really selfish. Like when you meet the people at the end and in the beginning, and 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. And so he had sort of these like, I guess it's, it's shingles, like a, like hives sort of. And I was like, what's going on with you, man? And it was because he had a, um, what is that called? Where you go and, uh, check a company, uh, check a house to see what it's worth.

1:17:34Oh, 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 your, it was your 3PL problem. 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.

1:18:07Did 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 sauce you're given? I mean, I don't even track it, but like 3.62 million, something like that. I barely know. So I don't track it.

1:18:40And where do you like people to follow the most? I like your Instagram and your Twitter. I try to stay off X as much as possible, actually, because it can be accessible. 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. Or TKOpod.com. I actually thought it was Korner up until this very moment. Well, I don't do myself any favors. So it's the Kerner Office because it looks like Korner. I'll accept both of them. Okay, cool.

1:19:12Well, thank you for being on here. Thank you for all 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 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 give away some merch to you. Maybe we'll even get an original Buc-ee's something that Chris did simultaneously.

1:19:44Thanks for being here. Thank you.