I Tried 20 Business Ideas. These 3 Made Me Rich.

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1:52I had 25 years ago, the only three business models that actually are worth your time.

2:03Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. If this show has helped in any way, It would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Business number one, a premium service business.

2:42This was my first real breakthrough. And it sounds boring, which is exactly the point. This is why it works. A premium service business means that you're solving a specific painful problem for a specific type of client at a high price point. Not cheap and cheerful. Not anyone with a pulse. Okay? Premium. My early failures, I tried to do everything for everyone. And that is a recipe for disaster. I tried to build websites and logos and copy and do marketing for them. I did low prices, high stress, endless revisions. And then something clicked. When I raised my prices and narrowed my focus, everything changed.

3:23I got better clients. I had better conversions and conversations with my clients. I had better margins, which allowed me to keep more money. And the whole thing was just almost like night and day. Like all of a sudden, I was like, wow, this is what business should be like. And here's the secret most people miss. High prices don't scare off good clients. Confusion does. Actually, high prices attracts a lot of great clients, the best clients you can find. When someone understands exactly what you do and who it's for and why it matters, price becomes really secondary. Premium services really work because you are cash flow immediate.

4:06You make profit immediately, right? You learn fast about how to improve your product or your service. and most of all you build confidence and skills quickly because you have some money to invest in your skills and gain some confidence and that's the whole key if you're not making enough money to reinvest in yourself in your business it's very hard for you to grow and scale this business didn't just make money it taught me how value actually works now for me what i did is i I created custom websites for entrepreneurs. And then I niched down to just focusing on building websites for bloggers. So this is 2012.

4:46So 2012, blogging was all the rage and bloggers were making a lot of money. So they were willing to invest in building a beautiful website that was very functional. I had a standard base price for a standard website that included three pages. And then every additional page had an add-on fee. This made things a lot simpler for me, but it also allowed me to have more additional revenue per customer as they wanted to add more pages to their site. Later on, after the project was over, I can charge them as an add-on and I would make more and more money from customers I've had for years. I also offered a reoccurring fee where my customers can host their websites with me.

5:21I can host them. They don't have to worry about hosting or paying for that. Every single month, I would update all their security protocols and make sure their site was secure and they would pay me a monthly fee for that. This allowed me to have reoccurring revenue because I worked hard to get that customer. Let me make sure that I keep them and have them paying me month over month. So every time I got a new customer, I got more reoccurring revenue. And that leads me to business number two, a reoccurring digital business. This one changed everything for me because one-time payments is very exhausting, like I mentioned.

5:53You sell, you celebrate, but then you realize you got to do it all over again. You work hard and get a new customer so that you can get paid. You have to reinvent the wheel over and over again. You're starting from zero with every new customer. And that is really exhausting. Then I built a software business called Webinar Ninja. It was a SaaS business, a software as a service business. And it's exactly what it sounds like. People would pay me monthly to use the software. And this was a novel kind of concept back in the day, but now it's kind of the standard. So customers paid us repeatedly for ongoing value.

6:28This is where I built real leverage. So instead of me waking up every morning and saying, how do I sell more today? I would ask myself, how do I keep my customers happy for years so they can continue to pay me? That shift alone changes how you think about business. Reoccurring revenue businesses are high value businesses because it's predictable revenue and it's sustainable. It's also long term. People understand how much money you're going to make in the long term. And this makes your company a whole lot more valuable. When a buyer comes to buy your company, you're going to say, oh, wow, this is reoccurring predictable revenue.

7:07I know how much money this company will make in the next month and next year, next five years. But let's say, for example, you're an e-commerce business and you're selling physical products, okay? And you are selling these products by getting customers through ads on Facebook, or maybe you're using SEO, or maybe people are finding you through ChatGBT. What if that stops happening? What if the algorithm changes on Google? What if ads become too expensive for you to be able to run them and be profitable? You don't have any more customers. It's game over. You don't have reoccurring revenue of customers you've already established.

7:41And that's why reoccurring revenue businesses are so valuable. This is how I built wealth that didn't require me to burn the midnight oil every single day. And yes, this is where Webinar Ninja, my software company came in, and it didn't happen overnight and not magically, but steadily, impatiently and intentionally. And it took 10 years, but it changed my life. After 10 years, we sold up in our Ninja for life-changing money. So I never needed to work again, but I was too young to retire. I was 43 and I went all in on my third type of business that I want to share with you. If you're selling online or out of a storefront, full-time or as a side hustle, you already know the challenge.

8:19You're hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. Lucky for you, there's Whatnot, one of our proud sponsors. Whatnot flips that. On Whatnot, you go live and sell directly to people in real time. I'm a huge fan of live video. As you know, we built and sold a webinar software for over 10 years. The great thing about live video is that they see what you've got, they can ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Anyone can sell, whether your business is big, small, or yet to even exist. People selling on Whatnot sell 10 times more than on other major marketplaces.

8:55That's because they're not just listing products. You're building real connections with buyers. I'm a big fan of Whatnot. I'm a big user of Whatnot. I've bought products on Whatnot because it's a lot of fun, actually. You get to interact with the seller as well as the fact that you get a great deal. It's super easy to use. It's intuitive, which means your buyers are going to find it easy to buy. Download the WhatNot app today and get free shipping on your first order. Just search W-H-A-T-N-O-T, WhatNot, in the App Store and start scoring amazing deals. One of the biggest growth hacks is realizing you don't have to do it all yourself.

9:33That's how you can scale your business. This is why I'm so excited to have Upwork as a sponsor because I've been using Upwork for over a decade. Why? because it makes it easy to bring in the right freelancer when you need them so you can stay focused on what you do best. Upwork is a one-stop shop platform to find, hire, and pay expert freelancers across web and software development, data and analytics, marketing, business operations, and more. I've made some of the best hires in our company through Upwork. I'm talking about people that have changed the trajectory of our entire business. It's free to sign up to Upwork and And posting a job is super simple and easy.

10:15Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialized talent across 125 categories. It makes it simple for you to just fill in those skill gaps, to launch projects faster, and scale your support up or down without committing to full-time headcount. And let me tell you about Business Plus. It's a game changer. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. And with AI-powered shortlisting, you'll get matched to the right freelancer in under six hours. No endless searching required. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top town ready to help your business grow.

10:56That's U-P-W-O-R-K dot com, Upwork dot com. Before we get into that third type of business, I want to ask you, are you getting value from this show? If you are, then I have news for you. We have an upcoming episode that you don't want to miss where I break down why podcasting is now moving to Instagram and why that matters for you as a content creator, or if you're building any kind of business. Hit subscribe so you get that episode automatically when it comes out. My team is just doing the final touches on it. It's going to be amazing. Business number three, a media company. I got to be honest, this one really surprised me.

11:37I didn't set out to build a media company. I really just wanted to teach and share what I've learned over the years. But I found out that media is really powerful. When you consistently create content that educates, that helps people, that motivates them, that builds trust with them, you don't just get attention, you get permission. A media company allows you to launch products effortlessly. It tracks the right opportunities. It builds this long-term influence that you don't really expect. You know, I run live events. I love in-person events. And when we throw a live event, they sell out immediately.

12:13It's so easy to sell these events because of the influence and the impact we make with our media. The$100 MBA, this podcast, didn't explode because we got lucky, right? It grew because we showed up every day and helped people to earn their trust. Media starts to compound over and over. You know, a lot of people don't realize, is we've been running this podcast for over 11 years. We've published over 2 ,700 podcast episodes. Then we moved into producing videos in 2024. And one video becomes 10 clips. And one podcast becomes a library. And one idea kind of lives forever. This is one of the things I'm most proud of, is that my work is documented.

12:53And then when I'm dead and gone, I can still make an impact. And here's the most underrated part of building a media company. Media gives you choices. You can sell. You can partner. You can invest. You can step back. It's not just income. It's leverage over your future and your life. But let's address why the other 17 businesses failed. Looking back, those failures had certain patterns, certain repeatable things that I noticed. And here they are. Low margins. I wasn't making enough profit. One-off sales and one-off products. dependent on me forever. There's no way for me to scale the business without me involved.

13:35And then built on hope instead of math. The math has to work out. You have to actually be able to write down the numbers of your business and say, yep, I can see how I can make money and profit year after year. In the moment when I was building and running those failed businesses, I felt productive. I felt like I was doing something important. But the truth is the business was just simply not scalable. I wasn't able to hire more people to get me to grow the business and improve my bottom line, how much money the business was making. And they weren't really aligned with the life I wanted, right?

14:10The business kind of was a mismatch with the life I wanted to live. And that's the real lesson. Success isn't just about effort alone. It's about choosing the right vehicle for the journey you want to go on. So how do you choose the right business for you? You need to ask yourself some important questions. Here they are. Do I want cash flow now? A premium service will give you that. You will have more money in the bank and have more cash flow to invest in your business and in yourself with a premium service because the margins are so high. Ask yourself this question. Do I want stability and leverage in the long term?

14:47Well, that's a reoccurring digital business like my software company, Webinar Ninja? Do you want long-term influence and options and different doors you can go down? Well, that's a media company. Like with my media company, you know, I get to speak on stages. I can write a book. I could travel and make mini movies and document what I'm learning along the way. And please don't do all three at once, okay? Choose the one that works for your lifestyle right now, what you want out of life right now. Because when you spread yourself thin, when you try to do more than one business at a time, you're really forgetting the fact that you're competing with people that are 100 % focused on one business.

15:23So don't ask for trouble. Choose one and focus. Build it properly. Then after you've built that, stack it to the next one, which you can scale that and hand it over to other people to manage. That's how wealth is actually built. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Failure doesn't mean you're bad at business. It usually means you picked a business that was bad for you, that didn't actually work in terms of what you need out of life right now. When you choose the right type of business, work starts to feel lighter and progress is visible and momentum starts to build. And suddenly, success feels almost kind of boring because you get it now.

16:03You know, it's like you're playing a sport that you're really good at and you're just repeating the patterns so that you can keep winning. And in my book, I rather have a profitable, strong, valuable, boring business than one that's exciting that gives me heart attacks. Okay? So strive for that. Strive for a consistent, repeatable, reliable business. If you want to go deeper on this, check out a previous episode that pairs perfectly with today's topic. It's called how to make your first million dollars in one year without getting lucky, no matter your circumstances. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast.

16:45Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.

17:32Thankfully, Walmart business lets me keep track of all our expenses in one place. Aaron, don't eat that. Michael, uh-uh. It's Walmart. Built for your business. Who knew? Eligible organizations. Additional terms apply.