The 6 Most Profitable Businesses To Start In 2026 (That No-One Is Talking About)

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1:20brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app.legal.podcast. 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 those businesses are not what this episode is about. Because here's the problem with every list you've read on this topic. It tells you what's already working. We don't care about that. We want to know what's about to work.

1:59Like Wayne Gretzky says, skate where the puck is going to 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 want to give you six businesses that are not on those lists. six 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.

2:38Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhom, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business. I got a quick favor to ask. If this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review. You could do so wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps me and my team reach even more people who need the same no-fluff practical business advice that you're getting from this show. It only takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey.

3:15As 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 six 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 three, 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.

3:58Every business on this list passes all four tests, okay? And none of them are on the standard lists. Business number one, 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 thousands of small businesses right now scrambling because they feel like they're behind because AI is 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 going to reduce their costs. It's going to generate leads.

4:33It's going to 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 business owners 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 of 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.

5:13Is 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 want to deal with, but they just want the solution. They want the results. So what does this look like? Well, we're going to call this an AI installation agency. So it just looks like you're installing something. It's understood as something 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.

5:51You 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. So think about it, okay? A plumber misses a call at 9 p.m. 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.

6:27But 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. So when 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.

7:01You can charge them a setup fee and a monthly retainer to maintain and update the system. And guess what? Are they going to cancel? No, because even just one deal, one secured customer from the system is going to be worth your business. Now, I got to 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 going to come in and I'm going to install it for you. and all you got to do is just answer the text messages when you get them to follow up with customers.

7:35Something 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. 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 reoccurring 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.

8:06But in the beginning, you can do this in a few hours. You could probably do two, three 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 two, affordable customer service software. I want to tell you 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.

8:43It'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 redonkulous 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.

9:20Switching 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 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, under-delivering on value, and sticky for the wrong reasons.

10:00That 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? Because they have a lot of frustration. Here's the good news. You don't need to out-feature Intercom.

10:37In fact, less features is better for that small to media and 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 a million dollars 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. They need a clean mobile experience. They need AI-powered first responses, which is going to be very easy now these days.

11:12And it needs to be priced reasonably, like at$49,$99 a month, 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 a tremendous amount of money. To give you an understanding of what I mean by this, a good friend of mine, Nathan Berry, runs a software company called Kit, Kit.com. It used to be called ConvertKit. It's an email marketing software. He has a niche product. It's for bloggers and creators. 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 nine-figure business in revenue.

11:53If 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 this 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. For small business, a high-speed fiber connection is only one piece of the puzzle. You need the total solutions advantage from Comcast Business. It's a first-ever combination of the largest, fastest fiber-powered network, gig speeds with equipment and security included, plus a five-year price lock.

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13:02You've built experience and you know what you're capable of. Now, this is your time to turn that momentum into more. The only real question is, what can't you do? Learn more at capella.edu. Business number three, 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. 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.

13:47Here'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 going to install some AI systems that will handle those tasks, and your team gets those hours back. So 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 and say, hey, I'm going to 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.

14:21They 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 entering, reporting, customer service, FAQs. There's so many of us, right? Invoice processing. The list goes on and on and on. Now, 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.

14:59The audit alone, a two - to three-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? So 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 and 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.

15:48You 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, They're team members that they pay every single 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.

16:20And 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 four, AI-powered personalized 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, Strength Finder, you name it. These tools used to be for hiring, for team building, for leadership development, for coaching, for self-awareness.

17:06All 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 everybody. So there's an opportunity here with AI where you can create a conversational AI that can now ask you lots of nuanced, contextual, personalized questions.

17:41AI 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 disk 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.

18:19Now, you might be asking, Omar, who would buy this if they could just ask ChatGBT? Well, ChatGBT 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 will tell you how to create one. And it'll walk you through the steps. It will create a product for you within a GPT, but you could sell that GPT to the customers that you're looking to go after.

18:56So 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 the chat to you, say, hey, chat, can you please tell me what are the steps in building business number four 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 want you to miss, all right?

19:36I 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 is to hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Two more businesses to go. Let's go. Number five, business number five, 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 We love boring businesses.

20:12And 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, and 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.

20:45But let me tell you what they are. They're recession resistant. They're reoccurring. They're high demand. They're low barrier to entry. They're all the 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.

21:22Start 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 reoccurring client. Hey, time for your next car wash? How about you book the next six 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.

21:59You 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.

22:30Just think about Uber Eats. Why do you do Uber Eats? Why do you use this app? 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.

23:16Business number six, 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. 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.

23:55There's an opportunity here to be the person who transforms their 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 three moves, right? Again, how to take their course and turn it into implementation, accountability, and outcomes. First, you're going to help them reposition the offer from an information delivery to outcome delivery. Stop selling a course. Start selling a result. Second, add the coaching layer.

24:31Are you going to do group coaching? What does that look like? How often? By deciding on a week 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 their 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 their pricing. Move from a one-time purchase to a monthly and annual membership. This gives the customer reoccurring revenue.