The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Q&A: Is Passive Income a Lie? Fake Private Jet Studio, Advice for 2025 & More⏐Ep. #109

Episode Date: December 25, 2024

I’m back with another Q&A episode! This week, I answer your questions about launching a private jet photo studio business, starting a tree trimming business while working a full-time job, and when to form an LLC for your side hustle. Plus, I share my thoughts on investing in e-commerce stores for “passive income,” how to cold email real estate agents for online personal training, expanding dog training business and creative ways to monetize inflatable walls. Finally, I leave you with some advice to help you kick off 2025 with the right mindset: Now, Not How.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 Welcome and Quick Overview00:23 Private Jet Photo Studio Business Idea03:39 Starting a Tree Trimming Business05:48 LLCs for Business Experiments08:08 Investing in E-commerce for Passive Income12:57 Cold Email Follow-up Strategies15:36 Monetizing Inflatable Walls17:47 Expanding a Dog Training Business21:09 Final Advice for 2025

Welcome to the Kerner office. I'm going to make today's episode short and sweet because it's Christmas Eve. And I'm smoking some ribs right now. And I'm about 30 minutes away from having to put more logs on the fire. So I'm going to do some listener submitted questions real fast. And then I'm going to give you some pump up language for 2025 at the end. And I hope it helps. Let's start with the first question.

Hey, Chris. My name's David Hayes. I'm serious about starting that private jet photo studio here in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. But curious to get your take on how I would. would decide location. I think people would drive an hour to it. So I don't think it's that important to be in Dallas. What do you think? All right, David, great question. So most of you probably never saw this, but on social media, I posted a reel of a private jet studio business.

And there's only a couple of these in the United States, New York, L.A., maybe Atlanta. And it's going to make you sigh and shrug. But it is what it is. People pay 40 to $200 to rent out a private jet photo studio so they can flex on social media. It's dumb. It's cringe makes me a little sad, but if they're going to do it, then let's find a way to monetize it. That's what my real was about. So David wants to do this in Dallas where I live. And he said that he thinks people will drive an hour to do that. And maybe he's right. I don't know. But if I were launching this in Dallas, I would first go reverse engineer the ones in L.A. and New York as as much as I can. Where are they? What types of locations are they? If I were really serious about

this, I'd probably fly to both New York and L.A. and see them in person and get a feel for the neighborhood. Are people walking in spontaneously? Do they have to book an appointment? What does it cost? What's the booking system like? Etcetera, et cetera. Then I would go to the web archive. I'd go to WhoIs.com. I'd look at how long their social presences have been around. Their websites have been around. What does their website look like? I would do all that first. I think people would drive an hour to take a picture in a private jet photo studio, but I think you're going to lose a lot of people if it's far away from a city center. So I think you should try building one of these in a 20-foot shipping container. It might be a little tricky because it might be a little tight in there,

but I think you'll save a lot of money and it'll be portable. You can pay 500 bucks to a flatbed to move that around town. You can go find an outdoor shopping area like Legacy West or Waters Creek and see if you can get permission to post up your portable private jet photo studio. Get it wrapped with some cool branding so when people walk by it, they know exactly what it is because I guarantee you if you take 100 people at random and bring an iPad up to them and say, I have a private jet photo studio.

It's an hour away. You can book it right here. Here you go. Verse, those same hundred people. I have a private jet photo studio. It's right there, right next to you. Same price. Same everything.

You're going to get significantly more people. And that sounds obvious on the surface because, well, of course you will. It's closer. But no, it's not as obvious as you think because it's the difference between a planned purchase and an impulse purchase. And the extra narcissistic folks out there that really want to flex, they'll drive an hour. but you don't want only them. You want the mass market.

You want to get as close to the mass market as you can. So you want to make it as accessible as you can. Put it in a walkable outdoor shopping area like my buddy did with his 40 foot shipping container escape room business. He was able to move that around. He was able to AB test locations. Guess what? In retail, you can't just AB test locations.

You can't. You sign five year or 10 year or 20 year leases. But with this, you could. So if you put it in a 20 foot shipping container and you find that walkable outdoor shopping areas aren't great for this, then at least. least you can move it. You could move it inside a building if you had to. But location wins always. Don't skimp on cost on location when it comes to a retail business like this. Next question. Hey, Chris, Roberto Garza here from Oklahoma City. I'm really interested in starting up the tree

trimming business idea, but the only issue is I'm currently working for a company that I'm on calls, like from nine to five and don't really have the capacity to go out to homes and give quotes to people that want to get their trees trimmed. I'm wondering, do you see any path to stair step into that while also maintaining a high quality service for clients in the tree trimming business? Or are there any other suggestions for business ideas for folks that can't really commit to a second business

because they're extremely busy and they're nine to five? Okay, Roberto, great question. Roberto wants to start a tree trimming business, much like the one that we started where we used crews to do all the work. We didn't own a chainsah, yada, yada, yada. You've heard this story before. And you could really copy this model with any local home service business. He's got a full-time job at 9 to 5.

He's got zooms. He's got things he actually has to do during the day, but he really needs to be going and quoting jobs during the day. Eventually, you can work up to the point where your crews go and quote jobs and you don't have to worry about them circumventing you for the cash because you're the one only interfacing with the customer. But for the first few months, you want to quote jobs yourself. least so you know how to do it and you know the industry well enough to not get screwed by your

subcontractors. So yes, you can still do this. Of course it's going to be harder, but you can still do this. If you literally have a nine to five, then try to book things before nine or after five, even if it's in the evening with a big mag light or try to quote jobs only on Saturdays or try to line up your marketing to where every two weeks you take an afternoon off or a full day off and you line up all your quotes for that day. That'll get you by for the first one to three months without interfering with your regular job. And then as you're, quote, working, as you're on Zoom, you can be playing with Angie's List, Thumb Tech, SMS,

realtor referrals, anything else you need to do to grow the business that needs to be done from a computer. So yeah, you can get creative with it. The fact that you have a full-time job means you'll have to get more creative with it. And in a weird way, it's kind of an advantage because it's a constraint. And constraints breed creativity, as I often repeat. Hey, Chris, I'm wondering if you're doing an LLC for every single one of your business ideas or do you experiment separately before you decide that it's worth investing in an LLC?

Is there a way to put all your experiments into one LLC or you just not worrying about it at all? Mostly I just want to make sure that if I'm swashbuckling with some other businesses in a B2B experiment, my only asset in my house is protected. But I'm looking at this in California and it is surprisingly expensive for even one LLC. So I'm wondering, do I even need to care about this or is there a loophole or a cheaper way to do things? Is it fine to just go to legal zoom and just click next and fill out the minimum wizard here to get what I need? Thanks for help. Okay, awesome question. I have countless LLCs and they're $300 a piece plus I don't even know, 50 to $100 a year just to keep it active. But theoretically, if I filed an LLC for all of the 70 plus businesses I've started, I would have a lot more LLCs.

I don't file LLCs until a couple things are true. Number one, I'm sure that this is going to be a real thing. This is a thing. I'm going to be doing this a year from now, six months from now, six years from now. And I already know that because the other qualifier is the fact that I have already received revenue for this. And it's repeatable revenue. It's not just friends and family revenue. If I'm slanging pizzas at a farmer's market for funsies, I'm not going to get an LLC for

that unless I have to for regulation reasons. But if I start with that and then I realize, oh, I can hire someone for 20 bucks an hour to do this for me and still make 500 bucks every farmer's market. Yeah, I'm going to get an LLC. especially when I start hiring. So it's like there's certain triggers there, right? Hiring, absolutely. Generating repeatable revenue, not recurring, but repeatable revenue.

Like you're pretty sure this is going to keep going? Absolutely. Actually, I won't say absolutely. Most likely, okay, depending on the circumstance. Am I going to be doing this for a while? Is this a thing? Is this going to stick around? Have I proven the model?

There's product market fit. There's demand. Then yes. And it sounds like on the surface that you might file an LLC in almost every instance, but no. In fact, usually the tests don't go very well. Your launch doesn't go very well. I mean, that's life.

That's the reality of it. And you're just not that enthused by it. And you're not sure. So at that point, you either don't buy an LLC and abandon it or you just keep going and then buy an LLC later if you think it's something to keep working on. So. Hi, Chris. Hope you're doing real well.

I have funds to invest like, let's say, about 50,000. And I want to buy a fully functioning, up and running e-commerce website. And I want to have someone else manage. I basically want to have the passive income and I have the funds, but I'm looking for someone who has time and expertise, but no funds. And I'm looking to kind of match up with them. What do you recommend as far as finding that type of person, hiring them, and just putting my excess funds to work in a non-correlated way with an e-commerce site that's already up and running? Really appreciate all you do, man. Thank you. Look forward to hearing your answer.

Thanks. Jim, thank you for the question. First of all, this format of people recording questions and leaving them for me to answer. I just realized another reason why I love it so much. Because if I were talking to Jim right now on the phone, I don't like confrontation. I don't like awkwardness. I know I would kind of dance around it. Like, well, you know, no, no.

And that's not helpful to me or to Jim. That's something I got to fix. I need to be more direct. Okay. So with this being a recorded call and show, I feel much more free to be direct. And no, you don't have to be rude to be direct. So first of all, Jim,

I just don't like the phrase passive income. I've heard, you know, it doesn't exist. It does exist, right? With an asterisk, passive income exists after many years of hard work of getting you up to that point. For instance, if I invest in T bills at 5%, that's very passive. That's very safe. But I have to have money to invest in those T bills. And I had to presumably do a lot of work to get that money to get to that point to where that income is actually passive. And even though it is passive, it's not a lot. The investors in my RV parks, they enjoy passive income. but after years or decades of hard work to save up $50,000 to invest in an RV park.

So I would not consider investing in an e-commerce store passive income by any stretch of the imagination, even if you are not the one operating it, which is what we're discussing here. I've had eight plus-ish different Shopify stores, some small, some big. I've lived in Shopify since 2012. To be frank with you, Jim, I just don't really like this idea. I'm curious what got you on to this idea, investing $50,000 into an e-com store specifically. There's a selection bias at play. Let's say you find a partner that's a great operator.

Okay, then let's say you find a good deal where you only have to put down 20%. Maybe SBA, maybe seller finance. Well, I wouldn't suggest SBA for a small deal like this because if you have 50 grand and you're putting down 20%, that's only a $250,000 business. If you're going to go through all the hassle of an SBA, then you want it to be seven figures, right, to make it worth your while. So let's say you find a seller finance deal. They finance 80%.

You put down 20%, 50 grand, $250,000 business, three times profit. It means it's making $80,000 a year in net profit today. And you're buying it because, A, you think your operator's great and he's going to pull some levers to increase the value, increase the profit of the store. B, you believe in e-commerce for some reason as an industry. C, maybe you really like the niche that you're buying in. Let's say it's golf or pet supplies. I don't know how you would structure this deal with the operator, but there's a selection

bias because if he's really, really good, then he's not going to be wasting his time on a business that has a net profit of 80,000 that he has to split with you somehow. If he's not really good, then he's going to be excited to do this deal with you because it'll be a great opportunity for him. But the tradeoff with that is he's going to have to learn on the business. the job with you, which means this will be less passive than you expected. So the more passive you want it to be, the better operator you need to partner with equals the bigger of a business you need to find equals the harder it's going to be to find

that great operator because he's probably already tied up either working for a big D to C brand that's VC funded or building his own brand on Shopify. So at that investment level and the desire of passive income, it's just going to be really hard to find what you're looking for. Not impossible, of course, but hard. Where would you find a business like this? Quietlight, Flipa, Acquire.com, bizbysell.com. Those are the big four.

Shopify used to have their own marketplace for buying and selling Shopify stores, but they closed it down for whatever reason. So, Jim, this is tough because if you use a 3PL for this business, then there's not going to be much profit left. But if you fulfill products yourself, then it especially won't be passive. And you're going to need a warehouse or some sort of a facility unless it's a digital product, in which case it's probably closer to a SaaS business or an agency business than a pure e-commerce business, which is what you want. So that's my hard truth, but I hope it saves you some heartache.

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 tkopod.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.chaycernor.com. You'll see the link and we'll see you there. Hey, Chris. This is Bill in Orange Beach, Alabama, big follower of all your stuff. I really

appreciated it. Learning a lot. My business is online personal training and I'm kind of specifically targeting male high performing real estate agents. My question is after the first cold email goes out, gets opened, but no replies. What's a reasonable follow-up? I know three to five days. I'm kind of using upticks.I.O. for everything. But I'm just not sure. Once I've sort of captured a quote unquote lead what to do with it should it not reach out and say hey yeah something like a product what i do next to kind of keep them on the hook also got a facebook page and open it up a lincoln page just sort of curious how you would proceed thanks again and i appreciate your work bill thank you for the message thank you for being a fan thank you for living in orange beach because that's one of my

favorite beaches on the planet and if next year goes well i'm going to buy a house down there anyway i love that you're selling online personal training for high performing real estate agents oh i just Love a good niche. And I'm sure that you're in that niche because you found something special there. And good for you, Bill, because you deserve it. All right. You asked about generating customers from cold emails, specifically what does the follow-up sequence look like?

Okay. Of course, this could be different based on the industry, but what's worked well for me is initial email with at least two points of personalization. Keep the subject line very, very short, two words max. First name, pitch, pitch, pitch, yada, yada, yada, less than three sentence. in the body, end it with a question. Don't put a question in there and then end it with a comment. Always end it with a question because that question is a call to action. Any question is a call to action. You're asking them to respond to you. Okay. Always end your first cold email with a question.

Keep it simple. Don't put any links in the first email because it could, not will, but it could affect deliverability. And you don't want your results to be tainted by some dumb deliverability glitch. It's tempting, but people aren't going to buy cold anyway. You got to warm them up, especially for something like this. So first follow up would be two days later. Next follow up would be three days after that. So five days after the initial one. And then I would never, ever follow up more than three times.

So it's like two days and then three days and then seven days and then leave them alone. Because your chance of getting a response or a sale with every follow up drops by like 80%. That's what I would do. and for an offer like this, I don't know what your exact offer is, but for a service like this, I would recommend just do everything you can to get them on the phone as soon as possible, since this is such a personal sale and personal offer. It would be a great time if this were a live call-in show because I could ask you follow-up questions like, how much does it cost?

What's the actual offer? But we don't have that luxury, so I have to make some assumptions. Thank you for calling in. Hey, I sound like a little bit of a crazy person, but I recently purchased two big, inflatable walls that convention centers would use for big events. I work with an event space in my neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. And I'm wondering how I can use these two 25 foot by 25 foot by nine foot high inflatable walls as like a side hustle to rent out either target like wedding planners or private events and any ideas you have there or any resources that you have already. You can point me to.

Thank you. Clay, I love the question. Inflatable walls. I didn't know that was a thing. But obviously, I love all things inflatable, bounce houses included. And I love questions like this. Oh, I love questions like this. You need to watch the show. I think you should leave not around kids, preferably. I watch it on Vid Angel when I can, when I remember. But there's this one skit in the first or second episode of season three where he's

a driving crooner and he's driving around. And I can't even explain it because it sounds too weird. And a lot of his skits are not that funny the first or second time you watch it. but then they get hilariously funny. And he has a line in there that I think of all the time. And it's, I got to figure out how to make money on this. So that's what I'm thinking of. I love that question.

How do I make money on two nine by 25 by 25 foot inflatable walls? So I review the first thing I would do when working with like a really weird new, unique product or offer, go up the supply chain. Go back to the source. Who did you buy this from? Where did you buy it? What other companies sell this? Maybe they're a distributor.

Maybe they're the manufacturer in China. Get them on the phone, not email, but phone. As many people as you can and just ask them. Who are your customers? Not specifically, but are they event planners? Are they brides? Are they conference centers? Who's buying these?

How are they using them? Does anyone rent these out? If so, how much do they rent them out for? Where do they place them up for rent? Are they on PeerSpace, Facebook marketplace, the not, whatever. Go up the supply chain and start asking as many questions as you can. and that will give you all the ideas you need. I could give you more ideas,

but honestly, that's the 80, 20 of it. That's where you're going to get the best info. Hello, Chris. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Leticia. I'm a dog trainer in the area of Washington, D.C. And I've been on and off in this business for 11 years. I have a good feedback from clients.

They like my training. To be honest, I think like D.C. It's a very small city. I want to get to every house here with the dog. I'm like, this must be easy for you guys. So I was like, maybe I reach out to you and see if you have some ideas to reach a lot more people here. I'm very famous in my neighborhood, but I want to be famous in the whole city. If you have any ideas, I will appreciate it.

Thank you so much. And I love all your videos and podcasts and following you everywhere. Thank you so much. Latisha, I love your question, love your business, love your energy, dog training business in D.C. You're famous in your neighborhood. You want to be famous in all of D.C. How do you do it? Well, look at your biggest competitors.

Who are the competitors that are not just big, but the ones that just seem to be doing it all right, the ones that you really look up to and respect. In any business, we all have them. We have that one other company that we, maybe there are inspiration to start it. Maybe we just admire them from afar. And from the outside looking in, it's how do they just do everything right? their social media posts, everything, their offers, their pricing, they're always busy. I just want to be more like them. I know you've got someone like that. What do they do to get there?

How can you find out? How can you get sneaky to find out? Do you pose as a customer and call them up and ask, like, what a great business? How long have you been in business? Jeez, how do you find your customers yet? What do you have to lose, right? Find the people in your market that are doing it right, that are big enough to scale throughout all of DC and reverse engineer. You can use a app TikTok and Instagram Sorter. It's a Chrome extension. It's free. And you install it.

Then you go to TikTok and Instagram in your Chrome browser. And you can sort by their oldest posts. You can put the oldest at the top. You can put their most viewed at the top. I use it every day. It's awesome. You can do that to find their best performing posts, their oldest posts. How have their offerings evolved over time?

Web Archive. Who is? Look at what their web. website has looked like over the years in D.C. Did they used to be famous in their neighborhood and then they blew up? What did it take to get from that to that? That's going to be the most specific and relevant thing you can do for your market. And this applies to any local service business.

And I guarantee you, if your competitor has grown fast in D.C., a lot of times we're like, oh, what are they doing? They must have made this amazing hire, yada, yada, yada. And a lot of times, honestly, the 80, 20 of it, it's just Facebook or Google ads. that's it and they're not even wizards at it they just found a good offer paired with a good video or a good picture a good coupon whatever and they just scale the heck out of that ad and it works or it's just for local it could just be angie's list they give angie's list 30,000 dollars a month right or thumbtack or whatever or sniff spot right or one of those dog walking marketplaces that's another thing you can

do is go to those marketplaces where you can find jobs and who has the most reviews and how did they get there. Maybe they're just exploiting one or two marketplaces and getting all of their customers from there, giving them all of their marketing dollars and they're not using Facebook or Google ads at all. You got a reverse in generic. All right. Well, that wraps up the Q&A section. I want to end with just a couple minutes of advice for 2025. I might do another episode. It's the 24th. We have another week for like end of this year, beginning of next year. I don't know yet. But I just thought of this framework recently. And by nature of my job, people come to me a lot. And they're like, all right, I want to do this, I want to start this side hustle, I want to start this business, or they come to me

and they said, I quit my job, I started this business. Like, just trust me, by nature of my job, I hear about people every single day that want to quit, they want to start something, they want to sell something, side hustle, full-time business, whatever. And I will tell you this truth. I've never talked to anyone that was on the fence about starting a business or quitting their job and did it and then say they regretted it. I shouldn't have done that. I should have kept my job. I didn't realize how good I had it. Are they out there? I'm sure they're out there. Absolutely. People declare bankruptcy. They fail all the time. But given a long enough time horizon, even the people that fail don't regret quitting their job because of what that failure ended up turning into.

And that's just a framework for life. We don't usually regret things that we do. I'm excluding things like terrible life decisions, right? If you go rob a grocery store, you're going to regret that, right? So I'm excluding that stupid stuff. We don't usually regret stuff that we do. we regret stuff that we didn't do. Think back to your own life. What do you regret? It's probably something that you wanted to do or that you were doing and then you quit. And I shouldn't acquit.

Like I wrestled in high school. It's silly. It's a silly little thing. But I've talked to so many people that are like, oh, I started wrestling and I was kind of good at it. And I quit. I shouldn't have quit. Or I was really good at wrestling. But I never ended up playing.

Like I've talked to so many people. Like we regret the things that we don't take action on, not the things that we do take action on. So take action. And that leads me into my next piece of advice. I was hanging out with this guy named Mitchell Cohen. And if you've heard of Apsumo, he does all their content. And he's awesome. And he was at my house right here where I'm sitting yesterday.

And he filmed a video for their YouTube channel. And we were talking about, he works for Noah Kagan. Noah Kagan owns Apsumo. It's a software company. And Noah Kagan had a book that came out. He was on this podcast six months ago. And this book is awesome. And the first chapter of his book is called Now, Not How.

And that idea, that three-word phrase that I've come to love over these last 24 hours came from Mitchell, their head of content, who was at my house. He gave the idea to know it, no accredited to him and his book, Now Not How. Okay. And Mitchell thought of it while he was out for a run one day. Don't get paralyzed. Don't have analysis paralysis. Just do. Just take action.

Collect revenue. Buy the domain name. Move forward. Move the ball forward a little bit every day. in 2025. Now, not how. Thank you so much for listening. This is the first year of my podcast. It's been 10 amazing months. Really, really, really appreciate you guys. Thank you for sticking with me. And we will see you next time.