The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The $60K/Month Side Hustle AI Will Never Replace - Ep. #306

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠��⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━I sat down with Mike Stuart, a tile guy from Iowa who started a concrete coatings business and quickly grew it to over $60,000 a month. We talked about how he got started with garage floor coatings, why the blue collar world still has so much opportunity, and how simple things like answering the phone, showing up on time, and being upfront about pricing can make you stand out. Mike broke down the numbers behind the business, including startup costs, material costs, pricing, ad spend, margins, and how he gets most of his leads from Facebook ads. We also talked about learning the trade through YouTube, making mistakes early, hiring crews, and why courage is often the biggest advantage when starting a business. You can find Mike at https://oldcapcoatings.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/oldcapcoatings/ or email him at [e-mail]!---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---

We started in March. So we did 60,000 in revenue in April. We'll do 69,000 this month. Holy cow. From the start of April until now, we've been booked every day. Every day. And we're booked out a month. Four days a week?

Yes. Sometimes five. Three, four grand profit in a day? Yeah. For one job? Mm-hmm. We love doing garages. They're easy.

You've got slightly different layouts, but for the most part, you're just doing the same thing. If you're charging more, then you're naturally serving a higher-end clientele. And the types of people that we sell to, they have money. Like, this is such a luxurious thing. Yeah. Nobody needs their concrete coated. Yeah. Nobody needs an epoxy flake garage floor.

I told the guy in my gym, I'm like, hey, we do this referral program, you know, 200 bucks. That $200 referral turned into like a $30,000 job. This is a guy you went to the gym where. Yeah. It's not that complicated. You can just start a business. I think people take comfort assuming that there's more secrets to it because that kind of protects their ego from not actually launching. Just use AI to help you.

Yeah. All of our ads are copy and pasted from Clodin. Yeah. What do you think you'll do this year, your first year in revenue and profit? A million. Wow. I mean, you're not even to the thick of like the season yet. Exactly.

Exactly. There's a huge market for this. There's a lot of exciting things going on with AI. AI freaks me out because it's changing so much. But blue collar work is so steady. I want to emphasize, it's not that hard to stand out in the blue collar world. If someone wants to go from zero to 100 grand a month in this business, what's the playbook? So I get this email from a guy named Mike, middle of nowhere, Iowa.

He lays tile for a living and he says, Chris, I started a coding business three months ago and I'm already making over $60,000 a month, no experience. And you can start this business for under $1,000. So I said, Mike, you're my kind of guy. Let's fly you to Dallas, bring you to my new studio and have you tell us all about how and why you did exactly what you did so everyone watching can copy you. Let's meet Mike. Mike, thanks for coming.

Thanks for having me. Why don't you tell me who you are and what you do? I am from Iowa City, Iowa, and I own and run a concrete coatings business. And how long have you been doing that? Not long. We fired it up. I started flying the plane like December 31st. I was like, I'm going to buy all these tools and stuff right before the end of the year, write it off in tax stuff.

But we really started this spring like two months ago. Wow. Really recently. Yeah. What were you doing in December that gave you this? idea. I'm a tile guy by trade. I've been doing that for about five years now. Tile was like to the point where I was kind of on autopilot with it. And I had gotten down, you know, getting the leads and selling the jobs and filling out the calendar and doing the work. So I was like, I think I'm at this

point where I have this margin of my life to where I could do something else. Well, one of my friends, Corey, he was thinking about starting one of these. He had a friend in Illinois who runs one of these businesses. And so Corey was going out and visiting this guy. And, and, you know, he was, you He facetimes me while he's on one of their job sites. And he's just like, look at this. You know, look what I'm doing. I remember where I was. I was like, wait a second.

This is as simple as the process is. They're literally grinding the floor, put it on the base coat, throw in the flake, put the top coat on and get out. And this is the dead of winter, by the way, in Illinois. So it was like zero degrees. And they're still working, which I was like, huh. I didn't expect that. So he kind of shows me this stuff.

And I just say, Corey, take pictures of everything. Yeah. Record everything. You're a tile guy. Yeah. You kind of, you know floors. Yes. There's some overlap in the products and stuff and just like the surface prep and all that.

But I'm like, dude, get me as much information as you can. And so then he starts, you know, all right, Mike. Yeah, he like takes pictures and stuff. And I just started thinking about it. I start watching YouTube videos and asking, you know, AI stuff. Like what would it look like to actually start one of these? And I just kind of start like I said, like flying the plane as I built this. So then I just create the LLC, start the website.

And then I'm like, I'll get the pieces as they. come. But I know the way I started tile is like just start doing it. Yeah. You'll figure out, don't get paralysis by the unknown things and like the the question marks of what it looks like to start a business. I was just like, I'm just going to start this thing. Yeah. Figure it out as I go. Yeah. First of all, are you still doing tile? Yeah. So I still do that every day. Do you do it or do you sub it out or? I do all. I'm just a solo guy. I, when I first started, I was like, maybe I'll have this big tile company. But I've since just like accepted. I'm just a. high cost tile craftsman.

I'm not like a production crew. I'm not doing commercial work. It's just like, I basically just do high end showers. Yeah. But yeah, so I do that day to day. Does that like,

do people need tile experience to be in this business? Or is it, there's no really? Virtually no overlap. Yeah. This was literally just like, when I was saying like my friend, he's FaceTiming me.

The idea just popped to my head like, this does not look that hard. Yeah. And seemingly there's really good money in it. So I had weighed, other business ideas, like Airbnb property management. And, you know, I had like tried some other stuff. At the end of the day, I was like, did you say it weren't worth a squeeze on this?

And then this one for whatever reason just like clicked with me. I'm like, I think I can learn how to, how to do this successfully. And so there's, I didn't feel like, you know, a calling to epoxy by any means or anything like that. It's just like, this is just a business that works. And I think I want a piece of it. But it's like, I would push back and say like, you did feel a calling to it. Because like you're not like you're an entrepreneurial guy.

Yeah. Right. Clearly. You're not like a lifelong W tour. Right. And like this was the one thing you latched on to. Like you're entrepreneur curious. Sure.

For lack of a better word. Always. I think just the signal that this stood out to you is a signal that you should do something about it. That's your gut. Right. So to me, I just I hear that like it just rang true to you for whatever reason the universe was saying like this is what you need to do.

You can't put your finger on. why, but it was right. Like your gut was right. You're only three months in and you're crushing it. Yeah. One thing that I've always said is like, I'll always explore an opportunity until it doesn't make sense. Yeah.

And oftentimes I've like explored opportunities and it just like didn't really make sense. Yeah. This one was just I started exploring the opportunity and it's always made sense. And it makes even more sense now than it ever has. So yeah, it's just yeah, maybe a call. I don't know, some sort of. I mean, that's all I've ever done. Like the tagline that always is next to my name is like,

I started 75 businesses. But I've just explored things until they didn't make sense. Yeah. It's not that complicated. You can just start a business. Yeah. Now, you know, depending on your state, like California, you can't just like start this up because you got to have experience before you get your contractor license. But like Iowa where I'm from, you can literally just do it.

Yeah. Yeah. So. Yeah. I mean, just chase the energy until it doesn't give you energy anymore and chase something else. Yeah. Explain to me what the business is. So we do, we focus mostly on garage floors.

but there's overlap with interior concrete coatings and some exterior patios and stuff. So you don't call this epoxy flooring? So we do because that's the term that most people associate with it. The recognizable consumer term for it. But industry speak is that's not super accurate. Correct.

Because we're not actually using epoxy. You can. Okay. But there's new products that people use. We actually don't use epoxy. We use our base code is called a polyurea. And then our top code is a polyaspartic. So those are the only two like resinous coatings we're using.

We're not actually using any epoxy. Okay. But we're doing the way people think of it is those flake floors that you see on a garage. Uh-huh. Yeah. So like a just a decorative finish on your garage floor. Okay. So is it usually garages that you're doing or are you also doing interior stuff as well?

It's usually garages. That's most of our inquiries. Although when people see our ads and stuff, they do think like, oh, I could do this in my basement. So then, you know, we get a lot of inquiries about interior stuff as well. And then pool decks and patios, walkways. front porch, that kind of stuff. That's pretty popular too. You can use the same product in all those all those spaces. Okay. What does like a typical customer of yours look like? Are we are we talking like 40 something like middle age with kids, three to five thousand square foot house? Just wants their

garage to look nicer. Yeah, I'm trying to think I don't know that we've had anybody that I would say I would assume was under 30 reach out to us yet. They're all older people. Typically males because the male typically cares about his garage more than his wife does. We haven't done. one car garage yet. So typically it's like two, three, four car gar garages. We've done a shop space. We're actually, the boys are actually working on a church right now, just doing like a grind and seal. So yeah, mostly older males, like our Facebook ads would say like 55 plus males is pretty much who's reaching out to us. So less 40s even, mostly 50 plus. Yeah. Okay. For two car garage, what's your average ticket price on that? So we charge eight bucks a square foot for everything. The way I get there is our

strict materials cost. So I kind of like reverse engineer this. Our strict materials cost is for our base coat, the flake that you broadcast into the base coat, and then the top coat is $1.56 per square foot. For each or total? Total.

Okay. That's your hard cost. That's my hard cost. Three layers. Yes. Okay. You got it. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. And then there's miscellaneous install materials like gloves and rollers and all that kind of stuff, plus some shipping. So I call it another 50 cents. So our strict materials cost is $2.6 a square foot. Okay.

Our monthly expenses that we're running are about $7,300. Okay. So that's like overhead fixed or? Pretty much. That's advertising. We have a shop. That's insurance, gas for the vehicles. Basically, everything else except labor adds up to about $7,300.

Okay. So that dollar amount per job comes down as you scale. Yes. And then per month, When I started the business, I was like, oh, if I could do, you know, 14 jobs a month at X amount of dollars. I later switched to thinking about 7,000 square foot a month is a very reasonable goal for a full schedule. So then, you know, you take those monthly expenses about 7,300 divided by 7,000 square foot. You're looking at another dollar square foot. And then for your labor costs,

it's hard work. So if I'm like coaching somebody on doing this, I would say, plug in like 35 bucks an hour for your, for your helper. So you can get someone good and keep them. Yes, because you can find anybody for $25, right? But you kind of need, you need that next level of employee. Yeah. And so I'm like, plug in $35 an hour and see what happens and see if you still like the numbers at that. With that, that's about $5,600 a month to pay that person.

So divide that by $7,000. You get another $0.80 a square foot. And to do $7,000 square feet, you could do that with one person, you're saying. One person plus a helper. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to still get there. Yeah.

Okay. So then your strict cost is $3.90 per square foot. We're almost at 50% here. So then that's where I say, just double it. Yeah. With tile and with I think a good local service trades business can make 50% gross profit on a job. So I was like, if I was going to give this job to somebody, what would this cost me? About $3.90 square foot, then I'm going to sell it at $8 square foot. Okay. So I'm thinking, I'm thinking of my garage. And so what we're talking like is 700 square feet? Is that like a two car garage? Yeah. That's like a large two car. So $7,000 would be 10 in a month, 10 jobs in a month. Yeah. Okay. So for $7,000, you're charging 50%. Yeah. So for $7,000, you're charging 50. $5,600? Mm-hmm. 600, yep.

How does that compare to, like, your top three competitors in your area? What would they? It's more expensive. So my top three competitors, there's two of them who would, who start really high, and then they eventually come down to just probably below us. There's one competitor who's honestly, like, way below us, like almost 50%. Hmm. They're just happy making less?

Yeah, and they're just a volume. So we've decided, like, we could be the volume business or we could just be a profitable business that doesn't have to, you know, kill ourselves to. to try and sell X amount of jobs so that we can pay our bills. But you get more difficult customers that way too. Yes, for sure. So we're more expensive, but we think like we provide a better service. Yeah.

Like we pick up the phone when you call. We show up on time. We don't smell like cigarettes. We, it's like the bar is low for a blue collar business to survive and like do really well today. Yeah. And you hear that a lot on social media like, man, just pick up your phone. Are you saying it's like actually is that way?

Oh, yeah. Like the bar is actually low. Yeah. It's, oh, it's solo. Like, yeah, if somebody submits a lead on our, if they click our ad, we just call them. And they're always like, wow, you call me right away. Yeah. Like, we get that notification. Yep, my brother's calling them. Hey, Sally, you just fill out our form. You know, how can we help you? It's like, wow, that's so fast. If you just follow through, go give somebody a quote in person, shake their hand, be a normal person. And then the thing that I found too is be honest about your pricing like from the start. Before you get there on site. Yeah. So like, like, our ads, they all say are pricing already. Really? Yeah. That's interesting. So like, our most successful ad is my brother and he, the hook is kind of, he's like, how much does it cost? How much does it cost? That's good. Because he's like, that's what people want to know. Yeah. And I read this book called,

They Ask You Answer. Have you heard of this book? I think it's like Marcus Sheridan or something like that. Okay. I don't even know what the main point in the book is. Here's my one takeaway of the book. People want to know the costs of what you're selling them. Me as the contractor, I know what it's going to cost. So I can just build trust with my customers by just telling them the cost. right up front at the beginning. Like literally in the beginning of the conversation. Yeah, because they're reaching out. And that's the number one question they have is how much does this thing cost?

Yeah. So if you just tell them that, my competitors, they're not telling them. They're like, oh, well, we have to come and we have to feel it. Nothing's different. Like, come on. It's a garage. Yeah. They all look pretty much.

In some home service businesses, that is kind of necessary, right? Like, but in this, it's pretty binary. Yeah, it's like, hey, if you go out and you measure, you can get a really good rough ballpark number. Yeah. Pretty much the only thing that changes our price is if they want to add stuff on. Yeah. Like if you want to add steps or like the vertical stem walls on the side.

So if we just tell people what they're looking for. Yeah. First of all, it saves us time too on customers who are just tire kickers. Yeah. And they expect it to be like $3 square foot, which is like less than my cost. You know, we get that too. But they're pre-qualifying themselves when they reach out. And the fact that they're reaching out plus the fact that they're asking the price shows you that they have high intent.

Oh, yeah. So it's like we might as well. answer because they have high intent. Let's reward that with their answer. Yeah. Okay. So where are most of these leads coming from? Facebook ads, Google ads, LSA, a combo. We do all of it. But my initial thought was like, oh, this is all going to come from people who are looking up, you know, concrete coatings near me on Google. I was so wrong about that. It's all Facebook and Instagram. People just see, once they see the process of, you know, getting the grinder out on the floor and throwing the flake, it's very like, catching.

visually. So people then start imagining, oh, I wonder what that would look like. And then they just fill out our form. So it's all, basically all meta ads. We get some Google traffic. We have a referral program, but it's mostly meta. Okay. Do you do like Thumbtack, LSA, Angie's list? Any of that stuff? No. You're not even listed on there? We do the local service ads, the Google ones. But no, we don't do Thumbtack or Angie or anything like that. Okay. Angie's really misleading with a lot of this stuff. We get customers just like, Angie told me my cost should be $1,000. It's like, lady. It's not $1,000. Yeah. Okay, so meta ads. Do you have more or less success with Instagram or Facebook or is it pretty evenly split? Mostly Facebook. My theory is... The age.

That's where the old people are hanging out. Yeah. And they scroll and they see it and they're like, oh, wow. Yeah. So that's, yeah, most of Facebook. You're in a good position because, like you said, the platform meta rewards you because your paid content is visually appealing. Yes.

Most people see it. Yes. ad and that we're just gone to matter what. For sure. But it's like it's kind of like pressure washing. Like there's a handful of things that are time lapses of a roof being swapped out or time lapses of an overgrown yard. Like your cost per acquisition is naturally lower because people want to watch that.

For sure. But that also means that that theoretically invites more competitors, right? It's not really a secret. So how much of your leads come from meta ads? Is it like the vast majority of them? Yeah. It's probably like 80 or 90%. Okay.

I'd probably say 90% plus. What is your cost per lead? Well, we're still trying to figure that out because like I said, you know, we're still relatively new. That one ad that I was talking about that has the good hook, it's like 30 bucks a lead.

Wow. Some other ones that we've tried have, and we've given them a good fair shake that's like 100 bucks a lead, which still is fine. You know, if you consider we're closing like maybe 20% of our jobs and they're plenty profitable.

Like it's okay. We're basically like putting in a lottery ticket. Every meta, it's like 30 bucks. and then sometimes, you know, $5,000 drop pops out. And it's like, oh, that was a dud, $30. Oh, $6,000 drop. You know, so it's kind of like, we just actually upped our ads because we are going to scale to a second crew here.

We bought the vehicle, the grinder, all that stuff needed, start a second crew. Amazing. Pretty quick. So is 20% your close rate then? Yeah, I'd say. What about like show rate? Because a lot of these ads are low intent or a lot of these leads, I assume are low intent because we run Facebook ads for, we have like a backyard.

It's called backyard Funhouse where we do sport. and stuff. And we get a lot of just low intent leads. Right. And they, we call them up right away. And it's like, who are you? I didn't even, do you ever get that? Yeah. Well, we, we put a little more friction in our, okay, in our ads before we did like the instant form. Yeah. And people were like, you know, cussing us out. Yeah. Who are? I never clicked anything. It's like, yes, you did, sir, because I have your information right here. How am I talking to you? Yeah. So then we, we made them answer one question, which was, what are you interested in? It's like interior, garage, exterior. other. So that one question has like made our quality of leads so much better. It increased the cost

obviously. Sure. But it's made our leads like actual people who actually are interested in the product. Is that question still asked on the instant form or do you send them to your website and ask it there? No. So it's like they click like get quote or learn more or whatever it is and they have to answer that question. And then it's like here's your information. Is this correct? And they just hit send. Okay. So it's like two buttons. Okay. Then you call them right away. Call them right away. Yeah. What have they submitted in the middle of night? First thing in the morning. Yep.

So we have a separate phone. My brother has it and he just, anytime he comes in. That's his main thing is like pick up the phone. You have one job. Pretty much. And that's an important job. Oh, yeah. That's your revenue.

That's your lifeline. Yeah. And I assume he's good at it. He's fantastic. You can sell ice to an Eskimo. What's his secret sauce? Probably just charisma. Okay.

I don't know what it is. He's just really good at selling and like winning people over. Yeah. He had some formal training in sales as a car salesman. Okay. But even that was just like, honing in the skills that were already there for him. You know what I mean? Yeah. Do you even send them to your website at all in any of your ads? We do like at the end when you already have their

info. Yeah, it's like they fill out the form and then it's like it redirects. Yep. It goes to the website after that. Okay. So 20% close rate? So if you spend 150 bucks on five leads, you're going to close one of them theoretically. Yeah. You might go 10 in a row. You don't close any. You might close two in a row. Yep. Yeah. We have like weird. Sure. It's worse. Like sometimes 10 leads will come in a day and sometimes zero will come in. We're Yeah. Is something broken? Nope. It's just totally random. Yeah. Now, average job size is $500,600 an average job size? Yep, about $600 probably, I'd say. Maybe $750, something like that. 750. Squore feet? Yeah, sorry. Okay. Okay. So 5,500, $6,000 somewhere in there? Right on there. Okay. And then how long from like time to close or like call to like you're doing the job and you're paid? So my brother will answer the phone. He'll be like, can I come out today? Can I come out this afternoon? Like speed delete. It's all just like get in front of them and let Luke do his thing.

And then, you know, we'll close it from there. After that, he's like 10% is all I need to get you on the schedule. So 10% non-infundable down payment. And then, you know, we're booked out like a month right now. So then jobs take a day, most of them. Okay. Big job takes two, but most of them take one day. Okay.

With one guy and a helper? Mm-hmm. Okay. Two guys in the field. And then yeah, we get paid right after, either check or Venmo or whatever. A day being eight hours, 10 hours? They're about 10-hour days. So what we do is we schedule Monday through Thursday

and we just tell our guys like, hey, anticipate these are going to be hard days. Friday, don't consider like off, but if you get everything done Monday through Thursday, then Friday's off. So another reason we do that is because you can't do it in the rain. We had in Iowa, we had a few like, like rained at night. Then it was super hot the next day.

So all the garage was like sweating like can does when you pulled out of the fridge. So we had to like wait on that. So we just have that flex day in there and we just tell people, we're going to work four days this week. we plan on them being Monday through Thursday, but sometimes it's Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday.

Are they W-2? Are they independent contract? Yeah, they're W-2. Okay. Do you pay them on Fridays if they're not working? Or do you only pay- Yep. So we tell them like- Weekly pay? Yep.

We tell them we'll pay on Friday and we'll pay for 40 hours. Okay. Whether you work 36 hours or 44? 44. Yeah. You're getting paid 40 hours. And everybody's like, cool. So call it 35 for the main guy.

How much for the helper? Well, so in my mind, 35 would be like a super high-qualified helper. Okay. And then the other, the other person would be, in my mind, the operator. He's like the crew lead, like the GM. Yeah. If you're not going to do any of the work, I would say, yeah, you could probably find the right guy for 35 and then a helper for 25.

Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. So 35 and 25. Yeah. Okay. I mean, that would, I think that's plenty safe. Yeah.

Okay. So let's say it's 10 hours. So that's $60 an hour for both. $600 in labor plus like the $3 per foot for everything. Mm-hmm. So man, that's that's really good margins. Yeah, really. Three, four grand profit in a day.

Yeah. For one job. Mm-hmm. That's incredible. And one crew equals one job a day. Correct. So if you have a heavy week, you just got to spread them out. If we're a week out or whatever.

Let's talk numbers. So first month, okay, so you had the idea on December 31st. Mm-hmm. You started making moves. You bought some equipment. You filed your LLC. When did you, like, in earnest start your ads or like, what's like your official launch day when you told the world that you're in business. Let me back up and do a little bit

of backstory. So I just kind of like chilled on the idea for a little bit and was getting the business structure in place. By that time, it was my brother and I. And in February, we tested it out on my own garage. So we kind of just like waited for a little bit. Okay. Right. Because it was also the dead of winter. I was like, we don't need to like rush this thing. There was no rush. Yeah. So we test the first one in February. It went fine. Now, now I look at it and I'm like, you see it every day. But now I told, I told my brother and my other business partners, like this is a monument. Oh yeah. Like we're never touching. You're not in business without that. Yeah. This is, this is literally what's about. That's like the proverbial first dollar framed on the wall.

Exactly. Yeah. So it's my garage is rough but functional. Yeah. Would the average person notice that no. You'd walk in and you'd be like, dude, this rocks. Yeah, but you have an eye for it. Yes. Okay. So then in February, we start spreading the word, hey, we're starting this thing. We do three. We book three of them in a week. Just from word of mouth like. Like, Wow. You want us to do your garage? This is just you word of mouth. Just telling friends. Yeah. Just like in the church. Just, hey, we're starting this thing. about it on your personal Facebook and Instagram. Actually, I don't even know if we did that. We were literally just like...

Just talking. We're going to basically test this thing. We'll give you an early bird discount if you want to be our guinea pig. And we had three people who were like, yeah, sure. So we do them three of them a day each. Okay. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. What month was this?

This is February. 2026. This past February. Yep, 2026. First one goes great. Took us way long because we're still just learning how to walk. And who's us? Me and my brother and then we had a friend who was helping us too.

So there's three of us. Second one goes great. Same thing. These were like relatively small garages. Well, one of them was three car. One was two car. Third one, this was our roughest garage yet. It was like all pitted and spalling. So it's like got the chunks out of it because the Iowa salt in the winter kind of pops the looking back. Was that actually rough? Yes. No. Okay. So it needed a lot of prep. Okay. Do you charge extra for that today? No. You just you average it out. Because we're like every garage needs a little bit of prep. Okay. And yeah, like we may do one that needs zero. And so that'll make up for the one that needs an extra two hours. hours of prep. We didn't really know all the products and stuff. My supplier is like, hey, use this. And we're like, we kind of got a better idea. So we tried to use this one product and the floor failed. Really? So our third one had failed. Just like a object failure. She calls my brother like two days later, hey Luke, the floor's bubbling and it's like peeling off and I'm just like sick to my

stomach. Yeah. I'm like, did we just mess up? You know, what are we doing? We know we have to redo that. We don't know what we're going to do. Okay. Was she cool about it? Yeah, she was fine. Luke's, you stood behind it. Yeah, Luke's the salesman. He's like, hey, we're going to take care of you. Like, don't know what we're going to do, but we're going to take care of you. Yeah. This guy calls me one morning. He's like, he's like, hey, my name is Zane. I work for a local coding company in Iowa City. He's like, I want to start my own in Quincy, Illinois.

How far away? About two hours. Okay. He's like, we should just meet up and talk because he's like, clearly you understand business, which I'm like, bro, you've only seen my website. Yeah. We've only done, you know, a couple floors. You don't even know what you're talking about. So we meet up.

I'm like 6 a.m. Coffee shop down the street, Saturday morning, kind of test them like, what you got, you know? And sure enough, him and his buddy, Jay's his roommate shows up. So he's getting up at 3.30 for this meeting. No, sorry, they live in Iowa City.

Okay, okay. But they want to start in Quincy. So that was my confusion. So I'm like, let's meet up and let's talk because I want to see what's going on. Long story short, they're like, we want to start this thing. I'm like, when are you going to move?

Oh, well, we live in Iowa City. We're going to stay here. just partnering this together. So we end up partnering with them. Okay. And starting this with them. And you're three jobs in. Three jobs in. Okay. And then these guys come, you know, onto the scene and rescue us. And they're like, hey. They knew what they were doing. Yes. Okay. So yeah, there's four of us. There's four partners. Okay. So I just do this basically on the side. Yeah. It takes me like an hour, maybe two a day to just, I'm kind of like the oversight, 30,000 foot guy. And then we have two guys who they have the experience. They're the ones in the field. And then Luke's the one doing all the sales and stuff.

Okay. And we're scaling fast. So we already have a couple employees because we're going to launch a second cruise. Okay. In the next few weeks. Guys, tkowners.com. That's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live.

You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about a thousand people in there building, starting growing businesses. Check out TKO as in the corner office. TK owners. All right. So you start this in February. How did you salvage that job?

You brought the guys in. They were like, dude. Yeah, no problem. Use this product. Yep. No problem. Just grind it all up. Just grind it all up.

The only way to do it is grind it all up and do it again. You say grind. Is it like a big floor sander? Are you just like making the floor more porous so it attaches? So it's a big, we have a 20 inch propane powered grinder. So there's no, because it uses. Yeah. Our vacuum is like a super high powered vacuum.

Yeah. The grinder's propane. So you don't want to be drawn on the customers. It would need like three phase power. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So yep, just a, it's got three, you know, discs that have three sets of diamonds on them and they're spinning.

and then the whole thing spinning. And so you're just scuffing up the surface, making it more so that your base code can soak in. Sorry, that was a really roundabout way. We really started advertising in March. Okay. Had a few jobs.

We had basically one job a week in March. And then from the start of April until now, we've been booked every day. Every day. And we're booked out a month. Four days a week? Yes. Sometimes five,

like if we're really feeling, you know, hey, the weather's looking good and we can knock out this small one two on Friday or whatever. And the boys want to grind it out. Then we do that. So I'd say we started it in March. and it was a slow month ever since then,

like April 1st was literally just booked nonstop. Jeez. So we did 60,000 in revenue in April. Your like first like real first real month we did 60,000 and we'll do 69,000 this month. Holy cow. So my. What was your profit on that? Over 50%.

Because we did we did a few like big jobs. We did a warehouse. This is funny. It was a I told the guy in my gym. I'm like, hey, we do. this referral program, you know, $200. That $200 referral turned into like a $30,000 job because we got his mom to do it. And then she's like, I also have this warehouse.

It's like this $3,600 square foot warehouse. Anyways. This is just a guy you went to the gym where. Yeah. He's in my small group too at church. But yeah. So it's like, yeah, that $200 cost to acquire that customer turned into like a $30,000 job. Yeah, we've just been swamped.

Okay. People want this. Yeah. February sales, roughly, $10,015? February was like our test month where we're just like literally figuring it out. Yeah. Probably at 10, maybe 12, something like that. March was probably same thing, 15 maybe.

Okay. And then February is 60. Yeah. And then Mays like 69. And that's what I would assume for like a fully booked high profit, you know, you're working every day. Yeah. That's what I expect. My numbers were like, if I can plan on 56K, if I can do 7,000 square foot at $8 square foot, that was my.

5,600. Projection. Yeah, sorry. Okay. No, sorry, $56,000 for top line revenue. Oh, okay. So 10 jobs? About, yeah.

In a month or? Well, it just depends. That's why I switched to the square, thinking about it in square footage. Okay. Because I'm like, a garage could be 500 square foot. It could be 1,200 square foot. You have no idea.

Yeah. What is your ad spend? We're always tweaking it, so I don't have like a good answer, but right now we're spending 400 a day. Oh, wow. But we just doubled it because we're launching that second crew. That's getting you at like at least a job a day. Yeah.

Roughly. We were doing about 200 a day. You know, get a few leads. Yeah. Sell one of them every other day, something like that. Enough to replace the calendar. Right. Right.

And then how many people live in your city? Like greater area? Oh, I don't even know. Let's look out. Yeah. Iowa City. But then Cedar Rapids is 30 minutes away. You do a lot of jobs there.

Yeah. So we have our ads going out on a 50 mile radius. Okay. Because then you have Davenport to the east as well, so the Quad Cities, which bleeds into Illinois. Only 77,000 people. That's crazy. Yeah. There's, dude, it's a weird product.

because people just like want it. Like if you say, hey, have you ever heard of those epoxy flake garage floors? That's what we call them. It's like our yard sign say epoxy flake garage floors. The flake. Yes,

because that's what registers of people. Yeah. Like, you ever seen that? Oh, my aunt has that. I love it. My neighbor just got that. I love it.

They don't even know what it is or like. Yeah. But everybody knows that this thing exists and that they think it's cool. Yeah. Do they choose the color? Yeah. We have like 200 colors on our website,

something like that. Dude, there's like two or three colors that people just choose. Yeah. Out of like 200, people choose domino which is a black white and gray or coyote which is a black white and like a brown people just love that they're simple so yeah people can choose their color you can choose the size of the flake okay how do you overcome price objections in what way like what's a someone's like oh fit oh

that's too much like you know like they are interested but they're just they're taken aback by that they were expecting to be 2k 3k how do you get them to a yes sometimes we just don't it's like you're clearly looking for something that we're not we try to we try to be the premium experience. Like I was saying earlier, we could be the volume crew. We'll move a little bit on price, but not much because we believe that we offer a great product at a totally fair price. So honestly, we'd have to ask my brother because he's like the get over the objection sales guy. He gives me a hard time.

I mean, time I would try. He's like, dude, why don't you just like say this thing? That's a brilliant idea. Yeah. So in a roundabout way, we don't get desperate because we know somebody's going to fill the calendar spot at our price. Yeah. So don't sell yourself short. That's a good way of looking at it.

Because if you go down to six bucks a square foot on this job, we know we would sell it for $8 a square foot to someone else. The person who's going to reach out in two days. Yeah. Your supply is fixed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Does your brother try to close jobs over the phone at all? Or does he really try to do it in person? Yeah, he really tries to do in person. Yeah. He's, uh, sometimes we'll like pre-qualified people like, but really only if it's like an hour drive or something. Yeah. I'd be like, hey, I'm interested.

You know, I live an hour away. We're like, okay, we got to make sure we're planning the same ballpark here. Are you, the way I like to phrase is like, we charge $8 square foot. You know, if you have 500 square foot, that's $400 square foot, that's $4,000 for your job. Is that a, is that within your cost of expectations or is that a shocking number to hear? And kind of like the way it likes it. And people are usually like, oh, that's shocking. Okay, well, we just might not be the best fit for each other. Or like, yeah, that's exactly what I was, you know, expecting. It's like, cool, then I'd love to come out. Yeah. Do you offer like financing? I know it's sometimes you can partner with financing company. No. You don't do that? I mean, we accept credit card so people can just put on our credit card. Is there any like ROI that they can see in the home value? Like, is there anything you can sell like that honestly? I'm sure there is. I'm not.

That's just not an angle that you take because it's unproven. It's like. I mean, honestly, the thing that we try and sell people on is like, this thing looks amazing. Yeah. Like, yeah, it covers your concrete and it protects it from salt and oil and all that stuff. Like if you spill oil on it, you let it sit for two weeks and then take a paper towel and just wipe it up. Yeah. But it's like, ultimately the reason people want it.

it's because they think it looks cool. And so we're like, yeah, this looks amazing. Just lean into that. We can make your garage look amazing. Yeah. You know? What about recession resistance? Are you concerned about that at all?

No. Is it going to be something that people cut in a recession? Recessions, to me, just expose who's running a bad business and who's running one that can actually provide value. So it's like, will a recession affect some concrete coding companies? Absolutely. Yeah. But it's probably not because the product is flawed.

It's probably because you're not charging enough to sustain or, you know. Right, right. You're not selling in the right way or something like that. So recession, like is anything really? Right. Well, like an analogy I would make is anytime I talk about it like a market being oversaturated or fads, I always think of frozen yogurt. 2010-ish, frozen yogurt was going crazy.

Big chains popping out of menchies and all these to up to 2015, 2016 and then it like cut in half. It was just it was a trend. It was a fad. But guess what? They're still fur your places. Right. And a lot of them still do great. Yep. But the ones that survived other than like being good operators, let's just assume they were all good operators, which is the case. But the ones that survived were the ones are the best locations. Period. End of story. Location wins when it comes to retail. So what I'm hearing from you is like it's the same principle, but the ones who survive are actually the good operators. Right. Right. Like there will always be in need for this. But those who charge enough and who have their crap together will survive and everyone else won't. Yeah. Yeah. In recession, people still spend money. Like, there's so much money out there. Of the market. If you're serving, if you're charging more, then you're naturally serving a higher end clientele. And those people keep spending through recessions. And the types of people that we sell to, they have money. Like this is such a luxurious thing. Yeah. You don't, nobody needs their concrete.

coded. Nobody needs an epoxyflake garage floor. But the types of people who want it, you're like, you're probably the type of person that I want to sell to. You know what I mean? Are these guys that have like organized garages? Oh yeah. And it's a great excuse. Like our best customers are always saying stuff like, this is a great excuse for me to organize my garage. You know, they're excited about the opportunity. Another, another interesting thing is one objection you might think is like, well, I don't want to move this stuff out of my garage. So we came up with this idea. Like, let's just charge an extra dollar square foot and we'll move all their stuff for them. So we ended up finding some guys in our church, some college age guys who were like, hey, if our average job's probably like 750, so if we're

getting an extra 750 bucks, let's offer these guys 500 bucks and say, all you have to do is the day before you go in and you move their stuff. Put it outside. It'll take you 30 minutes, maybe an hour. Yeah. We go in and we do the floor and then the next morning, you go in and you move it back. So they they think about 100 bucks an hour, 200 an hour? Yeah. Or it's like, if you just want to do it yourself or, you know, you keep all the money. I don't care. Or you bring three guys. I don't care.

Yeah. I'm offering you $500 to do this. Yeah. People are stoked about that. The interesting thing is we don't really have that many people who ask us about that. Like hardly any at all. When I think about like our best customers, none of them have said, well, moving stuff is like my biggest objection because they're pretty organized people. Yeah.

And they look forward to the opportunity to like organize in their garage. Yeah. So I think, I don't know, I thought that was interesting. I thought that moving stuff would be a bigger hurdle than it actually is. It's seemingly like a non-factor. So people don't really take you up on that very much. No. But if they do, you make $250 more profit.

Yeah. And your close rate goes up. Like my brother threw it in, you know, hey, we'll move your stuff for free. Like price objection. That's one thing that just came in mind is like he threw in on this job we're doing next week. The guy's like really on the fence. My brother's like, I'll throw in a pod and we'll move your stuff for you. You guys like, done.

Sign. You know. Because he had heard him say a comment earlier in the conversation that probably tipped him off. Yeah. That was a hesitant. He knows what's strange to pull, you know? Yeah. Okay.

So what about startup costs? So startup costs? What do you think they were? Oh, man. Also, I want to talk to about education. Don't let me forget about that, how you actually learned to do this. Okay. 19 for the grinder, you said, I mean, you told me what the materials cost is.

What was the other equipment you said you needed? I mean, like a super high-powered vacuum. Okay. You need your spike shoes, rollers, scrapers. all that stuff. 22 grand? Yeah, close 25. Okay.

And that's like, that's including like, and that's kind of doing it right. Like, I'm sure you could go cheaper. For sure. That's what I was going to say is that's including a thousand bucks for a logo package from a like high quality designer. That's, yeah, a 20 inch propane grinder. You could get away with an electric grinder that's way cheaper. If you just have like the right generator, you can get away with, you can, you can, you can trim it down to 20 or less.

Yeah. You can maybe even get close to 15. Can you rent those grinders? You can. What do they cost to rent? A few hundred a day? Yep. Yep.

It's like probably 1,000 a week or like 300 a day is what I think our local. We looked into it once. We were just like, yeah, we need this extra power for this big job. What would it look like to rent? We ended up just buying our second grinder. But yeah, it was 300 a day or 1,000 for a week. Because if someone's like on the fence about this, they want to like five code a website, throw together a website,

start talking to friends and family, but they're not really sure. Theoretically, under a thousand bucks, you could rent one, buy the equipment. prove out the model. You do one job. You make all your money back. Yep. Then you kind of just save up to buy your own grinder eventually. Yeah, for sure.

I feel like if people, if you can do this in middle of nowhere, Iowa, I mean, 77,000 people, there's like 30 suburbs in DFTO with more people than that, right? Probably a lot of competition here too. But if you can do that in Iowa there with a couple, like you probably have a few Facebook ads, but really, I'm sure like one or two are the ones paying all the bill. For sure. Right. Yep.

Are we talking like vertical video in the ad? How long is a video, give or take? 23 seconds, maybe. Yeah. I mean, that's the money spot. Yep. 50 mile radius. Is there anything?

What about like your Google business profile? Does that bring in leads? Do you ask for reviews? Yeah, we do. We ask for reviews. Yeah, I think Google business profile just like naturally ranking high from getting reviews is such an easy and important thing to do. Yeah.

So yeah, we put a lot of care into that. But from what you're saying, there's a huge market for this. Like when I hear your stuff and, you know, people are talking like AI. There's a lot of exciting things going on with AI. AI freaks me out because it's changing so much. Yeah. And it can be so niche.

And like you can have a fantastic idea and a fantastic business that works now, maybe for the next year or so not to like poop on AI or anything. But blue collar work is so steady and so easy. To stand out. Yeah. It's like I want to emphasize it's not that hard to stand out in the blue collar world. Yeah. If you,

the more time you spend like rubbing shoulders with all these contractors, you're like, wait a second. If I just like shower in the morning and I take my truck through the car wash and I show up on time and answer the phone. Yeah. I will have a successful business. Yeah. It's like not that hard. Yeah. Do you have a truck or a van?

So for our first one, we bought an old U-Haul. Oh, okay. So U-Haul sells. Like a box truck you-hull? Yeah, like a box truck because they have that ramp on them because the grinder is 570 pounds. Okay. heavy. So you need two people to move that. That's one of the reasons that I say you need two people. Yeah. So we bought a old U-Haul box truck for 10K. Okay. And it's great. And you still use it?

Yep. Tons of space in there. You can, you know, screw your shelves to the wall. You can rent that too when you started the business. For sure. Okay. And then we just bought a transit last week. Okay. Like one of those Ford. Yeah. Medium roof. Just easier to maneuver. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Lock up all your stuff. It honestly just like looks nicer too. Yeah. Are you like going to wrap your vehicle? or anything or like eventually at the beginning i'm like let's let's go hard at scaling this thing at the beginning yeah and let's just reinvest our cash yeah to start the second crew and it's worked and it seemingly is going to pay off and imagine if you wrapped it in like what lake right what looks like i know that was my wife's idea she's like you should totally do your most popular flake color on the man

like that's a great idea that is great do you like show up in like a company shirt like just these shirts I just say our company name and then there's like a, you know, built to last on the back or whatever. Yeah. So just just a company T-shirt basically. Education. Like how can people actually learn how to do this? Well, I've helped some people like start them up. Like come talk to me.

I'll gladly help you. Yeah. Share like I'm doing it right now. Like I'm sharing my startup cost of stuff. Like, you know, talk to people that you know do it. Me if you don't have anybody local. And then there's just some like look it up on YouTube. People will post what they know on YouTube.

Is that how you learned how to do your first couple? Just watching YouTube videos? Yeah, pretty much. I'm also just kind of like risky like that. Let's just do it. And then we'll learn from there. It doesn't have to. It's not going to be perfect.

My brother was like super bummed at how mine turned out. And I'm like, dude, this is tuition. This is our tuition. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't go to school for this. We didn't pay anything. Like, yeah, my garage looks a little goofy to you and me.

Nobody knows that. Yeah. That's what we paid to learn. And now look at the things that we're doing. Yeah. You know. How do you broadcast the flake evenly? Just chuck it out there. Full broadcasts.

Is there like a skill to that or is it just like? Oh, there's a technique. You got to fling it out. Okay. No, so they come in 40 pound boxes. You just put them in buckets or just hold the box if you want to hold a 40 pound box. And then you squeegee on the base coat, right? And you get it uniform.

And then you just literally throw the flake all over the floor. Okay. And then you push it around? Like, even it out? No. Just where it lands, it lands. You just throw it until. until there's like a layer of flake

across the whole floor. Yeah. And then your base coat just grabs onto it. It's like you're covering the floor and like a really hard glue. Yeah. Right.

And then after that you scrape the, well, you blow the flake that's just sitting on the top that didn't have any contact with the base coat. So it's just floating there, right? You just blow that to the back. You can reuse that.

So, you know, part of the materials cost is like, well, yeah, it cost me $2.6 cents for my materials. But that's not including, like, if somebody wants to use Domino again, we have boxes left over from just our, yeah,

the top. And then you scrape it, because then, you know, some of the flakes will, will land like on the side. And then they'll like get stuck there. So then you have to like flatten it all out.

So you have these like scrapers. Mm-hmm. And then just put your top coat on after that. 10 hours. Yeah. Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle

or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly M-M-O-L-L-L-L-Y at co-founders.com. That's one word cofounders.com. Molly at cofounders.com, tell her your story and we'll give you $100 if we end up interviewing them. What do you want to do more of? More garages. Do you just want to stick to what you know? Or do you want to do more interior stuff, commercial?

Yeah, that's another thing I want to bring up because people will wonder is we don't do any of the metallic epochsies. You know what those are? I think so. You probably seen like AI Facebook videos where they're just like dump in the. Yeah. They're just like fake, but old people just eat that up. Yeah, they do. But that's like, that's a whole.

another realm of of concrete coatings. Yeah. We've decided to stay away from that, just because that takes an artistic eye. That's a little harder to train. I'm about like the swirls and all that. Okay. So that is actual epoxy. Okay.

Similar process to where you're grinding it and then you're priming the floor and all this stuff. We've decided we don't offer that. It's more artistry than what you do. Yeah. That's harder to train. That's harder to grab some guy and say, hey, I'll pay you $35 to. Yeah.

If people want to get into that, they obviously can. But we've decided just for business purposes to keep it simple. we love doing garages. They're easy. It's like, they all look the same. Yeah. You've got slightly different layouts,

but for the most part, you're just doing the same thing. What do you think you'll do this year, your first year in revenue and profit? My brother's goal is for us to do a million. Wow. I mean, you're not even to the thick of like the season yet.

Exactly. Exactly. The winter will slow down, I'm sure. Yeah. But we're also going to incentivize once we get towards those fall months, you know,

if somebody reaches out to us for an interior. project like hey we'll give you 10% off if you want to book in December rather than in October so fill up as much outside stuff as you can't just just for comfort sake not not because like you can't do it yeah but with two crews you know if we're doing 60k month right now theoretically we're doing over 100k 120k get there yeah with two crews and then you multiply that by yeah 10 more months since we really started it's like yeah we could we could literally do a million dollars this year yeah just keep scaling that

Yeah. So then we have plans to We're going to sit on some cash. We have plans to launch in Des Moines. Okay. In the spring. That's the capital of Iowa. How far away is that? Two hours. Okay. Would you suggest that other people partner with someone that is doing this already? It's a good question. It's not like I feel like you might have gotten lucky with the guys that you partnered with. Because partnering with strangers for me has not gone well. Sure. But it worked out for you. Yeah, it did. I were very fortunate to have these guys. literally just fallen into our lap. I don't know that I would like recommend partnering somebody just because like you said,

you never know what you're going to get. And like, we're married to these guys now, you know? Like, that's risky. That's an option. I would just say get as much education as you can. Maybe don't go like as fast as you can right away. Make sure that you're doing it the right way so that you don't have.

Because a mistake is pretty costly. Like to redo a floor, that costs you quite a bit, both of materials wasted and then time to do it again. But if you take the time to do it right and you just treat the garage like it's your own garage and you again, low bar stuff like you just take your time on it. You don't have to have years of experience. So reach out to the right people to get that experience. Yeah.

Contact me. Yeah. Okay. If someone wants to go from zero to $100 grand a month in this business, what's the playbook? How can they start with their first customer to their whatever customer? Zero to $100K a month? You say, what's the playbook? Yeah.

If you were to condense everything you've learned down into like a three to five step process. Obviously the backbone is you have to deliver a product that people want. So you have to do a good job on the product. But after that, that's like obvious. You learn that by doing it yourself, watching YouTube videos, do it in your own garage. Yeah. Be willing to spend a little money to buy the material. Yep.

Okay. Yep. And then after that, it's just have some ads that work. Call people right away. Go get in front of them right away. Be honest about your pricing. And then from there, it's just snowballs. Like, people like dealing with, when people have a good experience with a contractor, they talk about it.

Yeah. And they. Because it's rare. Yes. They love recommending a good contractor experience. Yeah. So I don't want it to sound too simplistic, but it's like deliver a good product and have good customer service. But before you even learn ads, just talk to people you know.

Oh, yeah. Like just don't be afraid of it. Don't be a shame that you started a business or embarrassed. Like, for sure. Be bold about it. Like, own it. Your greatest asset will probably just be. a large dose of courage.

Like, I genuinely think most businesses will work if you just have a lot of courage. Yeah. You know, just go for it. And don't get paralysis by, you're going to have roadblocks.

You're going to have things that trip you up and you're going to have problems that really bother you. But if you can just deal with it and move on from them, you'll succeed. Like, if you want it, you'll find a way.

Did you learn Facebook ads yourself? Did you hire an agency? What would you recommend people do? Because it can be a nightmare if you've never logged into meta business suite. It can be a nightmare like figuring it all out. Yeah, I'd say take some time to like learn. Like what are the ads that catch your attention? So start paying attention first to when you're scrolling.

Like what gets you to stop? And then make something similar to that and have some sort of interesting video. I would say don't just do like a still picture or something. Like have some sort of interesting video that explains a process or whatever. And then just use AI to help you. Yeah. Like tell everything. Hey, I'm running this concrete coding business.

Here's where I'm located. Here's where I want to reach. Which my title be description. All of our ads are copy and pasted from Claude. Yeah. And it's like, give me five headlines for this video. Yep. Yep.

And it's like, it pumps out great headlines. Yeah. So you didn't hire. It's smarter than, it's smarter than I. No. Yeah. I'm like, why would we hire an agency if they're just going to do the same thing that I'm doing? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. They're just going to use AI to say, what's a good headline for this video in this market. It's true. So I'm like, what I'm going to save thousands of dollars. a month and just do that myself. It's working. Did you have experience with Facebook ads before this? None. Wow. Just start it. And you could probably look at it under the hood and be like, dude, you, you got this thing that's messed up, but it's working. And so we're always tweaking it. And like right before

this, I was at a coffee shop tweaking ads and adjusting the budgets. And I literally took a screenshot of my meta ads manager and I put it in the cloud and I said, what should I do? Yeah. And it's like, allocate this much to this ad and then take money off this one. I'm like, cool. So now we're doing it. And we'll see what happens. Yeah. Man, is there anything I should have asked you, but didn't anything interesting worth mentioning? One thing would be, if you do start looking into this, you'll probably get a little overwhelmed with all the opinions in this space because there's a lot of different flavors.

There's epoxy guys. There's polyurea guys. There's polyspartic guys. What I'm saying is is the base coat. People get like very dogmatic about. Yes. The materials or. Yes.

And what I'll say is, and what's interesting is it's literally only about the base coat. like everybody's using the exact same brand of flakes everybody's using the same type of top coat the only difference is people will give you a hard time like oh you use this how how could you possibly think that's better than this and then the other guy will say the exact opposite yeah so it's like just take a deep breath yeah pick something and then just do it yeah probably multiple things yeah we've tried multiple things and we might try something else again because our supplier we have a great relationship with our supplier they're like hey you should try this new product okay cool if we like it better we'll use it if not we're going to use what we were using.

Yeah. So what are the materials you use again just for people watching? There's three different types of base coat you could use. You can use a polyurea. I don't even know what the. Sure. I can't even break it down further than that. It's polyurea, epoxy, or a polyaspartic.

For the base coat. For your base coat. Okay. And what do you go with? We use a polyurea. Okay. Yeah. And it's a newer product.

It's frowned upon by epoxy guys because it's the faster, blah, blah, blah. Because it's better. But I'm like, guys. they're used to. I'm like, guys, it's a better business decision. Because if we use epoxy, every job's now a two-day job because it has to kick over longer. And you can't scrape it and top-coded the same day. So many opinions. But at the end of the day, I'm like, we do this because it's a better business decision. Because if we can do a job in one day and my competitor is doing it too, I'm making more money than them because I'm doing more jobs. And it's going to last the same amount of time. They're both pretty permanent products. Like I dare you to try and pull up either of those from the grouch. They're not coming up. Is there a brand you prefer? Yeah. For the Polyria, we use a brand called Cimarron. Okay. S-I-R-O-N. Okay. It's the most expensive one, but...

It's worth it. It's a great product. And then what do you use for the flakes? What brand? Everybody uses Torganol flakes. Torgonol just bought Chips Unlimited, so now it's basically... Okay. You're using Torgonol.

Okay. And then what was the top code again? We go through our supplier's 5-on-5 decorative concrete supplies in Des Moines, and they have an agreement with lab surface. They're like a distributor for... Yeah. Yeah. So we just, we're like, what's your best polyspartic top coat?

You're like, this one is sparket. Okay. Cool. we're using that one. Okay. Man. Dude, this was awesome. Is there anything I miss?

This seems pretty exhaustive to me. Yeah, I just think, like, to the listeners, just try something. Just be courageous. Yeah, stop planning. Stop planning and just start flying the plane and you'll build it. You'll find the parts. It's going to be okay. Yeah.

It's worth it. And it's just good for the soul, man. It's like, it's good for you and you'll figure it out. Yeah. My favorite viewer is the one that will pause this video, like nine minutes. minutes in, 18 minutes in, and go start Googling and go start. And then they'll come back to it and they'll keep watching. Then they'll pause it.

And then they'll end up watching the whole video like four times. But they're interrupting themselves from planning to start doing. Like that is what people should do when they watch this or any of these videos. Like I love when people turn this video off to go do something about it. Yeah, for sure. Because we want people to take action. That's what we're talking about like polyurea and all these like. Yeah.

In other podcasts are like just wake up early and you got to grind and. It's like, no. Like, no, I'll tell you everything you need to know. It's right. It's not that hard. Right. It's hard work. But, you know, there's only a handful of secrets.

And I'll share them with you. I just shared most of them with you, you know. Yeah. I think people take comfort assuming that there's more secrets to it. Because that kind of protects their ego from not actually launching. Right. When they actually wrap their head around the fact that there's really no secret, you just have to go do the hard thing, hard thing of like just doing something.

then the whole world opens up. Yeah, dude. Man, where can we find you? If we want to learn more about you, your business, consulting, whatever. Our website is oldcap codings.com. Old cap is short for the old capital of Iowa.

Oh, Iowa City. Okay. Old cap codings is our business. So you can just go to that website, email me at Mike at old capcodings.com. And then honestly, just like our forms on the website.

Okay. So. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Hey, guys. If you're still listening to this, it's probably because

you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mulling the lawn. You're still driving. What have you? If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple,

or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.