The Side Hustle King: “I’m making $8K/DAY from easy businesses”

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/5712dfd16f37ad7c

All right, this guy might be the king of side hustles. He makes about three million dollars a year off of six or seven different side hustles, different streams of income.
And normally all the advice you hear is about focus, focus, go all in on one thing. This guy's like Mr. Shiny Object syndrome. So I loved having him on. He's very fun.
And he comes on and he tells you
The side hustle ideas that he loves. So things that you could do
They're kind of weird businesses, but you could do them really in any local market.
And on this podcast sometimes we have really brilliant people, but they talk about stuff that's
for most people not something they could go do. It's interesting to hear, but you can't really do it.
This is an episode I'm going to send to my sister or, you know, my brother-in-law, because I think they would like to do these businesses. And I think these are things that anybody actually can do and get to where he's gotten where
I think he's making eight thousand dollars per day of free cash flow off of these.
uh side houses per day. That's pretty crazy. So
Enjoy this episode.
It's all about the weird crazy side hustles that
Anybody could do if you just got a little bit of hustle.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's off On the road less travel never looking back
All right, what's up? We got Chris here. Chris, you are a crazy guy. Uh, you're a madman.
And one of the reasons I wanted you on here is because
Most business advice on the internet sounds like this.
You gotta focus.
You gotta lock in, you gotta grind, you have to just go all in on one thing, focus, focus, focus.
And you're like the exact opposite. You're a dude who's
You see a shiny object, you chase it, and you're not ashamed to say it. That's actually your strategy.
Uh, we were talking before this and you were telling me that you have
I think started thirty different businesses that crossed over fifty thousand in revenue, maybe thirty five.
You said you have six different revenue streams right now that each produce
Over a hundred thousand dollars of cash flow for you and I was doing the math on some of your numbers and I think
Basically just on your side hustles.
You're making like eight thousand dollars a day of cash flow.
And I think that is amazing. I want to hear
What your side hustles are.
I want to hear what other side hustles you found'cause you find these like random.
simple businesses that are cool.
I wanna hear which ones you think are cool that other people can go do, uh, for their own side hustles.
And I want to hear your philosophy as you go, because again, I think you defy some of the odds.
That sounds perfect. Absolutely.
Let's do it. So tell me about some of the ideas you have that other people could do.
Dude, I think you should pull up that video of the whole in one golf challenge.
This is one that I can't get out of my head.
Alright, there we go. Look at this freaking thing right here, and I see a
Basically a a golf
Putting green.
With just the part where the hole is.
And it's just floating out in the ocean.
And you said that this driving range in New Zealand pays out ten thousand dollars if you hit a hole in one.
It's a hundred and eleven yards away. You get this like
plaque if you hit the hole in one.
And um so w w what is the business here? They basically they ch it's like a carnival game. They charge you a little bit to try to hit a hole in one. Is that it?
Yeah, it's kind of like think of like unbundling a carnival. It's the business is math.
They're just using math, right?
And here's the math.
The the average amateur golfer and I don't golf.
I hate golf.
Um has a one in twenty five
thousand chance of getting a hole in one on a par three.
Which this is.
Okay.
Yeah and so
This
Company in New Zealand. It's right off the road on this lake.
Um, they have announced multiple times that they pay out on average once every two weeks.
So I can use math.
Uh to say, All right, these guys and I know how much they sell balls for. It's like
Forty bucks for twenty five balls or something.
Uh and they have a sensor in the hole and they have divers go get the balls every couple weeks. Yeah, there's like a scuba diver
Yeah swimming around the thing. Is he there all the time or he just does that once a week goes and gets all the balls?
Just once a week.
And so I can surmise
Based on math and statistics.
That this place.
net profit like three to five hundred thousand dollars a year, which is
There's nothing to see there. It's a little stand with a floating green, one guy just standing there with an iPad.
So why isn't this all over the place? Wait, so you said this is just roadside in New Zealand?
There's one. There's one of these in the world that I know of.
Off the side of a road in New Zealand. But it's off the side of the road. It's not even like Mirror Golf Course or tourist attraction. You're just saying this is just in a random area right now.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's say we wanted to do this. Let's brainstorm this together and maybe we'll actually do this. Maybe we'll find a a listener to run this for us to make it happen. But like we'll make this an MFM case study. All right. So how would we do this in order to make this happen?
Um, you know, quickly, like get momentum.
And then have it actually work, have it actually be successful.
So to me it's all about piggybacking.
Right. I don't want to guess where the golfers are.
Like.
There are no golfers where this place is, but how much better would they be doing if there was all already a captive audience right there?
And so I would just find one golf course.
You know how you you go you go to a golf course and like
After the eighteenth hole, there's just like a putting green where you can chill.
It would be like that.
Okay, take your nearest pond.
Put a floating green out there, put a T.
And have a little iPad with a stand.
And say, Here's your ball, just like a driving range.
Twenty balls, twenty bucks or whatever.
Ten thousand dollars if you get a hole in one.
And it's a way for a golf course to earn additional revenue.
they're not about to build a floating green and work out the logistics of the point of superpower. So you could yeah, you could do this as a service and say, We'll install this, you're gonna have more net income without doing any work.
We're gonna take thirty percent of all your revenue as a fee.
Okay, I kinda love this idea.
But you need
The water for this floating thing, right? Or what do you what are you suggesting? So like
How would you do this if the golf course is not situated by like, you know, like in this case it's like the ocean or whatever lake?
I think
I'm glad you brought that up'cause I think the water is a key point. Like
As men, we want to throw rocks in the water.
Yeah, I think visually there's a there's a
There's something that like my testosterone went up like fifteen points just looking at this. Like I could I could do this. Right. Like if if it was literally just like uh
Oh, like here's just like a hole. Here's those the nineteenth hole.
Right, you could do that. You could brand it. Oh, this is the nineteenth hole.
Just having that obstacle of Mother Nature there.
Yes.
There's something to that.
I mean you win either way. So you get it on the green, you feel awesome. You get a hole in one.
You win ten thousand dollars. You really feel awesome. You miss, you see a splash.
You can't lose. Or worst case scenario, you're just playing golf.
You're paying you're paying money to play golf, which is why you're there in the first place.
And you're gonna get content out of this also.
You're gonna have your buddy film you or we set up a camera here where you get like an Instagram worthy story.
Yes.
You know, for for this thing. How much how much do you say people pay to take a swing at this, or you know, they buy ten balls or what do they do? Thir it's like twenty bucks or like thirty five bucks for twenty balls, or fifty bucks for forty balls, something like that.
Oh, so you get like twenty to forty hacks at it to do it.
Yeah. And every guy thinks.
Right.
Of course.
Or that today might be a right. And also golf you're already
Like I don't know what the average spend is.
of a golf day. Like of a n of a golf outing. I don't play golf personally, but like
There's the there's the actual like
The cost to actually play that day on the course. There's all the clubs, investments you've done. There's the cab, there's the tips, there's the food, there's the the beer along the way. There's all this like money spent.
Dude, to spend an extra forty bucks
to have a blast with your buddies at the end or to have a story or to listen like you know do something at the end.
That's an absolute no brainer if you actually did this with the golf course.
I thought you were gonna say though that you would do it just on the route to the golf course. You know there's a lot of golfer traffic
Who's gonna take a roadside stop here and and try to do this?
I mean you could do that too. Like I'm picturing like a freeway.
With a a lake over to the right and an exit nearby.
You rent the billboard right above it, arrow pointing down, ten thousand dollars for a floating hole in one.
And people can just pull off.
And do it. Like it doesn't have to be a golf course. I
Like you could use the same principle and to me the principle is just
Math as a service, right? We're calling this a math business. Okay. Right. And it's
Like let's say you have a one in a hundred chance. It's a it's a it's an outdoor casino.
Yes. Exactly. W what is a slot machine, what is roulette, what is craps, what are all these games? These are
Games where the house just said
Cool, we'll take an edge.
We'll take a map.
And you get to play and have fun.
Right. Yeah, but we t we take the edge. And that what you're saying is to do the same thing.
Yeah, even like a putting green in a mall or something or or a walkable outdoor shopping area.
Let's say you've got like a one in five hundred chance of making a thirty foot putt.
So you say, Hey, thirty foot putt, you get it, we'll give you five hundred bucks.
And you just do the math and you say, All right, I'm you know
Every three thousand dollars I get, I'm gonna pay out five hundred bucks.
Statistically speaking. Dude, I love this idea. If you if you want to do this idea, email me Sean at Sean Puri, and then me and Chris.
We will we will help you do this and we will document the journey. We'll put it out there in the public. We'll kinda make it a thing. Because you I think part of it is the branding.
And the novelty factor.
And you wanna see this online first, and then people will actually drive out to do it or they'll plan to stop.
Not just
whoever happens to see it and understand it while they're driving fifty miles an hour down a road, you know what I mean? Yeah.
I like the name Nineteenth Hole. That's a good one.
It's good, right? We might need to snag that domain name before this goes live.
All right, so I love the whole in one golf course. All right, give me the next side hustle idea.
Okay, well
I wanna talk about Facebook marketplace.
I feel like
There's an entire economy.
In Facebook marketplace.
There are seven figure business owners.
Let's say fencing business.
All they do.
Is post to Facebook Marketplace organically once a week to get all their leads.
By the way, Facebook Marketplace has one billion monthly active users.
Just that towel. Crazy. And no one's talking about it.
What are we doing?
What
So I've got a story for you. I've got a story. And by the way, just explain the thing you just said real quick before you go to your story. So you said
There's people who own like local fencing companies. Their entire sales machine is posting on Facebook Place.
Fencing services. Is that what you're saying? Or answering uh the request for fencing service. What are they actually doing?
Yeah. Like they're just posting, hey, I put up fences, cedar, six foot, um, eight dollars per linear foot.
And then people message him and he goes out and gives a quote.
And he has a seven thousand dollar job. Like
There's nothing paid. There's no paid ads. This is just one organic post that takes them five minutes.
And he'll refresh it every couple of days. Dude, I don't know if you saw this. We did this episode with uh high schoolers. I think it was like a high school version of Shark Tank. I saw that, yeah. And there was a kid who was I think seventeen, eighteen years old, and his entire business, I forget even what the service was. It was home services of some kind. I don't remember.
Yeah, it was like window washing or like gut oh their their their their highlight thing. It was like gutter cleaning.
And his entire business model was off of next door.
So he's like, Yeah, I just started this in my neighborhood where I live. I went on next door and I say that I do this and I serviced
Yeah, the last year I service sixty homes in this
Neighborhood of six hundred homes or whatever it was.
for gutter cleaning and that generated I'm making up the numbers now'cause I don't remember off the top of my head, but it was like
Five hundred thousand in revenue.
And we were like, What? He's like, Yeah, I just post on there that this is what I do and then
It's people in our neighborhood.
And I was like, So could you post in the next neighborhood? He's like
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to get around the restrict you know, like, Yeah, I can, I just haven't done that yet. It's like wow.
This is g everybody should do this. Like, you know, what is my kid doing? Yeah, what what are they teaching you in pre-K right now? We gotta get after it with this next door.
Uh you know, next door lead gen basically. And so you're saying the same thing's happening at a bigger scale on Facebook marketplace.
Yeah.
Both great opportunities.
Okay, great. So tell me the story you're gonna tell me.
Yeah, this is this is an outlier example.
Okay. Results not guaranteed.
But
Twenty twenty twenty one.
China had canceled Bitcoin mining.
Right.
Twenty twenty one was a crazy year.
Lot of money being printed.
Uh and we started a bitcoin mining facility.
And people were selling Bitcoin miners and hosting services.
On Facebook Marketplace.
Um and so these miners cost ten thousand dollars.
So you go type in the name of the model and you see them listed cool.
Uh, but I thought, huh, the the hosting price, because if you buy a Bitcoin miner, you have to host it at like a data center.
And it's usually like two hundred bucks a month.
For the hosting fee.
So I just posted organically a Facebook marketplace.
Uh Bitcoin mining, hosting service. But instead of putting in the price of the miner, which turns people off.
Ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars. Great.
Yeah, I put in the price of the hosting.
Two hundred dollars. And then when you click into it in the description, it's like
It's actually two hundred for hosting. Here's the cost of the miners.
I'm not exaggerating.
Um
That one ad. And I had it going on multiple accounts. We would refresh it.
But no paid.
No paid.
Did nine point eight million dollars.
All on Facebook Marketplace in three months.
Profitably. Like this isn't like your oh and we spent nine point eight million in ads. Like
Right.
Profitably.
That's like the potential. Uh and kind of an extreme outlier, but I have other more you were selling
Miners that you ha that you already owned, or what were you doing?
We were pre selling them and then ordering from them China. So we had a positive cash flow con conversion cycle in addition to the U went on Facebook ads, you w specifically did the marketplace ads, is that right?
Not even ads. We're just posting.
Just posting. Just organic posting.
And you're posting every day, you're posting it and you're posting it in every city. Did you set up like a farm to post these? How'd you do that?
Yeah, we used VAs.
And multiple Facebook accounts.
And we post it in multiple cities'cause most people want to buy from someone local.
Um and the funnel was
You know, VA answers
uh response.
Then they
push them to a sales call'cause it's hard to sell something so expensive over the internet.
Once they got on the sales call.
We would close like half of'em.
Right.
And so and then you would close them and then you'd go order that same thing from China because there's like a knowledge arbitrage here of like I don't know how to go or I don't trust spending ten thousand dollars on Alibaba or AliExpress
And so you would then do that and you'd have a margin. What was the rough margin on something like that?
Call it thirty percent.
Thirty five and high ticket. So
And this one I'm guessing didn't last in the sense that like, you know, in twenty twenty five, maybe the same
market dynamics, the demand, the supply are not the same. Is that true?
Yep.
Really the biggest variable here is like the frothiness of the mining market.
Which is not good right now.
So I think this would work again if the mining market turned around more.
When the time is like like would you do this like are you planning to do this again if the mining market, you know, gets uh
Gets hyped again.
Yes.
Yeah and how do you spend your money, dude? So let's say you make a few million dollars doing something like this. What do you what does Chris like to spend his money on?
Oh man.
Um
I'm my family, we go on cool vacations and starting more businesses.
Um, I invest in real estate, but I just I love like starting businesses is my it's the only thing I know.
But it seems like you start businesses that don't take a lot of capital.
Yeah, that's true.
But
I like investing.
uh like tripling down on businesses that are more mature.
Along the way.
Where I can see a clear path to growth with more capital.
What's another Facebook marketplace idea that somebody could do?
Like is it as simple as, Hey, I noticed that there are garage shelving companies, they're not currently active in my area.
I go talk to ten business owners, I say, Hey, if I bring you a customer
Give me three hundred dollars or whatever it is, and you do lead gen because that that business owner doesn't even think to do Facebook marketplace activity to
To drive that. Most most service people
Most small business owners
Don't even think this way, right?
Oh yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you could literally build an agency that just posts to Facebook marketplace for business owners, sells them the leads, right? Right. But
You mentioned shelving.
I interviewed this guy named Alex.
On my podcast, The Kerner Office.
And he has a six figure business.
Just building.
Not shelving.
But garage shelving on wheels.
With Costco totes.
Like that's it.
Uh
Only with organic Facebook marketplace posts.
And he net profits.
Hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year.
That's the whole business.
Right. Garage shelving on Facebook Marketplace.
All right.
Three hundred dollar saw.
And he goes and buys two by fours.
And he he didn't even have a truck for like the first year and a half.
Right.
Okay, what are your other ideas? I see a list of ten here and we've probably done two or three. So give me give me more.
All right, any idea or you want you want no no any idea. You want me to just call out one of these? Just tee me up, yeah.
Take local tourist traps and put them in your home market. Is this like the Hold in One Challenge or you talking about something else?
Different. Yeah, this is a good one.
So I went y you've seen a a rest development.
I assume.
Of course.
Okay. So there's money in the banana stand.
We all know that. Um
We first day business school in Harvard, that's what they teach you.
Yes. So I went to Balboa Island with my family last year.
And we went to the banana stand. For whatever reason, this one street
It has like seven banana stands and there's one that's supposedly the best.
And I shelled out like eight dollars each for these bananas covered in chocolate and nuts.
And I made a video.
uh about, you know, how much profit these guys make. Because as I went to the window
I had to.
I asked her, How many of these do you sell the day? What's your busiest day ever? What's your slowest day ever. All these people are behind me. Do you want nuts or no nuts on a banana? People were but I had to know. And then to make matters worse, I pull out my phone and make a video about how anyone could copy them. So I'm a great guy.
Exactly. Steal your banana.
Th this one little shop that's like three hundred square feet.
Is doing like seven million a year in frozen bananas.
Like and what's the margin on an eight dollar banana?
With chocolate and peanut.
And so I just thought like
Why isn't this like
Why isn't this a thing? I didn't go to Balboa Island for the bananas. Once I was there, I I got them.
But there are Balboa Islands all over the world.
And most of them have no banana stand. Like
So it's this idea isn't just about banana stand, it's about
Taking something really unique and novel and
Maybe it's like the old Western
Timey photo booths that you see in Pigeon Forge.
Maybe it's like um funnel cake or like the mini donuts that you see in Gatlinburg. Like take something like that.
And just test it.
I'm not saying it's gonna work, but you could test it very, very cheaply.
in other tourist markets or in non tourist markets.
Yeah, that's interesting. I wonder if that would work. Like I wonder how much of the
appeal is that oh humans just like these kind of frozen chocolate bananas.
Or is it that
In that area, on that street, it's kinda known for this, and you see a line, and so you see the line and you start doing it. Like I wonder if that like
It's kinda like an organ transplant. I wonder if there's like that d you know, donor rejection or sor the the host rejection of the of the organ.
When you put one of these in a new in a new area.
It could be, but I think that the greatest chance you've had you would have s for success.
Is taking specifically a tourist trap.
And putting it in.
a different tourist trap. Where it's like this is a unique novel thing that people don't buy when they're home.
But like for instance, um
I have a friend in in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, that owns an indoor sledding facility.
You can't tell me that wouldn't work.
in other tourist traps that have the same type of demographic there, you know?
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Um, okay, give me another one. How about um Toasted Tours? What is this?
This is a
All right.
This this is in Northern California.
By you.
This guy took a
A forty foot shipping container.
Put it on the back of a semi truck.
Cut out the walls.
Put handrails on there.
put tables in there, chairs in there.
And he takes people on wine tours.
It's a party bus.
But it's not even a bus, it's a shipping container.
And it's open air.
Open air, yeah. They like cut out the sides.
Yes. And so I'm swiping Instagram one day and I see this video that just broke my frame.
It's the shipping container and people are like dancing inside as it's going around a bend.
At a high rate of speed.
Yeah, this look dangerous.
What am I looking at?
But this guy
Crush it.
Like his first year, and he had experience in doing like wine tours, but nothing like this.
I think he did like over a million bucks his first year.
With like sixty percent margins.
What I like about some of these is that they are
visually viral.
So, you know, but the definition of virality, uh people get it wrong. People think it's a word of mouth. Word of mouth is actually a different thing. Word of mouth is I like this so much, I wanna tell my friends about it.
Mm-hmm. Viral is actually more like a sneeze. You spread a virus without even wanting to spread it, right? This was like
Back when uh hotmail started. I'm just sending you an email. I'm not trying to tell you to use hotmail, but because I'm sending you an email from my hotmail address, and at the bottom it says,
I sent this via hotmail.
You know, they they added that to the bottom of the email. It spread like a virus. And that's how
You know, a lot of the big viral services
actually spread. Facebook was like this, right? I'm look I'm uploading photos, I'm just tagging my friends.
I'm not trying to tell them, hey, you should join Facebook. I'm having a grand old time here.
They tagged a friend, it sent them an email said you got tagged in a photo and people can't resist
Being like somebody put a photo up of me on the internet, I must see this. And that's how Facebook grew early on. It was like this this one viral loop.
And then there's this other types of virality. One is like this, visually viral.
Where
It's not like the people on this truck
We're trying to go tell everyone about it, but it's so
Novel looking.
That I can't help but
Look at it, learn about it, you know, and and I think the the whole in one challenge has the same benefit, which is like
You see it, it's super interesting to look at. You get the concept right away.
And it's worth remarking on. You're talking about it with people. You notice it. You wanna do it.
Bec the act of somebody else doing it made you want to do it. And so I like these things that are sort of walking billboard style businesses.
Because
Um you know, they market themselves once you get them going.
Dude I I have some
Really good I uh uh good examples of visually viral stuff.
To have you seen that guy
That does like he'll mow people's lawn for free.
Please tell me you've seen it. Who is this guy?
Okay, this guy out of Kansas or something, young guy, he owned a lawn care business, small kind of struggling business, and one day
He sets up his tripod.
S B mowing.
And S B pressure washing.
He sets up a tripod in the big YouTube channel now, right?
So this guy has
Forty five million followers across platforms combined.
Forty five million.
And all he does is he sets up a tripod, he puts on a mic, he walks up to a door, he says, Hey, your lawn looks like crap.
Mind if I mow it for free?
What's the catch?
I publish this to YouTube and make money.
Cool.
And then he mows it for free with a time lapse video, visually viral. Yeah.
Yes, we want to see the outcome.
The retention is there, so the platforms push it. Like what is it gonna look like when he's done?
And this guy, I mean, what is the value of forty five million social media followers versus the value of a local lawn care business?
Right.
I mean, dude look at this, by the way. Like if you just sort by popular
Yeah, he stacks the things. So there's the visual viral part of
Uh before and after.
Which humans want to complete that. They want to know the the solution.
Then you have um
the sort of novelty surprise factor, like, oh, this guy's doing this for free. That's interesting. Why? I want to know what's the answer here.
But then he stacks on drama. So the top videos are Angry home homeowner confronts me while I'm mowing this vacant home. Cop approaches me while I'm mowing this deserted home and tells me this.
Homeowners stunned at how how wide the sidewalks are.
Right.
Her tears said it all My prayers have been answered. So this guy has this skill stack where he's got, you know, the the lawn care, this sort of that's one skill that okay is worth
You know, only X dollars in the market of
Of the economy.
But then he stacks on being really good at content.
And those two together created a how many lawn care guys are really good at content? I don't know. Zero? Like you know, the the numbers
Less than a dozen. And so suddenly he became
rare. And when you're rare, you're valuable.
Exactly.
Yeah.
That's really cool.
Okay, so let's jump in. Side hustles and um
The ones that you currently have. So let's do some of the fun ones. The one I met you on is about
Buckies.
And so for people who don't know, could you explain just how crazy of a busin Buckies is and then the side hustle you created.
Off the back of Bucky's.
Yeah. Bucky's is like your redneck Disney gas station.
They're about half the size of a Costco.
There's fifty one locations and they do like sixty to eighty million in revenue per year each.
And it's just
If if you haven't been there, there's nothing like it's like a religious.
Three billion in revenue on fifty gas stations. Yeah.
Yeah.
What? Yeah. Well I've never been to a Bucky's. What what makes a Bucky so great? Is it even a gas station, or is it just something else with that happens to have gas?
It's a brand with a gas station. They have over a hundred pumps. You walk in
There's just things happening everywhere. You've got tacos being made. You've got people shouting about brisket.
You've got beaver nuggets, T shirts.
Like beavers walking around.
the the cleanest bathrooms you'll ever find.
There's nothing else like it. You just walk in and you're you're amazed from the get go.
Okay, before you tell me your side hustle off the back of that, what's the quick
kind of origin story of this. Has this been around for like a hundred years?
Who started it? Like why is this so successful? I mean, I've never heard that. Three billion dollars in revenue on fifty-one gas stations.
They founded like 40 years ago. This guy named Arch. He was called Bucky as a kid. And he opened a gas station. And then they just started going bigger and bigger and bigger. They just kept pushing the envelope and
Their whole signature was this mascot.
Just this cheesy looking beaver that people just loved.
And so once they started selling merch T shirts and and tumblers and all that.
They just exploded and they're really unique in that
They put themselves in far flung areas.
Um they're not like
in the city, they're on the way to a vacation.
Or close to a vacation destination. Oh, so it's like the perfect rest stop, right? Because
If anybody like I was just on a road trip, we drove to Tahoe.
And it's a three three hour drive, roughly.
But there's these patches where you need to stop in the middle.
And the bar is so low for rest up
Experience, right? It's like you know, it's basically a port-a-potty uh in a good in a good scenario, and then you get like the trucker rest stops, then you get a gas station, then you get like
Maybe a little strip mall with the Starbucks.
But what you're saying is they built something actually like really cool out in that's on those drives.
And that maybe is like one of the golden insights for them.
Yeah.
It's just the you walk in and you're a captive audience. You can buy lunch.
You can buy gas. Most people just park at the pump.
You can buy a T shirt and
The average ticket, I I don't know what it is. They're privately traded, but people spend hundreds of dollars there. You're not just like buying a Celsius and and hopping out. All right. What is this business you created on top of Bucky's or like your side hustle for Bucky's?
Yeah. So
Back to what you said about me not being able to focus. I was
in the middle of running this business that was growing and demanding all of our time and attention.
And I took my business partner to Bucky's and he was from Utah was his first time.
And on the way home
I distinctly remember this. I remember the overpass.
I was driving. I'm ashamed to say I pulled out my phone.
And I said
Kirk.
These guys must kill it online. And I said, Do you know
Disney does like X billion just through their online merch store.
These guys must kill it. So I go to Buckies dot com, I look for the shop button, and it wasn't there.
They didn't sell online anything, not food, snacks, shirts, anything.
Yeah.
I just like I just sat there in silence. I felt like capitalism was being murdered. Like what is
Why what like what good reason is there for this? And this was like six years ago.
And so then we just started talking.
And we're just like, What if
What if we launched a website for them?
What if we went online for them? Because we were running a three PL third party logistics business at the time, really hard business, and we thought
We could launch this business for them.
as like a permissionless way to get their business.
Uh end to end.
And get them as a customer. And maybe they'll try to sue us, but
Worst case, it'll be a great story.
And so what'd you do?
So the first thing I did was started cold emailing the founders, the executive team, everyone and saying, Hey
You need to be online. We can do it for you. We'll build a Shopify store. We'll do everything end to end. We have a warehouse, shelf space, et cetera.
No response.
Just cricket.
So at that point it's like all right, let's take this into our own hands. So most people give up there, right? Try to partner. Most people won't even cold email, but if you do cold email, you give up when they don't reply.
Yep.
Exactly. So
We bought Beaversnacks.com.
Uh because that's their mascot was a beaver.
And I went to ThumbTal and I hired a photographer for like two hundred dollars.
And I I documented all this. I have pictures of all this. I took my four kids and wife to the nearest Bucky's.
And w my wife and I split up. I said, You get merch.
I'll get snacks.
If it has a Bucky's logo on it, buy it.
Like I don't want the Doritos or the Coke.
It'cause they white label a bunch of stuff, right?
Okay, I only want something with a Bucky's logo. So we spent like three thousand dollars, we had a receipt this long.
We took it back to the warehouse.
Was the lady like, wow, what are you what are you doing? They were everyone was looking at us. And I'm like an introvert. I hated it. I felt so weird. I'm like, don't look at me, just
Let me do my thing.
So we bring it all back to the warehouse, we put it in this office.
Hire this photographer.
And she takes pictures of everything. We upload it in a CSV to Shopify.
We launch a website.
Uh Beaversnacks.com.
Yeah, I say launch. Like nobody knew it existed.
So the first thing I did was start
Scraping and cold emailing every Texas reporter I could find.
Eater Southern Living.
uh Texas Monthly
Fox News thirty eight, you know, San Antonio district.
You name it.
And I just start saying like
Here's who I am.
Here's what I'm doing. Here's who I am. Here's what I'm doing. And so you weren't afraid, because most people try to be laying low doing this, because hey, we don't have an official partnership. You took the opposite approach. You're like, hey.
Can I use this story?
To get some attention.
Whether it be good or bad, is that right?
Yeah,'cause I thought like, okay, worst case scenario.
Cease and desist. We have great story for our podcast one day.
Best case scenario, we get them as a customer, or this is a standalone business.
Somewhere in between is gonna be interesting, right?
Uh, maybe I have to fill my pantry with snacks, like three thousand dollars worth of snacks and my kids eat it for the next seven years. We had a guest come on and he said, you know, do what makes the best story. When in doubt, like when you're at a fork in the road, do whichever take whichever path will make the best story. You chose
The path that'll make the best story here. Okay. So you'd heard pressure. I heard that episode and I thought, that's me. I agree with that.
So I also did my research and it's called first sale doctrine.
Which means
Anyone can sell, resell, whatever they want. They just can't pretend or imitate that brand.
Right. Like the there's a guy that imitated trader Joes to do what I did, but he called himself Pirate Joes.
The logo was similar, the store layout was similar, and he got sued out of existence. So
I thought okay, as long as I say I am not Buckies, I'm a third party reseller and I'm clear about that.
They really don't have grounds to sue me.
So I started called emailing people.
They loved the story.
And I started getting on the phone with reporters.
And any tips on that? So
You know, I've learned this w with with PR, which is that there's
PR is just very specific.
Niche game. And once you understand how a journalist thinks
You can
reverse engineer what you need to actually do. So like for example
Our buddy Ramon.
Did this recently.
He went mega, mega viral because and he knew this. He c texted me, he called a shot, he's like
As soon as the tariff dues came out.
And uh some people thought this is gonna be horrible for businesses. Some people thought, Well, why don't those businesses just make it in America? We'll buy it if it's made in America.
And so he launches an A B test on his website. So he Afina.com. It's like a shower uh a clean shower head.
So he was he runs a A B test.
And he says you can either buy buy the one that's sourced
Out of China.
Or you could buy the one that's sourced out of America and the American one costs a little bit more.
Uh, because it costs more to make it in America, but you know, here you go. You have a choice.
And the results were something crazy, twenty five thousand visits or something like that.
And there were literally zero checkouts on the American product. There's a few hundred on the on the on the Asian made product.
And he goes to the journalist. He ran the test because he knew
Look, either the results are gonna show
People will buy made in America.
Or they won't. In either case, I have a very strong story.
And he goes and he gets it written up. It's been written up in like forty major publications now. And he got tons of traffic to the site, tons of backlinks. His SEO went way up. It was a genius quick acting move on the back of the tariff news. When
Most people were playing defense like me.
In ecom, you're like, Oh shit, I just need to survive. He went and played offense.
So I was c I'm curious, do you have any tips from your experience about
How to get people to actually write about you.
Yeah.
You have to understand that reporters want something cool to write about.
Um I I get DMs all the time from people
Wanting something from me.
Yeah.
Ninety eight percent of them, they have nothing interesting to talk about.
But if someone DM me and said, Hey, I did this cool thing, will you post about it?
I would'cause I want to post about cool things. You know? My job is to post interesting things. Yes. Please send it to me.
Um so once you realize that, like
Do something interesting, something cool.
And then go tell as many people as you can about it.
And a small percentage of them will post about it, reporters included. How how did you frame it at the time?
I framed it as
I am doing a viral marketing stunt.
And I want to get Bucky's attention.
And if I don't, then I'm gonna run this business as well as I can.
Oh, so you told the reporters that up front?
Yeah.
Oh okay, gotcha.
But by the way, give us the headline'cause you know, we're talking about this out also. We haven't mentioned how well it's done. Can you give us some numbers that give us an idea of like the success of this?
I mean, I'll tell you what the headline literally was, and it was like Texas man makes two hundred grand in his first thirty days reselling Bucky's goods.
I might.
That was it.
So
Texas Monthly reach out to me. They're the biggest Texas news publication. And they were like, We love this. We're going to make this a feature story. Give me everything you can. So we talked and we talked and talked.
Then later that afternoon.
They're like, Chris, good news. Uh
Bucky's in house counsel.
Would love to chat.
And I'm like what's good about that, like I'm dead.
I'm dead in the water.
And so I was like, Okay, you you told Bucky's great. I'm glad you were able to get a hold of them.
So I get on the phone with him and
He's like, listen.
We actually don't mind what you're doing.
Uh I don't like the name Beaver Snacks. We're a beaver. It's kinda confusing. I don't like that your colors are yellow. We're kind of yellow.
Uh change the name.
Put a disclaimer in your logo.
that is persist throughout the whole website, put a disclaimer on every product page.
And you have our blessing. Like we're not gonna sign anything.
But we're not gonna come after you, like we will support you.
And so we did. We made those changes.
And then they link to us. What a cool ass general counsel.
That's pretty rare.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then they link to us in their FAQs.
Which is like the most amazing backlink ever.
So
On one hand, going viral meant
We got a millian competitors.
And like all these copy cats.
But on the other hand.
We have like the biggest SEO moat that we could ever hope for.
So wait, how you skipped a step. You said
Their headline was
Two hundred thousand dollars in thirty days. But you didn't say how you got the two hundred thousand dollars in thirty days. Wh how did you initially get that traction?
It was all based on those viral articles. We didn't do any paid ads. We just went viral.
Uh we put everything as in stock.
Uh you know, on Shopify you can do that, whether it's in stock or not.
And we just started selling out.
So the articles initially must not have been two hundred thousand. The articles initially were just like
Texas man starts
shop to sell Bucky stuff online. Correct. Yeah, yeah. They've written about us since then. But in the beginning it was Texas Man
They called it Text Pats instead of expats. Like
Texas Man launches online bucky store for Tex Pats.
Um, that was like the big headline.
Like a a person from Texas who's no longer in Texas, but misses their stacks.
Mrs. Yeah.
That was the whole thesis because these Buckys are in like Ennis, Texas, like these places that you've never heard of because they're on the way to the beach.
And so if you fell in love with this
Random
Bohemian garlic jerky.
You could never buy it again.
Right. And so that's where we came in, like buy it from us.
And so how's this business doing now? Was this a flash in the pan or is it still doing well?
This business has grown twenty to
Fifty percent per year.
Every single year.
Steady Eddy.
We just
We are completely riding on the coattails of Buckies and we are not ashamed to admit that.
So can you say how much revenue you guys are doing on this thing?
We're doing between three and five hundred thousand a month.
Profitably.
With very, very little paid out spending. And the the funny thing is here, you go buy it retail.
Right. You don't have like a wholesale discount.
They're not giving it to you at a cut. So you
You buy retail and then you just mark up what, ten, twenty percent or something? What what do you do?
We mark it up a hundred percent.
Oh, okay'cause you're like if you want it twenty if you want it that bad, here.
This is the
You know, this is your way to get it.
Honestly, we market up as much as we have to. I mean, you know e commerce to make a
Fifteen, twenty percent net margin.
And that happens to be about a hundred percent markup.
Right. That's amazing. Okay, so that's
One of your side hustles. We said that there was, you know, like six that were each uh you know, six figures. I don't know if we'll get to all six, but give me another one. So what's another
of your side hustles right now that are contributing to your your cash flow.
So we started
A pet cremation business.
Uh, and that's a fun one. That one's actually
Very profitable. That's a fun one. Fun for you. Fun for you, maybe. Yeah. Okay. So explain. How'd you get the idea?
And then what is it and how how'd you do it?
Okay. So it all started with
uh a relationship that my business partner had with a very high volume veterinary clinic here in DFW.
They do as much business as five veterinary clinics.
And
He learned about the industry and how
Pet cremation has like 90 plus percent net margins.
It's a very old school business.
And so there's a
But you know, we've had this puppy bo boom during covet.
So all these puppies are five years old now.
Uh with there's more dogs than children.
That's that's like the whole thesis. There's more dogs than children. It's only getting crazier. A cremation has ninety percent margins.
Most of the operators are sixty plus years old. They're doing great.
They're doing fine. They don't need ads. They don't need organic
And if you go look at the Google keyword tool.
We saw that the search competition was low.
The ticket size was high.
Uh and the
The um
The search traffic.
was high.
So we launched a business around that thesis.
S sorry, so explain you went to the
You went to uh the Google ads keyword tool, right? That's where you went to to kinda diligence the the the demand for this.
And you found obviously the holy grail. Low low competition, high ticket, and what was the third one? Growth or demand?
Like volume. High volume, low competition, high ticket.
Yeah. Holy grill.
And so you start
one of these and you're you're actually the service that does it or you're the lead gen?
We are both. We have two different businesses.
One is a programmatic SEO site that generates leads for cremation facilities all over the country.
And then the other one is we're just a middleman. We have refrigerated vans.
And we pick up
The Pets?
Frozen.
From the facilities and deliver it.
From the veterinarians.
And then we deliver it to the cremation facilities and take a margin.
Okay, gotcha. And so tell me a little about this business. I don't I know nothing about the pet cremation business.
What did you do in the first
ninety days to make this business come to life. Cause I like
The speed with which you operate. We're gonna talk about another one in a second that I think is like a
a quick off the ground version of these ideas and
You very much are a zero to one.
Kind of guy. Like I like that
You do
A lot of different things.
I like that you're high energy and you're basically like
Not lazy. There's a lot of people out here who sell this kind of like
Side hustle, passive income. There's nothing passive about you. I feel like you are Mr. Active, actually, in the sense that
You get after it. Once you have an idea.
You know, I have this phrase like, you know
Uh inspiration is perishable. Ideas are avocados. They go brown very quickly. And
I think what's great about you is that
You don't let the ideas and the inspiration perish. You actually act on it very quickly and you have
You have a high, high bias for action. So what are the first
Ninety or ninety or so days look like when you have a new idea.
And maybe you could use this one as an example, or if not, you could use a different one.
Yeah. I focus
most of my energy on validating the idea.
with like some ad spend or a couple of conversations or whatnot.
I I don't do
Any like
extensive market research. I don't talk to any potential customers. And I'm not saying there's not value in that. That's just not how I roll.
I really, really like
Using tools like Facebook, like
General publicly available tools that most people don't and love.
Stuff I can do for my boxers at home. That's what I like for. Right.
Yes. And a lot of times by the end of the day, I realise, Oh, this is a dud.
Let's move on.
Um
Uh also a lot of the times, by the end of the day, I'm like
Oh wow, there's something here.
My thesis was true. Let's let's put another day into this. So so like what what would you do in this pet creation business? What did you do? So the thesis here started with this relationship that my business partner had.
The pitch was let's get
the the cremation facility owner.
And the veterinary clinic owner.
In the same room together.
And pitch them this, like win win. Hey.
We're gonna get you more veterinarian clinics because we're really good at sales.
Okay, and then to the vet.
Hey.
Uh you need to raise your prices, you're way too low.
uh you're gonna make even more margin working through a middleman.
believe it or not, because we're gonna be we're gonna only do one thing.
We're gonna
Pick up pets and we're gonna drop'em off.
And so there was a big conflict of interest interest here because the cremation facility owner
Was about to lose some margin.
But he was
Like we were selling him on the fact that we would bring him
A lot more customers.
And so
Basically this was a good
Like example of what I normally do.
If that conversation doesn't go well
I don't launch the business. I just move on. And you weren't afraid that when you put those two in the same room, they're like, Great, yeah, we should do this.
Who's this guy?
Why do we do this guy?
Did you see any risk in putting yourself there as the middleman with this and and actually connecting the two dots, the really high volume vet clinic with the information service that you thought
They should be using.
Well, the thing is is that they were already working together.
Right.
And so
I what you're saying was correct. That was the risk. We we insert ourselves. You're saying there was some friction. There was some friction that you were offering to remove, is that right?
Yeah.
And the friction in this case was what?
The the veterinary or the cremation facility owner made all his margin.
On the
actually doing the cremation and he was losing money on all the logistics.
Okay. Um
But this customer we were talking to was one of his biggest customers.
And so we were saying, Hey
You're gonna lose some margin on this biggest customer because we're inserting ourselves, we're gonna take some of it.
But we're gonna more than compensate for it by a
removing that logistics off your plate and B finding you more veterinary clinics.
And then for the vet clinic you were saying, hey
Raise your price a little bit.
And yeah, we we we need to be able to do that for to make this work.
Yep.
And so our thesis was if that conversation doesn't go well
The the business definition. Right. It's a asymmetric, but
But if it does.
then we have, you know, the m the hardest part. We have customers and revenue through the door from day one if if the if they're if they agree to this.
Exactly.
And then you went and tried to recreate that with, you know, getting fifteen other veteran acquis. Now most of them, I assume, would already have had a partner or some vendors for cremation services.
And so
What's your sales pitch to them? How did you go and get more customers on board?
Yeah, our sales pitch was like
Our competitors were very unsophisticated. Like they would literally walk through the front door of a veterinary clinic.
Get the frozen dogs.
put them in a bag and then walk out the waiting room.
And so our pitch was like
That's our competition.
We will never do that.
We'll pull out back.
Unmarked van.
We'll be very caring and respectful.
Um, in some cases they don't even have to pay anymore.
Uh and we'll just be we'll just pick up the phone and be reliable. That was the pitch.
And i is there something to learn here about like
You know, there's so many of these simple businesses where
the bar is really low or people are simply not doing any outreach. They're not doing any door to door sales.
Like
Have you made a killing in just
You know, Warren Buffett has said this before. He goes, The secret to winning is low competition is is uh is weak competition, right? Like he's not looking to prove that he's a genius at the hardest games. He's looking for
very weak competition where he can simply be competent and he can just do best practices. Oh dude. Like
It is so true. We see it on Twitter all the time. Like just
Go go find a a business with a fax machine to compete against them. Like
Yes, that actually works. I
We own a tree trimming business.
And
A big bottleneck for us is stump grinding.
So we thought
I thought man, there needs to be a business.
That's just some grinding, but B to B.
Not stump grinding that goes through the homeowners, but only the ones that goes through
uh the other tree trimming companies'cause we own a tree trimming company and we could see it from the inside. So I had a thesis.
I I hired a virtual assistant and today I would just use a an AI voice agent.
And I took the city of Houston.
And I scraped every single tree trimming business in Houston. There was about a thousand.
And I had this virtual assistant call every single one.
And no take. Did they answer?
Did the f number work?
If they did answer.
Say
Do you grind stumps? If yes, then would you ever outsource that?
If yes, then how much would you pay?
So I spent like two hundred dollars getting this research.
I'm not familiar with the tree trimming business. Surprise, surprise. So why does a tree trimming business not also do the stumps? Why is that a separate problem that they don't like to deal with?
Yeah.
Great question. So a tree trimming business needs
Sometimes a bucket truck to get up high.
And a chainsaw.
Right. But that's only half the battle. Then you gotta get the stump out of the ground, or else, you know, you can't grow grass there.
And so it's a
A stump grinder, you've got a pull on a trailer.
Whereas before you don't even need a trailer, it's just a whole different system.
And they gotta go rent it. They stand in line. They pay three hundred dollars. They rent it. They put gas in it. They drive it back to the job site.
They grind it, then they gotta bring it back. And it's like
It it eats into their profit.
And so I thought, okay.
If a tree trimming company could just outsource all of their stump grinding.
B to be only.
Is there an opportunity there?
So the assistant goes, she calls everybody, she asked them would they be willing to to outsource that? And are people just saying, Yeah, yeah, we we'd be willing to outsource that? Is that like a c can you get that clear of a signal just off of a
A VA's phone call?
So only twenty two percent of people answered the phone.
Um.
And of the ones that did
Almost half of them said if I could outsource this.
I would.
Gladly. And then we then we even got further down the script and said, Would you pay s seven uh
Seven dollars per inch or whatever of diameter.
Yes.
And then
I published all that info on my podcast and
People went out and started stump grinding businesses with the exact thesis.
And we learned.
Yeah, pick an industry where p people seem to be doing well.
And call all of them.
See how many answer their phone. You can cross reference that against like the Google keyword tool and you know publicly available stuff.
And see how much demand for supply is there in any given market.
Mm-hmm.
Okay, I like that. You did one recently. You had this um Instagram video. I'm gonna actually play it here, but
I love this video for a couple of reasons. Uh one, just the idea is fun, but the but two, like, you know, your energy and what you're describing here is is pretty great. So
Uh here, I'll let this. This is you
Talking about starting a pickleball
facility.
This freaking thing right here, I'm right here in my warehouse slash shop. It is 2100 square feet and I'm putting a business here. It's called Secret Pickleball and it's gonna be 99 bucks a month. I'm gonna cap it at 200 members,$20,000 a month. There are 7,700 people within 10 minutes of here that play pickleball every week and I just need 200 of them to make this a six figure business. No employees,
twenty four seven key card access right there. Cameras, bathroom, vending machines already in the next sixty days. We're adding drywall, we're painting lines, adding the bathroom back there. If you want to watch me fail or you wanna watch me win, follow and I'll document the whole journey.
Warehouse.
And it's and you're like
Look at this freaky thing right here, which is how you start all of your videos, which I think is a hilarious little hook.
So can you uh add some color to this. So where's the what's the origin of this idea? How's this going? Tell me tell me more about this idea.
Yeah, so that shop that I'm in in the video is in my back backyard, basically. It's at the back of my property.
Historically I've rented it out to landscaping businesses for like twenty five. You live on like a ranch or something? What what is this? It's three acres.
And it's very like
Yeah, it's at the back of my of my property.
And so I was just thinking like what is the best and highest use of this property?
And have you ever been to uh Secret Pizza in I think it's the Cosmo in Vegas?
Yeah. Yeah, I love that place.
Yeah, that place does like nine million a year in pizza and they don't have a Google
Profiler with no website. Yeah. If people haven't been there, it's like five feet wide. It's like a tidy hallway. Like
In high school, if your locker was like on the side, it's basically that. And they just sell slices of pizza at the Cosmo Hotel in Vegas.
Yes.
So I was going for that. Like I call it secret pickleball.
And
I I just thought, okay, I'm gonna run some Facebook ads, I'm gonna go to my shop, I'm gonna take three videos, I'm gonna A B C test them on
Facebook ads.
Instant form.
Six mile radius. Sorry, w was your ad uh a video like this where you're saying I'm gonna build this here? Or was it like a a mock up? That was one of the three.
Yeah, the one you showed was one of my three ads.
Yeah. And what uh what were the other two? Were they like finished product, like a rendering, or what what did you do with the other two? One of them had like an AI
really bad AI image rendering like overlay for a split second, but that's it. I'm just standing in this empty warehouse.
And when you say I ran some Facebook ads, give people a sense of how you do that, right? Everyone I know who does this.
they have uh, you know, a certain budget, like, hey, I'm gonna run five I'm gonna spend five hundred dollars and I'm looking for
maybe this cost per click, or I'm looking for this much net conversion of people signing up to my wait list.
Or
Or they even have a fake checkout and then they refund people afterwards saying like, Hey, sorry, this doesn't actually exist yet, or you know, I'm st we got delayed eight, but it'll be out soon. I refunded you for now, but you know, it's coming.
And they're looking for that funnel, the metrics to to sort of validate that hey
Cool. If this works at five hundred dollars, I think I'd be able to spend maybe a thousand or five thousand dollars.
in order to get my two hundred members or you know, fifty thousand dollars to get my two hundred members, whatever it is.
Um can you explain your method for Facebook ad testing this?
Yeah, for sure. So
I used one campaign.
And then three ad sets.
And three adds.
One video for each ad set and I started it at twenty five dollars a day per video.
So seventy five dollars a day total.
My ad was a Facebook instant form.
Asking for name, phone, email.
Then after the instant form it
It forwarded them to a type form.
With nineteen questions.
That are very granular.
What is your skill level at pickleball? How often do you play?
How mu do you do doubles or singles? Cause all of this is gonna tur determine how many members I can take on.
And the whole the whole thesis is to be
One pickleball court.
Indoors nice private air conditioning.
uh that people pay one to two hundred dollars a month for. So
I don't want the pros that play twice a day.
I like it's a very finite resource. I want people that hardly ever play.
Like
The planet fitness model, except expensive. Yeah.
But I knew five percent of Americans play pickleball weekly.
And I knew within six miles of me there's
Two hundred thousand people.
So I needed like
There's like five to seven thousand people in my TAM, my local TAM, right?
And I was hoping that I could convert someone for a hundred dollars.
Because
My guess is that the LTV, the lifetime value is gonna be about a thousand dollars.
But I think it's actually a lot more because no one plays pickleball alone.
So I get one custom, they're gonna bring two to three or four, right?
What I learned was
I'm converting
Like
I don't
The L T V is still to be determined, but
I'm able to convert new customers at twelve dollars.
Each.
And so how many members does this secret does this exist now? Like this I don't know when you're posting. I'm building it out. I'm I'm literally putting a septic tank in the building right now. Like it's being built out, but I'm expecting to be. So you already had the structure there. How much are you gonna put into making a pickleball cork to bring this idea to life?
On the low end, twenty thousand, realistically.
Thirty to forty.
That's it. Wow, I would have guessed it's more.
Yeah. Well it has air conditioning.
I I need to expand the building'cause I need room for a bathroom and then I need to add a bathroom. So with if I didn't need a bathroom, it would be
Much less. And then I need to paint lines.
So anybody could just Google Maps pickleball court in your area.
Right? Like wherever you live, you could hundred percent. You could just m take a map and you could be like
Where is their
Not space. And then you could go drive them and just see, Oh wow, that one's kinda shitty, or it's outdoors.
Right.
Or this one over here.
It's always overrun. It's always packed.
And you could literally just map out that oh wow, I just need to take an industrial space and convert it.
To a
A private pickleball gym, a membership, right?
One court, two court, three court, whatever.
Uh and so the math you're saying here, are you charging a hundred bucks or what'd you end up charging?
I'm gonna end up charging one forty nine.
Alright.
So you're charging one forty nine. Are you still targeting two hundred members or did you find out that that assumption was too high or too low?
It's it's
I can
Except around a hundred and fifty members.
If I accept the right members.
All right. And so you're talking about twenty two thousand a month.
of top line revenue from this.
And you're saying it might cost you in this case
twenty grand, thirty grand to to build. I think somebody else. Let's just assume it's even
Seventy five thousand dollars. Let's triple the price um to to build up because
Maybe either space needs it or you're just being conservative.
So you got twenty two thousand coming in, uh top line.
Is there any OpEx here? Do you need a person there? Is it like do you have a key membership?
Thing like that.
What is your monthly cost in terms of like, you know, roughly you think utilities, everything else?
Yeah.
Uh key card entry.
Twenty four seven.
Online booking system through a third party app.
Cameras.
No employees.
Cleaner.
That comes there and I'm gonna use the cleaner I use for my house.
She'll go go there like two to four times a week, depending on how dirty it gets.
Insurance, utilities.
Internet.
It's like we're talking
Including cleaning.
Fifteen hundred a month.
Two thousand a month?
So you're talking about like
you know, ninety percent profit margins on this.
But let's be conservative, let's even say eighty percent.
Mm-hmm. That would be roughly
generating about seventeen to eighteen thousand a month.
In cash flow.
Off of pickleball uh off of one pickleball court. Yeah. That's pretty crazy to me.
Yeah, and it's actually pretty unique. I use deep research to to see if
Are there any other private indoor courts that
Only have one to two courts.
Because there's a lot of franchises that have
Fifteen courts.
And a lot of the haters on Twitter were saying that like
No one no one would pay for this because people
They want multiple courts. They want other people to see'em play pickleball. I'm like, dude, nobody wants to be seen playing pickleball. Well no, but maybe they just don't want to wait, right? Yeah, they want to avail it. They're not able to get courts.
Um
And so there there are very few of these. And um anyone like this is something
Anyone could do like with some Facebook ads. You don't need to buy a building or have a building. You could go rent a building and and run some Facebook ads before you even sign a lease. Like
What are we talking about?
What are we doing here? All right. Now let's be realistic, uh, because you know, there's a lot of people on the internet who will
Say
It's so good. So easy. Look at this. The math is the math is mathing.
Where does a business like this actually suck? You've done enough businesses now to know that there is no such thing as these like
Perfect businesses.
So
In this one, realistically, why would this fail?
What might you be getting wrong here?
Or maybe at least like
Why would the numbers not be as rosy as they sound right now?
Yeah.
It's gonna be like
Uh customer support inquiries.

Things breaking, the A C going out in July in Texas.
Um zoning issues.
Yeah.
It it's not the type of business where
you're gonna have a hard time finding customers, but pick your problems.
There will always be problems.
I think it's gonna be customer support.
Um
And you know, getting
calls at three in the morning from someone that's playing this random game in the middle of the night and the A C went out.
What sort of problems do you like to pick?
I would love to not have to worry about customer acquisition.
And operations. Like
I am terrible at operations.
I I would much rather try to sell or market something than operate it. So
If it's marketing heavy and I don't have
An issue finding customers.
That's my business.
And then the operations either being simple or you offloaded it to somebody else.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Give me some of your beliefs here. So what what like you do all these random things, you have all these random ideas.
Actions come from thoughts, thoughts come from beliefs. And so what are the beliefs that are leading you to do all these random actions like starting this pickleball secret pickleball court or
Going in and
You know, being like Bucky should sell online, I'll do it for them and now I'm gonna do this as a publicity stunt. Maybe they'll partner with me, maybe this will work. I don't know, maybe it'll just be a good story and I'll get sued out of existence. Like
What are some of the beliefs that you have? We talked about one at the front, which is like
Focus is overrated.
Mm-hmm. Talk about that one and then give me some of your other ones.
Yeah, I think focus is overrated because
Compounding doesn't care.
Like
The the principle of compounding does not care if we're working on one thing.
Or a dozen things.
As long as we stay in the game, whatever that game is for us, and keep going.
Compounding is just gonna keep going with us, right?
So
If you're curious about something
Uh like let's say you're you've got a side hustle and it's going well and you're like, What about this this side hustle?
Test it.
Like answer that question.
Now if you have a side hustle and it's like you're not sleeping
Because you're just cashing all these checks.
And customers are beating down your door.
You're not gonna be thinking about, oh, what about this shiny object? Like you've got product market fit.
That's a signal.
Right.
So just chase the signals, chase the curiosities because you're gonna learn something over here.
that you're able to apply over here.
that no one else has ever thought of because they weren't doing these seven other things like you were. So
Net of net.
I
Like if I gun in my head.
I think you will be more wealthy.
If you do one thing.
But you're more likely to be miserable.
And not have an enjoyable life.
Yeah, so focus actually does work, but it's not the only way. And it's a lot of fun to not focus. Actually, what I mean.
You have a similar thing. I'm gonna read you this. I want you to to give a little take on it. You said say yes to everything.
Take on way too much. Increase your capacity for stress and let Parkinson's law
do its job. Most people have no clue what they are capable of because they don't take on m too much.
And they never stress test their life.
And you have something called the restaurant hostess analogy. Can you
Explain that a little bit.
Yeah, let's say you're a you're a
Host us at a Michelin Star restaurant in New York.
Manhattan.
Slam twenty four seven.
People coming in and out, people yelling, whatever.
And then you got a hostess in Des Moines, Iowa in a diner, and they're usually pretty slow. And then
You know, a soccer team pulls up.
Like, Oh I table for fifteen. And she's like, Oh my gosh, table for fifteen. Oh geez, what do I do?
Like
To to the woman in New York, like that's nothing.
That's nothing because that's her norm. That's her her new baseline, right?
So most people that I talk to are like oh
I could never run a Facebook ad campaign because I have to
clip my toenails that afternoon. Like
What?
Like they don't like they're not doing enough. They they think that like
The barometer.
Is down here.
And they think people like Elon Musk are just
He's an alien. That's not even realistic. And it's like no, he's just like
Took on way too much and
And now he's able to
Do.
Way more than ever before because the less important things just kinda
Fall off the plate. That's Parkinson's Law.
You you you bite off way more than you can chew.
And if you forget about it, then that's a signal that it was worth forgetting about.
Mm.
Yeah, I think that
If you ask people honestly, you said what percent of your potential
Are you tapping into?
I think that's a
Pretty scary question for most people.
Um, because the answer is not gonna be what you would want it to be. Very few people I know.
Right. Like
You almost have to be
very low self awareness to be like a hundred percent. The answer's not a hundred percent. Right. I think David Goggins has said this about when he trains and he says like you know
The moment where your brain
is ready to quit when it's over.
Your body still has thirty percent left.
Like the brain quits before the body and the brain will stop you as a safety mechanism.
th when you still have thirty percent left to give.
And I don't know if the number is right, but I think directionally he's correct when it comes to like what you're physically capable of.
And then in terms of what your
you know, creatively or ambitiously c capable of. I think it's kind of the same thing. I think it's probably even a worse ratio than that.
I think most people are tapping into less than thirty percent of what they're capable of doing.
I mean it doesn't mean you ne s necessarily need to work a hundred hours.
I think it's just like
your capacity to output and to be creative and to go for it.
And
Go for it with full force on the things that you're trying to go for.
Um, and maybe it's maybe it is take on an extra project or maybe it is
But sometimes it's just go faster.
Sometimes it's just think bigger.
And the you know, these all sound cliche, but they're yeah, they are they are
Cliche for a reason. They've been around for thousands of years because I think humans tend to have this problem.
Where
You know, we don't actually tap into, you know
How fast we can go, how big we can go.
Yeah, what
what truly going for it looks like without, you know, the fears, doubts, and hesitations that people have. And so
I I agree with you. You know, are you are you a family guy as well? Like I guess like you're doing a bunch of these businesses. Is that cause you're
You know.
The counter argument is well, yeah, you're twenty one years old and you don't have a uh kids and a mortgage, you know, that would be a way that somebody would maybe
Try to discredit the amount of output that you have.
Yeah, I mean I've I've got four kids.
I had all four kids between the ages of twenty three and twenty nine, and I was building all these businesses
Throughout that time.
I never miss dinner. I travel very rarely. I never miss a sporting event.
And I'm in my office.
You know.
From seven to four, give or take.
Working.
Sometimes I pop out to hang out with the kids, but
I think it's important that my kids see me work.
Uh but
It's also obviously important that I spend time with them. So
We go on a lot of vacations, four to six a year. We've seen all fifty states. We go all over the world.
Uh you can do both.
Period.
Right.
I think it's important for my kids to see me work. Unfortunately, my work just looks like me talking and laughing with friends, and so I don't think they get it. I don't think that's it. Um what about um
What about you know, you said you're building your family and you work let's say the seven to four
What are you doing during that seven to four to make those hours
Count for more.
than maybe the average person is doing. So like
How what do you do to have more productivity or more effect in those same number of hours? Like
How do you structure your day?
What are some things that you you've noticed you do maybe better or differently than the average
The average entrepreneurial bear.
Yeah.
Um, the perfect day for me is nothing on my calendar.
Um I definitely time that like
If I have seven calls that week, I'll try to put them all in the same afternoon.
Um, I think a lot of people kinda feel insecure about having an open calendar because it's like
It's kind of like s a comfort blanket, like, Okay, now I know I'll be productive today. Right. But when you have so many ideas, like so many ad campaigns I wanna run or newsletter I wanna write, like I don't have time filling I I don't have problem filling my time.
And so I
I don't use any fancy CRM notion or anything.
If a tab is open in my browser, it's a to do list.
When I close it, it's done.
My notes are up.
A lot of caffeine.
Uh admittedly.
And I I don't worry about context switching. I used to really stress like all right, this
We could do this for thirty minutes, do this. Don't contact switch like
I feel like with anything in life.
We we can evolve to it. We can become a lot more acclimated to it.
And so I'm
Always switching.
Always.
Yeah.
I feel I feel like I'm good at it.
Because I've done it so much.
Another one of your beliefs you said
The longer I'm in business, the more I realize this to be true.
If you wanna be a billionaire, you gotta innovate.
And focus.
But to be a millionaire, you simply need to copy paste.
Don't even try to copy something that works and put your own twists on it. No twists. Stop twisting. Just copy what's working and organically over time you'll discover the tweaks on your own, but you don't have to lead with all the twists or you'll just screw it up. Yeah. I think there should be like
There needs to be a school or something on reverse engineering.
Like it it is
An underrated skill.
I'm in like the meta ads library and the web archive.
All the time.
Let's say there was this taco restaurant.
Yeah.
Just
in my town that had a line around the corner twenty four seven.
And they
All they sold.
Uh were
Steak Tacos.
That's it.
And you said, All right, they've got more demand than supply. All right, this town could use another taco shop. All right, I'm gonna copy them.
I'm gonna do it even better.
People want more variety.
They want steak and chicken.
And there's no drinks. You can't even get drinks there. You gotta know I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that.
Every change you make is another variable.
To sc like to screwing it up. Risk. A risk you value.
Like you you're gonna you're let's say you copy them verbatim and you open
You're gonna learn really quickly.
Oh.
Oh, they're probably using that as their point of sale and not that.
Oh, this is why because the onions, they have to separate them from the meat. Oh, like you're gonna learn all these things that are gonna force you to have to change things.
But if you do that before you know if that copying works or not.
you're just gonna increase the likelihood of of screwing it up and thus not being successful.
That's interesting. You know, um

has this phrase he's he calls it being a shameless a s a shameless cloner.
And so he says, you know, I'm a shameless clone.
of the Buffett and Munger philosophy. I you know, I claim to have no
No good ideas except for one, which is
You know.
to copy the good ideas that already exist out there. If I hear a good idea, I I take it on as my own, right?
And he talks about, you know
The dumbest person in the world is the gas station across the street from a more successful gas station.
He's like'cause you know, you see that guy and that guy comes out when a customer's there and he washes their windows for them and
He prices it a certain way and he's uh uses certain b bright lights so that he's more visible at night.
You have to be a real idiot to be across the street, see that guy doing it.
And then for your own stubbornness.
Not just do those things, implement those best practices.
And so pride, yeah.
Yeah, Brian. And I and I think there's like, you know, a version of that in business. And
Like you said, you will organically end up
putting your own twists on the business.
But you you know, you bring up an interesting point, which is that baking in all those twists up front
Is a bit of unnecessary risk. I think there's a view that
entrepreneurs or risk takers when actually the risk minimizers.
And uh you know, they're trying to take as little risk as is necessary, but
But are willing to take the necessary risks.
In order to do something.
Unless there's like you know a a big asymmetric reward for it, they're not gonna do it.
And so um, you know, I think that you're right. And I think that this is very true for especially at like the local level and service level. Like it's not true.
If you're trying to be a founder, go through YC.
build the next big thing, the next breakout app.
Which is gonna be, you know, the next social network you can't just copy Facebook, it's not gonna work, right? The next uh
The next
ride sharing service can't just be Uber, right? They do have to innovate. They do have to do self driving cars like a Waymo or something like that.
So this advice does not apply to people who are playing what I call the business Olympics.
Where they're trying to do the th stuff that's like global greatness, move the world forward.
Disrupt a total an industry. Yes, you absolutely do need to be innovative there.
But in terms of people who are trying to
Become financially free.
You know
Working backwards is not a bad way to go. I have I have a very annoying phrase I say a bunch, which is in my companies anytime we have run into an issue and people are bitching and moaning about it.
I just say
Well, we're probably not the first ones to have this problem, right?
'Cause it's so true and it you're in an econ business and suddenly you have this supply chain problem. Well, guess what?
A thousand or a million other e commerce business have had that same problem and they figured out a way to solve it. So what did they do? Let's start with that.
I was talking to actually a friend yesterday who's
Yeah, this guy's almost a billionaire and he's in the real estate game and he's just crushed it on real estate on his own.
And now for the first time after fifteen years he's raising money.
For his projects.
He never wanted to do it. He always wanted to use his own capital, but you know, finally sort of relented and realized okay, I could do bigger scale and do more projects if I if I raise capital from other people and not just use my own personal balance sheet.
And so
I told him I was like
You know, he's giving me all his ideas about how he's gonna raise money and I go, dude
Every real estate guy I know raises money.
Have you first looked at what they did? Like, why are you trying to figure this out on your own? That's the hard way. There's no bonus points for doing this the hard way. Like
Let's just start by reverse engineering what other people do. Like
Go talk to five to ten other people who've already done this.
See if there's a common blueprint.
Go try that and only innovate where needed along the way when you run into some bottlenecks or some walls that you hit along the way of trying to implement that plan.
Because for most business problems you can just ask the question like
Has anybody else ever solved this and what do they do? And turns out it's almost always like
It's very common this is a common problem.
There is a common solution and we should try that first.
Yeah, like we we place our innovation on the wrong thing.
We place it on the features and the benefits when we should be placing it on being innovative about
Copying how they're doing what they're doing.
We had a three PL.
And you know three PLs, right? And it's like the worst. Nobody likes your three PL.
It's it's impossible.
And so
We saw all the other three PLs out there when we launched and were like, Oh my gosh, they charge for storage.
And pick and pack.
And this and that, and they mark up shipping. These guys are idiots. That's so confusing. So we set out to like innovate the industry.
Simple flat pricing.
And like at the end of that two year experience, like we looked like all the other three PLs.
Oh oh they charge for storage because some companies go out of business.
And then they're left with this big bill and they don't oh, that's why like
So that's another signal is if you see other competitors in your industry and
Your first thoughts, like
They're so stupid. Why are they doing it this way?
Probably
For a reason.
Like you just haven't learned that reason yet.
Especially if they're successful, right? Don't copy somebody who's failing. But if they're successful, you can start with that and say
All right.
Can I do that as well?
Um you know the reason I like this idea is
Because this is not the only way to win.
I spent most of my life.
playing in the innovation space and I really love that. It's super fun to be creative and to come up with the idea and it feels really
satisfying when you've you're the first to do something. That's a I mean, that's amazing. I'm very proud of that whenever I've tried to do that.
But it that gets talked about a lot'cause again, it sounds super noble.
And I think that does work, but there are many ways to win. And I what I like about what you're saying is that it is another way to win. You say, Oh wow
Those guys did that gutter cleaning service using next door and their neighborhood in Massachusetts.
I should do that in my neighborhood in California.
Let me start with that.
And I and I and I think that more people should do that if they want to actually like be successful.
And because that is another way to win. It's not the only way, but it's another way.
Yeah. It's the mid with meme all over again.
Right.
My my first
Yeah, I re I read about this
iPhone repair shop.
Making thirty grand a month.
And I thought
I can make thirty grand a month fixing iPhones in my city.
Like it's kind of an ignorant thought, but it worked.
And I did.
You know?
You gotta you gotta
Gotta be dumb like I like I am.
Yeah.
Chris, this was fun, man. I we still have like half of the dock of other ideas and small business and like you know random businesses that you've come across that we could go for. I think maybe
Maybe we do a part two if people like this one. Uh to have Chris back. If you if you like Chris.
Uh, either tweet at me or uh put in the YouTube comments would be best that you know bring'em back because I think this is a lot of fun.
I really love
the little nooks and crannies of the economy that you go looking in to find these, you know, stump grinding or the hole in one business or
the shipping container for for wine tours. Like you know, th this is fun stuff that I think
You know, sometimes on this podcast to be honest, we have
brilliant people talking about what you can do with AI and what you could do with XYZ. And that's great. I love that stuff.
But those aren't episodes I can send to my sister or my mom because
those businesses are kind of out of reach for what they want to do.
Uh, but I I think what's cool about y you know, the businesses you talk about, you know, your pickleball court.
This is stuff that anybody could do.
Chris, thanks for coming on. Maybe give people a shout, uh shout out your your Twitter, your podcast, whatever you want people to go check out.
Yeah, uh the Kerner Office Podcast is where I publish three times a week. Spelled like my last name.
And it's on your hat.
So that's right. Never miss an opportunity dot com.
Yes. Always be promoting. That's right.
All right, man, thanks for coming on.
Thanks, John.
I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to
I put my all in it like my day's off On a roadless travel never looking back