The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Q&A: Creative Growth Hacks, Fixing Burnout Problems and Agency Startup Tips Ep. #103

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

In this episode, I answer your voicemail-submitted questions about launching a vending machine business with math on your side, overcoming burnout and rediscovering passion, pricing for a mobile oil change service, and whether accountability coaching can work as a business model. Plus, I share insights into starting an email marketing agency built around Klaviyo and why a bike-powered smoothie business might be the next big thing at farmers' markets.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---00:42 Claw machine business tips08:01 Handling failure and burnout13:17 Pricing for mobile oil changes15:44 $20k—service biz vs. perfume vending20:54 Bike smoothie biz at festivals22:36 Business tutor—worth it?26:52 Klaviyo agency saturation

Welcome to the Kerner office. It is 9 o'clock. The kids are in bed. The house is quiet. And I'm ready for some listener submitted questions. I did this last week, back by popular demand. I stopped doing it over the summer. Started a backup last week and you guys loved it. So we're going to keep doing it. If you have a question to submit, go to tkopod.com, scroll to the very bottom and you'll see a little widget that will record your voice. You can keep it 100% anonymous. Most likely I will play it here on the show and answer your question live. So please do that. Let's get into it. I wish I could tell you how many I'm going to answer today, but I don't know. We've got to see where this goes because it's not who you know. It's TKO. Okay, that was really done, but I also liked it. So, okay, first question from Crystal. Kiyoda from New Zealand.

I have a question for you about a claw machine concept. What would you do if you had access to a claw machine? And the original idea was to create a hype around this machine that had luxury items in it and have it be at different locations and stuff like that. And now I have access to the claw machine and expensive items that could potentially go in it. And it's up to me if I want to do anything at all with it or just fill it with stuffed animals. I have a question of how you would go about even beginning this. I'm in New Zealand.

So with certain items, the gambling laws take effect for certain amounts of what things are worth. What would you do? Would you just stuff it with stuff and talk to people and get it in just a store to get revenue going? Or do you think this idea of sort of creating this luxury hype situation, maybe for the younger kids, maybe Fortnite cards, Rolex, Pokemon? I have access to be able to put those things in the claw machine. And it has a pretty funky name. It's pretty cool. What would you do? How do I start?

Crystal, I love your question. I love you. There's a reason I put this question first. because it's cool, it's unique. Everyone loves vending machines, right? The 5-year-old, the 50-year-old, and everyone in between. So this is a super cool opportunity, and here's what I think you need to do. Coincidentally, I posted a video about another New Zealand gambling-esque type business.

A month ago, the Whole In One Challenge, if any of you saw that on social media, what it is is basically a golf tea on the side of a lake, Lake Taupo, right in between the lake and the highway, and 111 yards away from the tea floating on the water is a green, a float. floating green with a hole. If you hit a hole in one, you can win $10,000. And the statistical likelihood of anyone hitting a hole in one is about 1 in 12,500. And this business has to pay out for holes in one about every two weeks. So I don't remember the exact math. It's in my video, but these guys are grossing around $600,000 per year and netting about a third of that. And why are they doing that? Because math is on their side. And I love your business because math is on your side.

So I did a little research on claw machines for you. And did you know that most modern claw machines are programmed to only provide a strong grip after 10 to 15 plays? Isn't that interesting? What a scam. From play number 1 to 10 or 1 to 15, the claw is deliberately weak. It will drop things on purpose and scam you out of your money. As a consumer, maddening.

As a business owner, interesting. Therefore, the statistical probability that an average user will win a client. claw machine is about 5 to 30%. So we can be angry and protest that or we can use that to game the system. As a user, I would sit there and watch someone play the claw machine 10 to 15 times and hopefully lose 10 to 15 times and then I would step in and play making my chance of winning closer to 30 to 60%. So what you need to do is you need math on your side, much like the whole and one challenge on Lake Taupo. You need to find out what is the statistical probability of an average user winning on your machine with various items because a Rolex might be easier or harder to grab than a stack of

Pokemon cards. So you need to run these tests. You need to make a spreadsheet, put a bunch of random things in it, have your kid play it, have your husband play it, you play it, and take note of your percentage likelihood of winning. Now, multiply that percentage likelihood of winning by the cost to play the machine, and then you know what you can afford. But now, now is when you get creative. I don't think you put luxury items in there. I think you got to put mystery items in there. baseball cards, NFL cards, Pokemon cards, Fortnite cards, and you have to put a sign on the machine that says something to the effect of. One of these packs of Pokemon cards has a holographic Charzart in it worth $1,000 or something. I don't know. But you have to actually make sure that

that's true. You don't want to lie to them. And you might have to open the pack of Pokemon cards to do that. You might have to rig the deck in their favor, so to speak, so you're not lying to them. Otherwise, you would have no clue what's in those Pokemon cards. So I have no idea what a holographic Charzart is worth. I've been out of the game for about 30 years now. Let's say you find one worth $1,000. You buy it on eBay, one card for $1,000. Then you buy 100 generic packs of Pokemon cards.

And some of them might have another valuable card in it. It doesn't matter. That's just the cherry on top for the user. You're going to open one pack of cards at random. You're going to replace one of the low value cards with the $1,000 card. and then you're going to seal the deck of cards back up. So you know for a fact that one of those actually has the card that you're promising. And then you need to do the map.

Let's say to keep the number simple, it costs a dollar to play. And you have 100 packs of cards in there. And the average pack of card is worth $5 and one of those packs of cards is worth $1,000. And let's say the average user has a 10% chance of winning. That means you're going to make $10 for every $5 pack of cards you give out, except for the one, $1,000, $1,000 pack of cards. So your cost on the cards in the machine is $5 times 100 packs equals $500 plus the $1,000 card, $1,500.

Okay. But to sell all of those packs of cards, statistically speaking, people need to play 1,000 times because there's a 10% chance of winning. If they play 1,000 times for $1 each, you're going to make $1,000, which you would lose money at. All right, let's use some easy numbers here. Let's say you do this research and you find out the average user has a 10% chance of winning. You can fit 100 packs of Pokemon cards in there and it costs $2 to play.

Okay, there's 100 packs of cards. Then it's going to take 1,000 plays for someone to win all of them eventually. 1,000 plays times $2 per play equals $2,000. Okay? Let's say the packs of cards cost you $3 each. Okay? Three packs of cards times $3 equals $300. So before we factor in the $1,000 holographic jarzard, you're looking to making $2,000.

$1,000 in revenue over $300 in cost. But you still have the $1,000 holographic Charzard. So it's $2,000 in revenue over $1,300 of cost. Pretty good profit. It's about 40%, give or take. And any user, if they win, has a 1% chance of winning the holographic card. So I'm just spitballing here, but I really think you've got to make the items in the machine mystery items.

So they don't really know what they're getting. But they know what they could get if they win. And to get even more creative, I would put some sort of a sensor. A motion sensor on the vending machine or on the claw machine that sends out a noise every time someone walks by it. Like win a $1,000 holographic Charzard card. You want to catch their attention. And you know what?

This might not be the offer. That might not be what kids care about. So you've got to test a bunch of stuff. Swap out the inventory every week or every month and see what really resonates with the kids. It also depends on what type of venue your machine is. It's going to be teenagers playing it, kids playing it, adults playing it millennials. So what do I always say? Test everything except drugs.

You got to buy a bunch of different things. You got to test the machine. Find out how much math is on your side and try different items. Next question. Man, now I want to go buy a claw machine and try that myself. Okay, Robert, let's see what he has to say. Hey there. I love your content.

Love your stuff. See, you need questions. Be quick and ask the question. How do you keep on? I know you've had certain to businesses and some succeed, some failure. How do you come back from that fear of failing and how do you get back on the horse? And how do you stay innovating and feeling fresh? and wanting to actually do this stuff.

I guess a little history, brief history is. I had a small freelance visual effects studio business that I did all the visual effects movies to use commercials, worked on big names, worked on Netflix, HBO. My niche was a very high-end part of the, in the pipeline after they filmed it. It was so niche that I kind of niche myself at existence when the industry collapsed last year or 18 months ago.

And I've been trying to pick myself up out of that. It's been tough trying to rebuild my identity and all that stuff. Yeah, how do you keep going? on and lifting yourself back up and recovering from burnout too. I just feel really burnt out. I guess that's my two questions. Thank you. Robert, thank you for leaving that question. Brutal, I can hear the sadness in your voice. I'm sorry that you're burned out. I'm sorry you went through that. It sounds like you're in a tough spot right now. But man, I will tell you what, I've never been through a tough spot that didn't make perfect sense to me later on down the line.

At some point in the future, you're going to look back on this burnout and be so grateful that this happened, that this experience happened. So your question was too. part. How to keep on keeping on, like Joe Dirt said, when you keep on failing. How to recover from burnout. Here's what I think, Robert. You have to love the game more than you hate the failure. So I have been through some brutal failures, partnership fallouts, business failures, friendship fallouts related to business failures. And I can honestly say, quitting never really crossed my mind. And that's not because I'm so tough. I've quit plenty of things. I've quit lots of stuff. It's because I love, love the game.

When I say game, I mean business, entrepreneurship, zero to one, startups, marketing, all of it. I just love it, right? And so I manage these failures by putting a very deliberate and intentional chip on my shoulder that just drives me forward. If someone steals from me or pushes me out or stabs me in the back, that action will directly correlate to success I have in the future. There was this wrestler on my wrestling team back in high school. And he was pretty good on the mat.

But when he got mad, he was really good. And his dad used to scream at him from the side of the mat. Get mad. Get mad. And it's kind of hard to force someone to get mad just by yelling that to him. But when he did get mad, he was five times better than his average day on the mat. So if you're feeling burned out, then that's a signal that what you were doing wasn't giving you a whole lot of energy in the first place. Work is an interesting thing because it's work.

It's called work. I sit down at this chair every single day for nine to 12 hours. Same chair. And it's work and it's intellectually stimulating and it makes me tired, which is kind of weird. Weird in the way that chess players can burn 6,000 calories a day just sitting there playing chess because the brain uses a lot of energy. But it doesn't feel like work.

But it still is work at the same time. I'm saying two opposite things that are both true. I need a break from work, even though I enjoy it. But I know that I will be doing this forever because it's addicting. And I love it. So if you're going through something tough, I think now is the time to take inventory on everything you think about on a daily basis when you don't have to think about anything. I mean literally take inventory. Open up your notes app. And as soon as you start thinking about a topic, write it down. What is that? The cooking pizza in your pizza ovens, barbecue, woodworking,

running, metalworking, reading. It doesn't matter what it is. It can be anything. Gaming, I don't care. What do you think about when you don't have to think about anything? I talked about this a week ago in my Q&A episode, you've got to follow your passion camp, and then you've got to suck it up and do what you have to do camp. And there's truth in both of them. If I were to guess, based on your 90-second question, you've enjoyed the work that you've been doing, but it hasn't truly been your passion. This is a perfect example of how not doing your passion is not scalable. So if your passion is something specific like woodworking, then you've got to find out a way to make money on that. But most likely you have five to ten different passions. So pick the two or three that you're

most likely to be able to make money on, whether by starting a business in that field or by getting a job in that field, or by doing it in the evenings while you have a job that you don't really love. If you love business, if you truly love business, then you've got a million options at your disposal. Then you just pick any business, which is why you're probably listening to my podcast in the first place. But to use another sports analogy, there are athletes that love to win and there are athletes that truly hate to lose. And if I were to guess, the ones that hate to lose usually perform better, which is another way of saying they have a chip on their shoulder. So find what your chip is, put it on your shoulder, refer to it often, use it to fuel you, start listening

to optimistic people, try to put yourself five years in the future where you'll look back on today, and you'll just know, you'll just know that this ended up being for your betterment. It's hard to do. It's really, really hard to do. It's easy to give you that advice. It's very hard to do. Try to put yourself in the future because I know this will turn into a win for you and you're going to make it. All right, let's go to Scott. Mobile oil change business. We go to you, we provide the oil, the oil filter, we do everything there. We remove the oil when we're done. I need help with price and anything else you think that I missed. Mobile oil change of business. I love it. First of all, this whole industry is blowing up. We've got a couple clients at our agency

that are doing this, and they are blowing up. Why would you go to an oil change place and wait in a stinky lobby and read old magazines? I mean, you could have someone come to you. Okay, you need help with pricing. There's several different ways you can price something. Number one, what is the hourly rate that I want to make? If it takes you an hour to do an oil change, including driving, and your time is worth $50 an hour to you, and your costs on the oil change are $25,

then you've got to charge $75 an hour. Or you can look at market pricing. call up your competitors, specifically mobile oil change competitors, because one school of thought is, oh, my costs aren't as high, so I don't have to charge as much. A fixed facility might cost a million dollars to build or $10,000 a month to rent. But my mobile oil change van only costs $40,000 one time, and my monthly payment is $500. So I can charge less. No, no, no, no, no. That's one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is you are offering a convenience, a luxury. It's kind of why food trucks are so dang expensive, even though their overhead is 90% less than a fixed restaurant.

It's convenience. It's right there. And the food might not even taste any better. In fact, it usually doesn't. So call up your competitors. And they don't have to be your direct competitors. They could be in a different city or state entirely. But what is the market price? And then do the math to figure out how that pricing shakes out to your preferred hourly rate. And then you've got to figure out if and or when you scale this, can you afford to hire someone to do it for you and still make a decent hourly rate? You're not going to make 50 bucks an hour. But if you make 25 bucks an hour and you have three trucks out at one time, you'll make 50% more per hour without having to do. any of the work. The other way you can price it is just by looking at your costs. What are your fixed

costs? What are your variable costs? Your fixed cost is going to be your monthly payment on your van, your insurance, and your variable costs are your gas and your oil and your materials. That's how you price it. And here's a hot tip for you, Facebook groups. I know I talk about Facebook groups a lot, but I know for a fact I have proven evidence that mobile oil change and or mobile break repair and replacement mobile mechanics do really, really well in local Facebook groups. That's not a theory. I know that firsthand. All right. Let's go to Rehan. All right. If you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check on my podcast while you're at it because sometimes I have podcasts that

aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTube that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkot.com. Also my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube. newsletter.chakurner.com. You'll see the link and we'll see you there. Hey, Chris, my name is Rihanna. I'm from Chirvana, Canada. So I come from a background in IT, more than 10 years of experience. Recently laid off about, I have about $20,000 Canadian dollars that I'm looking at rest in the perfume vending business. Now I have a family with three young kids, a wife and myself, and I have about like three months of living

expenses. Do you think it's worth that trying to explore the perfume lending business or try something else? By the way, I have a meeting with the perfume lending folks that link that you have in one of your videos. So what do you suggest? Okay. Great question. You have 20,000 Canadian dollars saved up, which is about 17,000 U.S. dollars. You have three months of runway.

You want to start a business. And you're wondering if you should buy a perfume vending machine from us to start this business. Well, I'm the most biased person you could ask. Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Never ask a real estate agent if it's a good time to buy or sell a house. But do ask Chris Kerner, if you're not. it's a good idea to buy a perfume vending machine from Chris Kerner because he'll tell you the truth.

And frankly, he's not so good at sales anyway. Okay. So sorry Terrell. I know you're the one that spoke to him over the phone. I don't know what you said. I don't know how the call went. But if you had your sales call with me, I would tell you not to buy a perfume vending machine from us. And here's why. $20,000 savings is not a ton. If you had a full-time job and $20,000 to invest in a business, I would say, yeah, this could be a good fit, provided you do your research beforehand, before buying it, which ironically is the hardest part about selling these machines because I go on social media and I preach, do your research, do your research, do your research about buying a perfume vending machine, which that equals friction to people actually buying one.

They start doing their research. They flame out. They lose interest. They move on to something else. They never buy, right? Which is why the sales cycle is so long and the funnel is so narrow at the bottom to selling these things. So I'm kind of hurting myself there.

But it's okay because I want to be honest. I do think this is a great business for the right person in the right market. but I would not spend your last $20,000 or a quarter of your last $20,000 on a perfume vending machine because it's too risky if that's all you have and you don't have any other income coming in. It's too high of a percentage of your savings and it's going to take too long to ramp it up. That machine will probably do $500 to $1,000 the first month. Call it $700 to $1,200 to next month. So you're looking at three, four months before you get your money back out of it.

And then you're looking at a profit of, you know, one to $2,000 a month after that point. That's not enough to live on, especially in Canada. So if I were you, I would focus on getting a job that can pay the bills and then build a service business of some sort, either online or in person, during the nights and weekends, until that service business can make enough money to support your job. Next question is Sean. Now, I'm going to do something a little different here, Sean. This show is an interesting format because a lot of the people listening are like me.

and their marketers and their salesmen, and they want an audience, and they're trying to sell something. And Sean was very clever to drop the URL of his business in his question because his business would be the perfect fit for the people listening to this podcast. And so he wanted a free ad. Sean, I see you. I respect you. But I'm not going to play your question. But I'm still going to answer your question.

Here's what Sean's question was. So there is a popular website that acts as an accountability partner for people to meet their health and fitness goals. They charge between $400 and $900 a month for a one-on-one call up front and for daily check-ins, accountability, coaching, nutrition and fitness plans, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they have a mobile app. And Sean was asking if he could slash should do the same business for a business accountability partner. Okay. So maybe you're starting a business. Maybe you're running a business. Maybe you're running a business. and you want someone to check in with you, hey, did you make 100 cold calls yesterday?

Did you send the cold emails? Did you file your LLC? Did you get your logo done? He's wondering if this would be a good business. Would people pay for this? Here are my thoughts. My gut thought, my gut take here is this could be a good business. My second gut take, my pessimistic take, is this would not be a good business because

of the fact that I don't know of anyone doing this. And I don't like that. I want someone to be doing the business that I'm starting. I don't want to be first, okay? Do you know how many other search engines were first before Google? Apple wasn't first. Facebook wasn't first. These are outliers, but we don't even need to look at outliers. Look at any business. I want to learn from the first through fifth. I iterate on what they did, right and wrong, and do my own thing. Okay, so I don't like that this isn't being done as far as I can tell. It probably is somewhere, but it's not a thing.

It's not on my radar. I think this is a really hard price point. There are gurus all over social media selling coaching packages, both business coaching and life coaching, for five to 12. $20, $50,000. Crazy prices. Why? Because they're hoping that that will be the kick in the butt that they need to do the thing that they actually know they need to be doing all along. And you know what? Usually it's not.

Usually it doesn't make a difference. They're still not going to do the thing. Same with health coaching or fitness coaching. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got automations and apps that are $9 a month, $10, $50 a month that do similar things. And then you've got the messy middle, the $400 to $900 price point. That's tough.

It's tough to sell at that price point. I just don't know that business owners struggle with accountability as much as they do with direction. I think there's a reason that business coaching is a well-established industry and business accountability is not. Anyone can hold a business owner accountable. But I think a business owner wants an accountability partner that is as or more experienced than them at business.

And how are you going to hire someone to do that for you at $300 or $400 a month and still make money? I think the better play here is more of an AI powered app, a chat GPT wrapper, so to speak. It keeps them accountable. Maybe something that they have to deposit money to. That's interesting, huh? You deposit $1,000 to the app. And if you don't do what you say you're going to do, then it will donate that $1,000 to charity at the end of the predetermined time period. Or it will keep $1,000.

and that's how you make money from the app. Maybe the app is free, and that's the only way you make money is banking on people failing at their goals. So, Sean, I'm going to say what I say all the time, and that's test everything except drugs. I know you already have a landing page put up smart. I would see if you can get some customers. How long does it take before they churn? You've got to learn these things. But if I were you and I was excited about this idea and interested in it, you better

freaking believe that I would launch it. I would test it because that's what I do. Next question from Jack. Hey, Chris, love your stuff. My name's Jack. I'm in Austin, Texas. I really want to start something, build my own business. I came across your newsletter in December of last year regarding the clavio opportunity about learning clavio, charging monthly retainers to help optimize that for businesses, help them make more money. I was curious if you still think this is a solid opportunity. I'm super interested in it. I'm currently in sales right now and marketing and whatnot. So this caught my attention. I'm wondering if this may be too saturated right now, if there may be too many agencies already doing this, or if you still think there's enough of an opportunity to pursue something like this. So we'd love to hear your thoughts and appreciate all you doing. Thanks. Jack, I love your question.

So he is referring to a newsletter I wrote one year ago, almost exactly. It was December 8th, 2023. If you go to newsletter.christjKirner.com and go to the very last page. find it December 8th. It was one of my highest rated newsletters. It's called your exact path to 20K per month and three months. It's about starting an email marketing agency, specifically one built on Clavio or Clavio, which is a publicly traded email marketing company basically built around Shopify. So if you have a Shopify store and you want to set up all kinds of email marketing automations, you're probably going to use Clavio. There's another one called Send Lane. There's a couple

others that are specifically e-commerce-based. Claibio does a really, really good job. I log in every single day. So there is a complete business you could build around managing someone's Clavio, just like there's a business built around implementing and managing Salesforce or Slack or whatever. Do I think this is still an opportunity? Absolutely. It's a framework I have. I think almost every opportunity sticks around. It doesn't go anywhere. Okay. It's only been a year. Shopify is doing great. E-commerce is doing great, But you can't go about this the traditional way. You're going to have to do this for free. You're going to have to join some Facebook groups with e-commerce store owners.

There's a lot of them in there. And, well, let me back up. Before you ever do that, you got to learn Clavio. You can start like a dummy account for free because it is pretty expensive software. Go in the dummy account and just start learning how to use flows. There's two types of core features within Clavio. You've got flows and you've got campaigns. A flow is an automation.

For instance, if someone visits my website, they subscribe to my newsletter, but they never buy anything, then they would go into a flow where you follow up with them periodically until they buy. A campaign is just sending a one-off email to a list or a segment. This is really, really fun software to use. Okay, if you like marketing, email, e-commerce, it's really fun. It's very intuitive. It's not that difficult to learn. You'll enjoy it.

But you need a test dummy, right? So go find a friend that has an e-commerce store. I'm sure you have one. Do it for free with him or her. Install Clavio on their site. Watch all the tutorials. There's a zillion videos out there on how to use it and start actually moving the needle. Clavio will show you exactly how much revenue you're generating through Clavio.

Use your friend to get a case study. Then use your case study to go to strangers through Facebook groups that own Shopify stores. Preferably, you're already finding people that are already using Clavio because it's much harder to convince someone to use it than it is to find someone already using it but not fully taking advantage of it, which I would bet you 80 plus percent of clavio users are only scratching the surface on its capabilities. So after your friend, let you have a stab at it, ask a couple strangers to do the same, do it for a month, show them proof that you made them more money, then ask if you can start charging, 500 a month, 200 a month, whatever it takes. Do it for a couple more months, raise your prices, ask for referrals, use those case studies on your

website to keep doing the same thing. I promise if you're doing a good job, which you will be, you'll get natural, referrals and that's the best kind of business but if you really want to get creative you can go to built with you can scrape a list of all Shopify stores stuff that I've talked about a million times this is a solid solid opportunity but it's going to be hard if you just start cold emailing Shopify plus stores because they get emails from people like you all the time so you got to go fish where others are not fishing like Facebook groups okay one last question from anonymous I like this question. Hey, I'm a fan girl here. I want to say, love you. My husband and I are really interested in the

biking juicing thing. And we even found a $14,000 camper, which has room on the back for bikes. We live in a super, super rural area. So our idea would be to go to the different festivals that they have in our areas to capitalize on where people actually are. The question is, what do I do next? How do I even and figure out what the licensing is to do this ton of business. Thanks. Hey, I'm so happy to answer your question because you sound so nice. And thank you for being a fan girl. And I love you too.

Okay. All right. For anyone that isn't familiar, I posted a reel a month or two ago about this concept in Dubai that I thought was amazing. Picture like a 20 foot shipping container, kiosk food trucks type situation. And out front of it were parked about three stationary bikes. And situated on the handlebars.

right in front of your face is a blender. Okay? The blender is attached to the chain on the bike. So you pedal the bike, you put fresh fruit in a blender, and you blend your own smoothie with your bike, with your own energy, okay? And this is just such a perfect business because the business owner is saving on labor costs. Sure, they still need someone to put the fruit in the blender.

They still need someone to accept your payment. But generally speaking, there should be two people in that trailer, one collecting payment, one making the smoothie. But now they only need one, okay? So your labor cost is cut in half. But on top of that, you can charge even more. Okay? You get to have your cake and you get to eat it too.

It's brilliant because you're charging for the experience. And then, you know what? We're going to have our cake. We're going to eat it too. And then we're going to eat some more cake because this is a visual business. People will post videos on Instagram of your bike, hopefully with your logo all over it, which is going to bring more people to your bike. Okay.

So Anonymous, I wish I knew your name. The trailer's cool. I like the trailer concept, but don't even go there yet. You need to start at farmers markets. You live in a rural area. I don't care where you are. There's going to be a farmer's market on a Saturday morning somewhere within an hour of you. It generally costs between $50 and $250 to post up with a 10 by 10 tent at a farmer's market. How do I know? Because there's a farmer's market one mile away from me and my wife goes there every other Saturday. She actually doesn't have to pay anything because we're residents of the city that puts on the farmer's market. But this is a great place to make a million dollars. No, no, to get direct feedback face to face from your ideal customer base.

And you can make some money while you're at it. And so you're going to work out the kinks. If it doesn't go well, guess what? You're out 100 bucks. If it does, come back the next week and work out some more Kings, get some more feedback, write it all down, running through chat GPT, all the feedback you get, write it through chat, GPT, and have it tell you what you should change in your business based on your feedback, okay? Then you're going to get a little revenue from this, you're going to get some feedback, you're going to make some changes. Maybe the bike is too flimsy.

Maybe it's too hard. Maybe they have to pedal too long because there isn't enough torque or whatever. Maybe the fruit needs to be fresh instead of frozen. Maybe the smoothies don't taste that good because your ingredients aren't that good. You're going to learn all this stuff, okay? And then you can scale however you want. then you can go get that $14,000 trailer. You can go to festivals.

Then you get even more feedback from a completely different customer base. And then you can post up where food trucks go. That's like the second or third tier of your business. And if it continues to go well, then you can open a permanent, a fixed location somewhere, hopefully that would support your bike smoothie business. But I love that you're trying this. I hope you go through with it. And if you do, I want to hear about how it goes.

Thank you all for listening to the Kerner Office. Please share with a friend, tkopod.com. Just send them there. tkopod.com and we'll do this Q&A segment again here very soon.