The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - I Started These 14 Businesses. Here’s How You Can Copy Them. Ep. #79

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

This is part three of 'Every Business I've Ever Started' Today, I’m doing something a little different. In this episode, I'm taking each business I've ever started and giving you actionable ideas on how you could start a similar business today. I believe that almost any business idea can be executed at any time, with a bias for action being key. Some ideas work in certain contexts, sure, but most of them are timeless if you put your spin on it. If you want even more business ideas, check out the previous episodes 14 and 21.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 Introduction and Series Overview01:19 Tree Biz Bootcamp: Launching and Lessons04:20 Fast Tree Care: The Journey Begins05:09 Binary Outcome Framework in Home Services06:59 Blue Metric: RV Parks and Campgrounds08:31 Busy: Aggregating Businesses for Sale12:18 No Greasy: High-Quality Restaurant Degreaser15:26 Lead Texters: Generating Leads via SMS17:50 Easy MLS: Flat Fee Listing Service18:54 Leveraging AI to Reduce Business Friction19:37 Exploring Business Ideas on BizBuySell24:22 Monetizing Content: Podcast and Newsletter26:47 Consulting and Advising Business Owners27:46 Speed to Ship: Innovative Shipping Software29:43 Mexican Baseball Merchandise Opportunity31:08 Better Parks: RV Park Investment32:35 Busy Juice: Creating a Unique Beverage34:16 Sunbeam ABA and Sunbeam Paws Ventures37:11 Conclusion and Next Steps

Welcome to the corner office. I'm going to do something a little different today. If you go back and listen to episode number 14 and number 21, they are called part one and part two of every business I've ever started. And I never did a part three or part four of those. So I wanted to do that, but with a twist, I wanted to take each idea, each business that I've already started and try to add some ideas of how you could start a business similar to what I did. Because I firmly believe that almost any business idea could be executed at any time. Certainly sooner is better. Bias for action is a good thing. But most ideas don't just go away or they don't become too competitive or too crowded. But some of these ideas did only kind of exist in a vacuum based on what I was going through at the time. So if that is the case, then I'll try to put a spin on it. So you could copy this today in 2024, 25, or whenever you're listening to this.

So part two of this series was on May 17th. And I finished by talking about $10 and $20 unlocks, which were domain names, $10 unlock.com and $20 unlock.com that enabled people to unlock their iPhone. So it could sell for more money. And I'll remind you that these are not in a specific timeline or sequential order. It was as I remembered them. And so the timelines are a little wonky. But the next business, this is number 40. This was the tree biz boot camp. And so over a year ago, we launched a tree trimming business called Fast Tree Care. And we launched you with James. And he's awesome. And we learned a lot about the tree business. And this was the second tree business I

launched because I had helped a friend named Jordan launch one about four years ago. So we felt like we knew a good bit about the tree business. And we wanted to sell a boot camp to teach others how to start a tree business as well. And we had never done a course or a mastermind or a boot camp or whatever you want to call it. So this was new to us. I say us. This is me and Nick Huleski, my business partner. And so we wanted to do it in person in Dallas. We felt like it would be the highest quality and you just can't really replace in person instruction. And so I tweeted about it a couple times and I sent one email about it to my newsletter. And we got about 20 people. About half of them, maybe 60% decided to join in person and the remaining 40% attended virtually. And so what this was was

two full days of instruction in Dallas, really McKinney, about 15 minutes from my house. And we taught people how to start a tree trimming business. And we had guest speakers that were marketers and accountants. And James did a bunch of instruction in Matthew, my good friend slash partner slash employee that helped with this business as well. We went out to job sites. We showed them different types of trees and different neighborhoods. We showed them jobs we had already done. We talked about equipment and checklist and hiring subcontracts. because the whole point of this boot camp was to start a tree business or any home service business without performing the work yourself by outsourcing all of the work.

Because we don't own a chainsaw. We just have a truck. And then we have crews that we 1099 and subcontract out all the jobs do. So this business was a success. I still have the virtual copy that every now and then someone will run across my old tweet and say, hey, can I attend that? And we say, well, we're not doing it in person anymore, but you can buy the virtual version. So we still sell the virtual version every now and then.

But the feedback we got on the course, both virtual and in person, was amazing. We got like a 9.7 out of 10 anonymous feedback score from all the participants. It was really high quality. We spent a lot of money to make it good. And I think we had like $45,000 or $50,000 in gross revenue over a couple days. I'm not including the prep time. And about half of that was profit. So about 20 grand profit for two days worth of work.

plus a good week's worth of work on the front end to plan things. We had really good food. We ate at a good steakhouse, good catered food. I love food, so I take it seriously. But anyway, that was a good business. And so you could start this business by monetizing your knowledge, whatever you know about business or about life and selling it in a boot camp or a course. Or if you come across someone online that already has an audience,

you could piggyback on their audience and you could put together content for them and help them launch an in-person or virtual boot camp. and take a percentage of the revenue. So the next business is fast tree care. And I kind of did this in the reverse order. But we started fast tree care in the summer of 2013, me and Nick and James. And James was a hungry college student or recent graduate from Bowling Green. And he moved to Dallas with nothing but a plan and hopes and dreams. And he stayed in my house for the first few nights. And he's incredibly hardworking and awesome and respectful. And I gave him my truck, my 2011 tundra, to use for the business. And I gave him the playbook that I used to help my friend Jordan launched

this business years prior. And I said, hey, call me if you need anything. Let's meet in person every now and then. Text me, call me. Here's the plan. Here's the funding. We paid him a flat salary every month. And then he went out and did his thing. And he's been doing it ever since. And he's crushing it. I love the tree business because it has what I call a binary outcome as opposed to a lot of other home service businesses. And here's what that means. We get a call for a removal or a trimming. That's basically all we do with some stump grinding after removal. And it's very clear. They need this tree gone or they need this branch or branches gone. Sometimes multiple trees, sometimes one. We remove them. We either put them by the curb or take them away, depending on how

much they pay. And then we get a five-star review, period. And it's so nice to have a business like that, especially in the context of having a bunch of other businesses that are so complex and difficult and nebulous and you might get a one-star review or a three-star review or five-star review. You might have angry customers. You have, they're just operationally complex. This one is not because we're stepping out the work. So in my opinion, if you were to start a home service business, you should start one with a binary outcome.

Other examples might be pressure washing, lawn mowing. You know what? My brain is failing me. I had a whole tweet about this. let me pull that up. Appliance repair, window cleaning, HVAC, plumbing. These are services where they have a specific problem and you fix it and their problem is gone. An example of a business that does not have binary outcomes would be like a custom home building business or a house painting business. Oh, this isn't the shade that I chose. This shade looks different in the sun or you missed a spot or how much primer did you use or there's just so many things that a customer could be dissatisfied by. And it makes your job a lot harder. So that is a framework I love. And I wouldn't have that framework if it weren't for fast treat care because we had a third-party logistics company. We had an e-commerce company.

And those are very, very hard to do a good job. And they do not have a binary outcome. Okay. Next one. This is Blue metric. Blue metric is the company that I am a co-GP general partner for that buys RV parks and campgrounds around the southeast. I didn't start this business. So maybe this shouldn't be on the list.

So this is somewhat of a stretch. Well, it's not a stretch at all to say that I started it because I did not start it, but it was a new endeavor for me, at least. It is very entrepreneurial. I have to go out and find potential investors that are interested in these parks and then sell them on it. I also have the task of helping to find the parks using my audience to find off-market deals. I also help write investor updates and help with marketing. This takes a decent chunk of my time today, and it's one of the few.

ideas here that I'm still doing because I've only been doing it for about a year now. In this business, I am compensated by investors that I bring into a deal. It's not a fund in the sense that we raised one big amount and then we're using that amount to buy a bunch of parks. It is a syndication in the sense that we raise one to $8 million at a time on a park-by-park basis. And so if I raise a million of a deal, then I get a small percentage of that deal in equity over time. And then I also get a small percentage of our acquisition fee at the closing table. So this is a great endeavor because it enables me to have some free cash flow every month or every couple months as we close parks and also build my net worth by establishing equity stakes, small equity stakes in these parks around

the country. Number 43 was a company called Busy. And in the early days of co-founders when our thesis was to partner with college students or recently graduated college students, I partnered with a guy named Sam out of BYU. Sam is an awesome guy. I hope he's listening to this right now. And we started a company called B-I-Z-Y. Usebizzy.com was the website. I think it's still live. We're not still actively running this, but I think the domain name is still live. And busy aggregated businesses for sale around the internet from dozens of different websites. sites, we scrape them, and then we put them all together, and we put them in a Google sheet, and then we email them out once a week. So this was never monetized. And there are quite a few

other companies doing this in a much cleaner way. They're striving to be the Zillow for buying businesses. We did this in a much more low-tech way for people that are more data nerds and want to see everything in one place, where they could sort and filter and crunch numbers. But what's cool is that people actually acquired businesses from these lists that we sent out. And we never charge anything for it. It was just kind of an experiment and we thought, ah, let's monetize this one day. But we kind of shut this down because Sam got another internship and I was juggling 1,800 things at the same time and it's just one of those many things that we never monetized. And there wasn't really a clear path to monetization. There's lots of ways you could monetize.

You could charge a percentage referral fee from the brokers for referring them a buyer. or you charge a monthly fee, it could be a SaaS product. More broadly speaking, we slowly just started and drifting away from ideas that did not have a clear monetization path. Now our thesis at co-founders is to only start or buy things that can cash flow very quickly. We don't care about building a ton of equity. We just want free cash flow as soon as possible for the least amount of dollars invested. So if you wanted to start something like this, pick an industry.

Pick an industry that is highly distributed and aggregate data for that industry into one place and send it out to people that are invested either literally or on a time basis. More specifically, I think there's a massive opportunity for anyone listening to this to reach out to Main Street business owners, right? Maybe it's a restaurant owner, maybe it's a dentist, maybe it's a SaaS company in a small town in the Midwest. and to find owners that are interested in selling their business, and then to connect them with highly competent business brokers for a 25% referral fee.

Because business brokers charge 5 to 10%. 10 is not uncommon for a good business broker. So let's say you built this HVAC company to $500,000 in profit per year. You want to sell it for $2 million. It took you 30 years to build this. You sell it for $2 million. A broker is going to take $200,000. of that as this fee to find a buyer. But if you connect that broker with the business owner,

you can take 50 grand of that, up to, right? 25% is like the top of the market, but most legitimate good business brokers are willing to pay between 10 and 25% of their fee if you bring them a client. Now, the hard part about this business is the sale cycle is so long. It takes weeks or months or years for a business broker to get a listing under contract. And then it could take weeks, months, or years for it ever to sell. And it's common for deals to fall out of the pipeline. Like picture home sales times 10 on a difficulty scale and timeline. Nevertheless, this is a huge opportunity playing matchmaker between brokers and sellers.

So that is the idea that I would execute today if I were you. Next business number 44, no greasy. No Greasy is a website I'm very proud of. I think the domain name is still live. The idea is to sell a very high quality restaurant degrecer in powdered form to restaurant owners. I love the idea of selling something to gas station owners or restaurant owners because there are hundreds of thousands of either one. I was talking to a friend one day who has a business in a different field and they started selling this powdered degreiser to restaurants, which wasn't their core product or service. And this powdered degreaser was so good. The restaurants were, loving it. They're used to buying de greaser in liquid form. So they have to pay for all that shipping of water, which is unnecessary. Instead, he was selling a powdered form to them, much more highly concentrated, and they can put it in a spray bottle, add water. And it was very, very potent. And so I was able to find the manufacturer of this powdered decreaser. And we place samples at like 50 plus restaurants by texting the restaurant owners and saying, hey, we have the best degrecer you'll ever find. We sent them a

sample and then we tried to get them to order. We did. This was James and I actually, James from Fast Street Care. We did this together before we did Fast Tree Care. And we had some success. We sold some degreaser and the margins are really good. And if you go to the website, nogreasy.com, I'm proud of this website because I worked really hard at the copywriting. I know that a rest, I've been in the restaurant industry a bunch before I ever started businesses as a teenager and as a college student. I worked in restaurants as a bus boy and as a server. And restaurant owners, culture of restaurant owners is they're a little irreverent, you could say. And so I made the copy on the website reflective of that. And it's funny. I think it's funny. But I wrote it. So I'm biased.

But I'm a firm believer that good copywriting can really, really sell. This opportunity is still out there for anyone to grab. It's a beautiful business because it's recurring. If you find the best to greaser in the world, you're going to buy it every month. What's hard about this business is that restaurant owners are used to buying all of their supplies from one to two sources. There's two or three massive companies out there, U.S. foods and Cisco in particular, that sell food and supplies to go containers, cleaning supplies, degreaser. So the hard part is breaking restaurant owners out of that pattern from ordering everything from the same place. It's possible, but it's hard.

So if you're a restaurant owner or you know a restaurant owner or the owner of a chain restaurants, send up to nogreasy.com or send them to me, Chris at cofounders.com, and maybe we'll sell them some really good degrees here because we still have access to it. And it's a great product. But if you're listening to this and you want to start something here, then find something you can sell the restaurant owners. You can get them on the phone by calling them before 10 a.m. Or between 2 and 4 p.m. when it's less busy. Now, it's still busy because they're prepping for the next shift, but it's less busy in the sense. They're not juggling a ton of customers. But it's a great business, even though they have low margins, even though the failure rate is high, it's a great

business because the reorder rate is super duper high. Sell them something that they're buying anyways that is a superior product. The next one is lead textors. Lead texters. Can you imagine what lead texters does? It was a lead generation service that I launched with my friend Jared in 2019, 2020 or so. And we would help home service business owners find more leads, roofers in particular. And we found them leads by texting and then selling them the leads. And this was a great business and it worked. But the difficult part about this business are the regulatory hurdles. You can't text people that don't opt in. You can't text people that are on the do not call list. It's tough to get around these things. There are some ways, similar to cold emailing. You can't

just add someone to your newsletter, but you can cold email someone. So we did find some ways around this, but we were concerned about the scalability of it. So in general, I would apply this business today by just looking at cold SMS as a different marketing channel that you might be ignoring today. Because the open rates are what 97% as opposed to 20% on email. The response rates are double digits as opposed to 5% for email. More broadly speaking, I'm very bullish on the home service industry and in selling marketing services to them because a lot of home service businesses are busy. They're doing great. They're doing fine. So you think, well, they don't even need marketing services. why would I start a marketing business?

Because the ones that are in that sweet spot, they're not too big to have a hard time funding the owner, but they're big enough to where they want to scale and they have the infrastructure to scale and they have the budget to pay $1,000 to $4,000 a month to get more business. Those guys are ready to be sold to. And when the economy turns,

whenever that happens, people are going to have to get a lot more creative to find more jobs. And you'll be able to fill that need. We have kind of a stealth-ish project going on right now called repeat leads where we're doing this. We're helping home service business owners find more leads and we're having a ton of success and it's been a great business so far and they've been very happy with us. So the pie is big enough for everyone. There's over 30 million small

businesses in America alone. That's 10% of all Americans on paper. That means one in 10 people you pass on the street or is a potential customer. More realistically speaking, most of those business owners don't even have any employees so they don't have a budget for something like this. But there's certainly millions of potential customers out there. Google Business Profile Management, Google LSA management, paid Google ads, paid Facebook ads, lead magnets. We talk about this stuff all the time on this podcast. Number 46, EasyMLS. EasyMLS was a flat fee MLS listing service for people that had already listed their homes for sale by owner. So we built an automation, my friend Jared and I, that would automatically text and or email FISBO for sale by owner, sellers, and say, hey,

no one can see that your property is for sale. I know you're trying to save 6%. I respect that. I'm a cheap O2, but for 100 bucks, you could list this on the MLS with us. Now, you're still probably going to want to pay 1 to 3% to the buyer's agent, but to get 10 times more eyeballs on your listing by getting it on Zillow on the right category on Zillow and on redfin. you're going to want this to be listed on the MLS, do it with us for a flat fee for $99 or $3.99.

It was low hundreds of dollars. And it was automated. It was beautiful. And so people would get an automated text. Then they could automatically pay. And then they would automatically get a type form to submit their description and their pictures. And today you could do this with AI.

You can have AI write the listing for them. You could remove 80% of the friction, which was the big problem with this business five years ago with all the friction that it takes. Sure, you get them to pay great, but they're not going to get any value out of the product if they never take the time to take professional pictures and to list the pictures and to write a description and to think of a description and to answer the phone when people call. It's a lot to ask in exchange for only $1 to $400. The price that you charge is not reflective of the friction they have to go through to use your service and to have a good experience. That was the big problem with it. But today, you could use

AI to do most of this work for them. So I'm much more bullish on this idea today than I was when I launched it four or five years ago. Number 47, my favorite number. This was, I just have rocking chair because one day I was shopping on biz by sell. And here's a great framework for you. If you're short on ideas, not just ideas of what business to buy, but what business to start.

If you're short on ideas, then just start window shopping on biz by sell. because there are a plethora of ideas, tactical, financials, everything you'd ever want to see about a small business is listed on biz by sell. Don't just look in your market. Look nationwide. Go to biz by sell and look at the homepage before you even log in because those are going to be really hot listings that biz by sale is putting in front of you because other people are naturally clicking on them and seeking them out. that's another good framework is on any platform that is somewhat sophisticated like a Twitter or any social media platform or a big website if you really want to see what's hot check it out in an incognito tab or when you're not logged in and it will show you like

the most popular things really really good for generating ideas so anyway I was on business by sell one day and I see this business for sale in Texas that was an e-commerce business that made these old-timey wooden rocking chairs, rocking horses, actually, where it would be just like a horse head combined with a kid's rocking chair and someone in Texas was making these and selling them. And their margins were like 70%. They were selling a ton of them. And I got the info packet from the broker.

And they had insane margins. And they were getting 100% of their business from paid Facebook ads, which is. is both bad and good. It's bad because it's only one channel to receive all your customers. It's good because insert $1, get back six or whatever it is. And so what I did was I tried to reverse engineer this to see if I could recreate the Facebook ad success that they were having because I thought, man, I might not start a rocking horse business, but I could sell a similar product to a similar demographic, aka mom's age 25 to 45

at a similar price point. And so I did. So I put up a website and I took some pictures from Google Images and I started pushing paid Facebook ads to it to see if they would convert. And then if they converted, I would just refund their money and say, hey, this is just the test. I'm just trying to, I'm trying to test something here. And it worked.

I was. I was able to acquire customers. Now this was, I don't know how long ago this was, six, seven years. But more broadly speaking, what you could learn from this is go to biz by sell. see what people are doing, request an info packet, and just learn, read the synopsis, read the executive summary, look at the financials, and think, where is the asymmetric bet? Is there something here that shows there's more demand than supply?

Is there something here that has outsized margins? Something that just surprise you, makes you kind of sit up on the edge of your chair and go, huh, this is interesting, and then take that data and do something with it. Number 48. This was the other tree business that I helped my friend Jordan start in 2019 or so. And this was a guy that is a brilliant salesperson, really a smooth talker, great with women, but also his life was kind of a mess. He had a history of getting in trouble. And so me and a friend helped him with the marketing, helped him find some crews to cut down these trees for him. And he was super busy.

We used a lot of cold texting. We used some Facebook ads. And for some reason or another, he was able to acquire a lot of municipal contracts, the city of Frisco, the city of Allen, Plano, cutting down and trimming trees for them in their public spaces. He fell into that niche and he's still in that niche today. He's been in business for six or seven years. He's doing multiple, I can't say multiple seven figures of revenue because I hate

when people say that. Anytime anyone says seven. figures, they mean like a million. And anytime they mean multiple, they say multiple, they mean like two or three, but that's dumb. Okay. He's doing seven figures of revenue. I have no ownership interest in that. I've never made a dime from that. I just helped him as a friend. And that gave me the confidence to start this myself. So technically, we're direct competitors. We're serving the same markets. But guess what? There's 950 tree trimming businesses in the Dallas, Fort Worth. Metroplex. It's a $500 million industry just in DFW.

plenty big enough for everyone. So I love the tree trimming business. I love home service businesses. Once again, find one that has binary outcomes. Okay, the next one is this, the Kernanoff's podcast slash newsletter.

I've had my newsletter for a little over a year now. I'm on edition number 55 or 56, and it is weekly, so it's a little over a year. And the podcast I launched in late February of this year, 2024. And it is a business. I'm monetized by YouTube.

YouTube pays me between, I've been monetized for almost three months exactly on YouTube and it's climbing. I make between $50 and $150 a day, which is awesome. It's like $2 to $3,000 a month. Not life-changing for me, but it's sizable. It's significant. That's a vacation every couple months from my family if I wanted it to be. Really, I'm just putting it back into equipment.

I'm using a $300 camera right now, which is quite cheap as far as cameras are concerned. I'm using $59 lighting from Amazon, which you might be able to tell. if you're watching this on YouTube. I'm cheap and sometimes to a fault, literally to a fault, because I can have a higher quality production here if I spent more on equipment. But I'm starting to use that YouTube revenue to pay for more editing. I'm going to do more in person, one-on-one style interviews, ride-alongs, diving deep into home service businesses with the home service business on site, kind of like a dirty jobs meets diners, drive-ins and dives with better hair, hopefully, in this case. But I've never had a paid ad on the news.

letter or the podcast. Not to say that I never will. I'm just very, very, very picky. And I turn down almost everything that comes in my way because I don't want to just chill things on behalf of people just because they happen to give me money. I value your time and attention. Just like I turn down most people that want to have a Zoom with me, I wouldn't blame anyone else that does the same with me. Time is the only thing we can't buy back. And so if I feed you guys irrelevant dumb ads, then I'm wasting your time and that's not fair to you. So I love running this podcast. I love business as you can tell. I could do this until I die because it is my hobby and my profession and my passion. It's everything rolled up into one. And so it comes naturally to me. So the business idea for you here

is talk about what you're doing. Go do cool things and then talk about it on the internet or on a podcast. Very few people will care or listen at first. But the better you get at portraying, those ideas, either through copywriting or through the spoken word, the more people will be interested and share it with their friends. My next business is consulting. I do advising every now and then very rarely with business owners. We speak once a week. They pay me on a monthly basis and I help them grow their business and or operationalize it. This is a tricky one because it can be decent money, but oftentimes it doesn't give me a lot of energy because there are so many things that I want to be working on in my businesses.

My passion is zero to one, not just business, like I just said in the last segment, but specifically the zero to one phase of business, going from idea to execution to first dollar in the stripe account. I love that. And so if I'm helping other people do that, that's enjoyable, but it's not as enjoyable as doing it myself. And so I say no to almost every opportunity that comes my way. But nevertheless, it is a source of revenue for me, even today.

I haven't been doing it for that long. but it is really cool to see a business owner implement an idea that I give that I give them and then see the fruits of that come to life. So the next business is called Speed to Ship. And this is a domain name that I still own today. And it is a piece of software that my brother-in-law Justin developed for both my old company, Send Eats, which was a third-party logistics company and for my current company, Texas Snacks, which is our Bucky's resale business.

So we had a very specific. software need with Texas snacks. And we wanted to rate shop, as in we wanted to scan a package and then put it on the scale. And then we wanted a piece of software to tell us, okay, between UPS, FedEx, DHS, and USPS, here is maybe not the cheapest, but here's the best shipping option, all things considered. So, for instance, maybe the person pays for overnight, but they're already in Texas. So we don't want to pay for a $25 overnight late. We would rather pay for a $6 label because we know that they're going to get it overnight. You also have packages with dimensional weight.

Now, you've got weight and dimensional weight. Let's say you're shipping a balloon. It weighs almost nothing, but the dimensional weight is quite big. So this software takes that in consideration. So I still think that this is an amazing piece of software that we should be selling. A lot of times the best businesses are built within another business to solve that business's specific need. And then you learn, oh, wow, this actually could be resold to other businesses. So we're not reselling speed to ship.

We don't even have a mechanism for that. But we actually have a couple big competitors today that are doing the same thing. But at the time we developed this, no one was doing this. And it changed the game. We saved thousands of dollars a month on shipping. So credit to Justin for building this and for maintaining it because we're still shipping thousands of packages a month through this just for Texas snacks. But one day, we need to resell this as a SaaS product to other e-commerce businesses.

So if you own a business, look for the problems that you're having. develop a solution for them and then start seeing of other business owners have the same problem. Okay, the next is Mexican baseball. About a year ago, I got approached by a guy on LinkedIn that said, hey, I've read your Bucky's story and I think it's awesome. And I'm connected with many of the baseball team owners here in Mexico. And believe it or not, baseball is the second biggest, most popular sport in Mexico behind soccer. And it's growing even faster than soccer. there's a winter league and a summer league and millions of Mexicans watch baseball.

And he thought, wow, why is there no MLB.com for Mexican baseball? The individual teams have websites where you can buy the merch, but there is no central place that sells all the merch. So he wanted my help in creating this and in promoting this. And so we talked for a while about it. We're still in touch. We wanted to launch before the last season, but we ran out of time. time. And so this is still kind of a work in progress. If anyone's going to do this, it's this guy that

reached out to me because he's so well connected. He owns a team himself, and then he's connected to the other team owners as well. And then he's also connected to one of the major sports streaming companies. So there's another opportunity to stream these Mexican baseball games as well. So how could you copy this idea? I have no idea. I'll be honest. Maybe find another country that has a sport that's growing quickly. Try to find a decision maker there and do the same thing. Next one is Better Parks. Better Parks is the entity that Nick and I started to buy an RV Park. Now, this RV Park is outside entirely of Blue Metric, the parks that I'm raising money for. This was just mine and Nick's thing. And it's a park in Waco, Texas. And we started Better Parks

as an entity to buy this RV park, turn it around. And one idea that we had for Better Parks was to be kind of a consulting firm that helps other RV parks increase their occupancy, where we would come in and say, hey, we'll make all these changes for you. we'll convert park-owned homes to tenant-owned homes. We'll be the bad guy that raises rents. We'll install cameras. We'll do all these things. And you pay us one flat fee or we get a percentage of equity in the park.

We never ended up going through with that. So this entity is just used for that park in Waco, which we successfully turned around, but then had issues with the city. And we are trying to sell the park right now because it has been a headache, to be honest. So we're selling the park with all of the issues with the city for. front and center in our deck saying, hey, this isn't something we want to manage right now. So we're willing to take a hit on it for you to manage this product, this project, and capture the upside. So how could you copy this? Buy an RV park. Start an RV park. Easier said than done.

Obviously, I don't recommend building an RV park, especially if it's your first four a into the game. But obviously firmly believe they are great investments, which is why much of my time is spent raising money and investing in RV parks. Next idea is busy Jews. So if you're an OG to the pod, you've probably heard me talk about busy juice in the past. Maybe you even saw a video of me on YouTube with a massive one gallon stainless steel container with a busyjuice.com sticker on the side. Busy juice is a drink that I invented to fill a need, my own need. I wanted to drink a gallon of water a day.

I also wanted caffeine, but I didn't want to drink a gallon of garbage. I was drinking meal, like that little drink enhancer you get from the grocery store. in the squirt bottles. I was drinking a gallon of water a day and mixing in Mio so it wasn't just boring old water. Then I thought, geez, I should not be drinking a gallon of red dye number 40 a day. This is, this cannot be good under any circumstances. And so I started ordering products to make my own drink, a drink where I knew what the ingredients were and that would give me energy and would hopefully not kill me. And that was busy juice. And it has three ingredients and I drink it to this day, every day and it gives me energy and it's clean and I know what's in it and one day I'm going

to resell it and so I put up a website I bought the domain name busyjuge.com and I put up a landing page but there's nothing for sale yet and this is a physical product. It's an industry I have very little experience in developing a physical food product and so it's just on the back burner right now but one day I will make this and I will sell it and it's in powdered form so it's not expensive to ship. It's obviously a crowded category, but I don't care because guess what? We all need to drink liquids every day to survive. So I don't care how many competitors I have. If it's a superior or a decent product, people will buy it. And if they like it, they will keep buying it every month until they get sick of it. So the last business that I will cover today, and then I'll do a part four,

and that will be the last segment. But the last one is Sunbeam ABA. Sunbeam ABA was my attempt to buy an autism clinic with my two good friends and business partners, Stephen and Nick. We found an autism clinic to buy in Tucson, Arizona. We spent a lot of money, what, 12 grand, putting paperwork together to acquire this business. We flew out to Tucson, which, no offense to anyone that lives in Tucson, but it's not a great place. We met with a business owner. We took him out to dinner. We spent a couple days with them. It's great business. After flying there, we decided, yeah, yeah, we really want to buy this. But there were a lot of red flags during the due diligence process. The owner was not willing to disclose all of his financials. He was really

dodgy about some things. It was difficult. The owner was being really difficult and we didn't feel comfortable with it. And we were going to raise money to buy this based on a tweet that I put out there in the world based on information that Stephen gave me about an autism clinic deal that he did while working for his last employer. And so I tweeted about this. It got $500,000. thousand views received a ton of interest from accredited investors. I put together a list. We had a couple webinars. We basically had the money raised. We had the deal targeted, but the deal fell through because it didn't look good. And then we lost energy on the deal. Time kills all deals. And we moved on. So we never raised money. We never bought an autism clinic. We thought seriously about starting one.

We looked at another one in Texas to buy a much smaller one, but it just never came together. And so we took that energy and interest and ended up putting it into our pet cremation business. So I guess this is kind of a two-part mini segment to end this segment. Sunbeam pause, all right? Sunbeam, the name came from a song that we have in our church, which is called Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam. And so we were optimistic with our autism clinics that we would be able to help children with autism treatment plans.

And so we named the entity, after a children's song as part of our religion. So we kept the name, Sunbeam, and instead of Sunbeam ABA, it was Sunbeam Paws, and we launched it. We now own a pet cremation business in the greater DFW area. And this is a great business because it's very operationally light. We have a refrigerated van, and we pick up deceased animals, mostly dogs, some cats, some hamsters, and we deliver them to a cremation facility. So we're basically the logistics provider

between the veterinary clinics and the cremation provider. And it's profitable. It's been profitable from day one. And we're working on acquiring more customers right now, customers being veterinary clinics in the DFW area. So that concludes this third part of every business I've ever started. I think I'll change the name because you're more likely to listen to it

if it's more relatable to you. But if you found this interesting, please share with a friend. Leave me a five-star rating and I will see you next time.