The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - A Secret Hack to Finding and Selling Home Service Leads + 2 More Ideas. Ep #070

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

I sat down with Connor, an entrepreneur based in New York who owns self-storage, recruiting, and e-commerce businesses. In this second part of our conversation, we talk about creating a health product for athletes with only two ingredients and how to make it scalable. We also discuss how to convert cheap construction permit data into high-ticket lead sales, as well as a unique concept for a gym for personal trainers, giving them more autonomy over their clients.We also talk about the importance of packaging and framing ideas to increase their value, and how to create and sell market research reports for businesses.  This is part two of a two-part episode. The first part went live last week in episode #067.Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Highlights & Introduction00:56 Introduction to Million-Dollar Business Ideas01:10 The Workout Honey Concept02:31 Market Potential and Challenges03:19 Packaging and Branding Strategies05:47 Exploring Additional Product Ideas08:53 Construction Journal: A Hidden Gem13:40 Leveraging Data for Business Growth18:32 Product Market Validation and Research19:40 Exploring New Product Ideas19:54 Identifying Potential Customers20:56 Insights from Xavier Helgeson22:05 The Value of Market Research23:12 E-commerce Idea Validation25:00 Personal Training Gym Concept32:33 Ranking Business Ideas34:38 Planning for Recession-Resistant Businesses35:55 Conclusion and Next Steps

I love businesses where you tell someone the idea and they're just like, that's stupid. That's stupid. Like, people don't think to do this stuff because it's so simple and obvious. But literally, your customer is anyone that doesn't use construction journal today, which is 99% of business owners. Okay, as promised, this is part two of Connor's episode from last week. If you missed it, go back and listen. And today we're talking about starting an endurance product that you could sell to athletes. That only has two ingredients.

We're talking about an AB testing agency. podcasters and YouTubers. We're talking about the importance of packaging and framing ideas differently. And then we're talking about selling market research reports and a gym for personal trainers, right? So kind of like a we work for gyms for personal trainers because right now personal trainers teach in someone else's gym and the customers are tied to the gym. So the trainers can't, they don't have full autonomy over their customers. I think it's a good idea. Enjoy. We've got the $1 million dollar year idea business. I have a $2.10 million. One is tap ex-sevy like you're going to need money to start this business.

And one, I think, is not. Where are we going? Why don't you just pick one that you're especially excited about? If money wasn't an issue, I think I would only sell health-related products and like the food and supplement space, et cetera. And I have this idea for one that I think is good, that I haven't seen it on the market yet and I've been doing it already and I love it. And it's essentially work out honey. And I don't like, there are goose. There are little like packets and stuff.

none of them are like this. And so maybe I'm finding a niche of a niche, but something that I've been doing before every workout, and I think it's great. I mean, you get really quick energy, you get a ton of blood flow, you get a great pump out of it. I already love it.

I take a big scoop of raw honey, and I put a ton of big sea salt flakes on it, and then I'll go to the gym, and I'll do like one or two of those, and I'll go to the gym, and especially this is if I'm going to the gym at night where I'm like, I don't want caffeine after 6 p.m., but I do want something that gives me that extra,

push. I'll do that and I swear it works incredibly well. You get the extra carbs and the sugar from the honey, the salt helps you get better blood flow to the muscles. There are plenty of studies out there that better pumps are essentially just all the muscle flowing into your, sorry, the blood flowing into your muscle. Better pumps lead to better gains. There's a good deal of research. The fact is that it's entirely natural. It's not caffeinated. You can package these things up in really little, easy to consume goo packets. They can toss in a backpack, pocket, fanny pack, car door, or whatever. I want it for myself, which is why I think that there's a market out there. But I also know it's a crazy competitive market. And so curious your take on this.

I love it. I love this take. It reminds me of the like I just sometimes I hear ideas and you don't even finish the first sentence. And I'm like, yep, I'm in. What are at the check? Yeah. And it's like this is something that maybe 80% of investors be like, stupid. There's not proprietary. But it reminds me of our dog electrolyte idea. So it's like new solace. is literally, you can go buy it at Walmart today. It's 50% potassium, 50% sodium, which is basically half of electrolytes, right? So it's like, okay, I'm going to go find the guy that makes new salt. I'm going to say, hey, put this label on it. Put a picture of a dog on it. We're going to sell it through chewy.com. Right? Well, you can't do that. It's like, no, you can. You can. We're just

repackaging something. We're not the first people to do this. So I look at this as a runner, as a cyclist. I don't eat the goose because they make me throw up. They're disgusting. I don't even like honey, but I like the fact that I know what it is, assuming there's a lot of fake honey out there, assuming it's real honey. Yeah, I was going to say like the goo stuff too. I used to do that when I was running a lot as well. That's that also nukes my stomach. I'm sure you're probably seeing like there are a lot of decent health trends and they probably are trends like the taping your mouth shut or the spread out your toes because modern day shoes compress this and like a big box of stuff. This feels like one of those trends where it's so simple, it's natural. You can say,

hey, don't take the, all of those chemicals that are into pre-workout. It's like the RX bar of pre-workouts. There's salt and there's honey. You see the ingredients right on the thing. There's nothing else in this thing. And maybe who knows if there's issues like shelf life of actually raw, good for you, honey? I don't think there is, but there might be.

And I think that it's just a really easy way. It tastes good, like salty honey. People don't really consume that much, but it does taste good. And then I think if you want to, you can add caffeine in the future. You can do flavored ones like spicy hot, spicy honey. you are into that kind of stuff that might be bad for working out. But this to me is the, I wrote that as my $1 million idea because if I find a co-packager and I just launched this thing D2C, I think I can probably get it there pretty quickly.

Last podcast, we mentioned Element as a brand, $200 million top line, $40 million bottom line. Like, there's room to run. Top bar here is like your only exit opportunities are PNG or other food brands. And that's the way it goes. And there's a lot like selling foods can objectively suck sometimes. But selling supplements on the internet is usually pretty. pretty good. So I'd probably try to stay more in that supplement world. And like, this doesn't have a big shelf space. Easy grab and goes at the cash register. There's some opportunities there.

So I'm glad you mentioned mouth tape because that's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. And like you go give that idea to 10 people and they're going to say, dude, that's a blog article. That's not a business. You write a blog article about how you tape your mouth and people are good to go. It's like, eh, it's packaging and it's framing. It's literal packaging. And then it's framing and packaging the idea. It's not even branding. Like branding was a cherry on top, right? Because branding is hard. It takes years packaging and framing. And so I love this idea because that's all it is, right? You're just saying, don't eat goos, don't have all this process crap. This is literally salt and honey. You can advertise it by shipping this stuff for free to races to just put in the packs for free

with your QR code so people can actually buy them. I'm going to add another idea to this that I've had forever. That's not on my ideas list. I forgot about it, but now I'm going to add it. So have you ever read Born to Run? I've seen the book. I've never read it. Yeah. So classic book. The whole thesis is like, you should run barefoot. That's where all those barefoot shoes came from because they said Tarahumara in Mexico, they run barefoot and they can run hundreds of miles at a time. Our bodies were built to run barefoot, yada, yada, yada. Anyway, the Tata Humara, as a southern idiot would say, like myself, they drink something very specific to run hundreds of miles. And the recipe is in this book. And I always

thought like, why is no one productized this? Why isn't this for sale? And I just asked Chat Chupit what it is. And it's chia seeds, water, lime juice, and honey. It's like all natural. That's all that they drink to keep going for hundreds of miles. And there are some ultra runners that drink that based on the book. It's like, why can't you take those four ingredients, get honey and make it like powdered honey because you don't want to ship water and just put it in a packet and it's like an oatmeal packet you just add water mix it in your water bottle and you can say i drink the same thing that they've drank for thousands of years in mexico to run hundreds of miles i love it i think humans will pay an ungodly amount of money for enhanced cognition performance specifically mental

and physical acuity but like i know you are big on the caffeine as much as i am but like lately what I've been finding is that like after noon or even after I don't know I don't really drink more than one coffee anymore because I started getting the habit of drinking like three a day and I was I'd be around this time right now and I would be just be on the couch I'm just like I can't do anything anymore and I'm realizing that the additional caffeine later on of the day doesn't work so finding light not heavy digestive or things that are not taking a lot of your energy to digest and can be quickly consumed. That's all I want to eat all day long. I even do some like the salt and honey stuff before this. I think the lime juice and chia seed side is also really cool. I'd be curious how that

works as well. But I think like lime, they talk a lot about either lime or lemon juice in your water to get the water itself more into the fascia or something like that of the muscle. So there's definitely, I think, a lot of opportunity for foods like that. And then I'll have the whatever, triple steak, Chip, Chipotle Bowl at 8 p.m. when I don't have to do anything else. Triple steak. What does that cost in Manhattan? Take a guess. I'll actually tell you. I'm going to say, do you get guac? No.

I'm going to say 2175. 26. Oh. Jeez. It's pretty crazy because like the 2175, that's double steak usually. Yeah. Yeah, right. No, it's everything here costs so much money. We went to the U.S. Open last week and all my relatives were like, oh, just be careful. the cocktails there are so expensive and we got a $22 honey deuce cocktail or whatever like that.

I was like, this is, that's every cocktail that I've ever had in this city. Holy cow. It's not cheap. Have you heard of a business called Construction Journal? No. Okay. You're going to fall in love. It is a permit database.

So if you've ever had to build, develop, change something, like look outside and look at your physical world. This must be expensive. This is going to be expensive. No way. Really? Wow. It's like a hundred and seventy nine a month. Whoa. Some of these websites, you look at them, you're like, that's going to be four grand a month. Okay. Okay. But I think they have a lot of customers. So here's my guess on how big this business is. They've got 2001 employees on LinkedIn as of today. With these types of database software businesses, tell me if this assumptions is wrong and then that'll probably shape a lot of this. I think they typically try to get an average of $300,000 in revenue per employee.

That's the ballpark that I've typically heard. You have the big guys like Google and Apple, they're a million dollars plus per employee. But $250, $300,000 per employee is roughly accurate. It's a $60 million a year business, is my guess. And what it is, it is a database of any permit and any zip code that has been pulled to do a certain type of job. And for the average listener out there hearing this,

they're probably thinking, who cares? or this already exists on government websites. Sure. Want to know what's awful to navigate government websites. Want to know what permits indicate. Permits indicate an intent to spend money to do something that can oftentimes lead towards a need to spend even more money. Examples of that being, I want to get a permit to remove a ton of trees on a property. If I do that, then somebody can pretty accurately estimate that I'm going to get a permit.

or that I'm going to want to build something. Or if I get a permit to, say, builds lay bedrock or some level of foundation and actually start a development, pretty high likelihood that somebody is going to need a general contractor. They're going to need an electrician, that they're going to need subcontractors, plumbers of sorts, builders, additional day labor, whatever. Can I give you another example? 100%. So in the state of Texas, if you want to pool, you got to have a fence around it. Most people don't have a fence already. You pull a pool permit.

They're going to need a fencer. If you have a sod company or hydro mulch company, you're going to pull all the permits of people that just put down a sprinkler system. In the city of Rockport, Texas, you have to pay, I think it's $50 per inch of tree that you cut down and you need a permit for that. And so that's what your stump grinder company can come right on in and get the list of leads. So basically, they will tailor it based on what you need. I think that there's a huge opportunity to say, hey, we don't get every permit in the country and we don't have this incredibly complex and robust database. But if you're an electrician and we find that there is a high degree of confidence that when you,

or let's use your fencing example, your fencer. And we know that when somebody's putting in a pool, that this is a super valuable lead for you, a lead that you'll pay $500 for minimum because they're going to need a $12,000 fence. let's do like poolleads.com. And it's literally just a wrapped version of a very niche version of this that is hyper-targeted towards one type of contractor. And you can build this out. Going back to the programmatic SEO stuff that we talked about in a previous episode,

do this for the five most expensive, most valuable types of leads, whatever that looks like to you and build up different wrappers of this. Oh, I don't know how I have. haven't heard of this. I love, I love businesses where you tell someone the idea and they're just like, that's stupid. That's stupid. People don't start to do this stuff. People don't think to do this stuff because it's so simple and obvious. But literally, your customer is anyone that doesn't use construction journal today, which is 99% of business owners. I also think that, like, I just got off the phone before this podcast with a broker in Florida. And he says that it's funny to be in the

real estate space, as I know you are too. Like some real estate people who are like, we don't have a website, which I got off the phone with somebody last week who doesn't have a website. They're big developer in the DFW or DFW in Houston markets. And they're like, yeah, we don't do that internet thing. And then you have other people. They're like, we use every tool known demand because we want an edge in any way. And he said that they just paid $10,000 to get a list.

And it's like, it's not even they don't care about the individuals. They want the aggregate information of all new vehicle registration. data by license plates within a certain area before any census data comes out because it helps them make more decisions on like where they should be targeting developments. So if you register your plate for DFW and Texas is predicting 20% growth year every year in a DFW market, but only 5% increase in plate registrations have come out before that data comes out. That's interesting to know because then it says, oh, they're actually pretty wrong on the projected

population growth. Maybe we shouldn't be developing and doing as many deals here as we, we're thinking because we know of that. So when you're doing these tens of millions of dollars deals, data becomes incredibly valuable for you and finding like government data that is required by law and finding easy ways to package that and sell it. Somebody can just go probably wherever they're getting these plate registration information and just get the same type of data.

But having it in an easy to access way and easily filthable, viewable, whatever, I think is very, very valuable. It's just it reminds me of another framework where, it's like, oh, I don't have a website. Oh, I just spent 10 grand on a spreadsheet. You would think like, all right, I'm going to build websites for real estate. And I'm going to go find all the people that don't have a website. No, they don't want a website.

You want to go to the person that spent 10 grand on a spreadsheet. They probably just upgraded their website six months ago. They'll probably going to upgrade it again with you because they take that really seriously. Man, I'm still stuck on this construction journal. Like, I wonder, like, what else could you do with it? So is it 179 for like unlimited access or for a certain, niche. So I'm not positive, but I do you know that one thing that they do really well, which is, again, probably the programmatic SEO stuff is I was doing a call with some

development company. I'll leave their name out because I think they really enjoy staying private. And I couldn't find anything about them. I couldn't find their website. I couldn't find their LinkedIn. I couldn't find anything. So I Googled the name and their page showed up on the first page via construction journal. And you click into it and it shows you their active projects, their key contacts, amount of funding that they've raised in the past. It'll show things like the locations of where they're building right now. You can sign up pretty quickly and supposedly get like a free preview of it than if you want more information beyond that, it's pretty expensive. So yeah, I think it's a pretty cool business.

I try to poke around a little bit more of their website. Their website's pretty simple. But I do think that I would love if there were more use cases that they showed on their website. Because I know if you go to the bottom of their website, it shows business types, general contractors, manufacturers, service, providers, subcontractors, suppliers and distributors, that's all really interesting. I bet also something that they can do that's probably very much needed is help you with bidding and estimating things. Like, I'm sure you've probably been on that side too where you're working with contractors

and you get the guy who's quoting $20,000 for a job and the guy is quoting $2,000 for a job. And the $2,000 guy, like, maybe you go with him, but like he could have gotten an extra $3,000 easily off of something like that. So I think they help with a decent. lot of quotes as well. Jeez. It's bringing back to an idea we talked about on our last podcast, Pickfoo, right?

One percentage of people listening to this right now have heard of pickfu in your mind. Just guess. 5% if there are entrepreneurs. Yeah, that's my guess. I would say 1 to 5%. What percentage of the people listening to this are or will run paid ads at some point?

Probably pretty high. I would think like 20% of their, again, if they're entrepreneurs at least. Okay. let's say it's 20% and 5%. So that means that 75% of people that will run paid ads have never heard of Pickfoo, which Picfoo is, like you said, it's basically find a target market. Maybe it's business owners.

Maybe it's soccer moms. And you say, hey, vote on this logo or vote on this ad. Tell me which one resonates with you more. Like you could start an agency that does, quote, like focus group research on your paid ads, right? Which one will resonate more to Facebook moms? And you don't have to tell them exactly what you're doing. For all they, no, you have, like a.

a conference room with a focus group, you go to Pickfoo and you just copy and paste their ads and you pay Pickfoo $13 and then you charge whatever you want for really valuable data. I still think this is an idea that if people want to run a skill for, because I'm entering an 18 month window of no new ideas and no new businesses to double down. Sounds brutal. It's brutal. It's going to be a cold winter's coming. But I'm just entering a season where like, I want to do more than I have capacity for.

and everything that I'm working on right now is working. And if I just keep doing it, it'll work more and work better and grow more. So that's what I need to do right now. And it's frustrating. But the idea that eventually I would like to launch it through my newsletter, I think you could also launch it just based on all of the content that you're doing. And it would be incredibly easy to launch and you find a way to validate it. Really big market research reports on these topics and spend the time going into an idea

fully in depth. If I turned to you and I was a little bit like, just wealthier and wanted to say, hey, I've got this idea. Tell me if it's a stupid idea or not. Salty, salty honey, right? Like, validate this product from AC if people like it. Here's $25,000, Chris. Like, I want a 50-page report. I want you to talk to people. I want something. I think that like product market validation reports are super cool and charge a really high fee for the custom ones and then resell that same information for you build it once you charge it maybe the $25,000 is a lost leader or maybe it is a break even or a slight margin for you. And then you say to the client, hey, we're able to charge $25,000 versus $100,000 because six months after I give you this research report, we put it

publicly on our website and charge people $500 a year to look at it. Like I really like that. It's like the other business you told me about last time. Yeah. Tegas. Yeah. But I really like that from an idea of research and value. To me, that is the most fun thing to do and turning into a business, I think would be really fun. And I do think that there would be people that would be willing to pay depending on the price point and how you position it. But that's the later game. Every page of that 50 page report could be different pick-through campaigns. 100%.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Yep. And so it's like everything from like, hey, what other ingredients would you want to see in this? Oh, what do you think about if we put guava in it, these flavors, the right ones? Which label and add you click it? Would you click on? to you like this packaging or this one, like, there's a lot of stuff there.

Who do you think the customer is there? Is it a company launching a new product? Is it a entrepreneur? I think, unfortunately, the less fun part of it is it's probably a company that wants a new product slash wants to do an acquisition. I also think it's probably to some degree, depending on the scope of it, right? We talked about a $25,000 thing, but like, is there a service that you can do pretty reliably for $2,000?

Because I can see myself turning around and saying, hey, explain. Explain to me the legitimacy of launching an attic insulation business in Tallahassee, Florida. Would that work? And if there's somebody who says, hey, yeah, we can do that. And they'll go out, they'll get up. They say, hey, we pay a million dollars a year for all of these different data sources. Everything from our unlimited pick-poo account to the amount of cars that drive by any given street on a given day to satellite on like the boats that are in a harbor or something like that. We'll do anything that you want.

And if they can then put something together in a more productized way, I think that will probably make it appeal more to the average entrepreneur. But I remember talking to Xavier Helgeson a while ago. And I was like, hey, here's like one thing that you do that goes very contradictory to every piece of like classic business advice that I've ever heard of is you buy businesses in every category. That's something that I enjoy doing. That's why I wanted to have this conversation. But everyone who is smarter than me tells me don't do that. You'll make more money if you go the traditional way.

and he's like, well, like, his first answer that wasn't really meant to be like the class yes one was just like, all right, but like, look at Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett has everything from candy to insurance to now Apple stock, right? Like, he's not the best of it. So how do you figure that out? Well, what you do is you talk like when you're thinking about making these investments, you talk to the smartest people in that space and you get every piece of information that you need to know about how to do business in that space.

And so that's what I do. Before we buy any business, we bought a pool installation business over an Arizona, like I'll talk to every person I can possibly get my hands on. What are the single most important KPIs for pool development? And then I'll talk to other people who are in Arizona and say, what's happening in the market right now? I'll just have an expert in that space. And how can you do this in a slightly productized, maybe less consulting way? I think that's where things get pretty interesting. That is interesting. Yeah, for me, like, I love doing that stuff myself. So I think the customer here is someone that's like a white collar worker that wants to start a business. Maybe he's

buying a franchise. He's buying a pressure washing franchise in Tallahassee, Florida. And he's like, listen, I'm going to put 500 grand into this. So I'm going to pay five grand to you to get on the phone and make sure that I'm not about to make the biggest mistake in my life. I can see that being a customer because the pressure washing franchisor is going to be like, Tallahassee's great. Where's your check? Your wire on the way? It's diligence as a service for sure. Yeah. And then I think the other customer could be like not a proctor and gamble, but like a mid-sized company that doesn't have a person for that, but still needs to do that research. Like, we want to launch this new shoe or this new food or beverage. That would be a fun company to run because doing that research is so fun. And I like using

the grandparent analogy where it's like you drop off your grandkids, the grandparents and they spoil them and then they get to just get rid of them. But this, it's like you do all the research, you get paid no matter what. You don't care if it fails or not. Like, you're off the hook. The other thing that I think it would be cool is specifically in e-commerce is, the validation that I know I would pay for. I bet you would too, I would think, is just bringing it back to this workout salt honey thing. If I could pay somebody 10 grand, and what that 10 grand gets me are a couple design mockups slash renderings. They make the most basic Shopify landing page. They spin up an ad account and they make three to five ads. And they run a couple of ads and give me

rough ballpark numbers on what cost per click and add to cards look like. And then when they add it to card, they're just like, hey, sorry, what's up? You can't check out right. now, I would think that's super valuable because I would pay for that too. Yeah. Yeah. So there are niche versions. I think what you have to do is when you tell somebody, we can do everything. Humans aren't that creative and they have a tough time saying like, all, can you do the things

I would actually pay for? Whereas if you can specifically say, like, I will call all of your self storage comps for you and gets the updated daily pricing for you. I will run an ad for a product idea that you have, stuff like that, I think would be pretty interesting. Just on this podcast and our podcast two episodes ago, we've got a three product company right now. We've got busy juice. Okay.

We've got honey in a packet. And then we've got chia seed mixture from the Mexicans. From the Mexicans. The chea slurp. Yeah, I like it. Yeah, we do. We've got a business on our hands. Cool.

I've got one last one for you here. We can probably get through it. CapEx heavy. Cepx heavy. Yeah. And maybe it's not because I guess you can actually lease these spaces. but you have to buy a lot of equipment. I'll give it to you.

This might be the worst one that we've talked about here today, but I think there's something. And let me do this. Let me do this. I'll try to see if I can find a variation of this idea that's more Cappex light. That'll be my task. Okay, cool. So my girlfriend recently, she's a full-time attorney here in Manhattan,

but she is also a personal trainer. And right now she's a personal trainer at the gym that both her and I go to. if we like decide not to go to that gym anymore she's kind of not a personal trainer anymore like she's got certified and stuff like that but like if she wants to sign a client like where are you taking them in Manhattan like she can't go to their gym without paying so the gym gives her clients the gym gives her clients currently yeah that's correct but on top of that they also give her the space to train in all of the equipment whatever I think that something that would be really cool would be gyms that are purely dedicated to having personal trainers

with a membership. And I've seen these slowly starting to pop up. And so a couple of interesting things that I think would be valuable here. There is a Chelsea Pierce, which is a New York chain gym, that opened up three blocks from me here.

60,000 square feet in Manhattan. That is so much. That's how big buckies is. It's a three-four buckies with cold plunges and 100 plus treadmills and crazy stuff, right? But it's a ton of square footage. I think one of the,

the biggest value ads for this is you can get away with making gyms with way less square footage, first and foremost. And I think the second thing is you can probably do a lot of really niche type of equipment. The reality is if you have a personal trainer, you're probably not just running on the treadmill the entire time. Most gyms are plagued with treadmills and they take up so much space. Like, you can probably put one or two in there and that's really just the warm-up. No one's paying somebody, runners, I guess, do. But like, very rarely is somebody paying somebody to take them into a gym and train them for an hour on a train them. headinal only. So you get different types of equipment. You could also do super high end levels of

equipment, which allow trainers to charge more, look like a superstar, give that prestigious feel. It keeps client retention high because it's, oh, I'm not just quitting my personal trainer. I'm quitting the cryo machine that they give me at the end of the workout. Or I'm quitting the, like, I know we use like Panada Italian style of equipment, which are like super nice plate loaded equipment at the gym that we go to right now. And so it's like keeps them a very sticky product. And I guess, all in all, I think that you charge the personal trainer and you charge them a combination of a pretty high monthly retainer. I know you're probably going to gawk in my gym price here. I think we pay $250 a month to go to the gym here. I feel like I'm on the low end compared to some

my friends, but we pay $250 a month. I think that you can probably, at least if this gym is based in Manhattan, charge personal trainers $400 a month plus a very small per their client. client fee. So that way people aren't like abusing it and bringing their friends day and night. So call that like 10, 15 bucks. I don't know what that looks like, but some level of friction. So overall, that's my current thought. I'll pause there and get your opinion on like if there's even a need for this and what your thoughts are. So this idea reminds me of the idea that I tweeted about a year ago with the youth training facilities. Did you ever see that? I don't know. So I've got a 2,100 square foot shop in my backyard. And I don't really use it for anything.

and I'm kind of in a rural area that's very close to the suburbs, like the DFW suburbs. And there is a ton of demand for one-on-one personal training for high school and middle schoolers, softball, baseball, soccer, running, like all of the sports, especially like baseball, football, and soccer. And like there's nowhere for the trainers to train the kids, right? Because the gyms don't know what to do with them. CrossFit doesn't want them. 24-hour fitness doesn't want them. No one really knows what to do with them.

but in aggregate, it's a really big market. And so I tweeted about this like, hey, should I convert my shop into a place for personal trainers? Even though it's rural, like everyone is telling me around here anecdotally, like you would be full on day one. There's so much demand. And it got a million views. And I tweet about ideas all the time and usually half people say I'm an idiot.

Half people say it's a genius. This, it was like 95% that's brilliant. That works where I live. That works where I live. That works where I live. So it reminds me of that idea. and I love it. And I'm wondering if there's a world where you could go find, maybe it's a Chelsea

Pierce, maybe it's a budget gym. And you can say, hey, you get 80% of your customers after 5 p.m. and before 7 p.m., like transparently, can I, like, it's basically like a we work for gyms and for private trainers, right? Where I'm not going to rent your whole space, but will you give me permission to come between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. with my clients, I'll pay a premium. I'll pay a premium for each client. have. I use all your equipment and I just use your space instead of building out a gym.

You want to know? Okay. What you just said was the genius part on how to make this thing asset light. The asset light version of this, it's got to be class pass for personal trainers. And therefore, you charge them a reoccurring thing and you get access to any gym or the gyms that at least are signed up. Because to your point, yeah, like you and I are lucky. I don't know if you're the same way, but like I never work out between 7 to 9 a.m. and 5.000. to 8 p.m. Like I almost, right, exactly. I almost exclusively, honestly, usually around now throughout the day is like when I typically

will go. And then like I'm walking out of the gym as people are walking into the gym, which is awesome. I'm never, I'm never waiting, whatever. But there are a huge amount of people that I'm sure would take people up on that. And I'd imagine, you know, the only downside then becomes, okay, are the personal trainers clients willing to go during the middle of the day? Maybe. But the point is, is like, can you get a class passed specifically for,

personal trainers. That way, it's also a good feeling where, like, I don't know how the gyms feel about this, but they want to know, like, there's some membership loyalty, whatever. Like, the personal trainer is going to treat your stuff right. And I also think that they are going to introduce more clientele to your gym. If you're not a class-heavy gym and you want people who wait train in the area to check it out, like it's more valuable to them. So there's definitely something there, I think. Yeah, it's the same model. I interviewed the swim school guy on Twitter. And he goes to country clubs and basically places with a pool already and says, hey, let me just rent out your pool so I can teach these kids how to swim. That way, he doesn't

have to spend 500 grand on a pool. Similar model. I agree. The hard part is all those people are working out in the mornings and evenings because that's the only time they can work out. And so you've got to find trainers that have customers that can work out in the middle of the day. Maybe then there's like you charge less because it is the middle of the day. It's the discount you get, I don't know. There's probably an interesting hook or go back to what you were saying earlier on positioning. Like, it's probably, if the services get access to your city's best personal trainers and a fraction of the price in the top gyms, okay, what's the catch? Well, you got to go at 2 p.m. All right. Like, I can take a late lunch. Like, there's probably some opportunity there to get pretty cool access to that. Especially if there's a shower. They could always, and if it's nearby, they can always go back to work. Cool. I think that can scale up pretty fast for what it's worth.

if you execute it right. So that's my $10 million of your business. I like that. I like that idea a lot. I like that it plays on all these current trends. It plays on these infrastructures that people are already using. It plays on the fact that people are only getting more vain. They're only going to want to keep going to the gym. That's a winner. You just have to play like, it's kind of like a marketplace. You're the guy that finds the trainers that already have the customers. If you had to stack rank these, let's do a little refresh here. We've got grill cleaning, workout honey, how do you want to call yours?

Podcast distribution agency. Podcast agency, yeah, AB testing agency, whatever. Database of niche construction permits, personal training, gyms, and chia juice. Workout honey, chia juice. What are you saying is to declare winner that if you dropped everything you'd go after today? I'm always biased for more accessible ideas. Same, same.

So I'm going to start with the first one, grill cleaning. That's my number one. Number two is going to be the honey slash chia juice. We'll throw busy juice in there too. Yep. Number three. Oh, man, though. Oh, but you know what?

Screw that. I'm going to say, number one, the lead gen. That's incredibly accessible. The construction permits. Yes. Like incredibly high margin. That's number one. Number two, grill cleaning.

Number three, the drinks and the honey. Number four, podcast agency. Number five. Is the gym the only one left? Mm-hmm. The gym one? The gym. If you want to do the idea of validation one, but I think that was a little toss up.

Yeah, I put the gym one, I put idea validation last because I think it's going to be hard to find your core customer in the gym one second to last because I don't go to the gym. I run in a cycle and weights are too heavy. I think I'm almost the same exact ranking there. Yeah. What do you got? What would you switch around? I think I hate selling to people that don't have money and the podcast one breaks that for me. I love the product concepts.

I just, I wouldn't buy it. And unfortunately, I love the product and I wouldn't pay for it. What does that tell me? Yeah. And you're a guy that like you're trying to grow. Like you could afford it, right? It might not have a positive ROI today, but you could afford it and you're trying to grow your podcast. But even then, it's not worth it.

I am the target customer and I'm being cheap about it. out of which sucks. Yeah. Otherwise, everything else like, for the most part you're selling to people, I think something that would be pretty interesting,

and I know you've got to jump here in a sec, something that would be pretty interesting that I wanted to make a segment on today, but I thought of it 10 minutes before we pressed record. And if we want to do another episode, I think it would be fun. I realized the other day that most of the companies that I own currently are pretty focused on like good times,

like economies rolling and everything is good. Yeah, like the boat. Storage units. Yep. storage units maybe a little bit less. When people have stuff, storage units, there's a bull case for I see what you're saying. Yeah, like people downsize when things aren't good.

They buy more stuff and things are good. Even like the recruiting stuff, like people stop hiring, people stop paying me. So like there's a lot of stuff where if the economy takes a downturn, I want to hedge. And so going into this next 18 months and we're not starting new companies. But after those 18 months, come time 2026, baby, we are going to build a recession-resistant business that is not a vice business. It is not a pure funeral business. And I want to find something that people still buy when times are tough.

So if you want to brainstorming that, we can record again anytime. Yeah, that seems like it's going to be the next episode. Do you have some thoughts in mind? Yeah. I was scouring Reddit before this. And I have three thoughts right now, but I want to do more research on them. Let's make that the next one then. Where can everyone find you?

C underscore GRO on every social media or biz brainstorming Orban's.com. Okay. And I will link to everything. And this is part two of our two-part episode. Go back a week to listen to the first one. And this is Connor Gross. Thank you for coming on.

And we'll have them on again. Thanks, Chris. Okay. What'd you think? Should I have Connor back on? I'm going to have Connor back on. Please, please share this with your friends. I would really appreciate that.

It means a lot. And we'll see you next time.