The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Part 1/4: Every Business I've Ever Started. Ep. #014.Small Business Ideas and Entrepreneurship

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

I've started over 70 businesses, so this is part 1 of me talking about all of them. Hopefully this helps you generate some ideas of your own. Or shoot, copy these yourself! Almost all of them would still work today. Enjoy! I'd love your follow and review, if I've earned it.Submit a question for the show:  http://form.typeform.com/to/Eb8KaY0pWatch the video version of this on YouTube instead: https://www.youtube.com/@thekoerneroffice?sub_confirmation=1Free weekly business ideas newsletter: https://newsletter.chrisjkoerner.com/Learn more about me: http://chrisjkoerner.comFollow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/mhp_guy

Welcome to the corner office. I wanted to do something a little different today. I have a spreadsheet or a Google sheet that is entitled every business I've ever started. And I had not added to this for six, 12 months. And last night, I couldn't sleep. And so I started adding to it. And I was at 40 when I started and I finished at 70. And so I have started over 70 businesses because I know there's a handful more that I haven't remembered. But here's what I qualify as a business. I'm going to read every single. one of these and give you just a quick primer on what it was and the background. So I count something as a business if they thought it would generate revenue and I spent hours on it. Maybe I filed an LLC and then spent some time on it. Maybe it was a full-fledged business with employees revenue, raised money. Or maybe there was never an LLC. It never generated revenue, but it was a test. right i'm counting test as businesses because every business i start starts as a test and so i just thought this is really interesting to look at because i get comments on twitter all the time that says wow how do you have all these stories like sounds like you've lived two lifetimes in 30 something years

and i think that's because i i've started 70 businesses and i've had 10 15 20 i know i've said different numbers of how many business partners i've had that's because i count them differently so it's kind of not a solid target, but I've always had a few tests, few businesses, few companies going at the same time, which means that I have a ton of experience in the zero to one phase. And I love it. And it's absolutely my passion, if you can't tell by now. So without further ado, let's get started on these businesses. And I will tell you either the market cap or the revenue or some sort of a metric that lets you understand how big all of these businesses are or were. And most of them had $0 in revenue because I abandoned them. And I'll also tell you the

outcome of all of them. So my first business was selling used golf balls as a nine year old in Logan, Utah. I lived across the street from the Logan River golf course and I was kind of poor, not really poor, but we just didn't have a lot of money. And I wanted to buy candy at the grocery store down the street, Macy's. And so I would go looking in the ditch across the street, Park Avenue. I think I lived at Park Avenue. And I'd look for golf balls and I'd wash it. And I'd watch them and I had a red rider wagon and I would wash them with laundry detergent, make them sparkly and white. And I put up a huge four by eight foot plywood sign. I leaned it against my mail locks. It was a really busy road, got a lot of traffic. And it just said, use golf balls three for a dollar.

And then these guys and polo shirts would pull into my driveway and give me a few bucks for a few golf goals, a few golf balls. And it was really fun. That was my first taste of entrepreneurship. it. Then, so I'm going to jump around. I don't have these in sequential order. When I was in college, I started a business called textbook crook. Textbook crook was a marketplace for college students to buy and sell textbooks to each other because I thought it was ridiculous that I'd spend $130 on a textbook. And then four months later at the end of the semester, the bookstore would give me $15 for it. But I knew that another student about to take that same class would give me $70 for it. So some people did it on Craigslist at the time.

There was no Facebook marketplace. This was two thousand. So I thought there should be a marketplace for this. And so I found some template online. It was really ugly. You can go to web archive and look up textbook crook.com and you'll see it. It was a really, really ugly website, terribly ugly logo, made an MSPaint, literally. But I paid $500 for this template.

It was a marketplace template. And people could list their textbooks for sale for $1. And that's it. I just made a dollar per listing. And I advertised by getting postcards printed, full color. two-sided postcards and me and my buddies that I worked with at a Thai restaurant waiting tables. After our shift ended at 2 o'clock, we'd go to the community college, Shelton State, and we'd go to the University of Alabama, where we were, and we'd put these postcards under the windshield wipers

of all the cars. And that got us our first customers. And then one day, serendipity happened. And I got an email from the university, some random notification. And they did not BCCB. they emailed all 28,000 students just on Gmail. It was right there. I had everyone's email.

And so I slowly hit reply all and shamelessly said textbook crook.com. We're textbook crook because we steal the competition. And I hit reply all and I emailed every single student in the University of Alabama because I could. And it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And that drove a bunch of traffic to my website. and the IT department reached out and they said, you can't do that. You should never do that again.

And I said, oops, okay, sorry. And you can't unring a bell. What's done was done. And that was really good for my business. But then a few months later, I had my first son. And the business wasn't showing a lot of traction. And so I abandoned it. That's what happened with textbook crook.

Then I had a business that lasted all of an afternoon called Clean Cuts. And this was like, I was 21 years old. I was straight out of my mission. And I wanted to mowl. lawns to make some money in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And so I printed up some flyers, clean cuts lawn care. And I went to a neighborhood. I still remember the neighborhood. I took my kids there last time we were in town for an Alabama game. And I started passing out flyers. And I got a job. And then an hour into it, I was like, this sucks. I just remembered,

I hate mowing the lawn. I have always hated mowing the lawn. What am I doing? There's better ways to make money. And so, yeah, I'm calling that a business, but really it was an experience. that lasted an afternoon. My next business was CK Properties, and that was me buying rail homes. And I started by buying my first home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was a tiny 900-square-foot, three-bedroom, one bath, 50-year-old home, and we paid $90,000 for it. And then at the time, President Obama was giving $8,000 tax credits to first-time homebuyers to help spark the economy out of a recession. And so once I got that $8,000 check, I promptly put it into a rental home, five minutes down the road from me in a rough part of town. It was a four-bedroom two bath.

I paid about $56,000 for it. And CK Properties was born. I was a landlord at age 22. And then I bought a few more, one in Huntsville, another one in Huntsville. And I owned those homes for three to six years. I started selling them off in the mid-20. And, It was just too hard to manage single family homes from a few states away because I had moved to Texas in 24. Then I had a business. I consider this like my first real business. It was phone restore. And phone restore was a chain of iPhone repair shops in my first location.

And I'll talk about a lot of these in more depth on future episodes. But I just want to touch on these quickly. Phone restore started when it was 2010 and guy in one of my classes gave me a free iPhone. because it was broken and it's sitting in his drawer. And I had a palm phone with a physical keyboard. And then I saw a flyer that said, I fix iPhones $60. And the guy's name was Samir, I think. And he lived in the houndstooth apartments right on 15th Street.

And I called him up. And I said, I have this iPhone and the screen won't turn on. He said, bring it over to my dorm room. So I went over there. And he had already ordered the LCD screen from eBay. and I sat there in his dorm room and watched him fix it. And then I went to eBay and saw that part was only $15. And he charged me 60.

And it took him for 10 minutes. And I thought, that's a good business. That's going to be my first business. If he can do it, I can do it. Started doing some research and learned that there was a business in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, another SEC school town called My Phone MD. I used to be called iPhone MD, but Apple threatened to take them out. Sorry, I just got an interruption if we could edit that out.

They were called my phone MD. And they used to be called iPhone MD, but Apple said, hey, you can't use the word iPhone in your business name. And they were just bragging. They had a location and doing 20, 30, 40 grand a month fixing iPhones. So I thought, man, if they can do it there, I can do this here. So I did a bunch of research and learned that Tuscaloosa could support at least one store.

So I signed a lease on one of the best retail spots in town. I put a personal guarantee on it, $2,500 a month. right in between a subway and a batteries plus, and I was off to the races. And a tornado hit me, and I opened a second location of Birmingham, and then I graduated, and then I opened a third location in Huntsville, and then we moved to Huntsville, and then I opened a fourth location in Huntsville, and then two years later I sold the business, and then I had a dispute with my business partners that lasted a couple of years and was very stressful, and we ended up settling, and I got a check.

I got a sizeable check at the meal for selling that business. It was a lot of money for a 20-something-year-old, not enough to retire, but enough to feel pretty rich. And that was my first real, real business. And it was a lot of fun. So then I started LCD cycle, which I started literally the day after I sold phone restore. And LCD cycle was born when I got a call one day. I was sitting in the store, fixing an iPhone, hating my life, working in retail, which is the worst thing ever. And I got a call that said, hey, I want to buy your iPhone screens. And I said,

why would you want to buy those? Well, we can recycle them. We send them to China. And I hung up and immediately thought, I want to do that. I want to be on the other end of that transaction. And so I started reaching out to vendors through Alibaba, DMing iPhone screen vendors and saying copy paste, copy paste the same message saying, I want to buy iPhone screens and I want to recycle iPhone screens. Can you help me? And about one in 10 would say, yes, I can help you with both. And everyone else said, I can only sell you screens. I can't help you recycle screens. So then I just started sending them my company's iPhone screens to see what would happen. And I had to learn how to import, how to export, how to label your boxes to not get confiscated in customs, how to go through Hong Kong,

how to do all this stuff to get them there. And then I had a business. And so I had set the groundwork for this before I ever sold phone restore. And so when I sold phone restore, I thought, man, this will be a lot better. I like this a lot more. I don't want to deal with customers face to face. I would rather sell them stuff on the internet. So that's what LCD cycle was. And it blew up.

It was product market fit. It was right place, right time. And it was a lot of cold calls. And I will have a whole episode dedicated to LCD cycle and how we grew fast in the future. But the long and short of it is we did $28,000 the first month, exactly twice, $56,000, the second month in February, 2013. And then we did a $100,000, 140, something like that, the third month. And we closed out the year, over $2 million.

And then we doubled every year for a while. And it was a big business. And that was a lot of fun. And it lasted seven years, give or take. And then I had a business. So forget the timelines from here and out because they're all murky. I was doing a bunch of things at the same time. And I can't ever remember the years.

So forget the timelines. I'll tell you if I remember. But I had a business called Presto Cars with Nick, you'll ask you my current business partner. It was a concierge car buying service. And we, I mean, shoot, we sold a bunch of cars. So revenues were in the six figures. But it was a terrible business.

I don't like cars. I don't care about them. I don't like breaking down on the side of the road in an old Mazda meata. It was not fun. And during this time, I was still doing LCD cycle, which was doing great. And so I was just thinking, like, what are you doing, Chris? Like, why are you selling these used cars when you could just be doing LCD cycle? So the whole model was, you tell us what car you want.

We become a licensed dealer so we can see what is coming up at all the auctions, Mannheim and Addessa. Those are the two big ones. And then we would go to the auction and buy your car for you for a six-a-fee. So you pay basically dealer rates. You pay a wholesale fee plus like a finder's fee to us. And the whole model was to go to one auction for six hours and buy cars for 10 to 20 people and make six to 12 grand in a day gross profit.

But it didn't work out like that. You know, people would back out. the car would break down, something would be missed in the inspection, we couldn't get it at their target price. There was a million things that could go wrong in that business. And they did. And I probably ended up breaking even, maybe losing a couple grand on like, let's see, 20, 30, maybe 150 grand in revenue over the course of a few months. Yeah. Deason business, not for me. Then I had a business called No BS Crypto, and this is the one that I started with McAfee that I dedicated a whole episode to about a month ago.

You can go, I think it was after episode five of the Turner Office. It's called What Happened when I showed up on John McAfee's door. That was 28 to 2020 or so, give or take. That was a wild ride. We had a, our token had a market cap in the tens of millions, but that doesn't mean it's real money. It's just funny money, crypto money. But we had tens of thousands of customers, token holders, whatever you want to call them.

We also had a community. with like 5,000 in monthly revenue, something, not super sizable. But that was a very fun story, if nothing else. Then I had a business called Repeat Leads, where I would do lead generation for anyone that wanted to buy and scrape leads. And I'm actually going to reboot this at some point in the future.

So it's a good business. I had a company called ReadyMLS, where we would send bulk marketing to people that had a home listed for sale. I'm trying to remember this correctly. to in people that had a home listed for sale to encourage them to basically circumvent a real estate agent and list directly on the MLS for a flat $100 fee. I think that's what it was. It was fully automated.

So you, that's what it was. People would list their home on Zillow wherever as a for sale by owner and we would say, hey, you get a lot more eyeballs if this is listed by an agent. I understand you don't want to pay an agent three or six percent. So give us $99 and we'll list it for you. And it was fully automated. So they pay the money, they upload pictures, upload a description, and then it would go to the MLS under our broker's license. That business could still be very viable today.

I don't even remember why we abandoned it. It was me and a partner at the time. Then I had a random business called All Green Shades, which was like, oh, geez, where I bought an Instagram account that had thousands of followers, I don't know, 20, 30, 40,000 followers. And the whole theme of the account was just posting green things, all green shades. the name of the account. I don't even know if it's still around anymore. I don't pay that much for it, maybe 500,000, 2,000 bucks. And I was going to see if I could start an e-commerce website selling or drop-shipping all green things to the Instagram followers. And in looking back, it was actually a pretty stupid idea. And I didn't get very far with it. I think I posted, like I tried to grow it,

half-hearted leave for a month or two. Maybe resold the account, maybe abandoned it. I still owned it. I don't know. I had a, on the topic of green, I had another business with two good friends and partners, Grant and Max, called mellow migraine. And Grant is a good friend. And he's very smart. He's an engineer. And he always has brilliant product ideas. And he said, Chris, I suffer from migraines. And I recently learned that wearing like green tinted glasses will block out the light that causes is migraines. So what if we sell green tinted glasses as a cure or a remedy for migraines? I love it. So we ordered a bunch from China. We imported them. I think I still have some behind me in one of these drawers. And we started selling them via Facebook ads. And we sold some and they worked.

And then we abandoned it. And I don't know why. That's going to be a story that you hear a lot. Same partners, Grant and Max brothers. We started a company called Spot Shave, which was a razor. like let's say you shave in the morning and you missed a spot and then you get out there and you think oh crap how embarrassing I missed a spot it was a razor that was in the shape of a credit card that would fit in your wallet so you would always have a razor on you and I still own this domain name and I still think it's a good idea but hardware is hard developing products is hard and we had a prototype and it worked okay but we lost motivation lost steam never did anything with it at another business with a friend that lives about 10 minutes away good friend

called Leahona Home Builders. And he was a home builder, a custom home builder. He did it for years and he's really good at it. And it's really, really hard to find really good home builders. And he's very honest and people love him. He's sincere and genuine. And he's a great guy. And he made a great business partner.

And so I thought, hey, why don't you be the home builder? I'll be the marketing guy. And let's go build some custom homes. Probably the hardest business you can do. And so I remember I made this like 5,000 word ebook that we put out through Facebook ads of like how to choose the right custom home builder. It's pretty good content. I'm not going to lie.

I should dig that up somewhere. And then we just started like basically giving out a free info product to DFW residents that might be on the home for a custom home. And then we would use those leads to sell to. And this one lost team too. My friend, business partner was a very busy man. He was a pastor in our church and he didn't have a lot of time. And I didn't have a lot of time.

I built out of website, got some leads. But it just never went anywhere. me and him, the same guy, started the next business, which was called Assistant Realtor. We were way ahead of the game. This was basically virtual assistance for real estate agents only. And so they would text us a need like, hey, I need these pictures edited or I need a description written for a home. Can you help me with that? And we would outsource all of that to virtual assistance for a fee.

And I think we had a couple different names of that business at the time. But it just, yeah, we just abandoned it. It was kind of a low ticket item and it was working with realtors as hard. And we just didn't give it enough juice. We had another business, him and I called Halo Maids. That one actually launched. We got revenue. I think we got revenue for all these businesses except Leohona home builders because it's kind of hard to sell a million dollar custom home.

But Halo Maids was a, you know, an Uber for home cleaning. And this is actually really common now. This was 20 was less common at the time. but we use this guy named Rohoon, who sells like a course on it. And we had a really clean looking website. And we bought shirts and we had cleaners. And our distribution model was to go through real estate agents. Once again, you see a pattern there.

And they would say, hey, I've got this home that needs to be cleaned. It's a new listing. And we would send our cleaners there to clean it. And it was a nightmare. They were like Presto cars. It was just a terrible business. And I didn't like it at all. And so we abandoned it.

We didn't sell it. We just shut it down. We got, I don't know. thousands of, we did a bunch of jobs and I think we had issues with 80% of the jobs. And I was always on the phone with realtors saying, oh, there's a hair in the sink. There's a hair in the tub. And they didn't show up. It was just, it was the worst.

And that's one of those businesses. There's a lot of businesses where you have to hit scale to really make it worth your while and to get to scale is much more difficult than a lot of other businesses. So if you're like me and you like going zero to one and you're able to go zero to one very quickly, it's pretty easy to just pivot because why wouldn't you? You've seen that the grass is greener and a lot of times it is greener and you should go to that grass and it's a saying that people use tongue and cheek. But yeah, a lot of times you should chase that squirrel or chase that rabbit and go try something different because what you're working on is not the highest and best

use of your time and opportunity cost is very, very expensive. The next business was me buying mobile home and RV parks with a couple of partners. And that business went really, really well until it didn't. And we bought 25 parks over the course of 18 months with a handful of investors. And it went super well. And our investment thesis was sound and our parks were performing great. And we were finding these killer deals off market that were really good deals. And they still are today.

But I had a dispute with my partners. And it ended very abruptly, very, very unexpectedly. and it was a big trial in my life. And it was very, very depressing for a while. But I learned a lot from it and I'm much better for it today. I'm still buying RV and mobile home parks with other partners. And if had I not gone through that terrible, terrible experience, then I would not be doing well buying RV and mobile home parks today. I started my whole Twitter account on the thesis that people want to learn about mobile home and RV park investing. And they were not getting that information online. And so I filled that gap. And it brought investors to my plate. And I've been raising money with them to find great deals that they've been thrilled about. So I don't regret that for a second. What I do regret is partnering with someone that I didn't thoroughly that. But that's where I went wrong.

Next business is mining syndicate. And that I'm still running today. That is the first one that I've talked about so far that is still going today. And this started in 20, after China decided to ban Bitcoin mining. and Nick and I, we saw a big opportunity to start mining Bitcoin in America. We thought it would beheading this way and it did. We were right, but we needed to find a facility to mine Bitcoin and to sell Bitcoin miners out of because anyone can sell a miner, but 80% of people that want to buy a Bitcoin

miner need a place to put it because you just can't put them in your house, right? You can, but you shouldn't and you can't. And so it's really hard to sell Bitcoin miners if you don't have a place to plug them in. So we needed a facility. And so we found one on biz by sell sold by this guy named Josh. And he's a great guy and we're partners today. And we bought it from him. It was not a business. It was not an LLC. It was just a lease with infrastructure on site. We bought that from him. And we turned it into a business. And we did 9.1, 8.8, depending on accounts receivable. We did almost $10 million in our first 90 days profitably. And that was the most growth I'd ever experienced in my life. And it happened at the same time as my daughter needing a lung transplant and us moving to Houston and Christmas. And it was the busiest October of my life, the busiest quarter of my life. But it was good. And everything worked out. And we solved that business today. And it's growing. It's doing well. So the next business is I consider this a business in and of itself, even though it's technically not. Split shares. And split shares is basically a subsidiary of a mining syndicate where we take

these Bitcoin miners and we fractionalize them on our own in-house proprietary software that my brilliant brother-in-law Justin built. And it's pretty cool. So if you don't want to spend five grand on a miner, if you think that this mining syndicate thing might be a scam and you want to kind of sample it before you try it, there's a lot of scams in crypto. That's our, our biggest competition is convincing people we're not a scam. So split shares is a great way of doing that where people, instead of buying a $5,000 minor, they can buy 1% of a miner for 50 bucks and they can be mining immediately and they can see Bitcoin in their dashboard and they love it. And almost everyone, as soon as they buy one share, they come back within an hour or two and buy more because

that was kind of their test to make sure that we weren't a scam. And we're different because we post the serial number of the miner, the location, you can come visit it because historically, this has been called cloud mining, which has been a scam. Like 90 plus percent of cloud mining companies were just Ponzi schemes, literal scams. And there was no transparency in the serial number or where is the miner? Can I see it? Yeah, it was just we take your money and we buy Ferraris with it. And so we try to be different by changing, changing the game.

And it's worked out great. And so split shares is part of mining syndicate, but I consider it separate company in ways. Next one is Texas snacks. Texas Snacks is our Bucky's business where we are the largest reseller of Bucky's products in the world because Buckees does not sell their own products online. They only sell in store. And so I'll do a whole podcast about this one day, but long story short, we kind of brute forced our way into being Bucky's unofficial partner by launching a website for them.

We run it. So they're not an official partner. We are not Buckees. We're a third party that we pay full retail for all Buckees products and then we mark them up and sell them on our store. And we do mid seven figures a year. It's profitable. It's growing very predictably.

And I like this business a lot. because I don't have a lot of predictability in my life. When you've got a dozen, half a dozen businesses, you see kind of a normal distribution curve. Some are doing well, some are on fire, some are doing terribly at any given time. And so it's really nice to have a flagship stalwart in the bunch that just grows. Every month, it just grows.

And it's really nice to have that. So my next business is SendEats. And Send Eats is the company that we had at the time that we launched Texas Snacks. Send Eats was a 3PL, a third-party logistics company, which is a fancy way of saying that other companies outsource their fulfillment and logistics to us, specifically e-commerce order fulfillment, pick, pack, and ship. We launched this at the start of COVID, seeing a need for more e-commerce fulfillment. Our thesis was correct in that there was great demand for e-commerce fulfillment. We chose the name Send Eats because we wanted to take these regional food providers that had this regional, loyal, fan basis, and I'll do a whole podcast on this one day about why we had this thesis and how I

helped my friend's bread company go online. Our thesis was correct, but it was a smaller market than we thought it was. Even if you have this regional food product that you love, you're probably not going to be willing to pay an exorbitant amount to ship it across the country. That's what we learned. But we had a lot of non-food brands as well. E-commerce did blow up during COVID, and everyone said, this is the new normal. Like, why would you buy your groceries in the store? when you can order them on Instagram. Why would you go to the store when you can buy everything online? Well, it's sometimes just more convenient. And so e-commerce went way up and then it shrunk again, kind of back down to normal levels. And we learned it's just a very hard business that we don't like

being in. And so we made the hard decision a year ago to fire all of our fulfillment customers. We had plenty. We were growing. They liked us. But it was just not profitable. It was super low margin. So we quit that side of the business and we went all in on Texas snacks. And it was the best thing we could have ever done. The next business was called landlord data. And so I have a huge spreadsheet of contact info for landlords. I still have it today. I had it back then. This was about four years ago. And we wanted a business where we could sell leads, landlord leads, because you can't really get those anywhere, believe it or not. And they're pretty valuable leads. You could sell them or mortgages to them. You could sell insurance to them, home services, you name it. They're very

valuable people. And so we had a virtual assistant build us a website. I don't remember what the domain name was, but it was a place where people could log in and pay per lead to get contact information of landlords. And we launched, we spent thousands of dollars to build this site with a partner. And it just didn't go well. It just didn't go well at all. Our marketing channels didn't work very well. And we were trying like three other things at the same time. And so we abandoned it. And I still have that data. I still want to do something with it one day, maybe a conference or something, but I don't know. The next business is called quarter cows. And this started because at church, I was asked to give a class on entrepreneurship. And there was about a dozen of us in this class.

And we had to start a business as part of this class. And then we had to come back every Sunday night in person. and we had some steps we had to go through. We had to talk about how everything was going. And so this was one of 100 ideas that I have in a spreadsheet somewhere. And the idea is basically to sell grass-fed beef on the internet. And Butcher Box pioneered this and they've done very, very well. I wanted to do it a little differently in that you could buy a quarter of a cow on the internet. And it would be cheaper per pound.

And it's kind of a novelty thing. People think it's cool. It's kind of a flex. And they would be grass-fed. and believe it or not, the unit economics work out quite well for this. So the whole plan is to go through a farm, and I'm in North Texas, there's a lot of Black Angus grass-fed beef farms in the area to basically go to them and pay $4 per pound for a quarter of a cow.

That's all vacuum sealed, frozen, and everything, and then sell it for $7 or $8 a pound, shipping included in like a big foam box shipped overnight or two-day via FedEx. And it's a good business. I think this could still be a good business because in shipping food, a lot of times, in fact, most of the times it doesn't make sense. The shipping costs are just too expensive. But we're talking a quarter cow. Let's see if I remember this.

It's like 150 pounds, maybe 100 pounds worth of food. And $7 a pound, it's a $7 or $800 purchase price. Shipping's $50. You could eat that. Just include that in the price. They get, quote, free shipping. And you can still make a decent margin. call it a 40% gross margin.

Not amazing if you're growing via paid ads, but since it's higher ticket, it's worth having a lower gross margin if you have higher ticket, right? Like Boeing has a 2% margin, but they still make, you know, 10, 15, $20 million profit when they sell a plane until they break down and the wheels fall off quite literally. So I like that business a lot. I think I own quarter cows still. but I really just launched this as part of a as part of this course. And at the time,

I actually had cows in my backyard where I'm sitting today because I live on three acres and it was fully fenced. And I wanted grass fed beef for my family anyway. And so it's kind of good timing. I wanted to start this anyway, not just because of the group. And so we got our cows slaughtered. Funny story.

We had four cows, two minis and then two large black Angus. And I had to take the large black Angus to the butcher about an hour away. and I brought my son, Brady, with me, who was like four, three or four at the time. And I thought, this would be good. He'll see, you know, where our food comes from. And so we got this animal trailer, and we had to get the cows in this trailer, which was an ordeal. Okay. I now know that you need like a shoot and you need machinery and tools to get a 900 pound

cow into an animal trailer. I didn't know that. I didn't know what I was doing. I was a dumb farmer, right? I was a dumb wannabe hipster, millennial farmer, the worst kind. And so I had this rope and I somehow got this rope around the cow's neck and I was like physically pulling it into the trailer. I think I used my truck to pull it into the trailer.

I hope Pete is not listening. But I tied the rope around the cow's neck and then I kind of snake the rope. The trailer was like a cage, right? It wasn't fully enclosed. So I snaked the rope through the back of the trailer and tied it to my truck. And then I unhooked the trailer first. from my truck and then drove very slowly to slowly kind of walk this 800 pound. This thing was huge, by the way.

This 800 pound cow into my trailer. And it worked. It took like three hours and it was by myself and I had no tools. This is not normal. You can't really, you can't really manhandle to. And this trailer was too small for them. And it had like these rickety floorboards that were really old and kind of rotted out. Finally got him in there.

Got my son in the back of the truck. we started driving towards a, I think it was Blue Bonnet, Blue Bonnet meat processing. And we're driving down this country road and this minivan starts passing me. Like, okay, that's aggressive, this soccer mom. And she pulls up next to me on this country road and looks at me. And she's like frantically waving. Ah! And like pointing to my trailer.

And I was like, oh, crap, there's no scenario in which this is not something very bad. So I just like waved at her. Okay, thank you. and pulled over and I look back and I only see one cow. I'm like, oh, crap. How did I lose a cow? Like, how did I possibly lose a cow out in the back of my trailer? So I walked back there.

And the second cow was not lost. It was laying down and it had punched its foot through one of those rotten floorboards. And it had been dragging on the road. Okay, one day, there's, I'm lucky that I'm never going to run for president or even city council because I hate. politics and I would never ever do that. Mark my words on this podcast. I'm never going to run for president. I remember when Mitt Romney ran his biggest drama was that they went on a road trip as a family when he was a young dad and they put their family dog on the roof of their station wagon because there was no room for it. Now on the roof in like a cage with the cage pointing backwards,

but people freaked out. Okay. So cancel me. I don't care. This is what happened. Farm life is not glamorous. Anyway, I had been dragging my cow's foot along the road for I don't know how long. I don't think it was that long because there wasn't that much blood, but there was blood. And I was like, oh, I was like, I didn't know what to do. I don't like blood. I don't do blood. And so I had to get in that trailer with that big dangerous beast and like grab his quad and lift up his foot and like, oh, it was so heavy because it was just laying on it and then put it on a good floorboard. and then keep driving. And I got it there to the processing facility. And it was just kind of limp in, but it walked in there. And I was like, hey, I already got this one started for you. We already got some ground beef on this. That is my quarter cow story. And then we got all the meat and I had, I sold it. I sold it. Like, it sold very fast. I didn't ship it online. I sold it to friends and family here in the area. One Facebook post, which told me there's a ton of demand for good grass fed locally sourced beef. This would be a really good business for someone to start, by the way. And it was such

a logistically intense business and I didn't like it. And I definitely didn't want to raise any more cows in my backyard. That's not how I was going to scale anyway. I was going to outsource it to a farm. I actually drove out to this really nice farm and spent a day there met with these guys. We talked pricing. I just didn't, I didn't want to do that business. So we're almost out of time here today. How much time it would be gotten? Yeah, this has been about 35 minutes. So I'm not even halfway through. So I'll have to do a part two, maybe even a part three to go over the the rest of these businesses. Please let me know. You can email me, Chris at cofounders.com. Tell me if you like this style. I have a million business ideas. These are ones that I've already

started. I have even more that I've never started. Let me know if you want more podcast talking about stories, past businesses I've started, going to more depth on them or future businesses that I could start or you could start that are on my business ideas list. Let me know if you like this type of content and I'll do more of it. Anyway, thank you for joining the Kerner office. Please like and subscribe. I put a lot of work into this. And I don't have. any ads. So it would mean a lot. Have a great day.